Once all of Nova Sulitza’s population had been catalogued by the NKVD, there was a second forced deportation, this time not to the coal mines but to an unspecified place within the Soviet Union. Many of those deported were the owners of houses with their families, that is, the most prominent people of the town. Rabinovici speaks of the impossibility of describing “the atmosphere of fear and horror that took over the village.”119 The decline of Jewish Nova Sulitza, which had begun with a wave of emigration after the First World War and accelerated during the widespread fear of Romanian fascists, now entered into a new phase of displacement and terror under the Soviets. Misha and Noemí would not learn about the experience of Soviet terror and slavery until a couple of years after the end of the Second World War, when they managed to speak with some of the survivors.
The first Soviet occupation of Bessarabia was both disastrous and short-lived; the territory would soon return to Romanian control. During the run-up to the Second World War — the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the annexation of Austria — Romania had remained neutral. Its old elite maintained close ties to France, and the two principal fascist parties — Cuza’s National Christians and Codreanu’s Iron Guard — had left power. Hitler and Stalin had also signed their nonaggression pact, and as Romania was situated between both countries, there was in principle no one for Romania to fight. With the entrance of the Nazis into Paris, Romania’s old Francophone elite lost its luster, and the country had to cede to Nazi pressure and return the region of Dobruja to Bulgaria, northern Transylvania to Hungary, and Bessarabia to the Soviet Union. The political decline of Romania’s Francophone elites opened the door to a new coup d’état, which brought Ion Antonescu to power. Field Marshall Antonescu, a Romanian army officer and a supporter of the Nazis, would become prime minister and conducator of Romania on September 5, 1940.
Early in 1941, Antonescu signed his own secret accord with Hitler, according to which German troops might cross Romanian territory should they wish to violate their pact with Stalin and invade the Soviet Union through Ukraine. The Hitler-Antonescu pact also stipulated that the Romanian army would participate in the invasion of the Soviet Union on the side of the Germans, and that Romania would in return be permitted to recover Bessarabia and to annex a part of Ukraine that Hitler, who was fond of inventing cartographies to suit his designs, had christened Transnistria (literally, “beyond the Dniester”). The name resonated with “Transylvania” (“beyond the forest”), which Romania had been forced to return to Hungary as part of its agreement with Hitler, so that the Führer would give Romania Transnistria in recompense for having transferred Transylvania back to Germany’s old ally, Hungary.
Transnistria was a territory inhabited by approximately three million people, the majority of whom were Ukrainians and Russians. There were also roughly 311,000 Jews, 300,000 Moldovans or Romanians, and 125,000 ethnic Germans. The territory was bounded by the Dniester River in the west and the Bug River to the east, with the Black Sea in the south and the Lyadova River to the north.120 Its largest city was Odessa, which was an important Yiddish intellectual center at the time. The new territory also included the two towns that the Milsteins came from — Yaruga and Mogilev — in the district of Podolia. Noemí’s sister Shura and her young husband, Shmuel Grossman, were living in Mogilev when the war broke out.
Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, began on June 22, 1941. The Germans entered freely into Romania, as agreed, and they were joined by the Romanian army in their invasion of the Ukraine. By August 19, Antonescu had established his government in Transnistria, although the city of Odessa resisted until October 16. Antonescu’s idea was to transform Transnistria into an agricultural export center, the profits from which would finance Romania’s war effort.121
Transnistria would also serve as a death camp. The Romanian government sought to carry out a program of ethnic cleansing and to eliminate the Jews, especially in Bessarabia, Bukovina, Banat, and Dobruja, which the country had acquired after the First World War. The extermination policy was systematic. In fact, it preceded the program for the so-called Final Solution agreed upon by the Nazis at the Wannsee conference by around six months.
The widespread murder of Romanian Jews had certain points in common with the Armenian genocide in Turkey. As Matatias Carp explains in his Black Book, with support from documents and other materials that he compiled between June 1940 and May 1943:
The Romanian massacres lacked technological and scientific organization; there were no gas chambers, no crematoria, and no policies to process dead bodies. They also did not use the hair, teeth, or fat from their victims for industrial ends. Romanian fascism used its own unique methods of extermination, which also differed from traditional methods known since the invention of rope and gunpowder. For example, they would beat people until they succumbed, or they would suffocate them in cars that lacked ventilation. Some victims were sold as slaves. The wealthiest would be shot as they marched in columns, so that the Romanians might sell their clothing. Some Jews were quartered to lubricate the axles of carts with their blood. The list of crimes doesn’t stop there.122
The forced marches of Jews from Bessarabia to Transnistria were a torture from beginning to end, marked by beatings, murderers, and above all, theft: “the Jews were robbed by those looking to harm them and by those charged with protecting them; they were robbed in order to kill them; and they were killed in order to rob them. They were robbed also because, in any case, they were already dead.”123 In 1940, there were 760,000 Jews in Romania; 400,000 were murdered. In Bessarabia and Bukovina, there were 314,000 Jews in 1940, and in those regions there remained only 19,500 in 1942.124 This was the context in which Hershel Adler and Leah Altman perished.
Romanian soldiers entered Nova Sulitza on July 7, 1941; they were welcomed by the Christian residents, who waved Romanian flags. A three-day pogrom began that day, during which 975 residents were murdered and roughly half of the Jewish houses in the town were burned down.125 Sadly, my grandparents were not among the first group of victims. Instead, they not only experienced the terror of that pogrom but also suffered deportation to Transnistria and finally died in the midst of winter, at the Bershad ghetto.
After the pogrom in Nova Sulitza, the Jews who survived were held in a factory on the Bukovina side (the Caruso factories), where they remained for three days while Romanian soldiers registered their names one by one. Also held there were Jews from neighboring towns. Once everyone was registered, those whose homes were still standing could provisionally return to them. Rabinovici recalls that upon returning, they found that “everything had been stolen by the Christians, who had carried off everything in carts. My house had also been robbed. My former servants came to the house with their relatives and stole everything with no remorse. With no restraint at all, the Christians mercilessly robbed and killed their former Jewish friends and neighbors, people with whom they had lived in peace for generations.”126
They remained in the village for about a month, once again in their homes, trying in vain to understand what would become of them. On July 25, there began a rumor that they would all be deported. The Jews of the village put together a collection and managed to scrape together one million lei (the Romanian currency) to bribe the local officials to cancel the deportation order. The money was accepted, but the deportation was not canceled. When officials ignore even the moral claims of bribery and move instead to open theft, civilians are placed face to face with the state’s most naked form of power, which, in this case, was also a prelude to mass murder.
On July 27, 1941, two days after the bribes, it was announced that all of Nova Sulitza’s Jews — young and old, women and children, healthy and ill — should lock up their houses, hand the keys to a police officer, and leave with only what they could carry. They would then begin the long march from Nova Sulitza to Transnistria. This was the last day of Jewish Nova Sulitza.127 After that,
the town persisted only in the memories of a widely scattered network of migrants and refugees.
The murders that the Romanian troops committed upon entering the towns and cities of Bessarabia were extraordinarily cruel. Their hatred had been fired up during almost twenty years of anti-Semitic campaigns. Carp recalls that in the town of Parliti, the murder of Jews was carried out in such a horrifying manner that even the German officials who accompanied Romanian troops lodged a complaint with the Romanian high command.128
Malaparte tells a similar story. He had witnessed with horror the pogrom of the provincial city of Iasi, which was the largest of those that took place in Romania, and of special significance given the importance of that city. Sometime later, while in Warsaw, he recounted the experience of that pogrom to the German lawyer Hans Frank, who was the Reich’s governor-general of occupied Poland. With respect to the number of those murdered during that riot (seven thousand), Frank responded matter-of-factly: “That’s a fairly respectable number, but that wasn’t a decent way to achieve it. It’s not necessary to do it in that way…The Romanians are not a civilized people.” Later, he added, “I share and understand your horror regarding the massacres in Iasi. As a man, as a German, and as the Governor-General of Poland, I disapprove of pogroms…Germany is a country that possesses a superior civilization, and it detests such barbarous methods.”129 After the war, Frank was tried and found guilty of numerous war crimes, for which he was executed by hanging.
To give an idea of the Romanian “methods,” I can cite the memoir of Josef Govrin, who recalls the entry of Romanian troops into Edinitz, a town near Nova Sulitza and with many similar characteristics. As in Nova Sulitza, the soldiers and their local allies indulged in a frenzy of murder and pillage that lasted three days, and they then deported the surviving Jews to Transnistria:
Hundreds of women and children were carried to a nearby forest by Romanian soldiers, who brutally raped them. Only a few survived, and of these many committed suicide. Among them was my ten-year-old classmate, Blimale Mutzelmacher and her two sisters, Ester and Zahava, along with their mother, Sima. They were all raped in the presence of their father or husband. Afterward, the mother and the three sisters committed suicide, hanging themselves, and Mr. Mutzelmacher threw himself down a well near their house. I still remember Blimale’s smile on her beautiful and childish face.130
In various passages of his reports on the destruction caused by the war in Transnistria and Bessarabia, Malaparte stresses the extent to which Romanian officials tolerated the ferocity with which peasants and villagers attacked Jews. His description of the Iasi pogrom closes with members of the noble Sturdza family passing through the town in their horse-drawn carriage, just hours after the end of the massacre: “With a happy jingling of harness bells, the carriage passed between piles of naked bodies, while on both sides of the road, two rows of people lowered their heads in reverence, their hands filled with the plunder they had taken. The carriage passed by, pulled by two purebred white horses and driven by a eunuch named Grigori, who appeared regal and solemn atop the carriage, hanging before the horses the red tassel of his whip.”131
My poor great-grandparents and other members of my family — whose names I have never known — were forced to live through these pogroms and later suffer prolonged marches through mud and snow. On July 29, 1941, Romanian troops ordered the Jewish population of Nova Sulitza, 5,357 people in all, to begin moving. According to the record published by Yad Vashem, 1,500 carts were taken for the journey.132 One of these belonged to my great-grandparents, who began the march with an in-law, Ethia Meilijsohn, and her mother, who was sick and could not walk.133 The older woman died on the road.
Unlike what occurred with almost all the deportations from Bessarabia and Bukovina, there were no deaths between Nova Sulitza and Ataki, where they were to cross the Dniester into Transnistria. This was because the police officer charged with leading the convoy, whose last name was Yeftudio, made sure that they all arrived alive. For this he was chastised by his superiors. Yeftudio was later recognized by the survivors from Nova Sulitza as one of the Righteous Gentiles.
As the convoy arrived in Ataki, it announced that the Germans in Mogilev, on the other side of the Dniester, would not accept any more deportees. As a result, they were forced to march back to Secureni, and from there to the Codreni forest, which lies between Secureni and Edinetz. Here they were forced to camp for five days. It was also here that people began to die from exhaustion and hunger. Rabinovici states that it took people some time to begin to understand fully what the purpose of all of this was; that is, it took the Jews of Nova Sulitza weeks to understand and accept that what they were facing was a deliberate program of extermination, and not a disorganized process of forced resettlement.
The Christian population of the various towns and villages along the way to Transnistria met Nova Sulitza’s Jews with insults, and mobs that were eager to beat and rob them on the banks of the Dniester, but commander Yeftudio prevented these beatings until he was relieved from duty. And it was precisely then, on their first night near that river, that a group of villagers saw hundreds of bodies washed up on the shore. For the first time, they understood that they were facing collective extermination. And yet they had to continue, and even backtrack for a while, since the Germans forbade the crossing of the Dniester at Ataki because of an excess of traffic.134
Forced to go back toward Bessarabia, the remaining members of the caravan stopped for a short time in Edinetz, where they were held on a farm with wells that had been intentionally contaminated by the Romanian population. Here the Jews began to die at a rate of approximately six per day until the end of August, when a typhoid epidemic struck and began to kill between twenty and thirty people each day. It was also in Edinetz that Yeftudio was relieved from his command, meaning that the people of Nova Sulitza also lost the little protection they had. They remained in the Edinetz ghetto until October 10, when the worst part of the march began. One portion of the Jews from Nova Sulitza was sent to Markolesht, and the other was forced back to Ataki and from there to Mogilev Podolsk. Many were murdered on these roads, some shot by soldiers wishing to reduce the number of refugees, and others by peasants wishing to rob them of whatever they still possessed.
On a mountain near Climauţi, the Romanian soldiers guarding the caravan abandoned their posts to take refuge from the cold in some nearby houses. Winter had come early that year, and in mid-October there was a terrible storm that brought snow and ice. That first night, groups of local peasants sacked the Jewish caravan, taking even the clothes they were wearing. Many people died there. Rabinovici recalls the scene: people transformed into frozen pillars, running wildly to try to avoid freezing: “The sound of the storm’s wind, the cries of people freezing, and the cries of the victims of the attack all mixed together into an incredible and indescribable inferno. The voices will always be with me, along with the images of that horrible night on the Klimotz mountain.”135
Those who survived this ordeal arrived back at the crossing point in Ataki a few days later and finally crossed the Dniester into Mogilev. Many, such as Rabinovici himself, remained in that city’s ghetto. According to the record at Yad Vashem, “the majority of the Jews deported from Nova Sulitza to Mogilev were shot by Romanian police. Those who survived were sent to Bershad and Obodovca.”136
The story that my mother told us regarding the death of her grandparents Hershel and Leah is that they were attacked on the road to Transnistria by Romanian peasants, who robbed them of everything and killed them with two Shabbat candlesticks that they carried among their things. My mother tells me that this version of the story came to her from her mother, and the scene corresponds to what people from the community experienced in the hills above Climauţi. The other version of the story is that of my uncles Manuel and Mauricio, which came to them from Ethia Meilijsohn. She was with my great-grandparents during the entire journey, and managed to survive the Be
rshad ghetto. After the war, she emigrated to South America to be reunited with her family. Since she was a direct witness, hers seems to be the most reliable source.
According to Ethia, my great-grandparents Leah and Hershel survived the arduous trip from Markolesht and finally arrived at the concentration camp in Bershad, which was the end point of their march. On the road and in the camps, everything had to be purchased. Hershel bought three spaces in an abandoned stable, where he, Leah, and Ethia could sleep. All of those deported to Bershad slept in abandoned barns or stables. That winter of 1941–42 was especially harsh, with temperatures reaching forty below zero almost constantly. In that abandoned stable, my great-grandparents faced the winter that killed most of the Jews in Bershad. In the end, it would also kill them. There were doctors among the deported, but there was no medicine. In the camps, even simple and curable illnesses usually led to death. Leah died first, of dysentery. Shortly afterward, Hershel died of typhoid.
Each of their bodies was placed in a corner of the stable, until they were taken away to be “buried,” although in fact they were just thrown into a mass grave that was then covered with snow. The cold made it too difficult to bury anyone properly, so that my great-grandparents’ bodies remained in that ditch, covered with snow, unburied, exposed.
Obituary of Hershel Adler, published as a headline in the first issue of the weekly publication Grancolombia, edited by his son, Misha Adler.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The National Disease
The banality of evil?
In her well-known book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt speaks of the legal and political importance that the denationalization of the Jews had for their extermination. They lost all of their rights of citizenship, usually through laws designed for this purpose, and often they were deported, to be killed in places where they similarly had no claim to nationality.137 In my research into the fate of my great-grandparents, I was interested to discover that in countries such as Romania, too, Jews residing in recently acquired territories like Bessarabia, whose Romanian nationality was dubious, were killed first and in a more systematic manner than those who were from the old Romanian kingdom. The fact that so many Eastern European Jews were nationless and thus protected by no sovereign state facilitated the genocide.
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