not Martin but Mircea

[Jochen Stremmel]

In the annals of anti-Semitism, Romania holds a particularly egregious
position. For example, it is estimated that 130,000 local Jews were
slaughtered in Romanian-occupied Ukraine, and that Romanian forces
massacred 150,000 Jews in the area of Odessa and Golta. In a pogrom in
1941, as Sebastian records in his *Journal*, Jews were herded into an
abattoir and hanged by the neck on meat hooks. “A sheet of paper was stuck
to each corpse: ‘Kosher Meat.’”

Of course, Romania was not unique in this regard. In the early years of
Nazi conquests in Eastern Europe the ravening enthusiasm for pogroms among
the indigenous populations of countries such as Poland, Lithuania, and
Estonia startled even the SS. However, the detestation of Jews among all
levels of Romanian society, particularly intellectuals, was unrelenting.
Here is a typical outburst, recorded in the *Journal* in September 1939:

The Poles’ resistance in Warsaw is a Jewish resistance. Only yids are
capable of the blackmail of putting women and children in the front line,
to take advantage of the Germans’ sense of scruple…. What is happening on
the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal, because new waves of Jews are
flooding into the country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it
would be better to have a German protectorate.

Who might the speaker be? Some embittered partisan, perhaps, or a
street-corner orator? No: the speaker is Mircea Eliade, one of Romania’s
leading scholars and writers of the time, who after the war slipped away to
America and there became a highly respected and influential thinker and
historian of religions. In 1937 Eliade says of a left-wing student flogged
by Iron Guardists that personally he would have put his eyes out as well.
Sebastian writes, “Perhaps one day things will have calmed down enough for
me to read this page to Mircea and to see him blush with shame.”


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