Laszlo Alexandru

 

IDEAS THAT KILL

english version by Axel H. Lenn

In October 2003, the Romanian president took the initiative in setting up a prestigious international commission to study the Holocaust issues in Romania. Activities carried on under Nobel Peace Prize laureate Eli Wiesel’s honorary chairmanship. All research was completed, conclusions were drawn, the efforts made were gratefully acknowledged in the public statements of two successive presidents (Ion Iliescu and Traian Băsescu). Romania commissioned the publication of the impressive report by Polirom Publishing House. From this moment onwards, the press places a thick veil of silence on the incendiary book that makes you wonder: has no one really read it, or is everyone waiting prudently perhaps?

The generalized silence today – discontinued occasionally by antisemitic invectives – is somewhat justified. The Final Report of the Wiesel Commission proposes an extremely complex approach directed at studying mentalities, as well as Romania’s most prominent intellectuals’ biographies, historical events, including their numerous tragic details, authentic records of witness accounts, intense moral and existential debates on our past and present, especially throughout the XIX and XX centuries. Today, the numerous hypotheses brought forth by some self-employed researchers throughout the past few decades and contradicted by others, referring to Romania’s involvement in the large scale massacre of Jews, are summed up and officially acknowledged for the first time in a historically, politically, diplomatically and (even) economically important document.

The logical, thorough, solid structure of the presented material is, in our view, absolutely impressive. Facts are observed not only as they tragically happen, but considering the whole causality process over decades. How was it possible that, one day, peace-loving, gentle and harmless people run wild on their neighbours or fellow countrymen, hurt, rob and kill them? The answer to such an elementary question should comprise many steps of explicitness. One such step considers the most prominent intellectuals’ complicity was a fundamental cause. Top names of Romania’s intelligentsia, conscience managers of the bewildered nation have repeatedly chosen to use their influential power in serving hate. When a fascinating, intelligent, prestigious or charismatic man reiterates insistently that the Jew next door belongs to a human subclass unworthy of respect, chances are high he might actually be taken for granted. Instead of asking ourselves "how was it possible?", we should reexamine the public interventions made by many intellectuals of the time. Ideas that kill are only one step away from murder itself – and this step was taken enthusiastically.

- Ion Brătianu, a leading political figure, refuses in 1866 to grant the same civil rights to the Jews, as recommended by international conventions, and regards them as Romania’s social plague: "Strong administrative measures alone might rid us of this nuisance and might prevent foreign proletarians from invading our country".

- Cezar Bolliac, 1848 revolutionary, is complaining about Jewish parasitism: "It’s frightening, gentlemen, to see this fateful congregation expanding day by day, but even more frightening to think that nowhere did it take such deep roots as in our country".

- Mihail Kogălniceanu, prestigious statesman, intensifies in 1869 the process of eliminating Jews from Romanian villages by depriving them of their subsistence means: "You’ll see that Moldavia is exhausted, sucked dry by Jewish publicans and excise-men; you’ll see a poverty stricken Jew settling in any Moldavian village and then, 2 or 3 yeas later, leaving with a great fortune, you’ll see who the leeches of Moldavian villages really are". Confronted by western democratic governments, the Romanian politician conceitedly invoked the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of his country: "This was my reply to foreign officials, I said we do not grant them the right to interfere in our country’s internal administrative affairs".

- Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, encyclopedic personality, justifies in 1866 the hate Jews draw upon themselves by three elements: "their tendency to earn without working, their lack of dignity and their hate against all nations".

- Vasile Conta, well-known philosopher, considers in 1879 that Jews intend to chase Romanians away from Romania in order to establish a purely Jewish state and declares in front of the Parliament: "Unless we fight against the Jewish element, we’re going to die as a nation".

- Vasile Alecsandri, leading Romanian poet, draws the attention in 1879 upon Jewish religious fanaticism and upon the occult nature of their actions: "Talmud is their fatherland! Their power is endless, because two other powers constitute its basis and support: religious freemasonry and gold".

- Ioan Slavici, Transylvanian classic prose writer, in his paper Regarding the Jews in Romania (1878), characterizes them as a "disease" and proposes the radical solution, surprisingly foreshadowing the Holocaust: "We have no other choice but to close our frontiers at a sign, to strangle them, to throw them all into the Danube so that all their traces disappear for good".

- A.D. Xenopol, renowned historian, declares in 1902 that only christened Jews should be conferred Romanian citizenship, while those not converted to Christianity must be chased away from the country.

- Nicolae Iorga, brilliant personality in Romanian historiography, encyclopedic intellectual and emblematic political figure, urges in 1937 that Jews should be socially isolated and calls for general mobilization against the allogeneous element: Jews "work for themselves, as an invading nation that they are, gathering more and more. Even in the free professions, even in education, in science, in literature, as lawyers, as physicians, as architects, more and more philologists, journalists, poets, critical views of theirs, they are simply throwing us out of our country... They are strangling our churches, they are replacing our morality with their inciting journalistic and literary opium. (...) We must organize for a war of conscience and of labour. We must stick together wherever we are. And we must start regaining through daily effort and perfect unity, severing all our relations with those who want to take our rightful place, reconquering the things we have already lost. / Let them live among their own kind, for themselves alone, the way they have always wanted to. We shall live among our own kind, this must be our desire!".

- Octavian Goga, national unity poet (and obscure politician as well), before promoting the antisemitic laws that confiscated the Romanian citizenship and the civil rights from tens of thousands of Jews, was confronting in 1935 the mentality and the morality of this ethnic minority: "These people, who do not have burial sites in Romanian cemeteries, believe they can guide the soul, the material impulse in our mind, they imagine all our moral expressions are their heritage, they touch it with their filthy hands, they simply turn their rotary presses into a means of morally ruining the Romanian society".

And then, after the words had reached their goal, actions started to be taken: the Holocaust in Romania. Between 280.000 and 380.000 human beings died a violent death.

(July 2006)