BOOK REVIEWS : ROMANIAN - JEWISH STUDIES

Documents Concerning the Fate of
Romanian Jewry During the Holocaust
Selected and edited by Dr. Jean Ancel. Vol. I-XII. 
Jerusalem-NewYork, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1986.

In February 1986, a Jerusalem press conference called attention to an event of decisive importance for the comprehension and study of the history of Romanian Jewry: the release of twelve volumes of documents concerning the fate of the Romanian Jews during the Holocaust. These documents had been gathered, selected and edited by only one researcher, Dr. Jean Ancel, of the Yad Vashem Institute of Jerusalem. Their high quality reproduction was made possible by the initiative of the well-known Parisian jurist Serge Klarsfeld, originally from Romania, and his wife, Beate Klarsfeld, for whom the cultural foundation that released these volumes is named.
The Romanian chapter in the history of the Holocaust has hitherto lacked an adequate documentary basis, except for Cartea Neagra (The Black Book) published by Matatias Carp shortly after the war. This history was preserved in a peripheral zone, being either interpreted superficially or mystified. Now, this aspect of the Holocaust returns to research and public conscience in the shape of a fundamental work.
The first ten volumes contain photocopies of original documents; the eleventh and twelfth volumes, a key to the rest, include a study by the editor, a descriptive inventory of the documents and an index of names and places.
Within each volume documents are arranged chronologically, whereas, throughout the whole series, they are structured either according to territorial criteria: the Regat (Old Kingdom) with Southern Transylvania, and then Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria, or on thematical sections: the trials of war criminals, statistics on the demographic evolution of Romanian Jewry, the activity of the Jewish Center, anti-Jewish legislation. This collection does not concern the Jews of Northern Transylvania, since, during World War II, that region had been under Hungarian authority.
The excellence of this vast work (about seven thousand pages) is demonstrated by the majority of documents, selected from a variety of archives. Among the main sources were the Filderman and Romanian Funds of the Yad Vashem, the Matitias Carp Fund, collections of official documents by Romanian authorities, archives of the Zionist organizations, German correspondence and official documents from the Killinger Fund and the Foreign Ministry of the Reich, pages from the files of the Eichmann trial, correspondence and diplomatic documents from British, French and American archives, reports of the World Jewish Congress and the International Red Cross, and many others. Important documents from Romanian Army Headquarters and Central Institute for Statistics included in volume ten had been provided to the editor by the Institute for Historical, Social and Political Research of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party.
Along with genuine archivistic documents, the author also included in this collection published materials of special significance for the understanding of the Jewish problem in Romania in its complexity, considerably widening the informational basis of the work. These materials include collections of laws and decrees regarding the legal status of Jews, posters, electoral leaflets and other antisemitic propaganda materials, circular letters of the local authorities, numerous clippings from the Romanian and foreign press of the time, and even chapters from recent unpublished Romanian studies pertaining to World War II. The author had previously published only a very small proportion of the numerous testimonies of survivors of Transnistrian camps or the pogrom of Jassy. Such victim-accounts might be suspected of subjectivity and distortion. As a result, an account based almost entirely on official documents or reports of neutral observers gains greater credibility, being more difficult to deny. 

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