Matatias Carp, General Secretary of the Association of Rumanian Jews, published Cartea Neagră (“The Black Book,” known in English as Holocaust in Rumania) in four volumes in Bucharest between 1946 and 1948 — a firsthand documentary record of the mass murder of Romania’s Jews under the wartime dictatorship of Ion Antonescu. Shortly after publication, Romanian authorities confiscated and pulped every copy they could find; the book remained effectively suppressed for decades. The excerpts below (foreword, the Chief Rabbi’s 1946 introduction, and material from the first volume) are drawn from an English-language edition.

Foreword to the English Edition

You have just opened the pages of an extraordinary document. It sheds a piercing light into the most obscured, most hidden, most forgotten corner of the crime of our century, the Holocaust. It is the largely unknown story of the wholesale slaughter of close to 400,000 Jews by the wartime Rumanian government and the fascists of that country. Without this book, the story of the Holocaust is incomplete.

It is not a coincidence that this story has remained hidden for so long. Ever since the war and to this day, all the Rumanian governments and most of the country’s historians were united in a tacit conspiracy to deny, to obscure, to hide the truth about Rumania’s contribution to the Holocaust. And for good reasons, as that truth is abominable.

Rumania has had the distinction of completing its own indigenous Holocaust, without much prodding from their German allies. In fact, as evidenced by this volume, mass butchering of Rumania’s Jews started well before the Endlösung was unleashed on the Jews of Germany and of the countries under German occupation. No German prodding was needed, as the methods of the slaughtering reached such an incredible level of savagery that sometimes even German authorities felt compelled to protest the barbarism.

What we witness in this case is a monstrous, and so far largely successful, attempt of official Holocaust denial. The four volumes of this book were published in Bucharest between 1946 and 1948. Shortly after publication the Rumanian authorities confiscated every available volume and fed them to the pulp mills. Rumanian agents since have stolen and destroyed even most of those copies that found their way into foreign libraries. This book, until now, was practically unavailable to the outside world.

Into this enforced silence stepped official Rumanian propaganda, with perfect continuity through half a century, trumpeting a version of World War II history in which Romania was the only country under German influence or occupation that largely spared the Jewish population under its jurisdiction. This volume shows the opposite to be true. What Romania lacked in the cold, systematic calculation of the German death machine, it made up for in the sheer savagery of its own methods — including mass rapes of victims’ wives and daughters, and the burning alive of 20,000 of Odessa’s Jews.

The original work comprises four volumes. The first describes the anti-Semitic pogroms carried out by the Iron Guard, a fascist Romanian movement trained in part by the Gestapo. After Romania’s wartime dictator Ion Antonescu took power in September 1940, the Iron Guard was unleashed on the political opposition and especially on the Jewish population; thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were looted and destroyed, and thousands of Jews tortured and killed. The carnage was ended, temporarily, only by Antonescu’s own suppression of the Iron Guard — not for its crimes, but because it had become a rival to the dictator himself.

The second volume covers the mass murder of the Jewish population in and around the city of Iași, following Romania’s entry into the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, when the local Jewish community was scapegoated for every setback of the Romanian army. The third volume chronicles the mass killings in the territories Romania occupied during the war — Transnistria, Bukovina, Bessarabia, and the port of Odessa — where the overwhelming majority of the atrocities took place. Transnistria, an artificial province carved by Antonescu out of Ukrainian territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers, was under Romanian control for two years and seven months — time enough to murder more than 200,000 Jews there.

The three volumes above are included in this edition. The fourth — describing the 1944 deportation of the Jews of Northern Transylvania — is deliberately omitted here, for a specific reason: that deportation was carried out under Hungarian, not Romanian, jurisdiction. The Second Vienna Award of August 1940 had returned Northern Transylvania (awarded to Romania after World War I) to Hungary; after Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, Eichmann was dispatched there to administer the deportation of Hungarian Jewry — including, by then, the Jews of Northern Transylvania. Eichmann found Hungarian accomplices among parts of the gendarmerie. The editor’s foreword makes a point of noting that no Hungarian government since the war, and no Hungarian historian of standing, has ever tried to conceal what happened — the Hungarian Holocaust is well documented historically and in literature — which is why Carp’s fourth volume, concerned specifically with what is “credited” to Antonescu’s own regime, is not reproduced here.

Since 1946, the book’s publisher notes, traditional Romanian chauvinism and xenophobia have continued to compel hundreds of thousands of Germans, Jews, and Hungarians to leave Romania. Antonescu himself was rehabilitated by the Romanian Parliament, streets renamed after him, and a statue erected to him in Slobozia on October 22, 1993 — with the participation of Romanian government officials and members of parliament.

A Note on Scope

Carp’s book is a document about Romania, written by a Romanian Jewish community official documenting his own government’s crimes — it makes no claim about Hungary, and its own foreword is explicit that the fourth volume (Northern Transylvania, 1944) is omitted here precisely because that territory was under Hungarian, not Romanian, administration at the time. That distinction is worth stating plainly, because the two countries’ wartime records were genuinely different in kind, not just in degree.

Until the German army occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, Miklós Horthy’s government — for all its own antisemitic legislation (the 1920 numerus clausus, the 1938–1941 Jewish Laws) and its own atrocities against Jews in newly annexed territories, such as the 1941 Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre and the 1942 Novi Sad raid — did not hand its own Jewish citizens over for deportation. Hungary’s pre-1944 Jewish community, at roughly 800,000 people, was by 1943 the largest surviving Jewish population left in Nazi-dominated Europe, and Budapest had absorbed a real, documented flow of Jewish refugees fleeing there from Poland, Slovakia, and elsewhere earlier in the war precisely because conditions in Hungary were less lethal. The systematic deportation of Hungarian Jewry — including, by then, the Jews of Northern Transylvania — began only after the German occupation put Eichmann in direct charge, working with willing collaborators in the Hungarian gendarmerie and the Szálasi regime installed that October. Romania’s indigenous Holocaust under Antonescu, by contrast, was well underway by the autumn of 1941 — years before German occupation forced Hungary’s hand — and was carried out overwhelmingly by Romanian authorities against Romania’s own Jewish citizens, with no comparable external compulsion.

Introduction, by the Chief Rabbi of the Romanian Jewish Church

Memory plays a major role in the life of man. According to a 17th-century psychologist, its importance is so great that “its absence would render most of our other capabilities useless.” The role of memory is equally important in the life of communities. Even though the transfer of every code from the memory of individuals to the level of collective psychology may be impossible to the required extent, we have ample opportunity to observe that the function of remembering — which is in fact much more than static memory — must be determined not only by psychological intention but also by moral will.

According to the Jewish religion, the divine spirit is omnipresent in history and manifests itself in invincible moral laws, which place primary importance on the function of remembering. Jewish moral codes originate from the compelling necessity to remember. As individuals, we must keep a record of our lives, their events and accomplishments; these do not remain isolated frames but join the living images which keep our moral consciousness awake, and spur us on toward moral responsibility. From the beginning, the Bible taught us, as a nation, to remember and not to forget: “Remember the days of the past, think of the years of bygone peoples!” We are forced to remember, and never forget, the sorrows inflicted upon us by the sons of Amalek long ago: “Remember how Amalek treated you on your journey to Egypt… do not forget this!”

The ability to remember is at the essence of our Jewish existence. It is not by accident that a Jewish physiologist, Richard Semon, attempted to prove that memory is not only a psychic gift but is also possessed by living organisms — the characteristic of the living cell, its ability to recognize, record, and return impressions, was first called “Mneme” (memory, in Greek) by Semon. We can state, not only from the point of view of psychology but also physiology, that the impressions we have received during centuries of suffering are ingrained in our psyche. These are often referred to in our Books of Remembrance, which contain useful teachings for us and strict moral lessons for others.

At the end of World War I, in 1919, the Jewish thinkers Nathan Birnbaum and Hugo Hermann wrote a book on the sufferings of the Jews during the time of the Crusades. On its first page, the authors cited the prophet Isaiah — “and there was a great massacre in Edom’s country” — and the psalmist’s plea, “Lord, remember the sons of Edom.” “Remember!” — indeed, this is the recurring motif of our history, the history of a spirituality and martyrdom that struggled for the great moral commandments which we first gave to mankind, and which we continue to state with the stubbornness of our religion.

All the past sufferings of Israel pale into insignificance when compared to the martyrdom the Jewish people suffered during World War II — fulfilling, as the Talmud prophesied of the era before the Messiah, that “the sufferings to come will be so great that you will forget the previous ones.” It is enough to skim through “Remember!” — how Jewish this title is — written by the Soviet-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, to realize that the fragments describing Jewish martyrdom in our own century overshadow the flames of medieval auto-da-fés.

We must study the book written by Mr. Matatias Carp to be able to estimate the true, near-messianic extent of Jewish suffering. This book was written with “blood and tears.” This profound compilation was saved in spite of the dangers. “The Black Book of the Sufferings of Rumanian Jews” is a memorial commanding respect, erected in memory of the martyrs of Israel by the General Secretary of the Association of Rumanian Jews. Mr. Matatias Carp lived through each moment of the moving reality of which his book speaks. He deserves our gratitude for this.

The moral duty the author undertook in writing this book is accomplished if the book contributes to the respect of one simple commandment from Mount Zion: “Thou shalt not kill!” What else could that commandment be — asks Horia Carp, flag-bearer of the struggle for justice — other than the first step toward recognizing the freedom of individuals? First, it must be normal for people to respect the lives of their brethren; only then can they set out toward the peaks that bathe in the light of brotherly love.

Bucharest, January 21, 1946
Dr. Alexandru Şafran, Chief Rabbi of the Rumanian Jewish Church

I. The Iron Guard — The History of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Rumania, 1940–1944

The sweeping persecution and terror wreaked on the Jewish population within the borders of Romania was as violent and devastating as that of other countries under Nazi power or influence, differing mainly in the details of method. The Romanian massacres lacked the technological and scientific organization of the German system: there were no gas chambers or crematoriums, no industrial use of the victims’ hair, teeth, or fat. Romanian fascism employed its own methods — people beaten until they died; suffocated in sealed railway carriages; shot out of marching columns so their clothing could be sold; cut into pieces so that the axles of carts could be smeared with their blood.

Considering the many historical examples of thievery, Carp writes, Romania above all other nations and eras can boast of the most terrible acts of pillaging. Jewish property, rendered almost non-existent, was at the disposal of all who desired it, from the Romanian state down to the pettiest thief — highwaymen and government ministers alike, using different methods but committing the same crime. Jews were robbed to harm them, and also, by some, “to save them from harm.” They were robbed so that they could be killed, killed so that they could be robbed, and robbed because they had already been murdered anyway.

From among the Jewish inhabitants of Romania, estimated at 760,000 in 1940, approximately 400,000 were killed. Approximately 260,000 of these deaths are attributable to the Romanian government’s own account; for the remainder — the Jews of Northern Transylvania — the Hungarian government, then administering that territory, bore responsibility. The damage caused to Romania’s Jewish population exceeded $1 billion.

Census data on the Jewish population

Carp’s book includes a statistical table drawn from three successive national censuses — December 29, 1930 (Romanian); April 6, 1942 (Hungarian, for Northern Transylvania); and May 20, 1942 (Romanian, for the rest of the country) — tracking the collapse of the Jewish population region by region:

• Greater Romania before 1930: 756,930 (1930 census only).
• Territory under Romanian authority, 1941–1944 (Old Kingdom, South Transylvania, Bukovina, Bessarabia): 607,790 (1930) → 441,293 (Apr. 1942) → 292,149 (May 1942).
• Bessarabia (a territory subject to mass deportation): 206,958 (1930) → 72,625 (Apr. 1942) → 227 (May 1942).
• Bukovina: 93,101 (1930) → 71,950 (Apr. 1942) → 17,113 (May 1942).
• Dorohoi County: 14,874 (1930) → 11,546 (Apr. 1942) → 2,316 (May 1942).
• Northern Transylvania (under Hungarian administration from 1941): 148,294 (1930) → 151,125 (Apr. 1942, Hungarian census) → 29,405 returned from camps (postwar count).

From September 6, 1940, when the Romanian fascist dictatorship seized power, to the May 20, 1942 census, the number of Jewish citizens living in Romanian-controlled territory (excluding Northern Transylvania) fell by 315,641. At that time, tens of thousands of the Jews deported to Transnistria in autumn 1941 and the first half of 1942 were still alive; a Ministry of the Interior report dated November 1943 put the number of survivors as of September 1, 1943 at 50,741. Several thousand more died after that date, so that when the Red Army retook Transnistria in March 1944 it found only 40–45,000 Jewish deportees still living there. Taking the Ministry’s own figure of 50,741 survivors, some 264,900 of Romania’s Jewish citizens outside Northern Transylvania — 43 percent of the prewar Jewish population there — were unaccounted for.

More than half of these victims — 166,497 people — died before September 1, 1941, in the earliest wave of Iron Guard violence and the Iași pogrom, between the outbreak of war on June 22, 1941 and the official count taken that September. The remaining roughly 100,000 died on the roadside en route to concentration camps, or in the camps themselves, from misery, cold, hunger, disease, and Romanian-German fascist brutality. Separately, the same data show that 121,270 Jews in Northern Transylvania also died — under Hungarian administration, as this document’s foreword and the accompanying note above make clear.

Expropriation Acts

Under the expropriation act, the following became state property without compensation: the property of Jews living in the provinces (plough-land, hayfields, vineyards, country mansions, orchards, livestock- and poultry-breeding houses, beekeeping farms, and all related inventory, grain, and feedstuff); forests under Jewish ownership together with their mills, distilleries, and timber operations; ships, boats, and other vessels; urban real estate; film studios and printing plants; bakeries and industrial food-production equipment; medicine manufacturing firms; subsoil rights on Jewish-owned land; shares in travel and tourism businesses; and outright, all industrial and commercial businesses owned by Jews in Bessarabia and Bukovina. Directives also facilitated calling in mortgages held on Jewish-owned real estate long before they came due, and a large number of temples, synagogues, and cemeteries belonging to Jewish religious communities were seized outright.

Confiscation

Confiscated by law or administrative order: medical equipment owned by hospitals and private doctors (dentists and radiologists especially); radios; bicycles; skis and ski equipment; in some villages, batteries, telescopes, and cameras; the businesses of owners found guilty of holding undisclosed property; and, on May 10, 1941, the national, German, and Italian flags that Jewish merchants and property owners had been ordered to display — confiscated the same day by police officers roaming Bucharest’s streets on trucks to reclaim them.

Seizures and Requisitions

From the moment the Iron Guard came to power, it seized without payment: almost all the Jewish schools in the country; almost all the Jewish hospitals; most old people’s homes and orphanages; several synagogues (converted into warehouses, gymnasiums, and similar uses); and automobiles owned by Jews.

Expulsions

While the Iron Guard carried out robberies and violence, authorities and private individuals hunted Jews out of large parts of the country — mostly Oltenia and Wallachia. This situation persisted even after the Iron Guard’s own fall from power. In places where its violence had been most severe — Târgoviște, Giurgiu, Turnu Măgurele, Caracal — fewer than 20 percent of the Jewish population recorded as of September 6, 1940 survived. Jews were also driven out of Panciu at the time of the earthquake on November 10, 1940. During the Iron Guard’s rule, gendarmes also expelled Jews, especially from villages in Bihor and Suceava counties.

Evacuations

For two weeks after the outbreak of war, Jews were evacuated from villages and almost every country town by order of the Leader of the State. More than forty thousand people were made homeless; almost half of them were transported several hundred kilometers away under horrible conditions, where they lived in misery for more than two months. Their situation did not improve for the rest of the war — only a very small number were ever allowed to return home.

Internment and Hostages

Already under Iron Guard rule, Jews were being sent individually to the concentration camp at Târgu Jiu. Internment expanded sharply once war broke out. In some areas — Constanța, Siret, Darabani — entire Jewish populations were interned; in others — Galați, Ploiești, Huși, Dorohoi — every healthy man was interned; and in still others — Piatra Neamț, Focșani, Fălticeni, Buzău — most men were interned.

Ghettos

In early August 1941, following the occupation of Bessarabia and Bukovina, survivors from these regions were gathered from the Jewish communities and placed in five centers. Their populations as of September 1, 1941 were: the ghettos of Secureni and Edineți (Hotin county), 20,909; the Mărculești ghetto (Soroca county), 10,737; the Vertujeni ghetto (Soroca county), 24,000; and the town of Chernivtsi (Cernăuți), 49,497.

Deportations

Between September 1941 and October 1942, one-third of the surviving Jewish population of the country was deported beyond the Dniester. Deportees’ property was confiscated, robbed, or destroyed outright. The conditions of the deportation itself killed large numbers en route; half of those who reached the camps and ghettos of Transnistria died during the first winter there. The survivors lived in the most miserable conditions imaginable, surrounded by illness and hunger, and lived under the constant terror of further harassment and the expectation of death at any moment.

Withdrawal of the Right to Work

Even before the Iron Guard’s rise, Jews’ legal status had already ensured their exclusion from most positions.

In freelance work: Jewish lawyers, engineers, architects, journalists, consultants, and pharmacists lost the right to practice, with few exceptions; the law regulating medicine sharply limited the scope of practice for Jewish doctors.

In state-run and private companies: the Iron Guard’s Romanianization law drove the systematic dismissal of Jewish employees from private firms; all Jewish public officials had already been dismissed under the new legal status.

Among craftsmen: the trade certificates, work-books, and apprenticeship contracts of Jewish craftsmen were invalidated by the Ministry of Labour under harsh, and often simply unlawful, directives. Where some craftsmen managed to retain a nominal right to work, it proved largely illusory, since apprentices in that position had to spend nearly all their time in forced labour service regardless.

In commerce and industry: Jews were expelled from the boards of public companies; barred from commercial activity in villages; prohibited from selling alcohol, from selling official forms in Romanian, from trading in leather, iron, or grain, and from working in tourism, travel, or film. Company-registration law was used to refuse registration to Jewish firms outright — an opportunity, Carp notes, that was made full use of.

Labour Service

From autumn 1940, Jews were conscripted for “labour for public use” under the orders of county heads and mayors — formalized as “obligatory labour” by decree in December 1940, and placed under army supervision from August 1, 1941. For nearly three years afterward, with only one significant break (winter 1941–42), more than 150,000 Jewish men and women were forced into exhausting labour on roads, railway lines, and quarries — sweeping streets, clearing snow, removing the dead and wounded from bomb debris, defusing unexploded ordnance. Although the law nominally restricted this obligation to those between 18 and 50, administrative abuse routinely extended it in both directions — children as young as sixteen and elderly people past seventy were forced into the same labour. Jews driven into this service lived under constant threat of severe punishment, from corporal punishment through the deportation of family members to Transnistria, to death.

Forced Financial Contributions

Jews already deprived of the right to work, and impoverished by the burdens above, were also forced to bear direct financial exactions on top of the confiscations and seizures already described.

Miscellaneous

Throughout the four-year period, a continuous stream of legal and administrative directives competed with one another to deepen Jewish oppression and impoverishment. The Iron Guard organized boycotts of Jewish businesses, marked with “Jewish shop” signs, with armed members physically blocking entrances; the Iron Guard government barred Jewish students from state schools and universities outright.

It was forbidden for Jews to own radios; to employ Christian servants; to shop at markets at certain hours; to walk certain towns’ streets at certain times of day; to use swimming pools or bathhouses; to frequent certain restaurants; to travel between towns; or to buy directly from peasants. In some towns Jews were required to wear identifying signs — a practice that itself became the source of serious violent incidents. Jewish food-ration stamps were marked for reduced portions, often just twenty percent of their nominal value; for some staples, especially flour and corn products, Jews received no ration at all, and for a long period Jews paid twice the going price for bread.

Jews living in formerly Jewish-owned property that had been expropriated were at first charged higher rent than other tenants, then legally barred from renewing their tenancy and forcibly evicted without exception — including, in some cases, the original owners of the property itself. Jews renting from Christian landlords were, until April 1943, generally barred from extending their leases, left to choose between an arbitrarily raised rent or eviction. Centuries-old Jewish cemeteries — in Bucharest, Iași, Buzău, Moinești, Siret, and elsewhere — were destroyed, the bones disturbed, and the gravestones either discarded or used to pave roads and courtyards.

Responsibility for these acts, Carp writes, lay with the Romanian government and personally with Ion Antonescu and his successive governments — and with a broad cross-section of Romanian society besides: the administrative apparatus, the army, the press, the judiciary, the clergy, teachers, the guilds, and the business community.

III. Transnistria — The Massacres at Odessa, Berezovca, and Golta

A chronology, compiled by Carp from Romanian military and administrative records, of the destruction of the Jewish community of Odessa and the surrounding Transnistrian counties, October 1941 – December 1942:

October 16, 1941 — Romanian and German troops occupy Odessa. Though they meet no resistance, they murder a large number of citizens, mostly Jews.

October 22, 1941 — A time bomb destroys the Romanian military headquarters, killing 16 officers, 35 soldiers, and the town commander. Three hours later his successor orders that Jews and communists be hanged in Odessa’s public squares.

October 23, 1941 — By morning, gallows stand with victims hanging in every part of the city; people are shot at random. By noon roughly 5,000 people, most of them Jews, have been killed. Ion Antonescu orders 200 executions for every Romanian or German officer killed in the bombing, 100 for every soldier, and orders Jewish and communist hostages taken.

October 24, 1941 — Thousands are marched three kilometers to the town gate at Dalnic; the road is lined with the bodies of women, children, and the disabled who could not keep pace. Groups are shot in an anti-tank ditch, then driven into four warehouses and machine-gunned through holes cut in the walls. At dusk the warehouses are set ablaze while soldiers continue firing into them and officers throw grenades inside.

October 25, 1941 — Exactly 48 hours after the bombing, one of the warehouses — still containing wounded survivors — is dynamited.

November 11, 1941 — The Governor of Transnistria issues Directive No. 23, confining Jews to assigned settlements and conscripting them into agricultural and road labor for subsistence-level pay.

November 20, 1941 — The regional gendarme commander, worried that Transnistria was “filling up with communists and Jews,” requests instructions, writing that “only the extermination of criminals and fanatic communists will free mankind from the threat of communism.”

December 21–29, 1941 — At the camp of Bogdanovca (Golta county, holding some 48,000 Jews), the camp’s Romanian administrators begin systematic extermination. The sick and disabled are locked in straw-filled stables that are then set alight. Roughly 43,000 others are marched in groups of 300–400 to a nearby forest and killed with exploding bullets over four days, pausing only for Christmas. Their bodies are stacked in piles for burning by a work detail of 200 Jewish prisoners — 150 of whom are then shot dead once the work is finished.

January – February 1942 — Mass deportations proceed from the Odessa ghetto toward Berezovca, day by day, in groups of roughly 900 to 2,300 people — mostly the old, women, and children — through temperatures of −20°C; the dead are buried in anti-tank ditches along the route.

By early 1942 — The extermination of the Jews interned in the Golta county camps of Dumanovca and Acmicetca — some 22,000 people — is complete. Survivors deported from Odessa to Berezovca are, after being robbed and tortured, handed over to German forces for further “processing.”

December 1942 — The Romanian Central Jewish Office’s own survey finds that of the Jewish population once concentrated in Odessa and southern Transnistria, only 60 remain alive in Odessa and 425 in Berezovca county — a total of 485 people.