BUCHAREST DAILY NEWS

Romania commemorates Holocaust victims

Andreea  Pocotila

The Holocaust in Romania was commemorated yesterday for the third consecutive year through various manifestations whose purpose was to keep the victims of the Holocaust alive in the national memory.
President Traian Basescu , who attended the commemoration at the Holocaust Memorial monument, said such demonstrations confirm the Romanian state's decision of recovering the true history by publicly admitting that Jewish people had to suffer due to a discriminatory attitude during communism. 
Basescu said the horrors Jewish people were victims of should never repeat in Romania and that the acknowledgment of the Holocaust is not enough.
"It is a difficult process that involves a change of mentalities, the capacity to accept reality after 50-60 years of history transformed into lie. But it is a process that we assume," said Basescu .
He also referred to the conclusions of the International Commission for Holocaust regarding the Romanian Holocaust and pointed out that by accepting these conclusions, the country made an effort to recover its true history.
The inauguration in 2005 of the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania is a sign that this effort is serious, said the president. He added that the first high school manual that teaches children about the monstrosities of the period when Jewish people living in Romanian territory were deported and killed was edited last year.
However, Basescu said all efforts will be useless if all 22 million Romanians do not become aware of the historical realities and accept them.
Basescu spoke about the visit he made last year at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington , where he saw images about Romania that profoundly impressed him and changed his view on what the Holocaust really meant.
He said he saw photos with long lines of Jews and Roma people guarded by soldiers wearing the uniform of the Romanian Army and wagons of the Romanian Railroad Company filled with Jewish people that were pushed around. He also spoke about the photos depicting piles of dead Jewish people. Romanian soldiers appeared in those photos, near the bodies, he added.
The president said everyone should see those photos. While speaking about what he saw at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington , Basescu was visibly touched and his voice was trembling.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu , who took part at the event, said the historical truth about the Holocaust period was hidden over the many years of communist indoctrination.
Culture Minister Adrian Iorgulescu expressed his hope that the memorial will become a place of introspection, wisdom and reconciliation for the horrors of the past not to repeat.
The commemoration of the Holocaust, that had the motto "let's not forget so it does not happen again," included the baring of the Holocaust Memorial, a monument raised in the honor or the Jews who lost their lives during the Holocaust.
The Coral Temple in Bucharest hosted a religious ceremony with the same purpose, while the Elie Wiesel Institute held a photo exhibition entitled "Killed because they were born Jews."
A series of other similar events, such as conferences, exhibitions, commemoration ceremonies and meetings with Holocaust survivors, were organized by the Culture Ministry.
Representatives of the government, political figures, representatives of the civil society, cultural personalities, and others took place at the events and showed their respect for the victims of the Holocaust.

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The Associated Press

Romania commemorates Holocaust victims

Romania commemorated its national Holocaust day on Monday with ceremonies marking 65 years since the beginning of deportations of hundreds of thousands of Jews to death camps in the occupied Soviet Union .

President Traian Basescu laid the first stone of a national monument being built to commemorate Holocaust victims in central Bucharest . He reminded participants that Romania only recently began to confront its role in the Holocaust after decades of denial.

"The Holocaust Memorial is a monument which confirms Romania 's decision to recover its real history," said Basescu . "It is a difficult process which means changing mentalities and the capacity to accept reality after 50-60 years when history was falsified," Basescu said.

Other events held Monday included laying of flowers at the Jewish Coral Temple in the capital, a photo exhibit and the launching of books at the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust.

Israeli Ambassador Rodica Radian Gordon hailed efforts by Romania to confront its past.

"I believe that something profound is changing in Romania about the way the country is dealing with its past," she said. "It was hard to believe, when I arrived here in 2003, that this will happen in such a short time."

During communist times, the country's official history taught that Germans were the sole perpetrators of the Holocaust, ignoring the involvement of Romania 's wartime leaders.

In 2004 after a dispute with Israel over comments about the Holocaust, then-President Ion Iliescu assembled an international panel led by Nobel-prize winner Elie Wiesel to investigate the Holocaust in Romania .

The panel concluded that the pro-Nazi government of Marshal Ion Antonescu was responsible for the deaths of 280,000-380,000 Jews and more than 11,000 Gypsies, or Roma.

"This was a country where the Holocaust was a taboo subject," Paul Shapiro, Director of the Center for Advanced Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington told The Associated Press.

Shapiro said Romania was now following the panel's recommendations by creating an institution to study the Holocaust and a national monument to commemorate the victims.

The U.S.-based museum has offered more than 1.5 million documents related to the Holocaust in Romania to the Elie Wiesel institute and helped design the monument.

Dozens of elderly Jewish and Roma survivors of the deportations were present at the ceremonies and hailed the decision to build the monument.

"The fact that, despite the delay, the Romanian government has acknowledged the responsibility of state authorities of the time for what happened ... is encouraging for us survivors ," said author Oliver Lustig .

Lustig , now 79, was deported to Auschwitz- Birkenau at the age of 17 with his parents and six siblings by Hungarian authorities who controlled northern Romania at the time.

Roma survivor Dumitru Tranca , 71, also insisted that new generations "must know what happened, what we suffered." Tranca , was deported with his family of coppersmiths to camps in an area in the occupied Soviet Union , where his parents and two sisters died.

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