Romania Confronts Its Holocaust History

While local collaboration with the Nazis in the execution of the Holocaust happened throughout Europe, the case of Romania is unique. Poles, Ukrainians, and other East Europeans served as guards in death camps and even participated in the mass-slaughter of Jews. Dutch bureaucrats and French and Hungarian policemen helped round up Jews for slave labor and to be shipped to Auschwitz. But Romania, ruled at the time by a fascist dictator named Ion Antonescu, was the only country whose armed forces, as such, pursued a policy of extermination—more or less independent of the Nazis—with some 380,000 victims. Yet, for complex reasons, many more Romanian Jews survived, giving the country an excuse to downplay its ugly history.