In a corner of The Exported, by Sonia Devillers (Impedimenta), it is said that there was a moment in the 60s when a leader of the Communist Party of Romania was angry when he discovered that the agriculture of the People’s Republic was poorly mechanized and still He depended on the draft of the horses, so he decreed that all horses in Romania had to die (the cultural relationship of horses with the aristocracy also weighed in his decision). The remains of the slaughtered animals were to be fed to the pigs, the regime’s favorite beast for its high meat yield. There was a problem: killing 800,000 horses was a complicated and expensive task. The Government imposed a solution: let them die of hunger. Feeding horses would be considered a crime. And so it was done. Beyond the suffering of the animals, what could be the effect for Romanians of living for months with thousands of wandering, hungry and desperate animals?
“The massacre of the horses tells us that the most important thing about totalitarian regimes is the moral vacuum, the dehumanization of relationships and not only between people, but also between people and animals. The question of ethics is nullified,” says Devillers, a French journalist, daughter and granddaughter of Romanian Jews, who were exported by the People’s Republic of Romania, as the title of her book says.
Very briefly, Devillers tells in his book the story of his maternal family after surviving the Shoah. First, his grandparents joined the Communist Party after the liberation of their country. As they were qualified professionals and idealistic and sincere militants, they climbed the ranks of the new Romania until they fell into disgrace due to some envy, due to some resentment that was expressed through the same anti-Semitic language of the years of terror. Devillers’ grandparents became untouchables, they went hungry and were humiliated, until a solution appeared: their family and friends exiled in France claimed them, requesting their exile. And the Government said okay, but in exchange for what? In exchange for pigs: such was the pig obsession of the Romanian communists that they had developed a secret market for bartering Jews in exchange for cattle. A Jewish businessman residing in London mediated these businesses with impeccable professionalism. There was even a price table.
“The most impressive thing is that this entire market is perfectly recorded. The administration of totalitarianism was like that, it left everything in writing. There are 30,000 pages of files on this trade but you will not find a single report, a single letter that asks about its ethical problems. Due to logistical and efficiency problems, you will find all the questions you can imagine, but about morality, not a word,” says Devillers. “The communist regime was a crusher of human relations and moral sense. Everyone was afraid of everyone, everyone was marked by the threat of denunciation: no one could allow themselves to be different.”
Those exported is also a story of anti-Semitism in Europe. What was special about the Romanian case? “Romanian anti-Semitism is very old. Until World War I, the conquest of civil and political rights for the Jews was an ordeal and a cause of international scandal. In the interwar period, Romanian fascist groups were extremely anti-Semitic, although Its history is little known in Europe. The Legion of the Archangel Saint Michael was the second most powerful fascist movement in Europe after the German National Socialist Party, and Romania enacted racial laws on the Nuremberg model since 1937, before any other country. The Shoah Romania was a monstrosity for which the Romanian State was responsible. In other countries, the Shoah was a policy of the Germans that local governments allowed. In Romania, no. The last specificity of the Romanian case is that the communist regime did everything possible “for erasing that history. Since he could not assume that heritage, that national guilt, he imposed silence.”
“A complexity of the Romanian Shoah is that it was different in each region. The Jews of what is called the Old Kingdom, the heart of the country, avoided the worst. They lived in permanent terror of deportation, suffered pogroms, arrests, bans, dismissals, abusive taxes… but they were not deported like the Jews from the territories furthest from Bucharest. Everything was ready for their deportation, it’s in the documents. There were even trains and a destination, Belzec, in Poland. But their deportation was It was delayed because General Antonescu used them as a tool to negotiate with Hitler. Later, after Stalingrad, Antonescu stopped believing in the victory of the Axis and sensed that the Jews could be an asset in his favor. It happened like this: at the trial of Antonescu, his defense was: ‘I saved the Jews of Bucharest, half of the Romanian Jews.’ The terrible thing is that it is a thesis that still circulates in Romania today.
One of the meanings of Devillers’ book is to explain that this anti-Semitism did not die in 1945, that it mutated and poisoned the new world of the socialist brotherhood.
Let’s imagine that we are Romanian communist leaders of the time. What purpose would anti-Semitism serve us? “From 1945 to 1947, communism built its totalitarian power in Romania. First it persecuted opponents, journalists, judges… And, when it occupied the courts that tried the fascists of the previous period, it was useful for it to replace the cause of crimes against the Jews for the cause of class crimes against the proletariat”. And there, the Jews went from victims to useful suspects. “Furthermore, the Communist Party was tiny in 1945. To grow, it admitted many fascists who brought their anti-Semitism. The Jewish question officially disappeared. In the 1950s, the regime banned the use of the word Jew, supposedly to prevent discrimination, while allowing the press to be incredibly anti-Semitic… When my grandparents were kicked out of the Party, they endured a very violent trial, full of absurd accusations that took up all the anti-Semitic stereotypes one by one: greed, betrayal, cosmopolitanism. .. The usual but without using the word Jew.”
In Devillers’ book there is an idea that appears mentioned two or three times and that is like a punch in the stomach: “The Romanian communists achieved with the Jews what the fascists could not finish: their disappearance. It is a phrase that I accept and which is not easy but which is justified in the studies of historians, it is not an opinion of a journalist. Before World War II there were 750,000 or 800,000 Jews in Romania. Although the figures are complex, we believe that 350,000 of them survived in 1945. In 1989, when Ceaucescu was executed, there were 3,000 Jews left. The rest disappeared within 50 years. The socialist regime ended the fascists’ plan. I will never equate the extermination, torture and deportation of the fascists with the export of the communists “The Communist Party did not make the Shoah, but its policy was directed toward the same goal: governing a homogeneous Romania.”
Did this trafficking of Jews for pigs at least help Romania develop avant-garde livestock farming? “It helped, above all, the Ceaucescu family to prosper. There were two phases in this trade. In the first, the artisanal phase, families left Romania in exchange for livestock and industrial livestock material. The Securitate, the political police, became The first meat producer in Romania, but all production was for export. In Romania there were several periods of hardship, but the people never benefited from the meat of the Securitate. In the second phase, the State of Israel entered into the market and paid for the exiles with dollars that ended up in secret accounts of the Ceaucescu family and their associates. We are talking millions of dollars, again foreign to the Romanian people.