More than 13,000 Jews were murdered during nine days in early summer of 1941 in Iași (Jassy), Romania. This pogrom is one of the most thoroughly documented events of the Holocaust in that German troops, present in the city, were allowed to photograph the atrocities and to send those “souvenirs” of the Eastern Front to their family members. Members of the Romanian Intelligence Service were there also, and they too photographed the continuing massacre. Yet these images are, for the most part, unknown to the general public. Long inaccessible even to scholars, the Romanian archives opened for a time only under pressure from civil society.
The 127 photographs shown and described in this album, accompanied by survivors’ and even perpetrators’ testimony, were collected after the war but most of this evidence remained hidden away for decades. Together they are invaluable and provide unique insight into this monstrous crime committed by Romanians under the government of an avowedly antisemitic Nazi-allied Romanian regime.
“The orders came from above, from General Ion Antonescu himself....The Jews of Iași could expect no trace of compassion or humanity.”
from the preface by Elie Wiesel
Radu Ioanid was born and grew up in Bucharest, Romania. He studied at the University of Bucharest; at the University of Cluj, where he received a Ph.D.; and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he received a doctorate in history. He has written The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (also published in association with this museum), The Sword of the Archangel: Fascist Ideology in Romania, as well as numerous articles and contributions to collections of essays. He has been a Starkoff Fellow at the American Jewish Archives and is now director of the International Archival Programs Division of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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