A Documentary Discovered
On a serendipitous moment as I was completing this dissertation, I discovered a documentary published at the time of my writing, made by France 24 a French state owned international news agency, which takes us on a journey to Iași. The videographer visits the very places I found during my family research, only a month before I arrived in Piatra Neamt. First, they travel to the cemetery in Iași, where they meet the cemetery caretaker and her dogs, and where she shows the mass grave from the Iași massacre. They show footage of the plaza in downtown Iași, but the researcher is not aware that bodies were tossed into the ditch in front of the church, as Serge witnessed, and there is a possible mass grave under the plaza. They take us to my cousin Emil’s office in Piatra Neamt, to speak with a survivor of the massacre—but do not mention that they are interviewing in the heart of Bukovina, where most Jews were deported to Transnistria, and which “served Romania as a giant killing field for Jews” (Bletry, 2022).
The particular concern in the documentary was to set out two contrary trends currently existing in Romania. First, there is the enactment of an important new law making Holocaust education mandatory in middle and high schools commencing in 2023. Second, there is the rise of a right wing party ”The Alliance for Unity of Romania ‘AUR’), prominent for its revisionist, anti-semitic and racist overtones which has captured ten percent of the popular vote (Bletry, 2022). The documentary valiantly battles historic Holocaust denial, but still there are the gaps, the places where the stories are not told, or told partially, or without context. The stories of Rachel’s grandfather, of Danny’s grandmother, place Romania on the map of the European erasure of Jews. This exhibit is an effort to recapture the history of a family in the context of the wider travesty of the Shoah.