hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews, ending decades of denial. President Ion Iliescu, an ex-Communist who will face an election challenge in November, said Romania "must not forget or minimize the darkest chapter of Romania’s recent history" when it was a close ally of Nazi Germany. "Jews" he said "were the victims of the Holocaust."
Illiescu spoke at a joint session of both parliament houses Tuesday, to mark Romania’s first Holocaust Day, following a diplomatic row with Israel.
Last year Israeli and Jewish leader were angered by a Romanian government statement denying the Holocaust took place on its territory. President Illiescu said "the young generations need to know and understand the entire truth" about the Holocaust. "Such a tragedy must not be repeated" he added.
"DEATH TRAINS"
Illiescu made clear he wanted to appear as an elderly statesman and a far cry from the early days after Communism when he ordered mine workers to crush student demonstrations against his rule. He said "death trains, mass deportations and pogroms took place" in Romania during World War II and that anti-Semitism was a state-sponsored ideology even before the war started in 1939.
The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust says that about 420,000 of Romania’s 750,000-strong Jewish community died – including 100,000 deported to Auschwitz from areas of the country then under Hungarian rule. Under pressure from Western nations and the European Union it wants to join in 2007, Romania has said it will teach the Holocaust in Romanian schools.
The government set up a special committee headed by Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel to study Romania’s Holocaust. Its findings are expected by next month. Illiescu suggested that scholars will also have to look into the actions of leaders of the state’s institutions … those who executed, often with a lot of zeal, the orders of Marshal Antonescu."
WAR CRIMINAL
Leader Antonescu was seen as a war criminal who merely followed Hitler’s orders, however Romanian nationalists have praised him as a hero because he fought a Soviet invasion in 1940. Neighboring Hungary, which was involved in the killings of 600,000 Hungarian Jews, also launched a Holocaust Day and set up former Communist Europe’s first Holocaust Memorial Center this year.
Some issues have remained unresolved, including compensation for Hungarian Jewish survivors. In a related development Wednesday, October 13, bipartisan political pressure has been building on President George W. Bush’s administration to settle a lawsuit by Hungarian Jews who claim the United States plundered family riches that had been seized by the Nazis during World War II.
The plundered "gold train" as it became known, was a train carrying cargo worth an estimated $50 million to $120 million at the end of the war when Nazi Germans tried to flee Hungary. U.S. soldiers allegedly captured all or at least part of its valuable cargo, including priceless pieces of art. The affair was shrouded in official secrecy until the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets detailed it in a 1999 draft report, The Associated Press said.
Lawyers and Jewish survivors have expressed optimism that the U.S. will in the end pay compensation. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian and Romanian Jews lost their properties as well as their lives during World War Two.
