Israeli President Herzog’s visit to Romania this week, to attend a state ceremony marking 85 years since the Iași (pronounced Yash) pogrom of June 1941, reopened a largely forgotten chapter of the Holocaust which saw one of the most barbaric massacres of World War II.

In an orgy of savagery orchestrated by Romanian dictator and Hitler ally Ion Antonescu, 13,000 to 15,000 Iasi Jews—nearly a third of the city’s population—were murdered by Romanian and German forces, police, and local mobs.

The pogrom predated the Nazi mass extermination camps and demonstrated to Hitler the devastating efficiency of state-sponsored mass murder.

This week’s commemoration, which included a religious burial ceremony, was held at the city’s Jewish cemetery, where the remains of many of the pogrom’s victims lie in a mass grave discovered only recently.

“We are at the square where it all started, the massacre in Iasi 85 years ago, where thousands and thousands of Jews were butchered, slaughtered, and tortured both on-site, in pits, in common graves, and in the death trains,” Herzog stated.

“This memorial ceremony for the tens of thousands of Jewish women, men, children and elderly people murdered on this soil, in Iasi and its surroundings, between June 28 and July 6, 1941, does not erase the suffering of the victims,” he said.

“Nor does it lessen the moral stain of the perpetrators of the crimes. It does not undo the murders, humiliations, beatings or death train horrors that were planned at the highest levels, but carried out by all layers of society in those terrible summer days, 85 years ago.”

Herzog said the ceremony also does not answer the most painful question left by the massacre.

“How? How can one even begin to understand cruelty on such a scale, stretching across an entire society? How could it be that in a great European city, which for centuries served as a thriving center of Jewish life, the image of G-d was erased?

“The only answer to this shattering question is deafening silence,” Herzog said.

Others have offered a different answer. In Romanian society, where anti-Semitic outbreaks repeatedly erupted long before the Nazis arrived, particularly from the 19th century onward, Jews had never truly been safe.

“It cannot be denied that there is a strong anti-Semitic feeling in our country. That is an old question in our history,” Romanian King Carol II infamously admitted in January 1938.

The Iasi pogrom and the massacres, expulsions, deportations and murder of Jews across Romania and all of Eastern Europe during the Holocaust were the ultimate expression of a relentless hatred that had stalked Europe’s Jews for generations.

An Atrocity Preserved on Film, Official Documents

What makes the Iasi massacre seem unique is that it is extraordinarily well documented. Unlike other Holocaust events about which no written or precise orders have been found, or whose documents were burned at the end of the war, countless eyewitness testimonies, official communiqués, photos and films—many taken by the perpetrators themselves–document the monstrous inhumanity, almost hour by hour.

Many of these records, along with documentation of Romanian collaboration with the Nazis in countless other cities and towns, were hidden away for years in dusty archives during the Communist period. The regime’s leaders downplayed Romania’s role in the annihilation of almost half its Jewish population of 757,000.

In 2004, an international panel led by Holocaust historian Elie Wiesel found, based on copious documentation, that approximately 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were murdered in territories under Romanian rule.

A great deal of this shocking and heartbreaking documentation can be viewed today in Bucharest, in the National Museum of Jewish History and the Holocaust in Romania.

Historian Radu Jude has lifted the veil on the horrors of the Iasi pogrom in his documentary “The Exit of the Trains,” which documents the eradication of almost the entire Jewish community. In the video, the author recounts his own reaction to discovering the truth about Romanian culpability in the annihilation of Romanian Jews.

“After the 1989 revolution [against the Communist regime], my generation experienced a great shock in finding out, from history books, about Romania’s participation in the Holocaust,” the historian relates. Throughout our youth, we had been repeatedly taught that we Romanians were a special people, that we had always been the victims of others, never perpetrators. And then you suddenly read books about the pogroms, the Holocaust … I, for one, had a meltdown discovering the lies and cover-up.”

Scapegoating the Jews

Before the outbreak of WWII, the Jews had been a presence in Iasi for over 400 years, becoming over the centuries an important center of Jewish religious life. Between 1930 and 1940, despite outbreaks of virulent anti-Semitism in the city where the Jews were physically attacked, expelled from the university, and maligned for being “Bolsheviks,” the Jewish population grew from approximately 30,000 to over 50,000.

For all the pain and hardship that the community had endured, nothing prepared it for what was to come on June 28, 1941.

Under dictator Antonescu, a rabid anti-Semite and trusted ally of Hitler, the government scapegoated the Jewish community, accusing it of collaborating with the Soviets who were fighting with the Allies against Nazi Germany.

False rumors were circulated by Romanian agents that Jews had “signaled” Soviet planes, aiding the pilots in conducting air raids over Iasi. This provided the pretext for a government-ordered “cleansing” of the Jewish population.

The terror began on June 28, 1941. At 9:00 p.m., a flare was shot from a German aircraft above Iasi, signaling the beginning of the pogrom. Immediately shots were fired from the streets, from houses, and from rooftops in almost every quarter of the town.

German soldiers began rampaging through the city, pounding on doors, arresting Jewish men and killing many indiscriminately. Once-friendly neighbors turned on the Jewish people, joining in the wave of vicious brutality.

“Our Christian neighbors, whom I considered my friends, came out of their homes with iron bars, hoes, spades and guns” and began to attack, recalled Lazar Leibovici (Times of Israel).

Thousands of Jews, mostly men and boys but women and children as well, were dragged to the central police headquarters. The round ups continued throughout the night, until midday on June 29, when a total of 5,000-6,000 Jews had been assembled.

Then, between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m., a false air-raid alarm was sounded, at which point the assembled Jews were fired on from all directions by the Romanian soldiers guarding them. The massacre continued for several hours, until less than half of the Jewish prisoners remained alive.

Death Trains Drove in a Circle for Days

The survivors were then marched to the local train station and crammed into cattle cars whose air vents were sealed. These “death trains” were sadistically driven in a circle for several days, while the trapped Jews died agonizing deaths from thirst, suffocation, and complete mental and physical collapse in the scorching summer heat.

The first train carried roughly 2,500 people before it stopped. More than 650 dead were removed to a mass grave. Soldiers denied water to survivors, and the journey continued. At each of several stops, hundreds more Jewish people were discovered dead. Local troops hired Gypsies to remove the bodies; their payment was anything of value they could plunder from the dead.

Fewer than 1,100 survived the Iasi death train that arrived in Calarasi on July 6. The second train carried 1,902 Jewish people compressed into 18 cars, and only 708 arrived alive.

The Iasi pogrom foreshadowed the reign of terror that continued through the summer of 1941. Over three weeks, in July and August of 1941, approximately 50,000 Jews were murdered in areas under Romanian control, as documented by historian Avigdor Shachan in “Burning Ice: The Ghettos of Transnistria.”

In return for Antonescu’s support of the Nazis’ invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler gave the Romanian dictator the strip of land between the Dniester and Bug Rivers, and it is here that in September of that year, the Romanians began deporting Jews from the Bukovina and Bessarabia districts.

The region had been dubbed Transnistria, the name the Romanians gave to their new territory – ‘trans’ meaning ‘beyond,’ and ‘nistria’ for the Dniester River.

From 1941 to 1944, 300,000 Jews were killed at the hands of Nazi death squads and Antonescu’s troops before, during and after deportation to Transnistria, writes British historian Dennis Deletant in Hitler’s Forgotten Ally.

Unlike the industrialized killing machinery of Auschwitz, Romanian death camps used the more primitive methods—genocide by shooting, clubbing and starvation, and by exposing tens of thousands of people to a slow death by freezing and disease.

Of the 360,000 Jews deported to Transnistria, historians estimate that less than one-fifth survived. For decades, the survivors’ stories were rarely told and the annihilation of Romanian has faded from awareness.

Although Antonescu was tried as a war criminal in 1946 and executed by firing squad along with three of his top henchmen, parts of the Romanian people continued to extoll him as a great patriot who won back chunks of Romanian land from the Soviets.

Romania Today

Antisemitism in Romania remains a prominent issue driven by far-right political groups like the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). AUR has sought to downplay the wartime atrocities of Ion Antonescu, engages in baiting and intimidating Jewish leaders, and habitually minimizes the Holocaust.

Despite this, Israel and Romania today maintain strong diplomatic relations, based on a long tradition of cooperation going back to 1948, when Romania recognized the State of Israel immediately after its founding. Between 1967 and 1989, Romania was the only Warsaw Pact country that did not sever ties with Israel after the Six-Day War.

Romania generally maintains a friendlier posture toward Israel than many European Union members, but it also follows broader EU positions on many diplomatic issues. These include the endorsement of a “two-state” solution and adopting a critical position toward Israeli military actions in Gaza.

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Dangerous Gambles for A Mitzvah

Rabbi Ahron Twersky was 16 when he was deported to Transnistria in 1942, then under Romanian control. In a lengthy oral testimony, quoted by Holocaust historian Esther Farbstein in her landmark Hidden in Thunder (pages 226–227), he describes the terrible suffering he endured but also moments of spiritual triumph.

One such moment took place shortly before Pesach 1942. He and some friends scraped together a bribe to persuade a non-Jew to procure some wheat for them.

“He brought us the wheat, we gave him his payment and hid the wheat in the cellar. Before Pesach, we went down to the cellar, secretly ground up the wheat and baked a bunch of small matzos…enough to give to several Jewish families, in addition to ourselves. I felt real happiness.  Who would ever dream such a thing would be possible in this dreadful place!”

Rabbi Twersky reflected on another incident when he took a dangerous risk to observe a yom tov, but a gamble that ended badly.

“That Shavuos, I decided to hide and not go to work to honor the yom tov, but I was caught,” he related. “The Romanians dragged me out and beat me severely until blood gushed from my ears and nose. I was sure my life was over. But they threw buckets of water on me and ordered me to go to work. Somehow, despite my injuries and the terrible pain, I managed to do the road work.”

The Gravediggers

Rabbi Twersky went on to relate a terrifying experience in 1944 when a gang of Nazis entered the Mogilev ghetto and rounded up 1200 Jews, including himself. The Nazis ordered them onto a bunch of trucks, with the pretext of bringing them to a nearby town to work. Instead, the Jews were driven to a clearing in the forest about an hour from Mogilev, where machine guns ringed the area.

They were ordered off the truck at gunpoint. The stronger-looking men were given shovels and instructed to dig a mass grave.

“We were frightened to death,” Rabbi Twersky recalled. “We started to dig with the guns pointed at us, knowing these were our last moments on earth, that our bodies would soon fill this gigantic pit. The Germans were partying around, celebrating. Nothing made them as happy as knowing they were about to murder Jews.

“After we finished, one of them called out, ‘Juden schwein, your execution will take place in ten minutes!’

“The leader glanced at the watch on his wrist and called out ‘Ten minutes….’ As the seconds flew by, he’d call out ‘Nine minutes…Eight minutes… Seven minutes…Six minutes…Five…’ , smirking at us as the final minutes ran out.

Suddenly two German limousines pulled up and some officers got out. There was a lot of arguing in German—I couldn’t make out what it was about. It went on for ten minutes as we stood around the giant pit, praying silently for a miracle.”

“The Nazis suddenly turned to us, screaming, ‘Raus! Raus! Out! Everyone back on the trucks!’”

No explanation was given for the last-minute reprieve from death. But the prisoners needed none. Their prayers had been answered, igniting fresh hope in their anguished hearts. The war would surely end soon and with Hashem’s mercy, they would survive.

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Eyewitness to the Pogrom

Chaim Solomon and his family lived through the Iasi massacres of June 28-July 6. Below are gripping excerpts from his oral testimony in an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, October 1993:

On June 21, 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union and German tanks with soldiers singing were marching all over the city. We stayed indoors, shaking in fear, glued to the windows. On June 26th, the Soviet Union Air Force bombed the train station in Iasi, killing a number of people

The Romanians insisted that Jewish Communists in the city were signaling to the Soviets to drop bombs on the train station. They launched a vicious pogrom in Iasi, using a ruse to get the Jews to turn themselves in. On June 29, they instructed the Jews to come to the city hall to exchange their old identification cards for new ones. Many Jews complied. Others were brought there by force.

The police station and city hall were connected. The police station had a big courtyard surrounded by a stone wall. German soldiers and Romanian policemen kept bringing in waves of Jews. They were led into the courtyard, supposedly to continue on to the city hall. But lined up on both side of the courtyard were Romanians and Germans.

As the Jews passed this line of police and soldiers, these barbarians smashed their heads with their weapons. Or shot them in the temple. The courtyard of that police station filled up with dead or dying Jews. My two older brothers, Reuven and Henry, who had decided to go to the city hall together to get their new identification cards, should have been among these victims.

In the end, Henry went alone. It was nighttime as he entered the courtyard and realized something terrible was happening. He was near the back of the stone wall and he and a friend managed to jump over it without being spotted. They found a house with a big cross painted on it, saying “Christians live here, no Yidoni (Jews).” Which is a sign that the whole thing was planned ahead of time with the Christians in on it.

The boys hurried to the back of the house and found a shed filled with firewood, stacked all the way to the ceiling. They removed the top layer and crawled into the pile and replaced the layers so that when Germans or Romanians came to search for Jews, they saw the wood up to the ceiling and left.

They lay there quietly for several days, listening as the police and the Germans continued shooting people in cold blood. In one day, on June 29, between one o’clock and six, seven o’clock in the evening, they killed about 4 thousand people coming into that yard.

Meanwhile, we were hiding in the basement of our house which had several exits, as it was situated at the intersection of three streets. Which is how we managed to avoid the soldiers and guards. When they came in from one entrance, we slipped out another. Romanians were doing the roundups, the Germans did the shooting. We could see out of tiny windows and froze in horror as Jews were being marched away, or kicked and shot if they didn’t move fast enough.  

A block or two down the street there was a famous shul…I saw a sight I can never erase from my mind: the rabbi of our town being dragged, beaten and killed. He was left in the street for a couple of days until some brave neighbors dared to run outside and bring him in.