Alexianu was born in 1897 in the county of Vrancea, an ancient district of the old kingdom of Romania. Once the kingdom expanded to include lands acquired in the postwar peace settlements, he set out, like many of his generation, to the new eastern frontier. These corners of Greater Romania were Romanian in name only. Each had sizable populations of ethnic Romanians—even majorities, depending on how and whom one counted—but there were minorities too: Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, and, especially in the districts that had formerly been part of Russia’s Pale of Settlement, Jews. Many men and women of Alexianu’s generation saw their supreme duty as bringing Romanian culture to the benighted lands of the east. They signed up as schoolteachers, university professors, regional administrators, agronomists, journalists, and any other profession that would help to develop—and make truly Romanian—the lands that had once been captive to Romanovs and Habsburgs.
Alexianu ended up as a professor of administrative law at the university in Czernowitz, a once thriving Austrian-controlled city located in the district of Bukovina, in what is today western Ukraine. What he encountered there was different from what he expected. Far from being truly Romanian, the city seemed overwhelmingly German-speaking and Jewish. It was, in fact, one of the great centers of Jewish culture in central Europe, home of the future German-language poet Paul Celan (born 1920) and a haven for provincial intellectuals and artists.
Gheorghe Alexianu (standing) at a formal dinner. Romanian National Archive, I/6003.
Alexianu’s task, like that of other professors, schoolteachers, and local administrators, was to “romanianize” the city and its hinterland, to make the mélange of peoples and cultures into loyal citizens of the Romanian state. School curricula were reworked to tell a Romanian version of history. Minority languages were suppressed. Jews were excluded from universities and restrictions placed on their participation in civic life. His skill and enthusiasm attracted the attention of the central authorities, and in 1938 he was named rezident regal—the Romanian king’s personal representative and the effective governor—of all Bukovina and several surrounding counties.
When Stalin annexed Bessarabia in the summer of 1940, part of Bukovina was included in the bargain. The Soviet invasion had a galvanizing impact on local nationalists like Alexianu, who fled grumbling and vengeful back to Romania. His adopted city, Czernowitz, was now overrun by the Red Army. The Romanian-speaking peasants whom he had lauded as the repositories of an ancient national ethos were punished as imperialist stooges by the new Soviet masters. Jews in the city likely saw the Soviet arrival as a form of liberation, or at least something of a relief compared to the intense nationalism that, for some two decades, had promoted Romanians and Romanian culture at their expense. Stories circulated of locals jeering and spitting at Romanian troops as they pulled out in advance of the Soviet arrival.
Once Romanian armies joined Hitler’s push to the east in the summer of 1941, Alexianu was a reasonable if not obvious choice for governing the newly “liberated” lands. He had never had more than a provincial administrative appointment, but his nationalizing zeal and direct experience as a professor in one of the kingdom’s border provinces gave him a certain familiarity with the methods necessary to rebuild what the Soviets had destroyed. He knew how to get things done in a Jewish city. His major achievement as an administrator in Czernowitz seems to have been outdoing the central government in its anti-Jewish legislation. Before he had been in office a year, he had forbidden local citizens from using Yiddish in public.
In August of 1941, even before Romanian and German troops had secured effective control of Transnistria, Alexianu was named the region’s guvernator, at the head of an array of local prefects, police units, and eventually the mayoralty of the province’s new capital, Odessa. Thick-waisted and balding, with a penchant for fine suits and a tiny Hitler-style mustache, Alexianu was obsessed with hierarchy and protocol. Even his preferred form of address revealed the social anxiousness of a provincial arriviste. Right up to the end of the Romanian occupation, he always signed his letters and decrees as “Professor” Gheorghe Alexianu. He set up his office in Count Vorontsov’s old palace overlooking Odessa’s port. The large mural of an avuncular Stalin amid a gaggle of dancing Soviet children—left over from the days when the palace served as headquarters of the Communist children’s league, the Young Pioneers—disappeared beneath several coats of paint.35
In the fall of 1941, as the represalii were winding down and the bureaucracy for rounding up Jews was coalescing, Alexianu allowed himself a moment of reflection on the historical significance of Romania’s eastern project. In a rambling and flowery letter to Antonescu, he proposed resurrecting the Preobrazhensky Cathedral, leveled by the Soviets in the 1930s, as an homage to Romania’s eastern expansion: “As ever did our Princes of old after a victorious battle, so should we ourselves signify the most glorious moment in the life of our people, when the expansionist might of Romanian warriors has caused our country’s banner to be hoisted on the walls of Odessa.” He saw himself as part of a great historical pageant. It trailed back to the sword-wielding princes of the Middle Ages who had stood valiantly against Slav, Mongol, and Turk. It marched forward to a time when people would look on what the nation had achieved in Odessa as “a most magnificent icon, from age to age, of times past, of the exalted life of Romania.” As the country carried on with its mission, it should therefore be conscious of how it would be judged by history—which Alexianu believed would necessarily reveal Romania’s selfless and humanitarian response to the call to greatness.36
But then it was back to work. Alexianu, like his superiors in Bucharest and his colleagues in the military and gendarmerie, was deeply concerned with identifying Jews. Senior officials looked on the eastern province as a territory inhabited first and foremost by blood-defined groups, not by individual people. Determining the size and membership of each of these racial or ethnic groups was a basic task of administration, much like registering automobiles or issuing licenses to liquor shops. German comrades in the Wehrmacht liaison office and SS detachments in Transnistria no doubt approved of and even encouraged that process. But Alexianu had long experience with such matters from his time in Bukovina. Administrators were also convinced that finding Jews—or, by process of elimination, first identifying all non-Jews—would somehow contribute to the security of the city. If Jews were crypto-Communists, and if Communist agents had been responsible for the explosion at the military headquarters, sorting out which Odessans could be trusted became a principal task of government.
Alexianu and his team devised an entire system of checking and verifying identity, especially that of men. At its core was a registration system in which, if proper documentation could not be produced in other ways, Odessans might provide witnesses to their identity. The form provided by Alexianu’s administration made the task simple:
I, the undersigned, __________, living at __________, with passport number __________, declare that I have known Mr. __________ since the year __________, that I know he is not a Jew but is of __________ ethnic origin, that he was not in the Communist Party, and that he was living in Odessa [before the occupation].37
Alexianu was at times fulfilling orders given by Antonescu himself, but as a man who paid attention to details, he took particular care to shape the way in which orders were applied. His personal margin notes can be found in the periodic reports on the deportation of Jews from the city, often with stern comments evidently meant to encourage or reprimand his subordinates. Once the deportation of Jews was under way, he reminded the gendarmes that any Jewish children left behind by deportees were not to be taken in by Christian families; a special orphanage would be constructed for them in the camp at Berezovka. When the chairman of the evacuation commission reported that Jews were still thought to be hiding outside the ghetto in other parts of the city, Alexianu’s orders, jotted down in pencil in his economical script, were clear: “Raids are to be conducted and sanctions applied.”38
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sp; Nevertheless, his own conception of identity could be as slippery as that of the grotesque and quixotic province he helped create. Sometimes Jewishness depended on blood. Sometimes it depended on faith. Following a policy established by Antonescu, Alexianu decreed that Jews who could verify they had been baptized as Christians would not be subject to deportation. He personally intervened in at least one instance to save a baptized, presumably ex-Jewish woman at the request of her priest.39 But that was one of the many terrifying features of the government over which he presided with officious passion. With the life and death of individual Odessans and other Transnistrians determined literally by the stroke of his pen, Alexianu possessed a power that not even Antonescu—busy mapping troop movements and taking salutes—could exercise with the same pinpoint accuracy.
WHAT DID THE ROMANIANS think they were doing in Transnistria? The answer would have depended on which Romanian one asked and when. Sometimes officials were simply copying the Nazi experience in the General Government or the Reich Commissariat Ukraine—killing, deporting, confining, and then killing again—even though survival rates in Transnistria were an order of magnitude higher than in some German-controlled areas. Sometimes they were creating their own micro-empire on the fly, a poorly organized and inconsistent effort to have their own colonial possession in the Slavic east, which could supply labor and raw materials for the motherland.
At still other points, they were crafting a distinctly Romanian project, preparing the groundwork for a postwar state that would be even larger and ethnically cleaner than the one created in 1918. Romania’s borders had already been changed by force, and there was some expectation that at least a portion of those changes would remain in place after an Axis victory. The friendly Germans had awarded a sizable chunk of Transylvania, in Romania’s north, to equally friendly Hungary around the time the enemy Soviets had grabbed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Surrounded by such acquisitive friends, the Romanians reckoned, securing Transnistria might be an insurance policy against the permanent loss of Transylvania—a much more valuable piece of the Romanian heartland that remained the preeminent territorial concern throughout the war.40
Cultural antisemitism, formalized by the institutions of the Romanian state, was fundamental to these efforts. By September of 1942, Antonescu and Alexianu finally got around to closing the circle by outlawing Jewishness itself: ordering that Judaism would henceforth be considered an illegal religion while also prohibiting cultural Jews from espousing other faiths.41 One of the newly established newspapers, the Romanian-language Gazeta Odesei (Odessa Gazette), tried to capture the transformative power of Romanian rule and its relationship to the Jewish question:
Odessa used to impress its visitors mainly through the smell of dirty yid diapers and the decomposing waste of the Privoz market…. You’d think that only yids lived there, racing through the streets, crowding into shops, and forming great herds at the entrances to buildings…. But then came the Romanian army and, after that, the Romanian administration. And the Jewish hullabaloo was put to an end. Odessa started to heal its wounds and cleanse itself of the filth that had accumulated over many years. The repulsive smell of Jewish courtyards disappeared with time. Odessa awoke to a new life, full of luminous hope.42
But there were other motivations beyond anti-Jewish sentiment. Romania was bound by a vague sense of manifest destiny to its east and by the desire to create a territorial buffer zone around a liberated Bessarabia and Bukovina. Once the state began the large-scale deportations, it took on a set of responsibilities that it was both unable and unwilling to meet. In the end, with Jews and Roma/ Gypsies lying hungry and diseased in atrocious facilities, the Romanians got rid of the problem by turning it over to someone else—in many cases the ethnic Ukrainian and German villagers in whose laps the deportees had been dumped. Emboldened and outfitted by the Nazis, local ethnic Germans, or Volksdeutsche, descendants of the sedulous German farmers originally invited to the region by Catherine the Great, sometimes killed the starving people they had never really thought of as neighbors anyway. The desire to unburden the state of human encumbrances was often one of the most powerful and grotesque sources of Romanian behavior.43
Thousands of average Romanians well below Antonescu and Alexianu saw in the Transnistrian experiment the chance to realize a particular pet project or further their own careers. Romanian officials did not by and large suffer from what the Germans called Ostrausch, the intoxicating effects of working far from home, in a place seen to be inhabited by subhuman Jews and savage Slavs. But the possibilities afforded by Transnistria were not to be ignored. Academics explored the riches of the region between the Dniester and Bug rivers and prepared for the wholesale restructuring of its population. Scholars organized anthropological expeditions, measuring heads and studying the brow lines of villagers to sort out true Romanians from hybrids. (Twenty-five percent Romanian blood, it was agreed, would suffice to make someone genuinely Romanian—a far more capacious definition of national identity than that applied by the Nazis.) A new “national eugenics institute” was proposed as a way of putting the Romanian nation on a more solid genetic footing. In the summer of 1942, Romanian authorities began the process of identifying ethnic Romanians who lived to the east of the Bug River, inside the Reich Commissariat Ukraine. The plan was to relocate them to the west, into Transnistria, where they would help build a flourishing and more ethnically pure province, the Latin equivalent of Germany’s “repatriation” policies toward its own Volksdeutsche. Some Romanian families were resettled before the tide of war began to turn against the Axis.44
Liberals and humanitarians spoke out about the treatment of the country’s own Jews, while prominent Jewish leaders in Romania organized aid missions to assist Jews in the Transnistrian camps. The most enthusiastic nationalists welcomed policies that involved moving people, changing borders, and purifying territories thought to be contaminated by the racially or ethnically alien. But to most Romanians, the fate of Jews in the occupied region was probably of only passing concern. Even worldly intellectuals had a particular blind spot when it came to what was happening in the east. The eminent historian Gheorghe Ioan Brtianu traveled with a Romanian cavalry unit all the way to Crimea, but he was moved mainly by the long rows of soldiers’ graves and the heavy toll that artillery had taken on the region’s antiquities.45 The province and its capital city were not the sole purview of a limited, secretive, and depraved cadre of officials and soldiers. Through acts of commission or omission, Transnistria was very much a participatory affair.
In Odessa all this would have seemed clear at the time. As one secret agent working for the occupying forces reported, some Odessans thought of the many Romanians now patrolling the streets and serving in government offices as representatives of a “soft nation,” whereas the Germans were “strong…they would have quickly brought discipline” to the city—that is, they would have restored order, kept the streets clean, rounded up criminals, and stamped out official corruption.46 That was probably the dominant view among Russians and Ukrainians: having Romanians in charge wasn’t the kind of occupation one would have chosen, but nevertheless there it was. And in any case, as brown leaves floated down to empty pavements in the autumn of 1941, the basic task that the occupiers had set themselves seemed obvious: they had come to get rid of the people the Romanians called jidani and whom Odessans knew in everyday Russian as zhidy—that is, the yids.
CHAPTER 10
“I Would Like to Bring to Your Attention the Following”
A city liberated: The Soviet Union’s 62nd Stalingrad Army marching down Richelieu Street, April 10, 1944. Photo by Georgii Zel’ma, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
After the war every Odessan schoolchild could recite the dates that bracketed the occupation: the Red Army’s strategic retreat on October 16, 1941, and its triumphant return on April 10, 1944. Those 907 days were treated as a brief interregnum before the restoration of Soviet power and as a time o
f communal suffering, when the city was held in the strangling clutch of foreigners. Even today, along the Alley of Glory in Shevchenko Park (the former Alexandrovsky Park), a sloping walkway is flanked by memorials to the war dead. It leads to the obelisk of the unknown sailor and a sputtering eternal flame. On public holidays the memorial is patrolled by goose-stepping, uniformed children, who compete for the honor of standing to attention at “Post No. 1.” From there, visitors can look out on the harbor and the high-rise apartments beyond, evidence of the city’s journey from victim to victor.
Soviet historians tended to label the old enemy as “fascists” or “German-fascist occupiers,” especially once Romania became a Communist state and an ally in the Warsaw Pact. The former enemy had become a socialist friend, so painful episodes from the past were quietly put aside. Few people, even in Odessa itself, know of the wartime experience in any detail—in part because of the passing of the generation that still remembers the war, in part because a half century of Soviet propaganda emphasized the city’s defenders and downplayed its foreign occupiers and local collaborators.
The Soviet narrative of resistance is still powerful. Schoolteachers walk their classes through the twists and turns of the catacombs, where guerrillas plotted raids on the enemy. Commemorative plaques still mark the former homes of heroes, patriots, and partisans. Only a few Odessan writers have begun to question this version of events. For over two and a half years, were citizens really thinking only about “how to blow up the enemy headquarters, rub out an enemy soldier, or at least puncture the tires of a Romanian car?” asked one author wryly.1 But today we know—or at least can know—a great deal more about the local response to the wartime occupation.
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams Page 20
