Ceausescu remains exhumed

by Kathryn Hadley,


Last Wednesday, July 21st, forensic scientists in Romania exhumed what are believed to be the remains of the former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena. Samples were taken from the couple’s grave following doubts that they were really buried in the Ghencea military cemetery in west Bucharest.

The couple’s late daughter Zoia Ceausescu had sued the defence ministry in 2005 saying she had doubts that her parents were buried in the cemetery. When she died in 2006 her brother Valentin, the Ceausescu’s only surviving son, and her husband Mircea Oprean pursued the case.

Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-89) became General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party in 1965; however his government was overthrown during the anti-communist revolution in December 1989. Ceausescu and his wife were executed on December 25th, 1989. They were incidentally the last people to be executed in Romania before the abolition of capital punishment on January 7th, 1990.

According to official reports the DNA tests could take up to six months.

The exhumation is symptomatic of Romania’s struggle to come to terms with its communist past. In Coming to Terms with the Past: Romania Markus Bauer hopes that Romania’s new membership of the European Union will enable it to face down the ghosts of its troubled twentieth-century past.

The holiday resort built among the ruins of a former communist gulag in Romania

by Kathryn Hadley

Under the leadership of the Stalinist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1901-1965), the Danube-Black Sea Canal was one of the most notorious forced labour sites. Gheorghiu-Dej was in office as the Romanian Communist Party first secretary from both 1945 to 1954 and then 1955 to 1965. The village of Periprava, on the Danube Delta, 19 miles from the place where the northern branch of the Danube empties into the Black Sea and against the old border with the Soviet Union, existed as a communist gulag until 1977. It is estimated that over 100 unidentified bodies of some of the prisoners who died in the camp are buried in the village cemetery. 42 prisoners are believed to have died during the winter of 1959/60 alone.

A tourist resort has now been built on the site of the former gulag by a French entrepreneur, Sylvain Remetter. Guests sleep in the four-star ‘Last Border’ Hotel, which previously housed the office of the commandant of the Periprava Labour and Prison Camp. The first tourist arrived in October.

Remetter allegedly plans to build a small museum in remembrance of the hundreds of prisoners who died in the camp. There is currently no memorial to the dead, however, other than a white cross with no inscription in the cemetery.

Walter Mayr reports in Der Spiegel.
In Coming to Terms with the Past: Romania, Markus Bauer considers how Romania’s new membership of the European Union, in 2007, would enable it to face down the ghosts of its troubled twentieth-century past.

The Hidden Holocaust

by Kathryn Hadley

Yesterday, Holocaust Memorial Day was in most of the headlines and events were organised across the country in remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust. Today, however, the economic crisis is, once again, the main feature of most front pages. Will those who were remembered yesterday have to wait another year to be remembered once again? One of the issues raised by the existence of an annual official day of commemoration is that those who it is designed to remember risk being forgotten throughout the rest of the year. Has Holocaust Memorial Day become an excuse to push aside the painful and difficult memory of the victims of the Holocaust during the rest of the year?

This is not the only question raised by yesterday’s commemorative events. Who is Holocaust Memorial Day designed to remember? In theory, the ‘Holocaust’ only refers to the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War. The term is of Greek origin and literally means completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering to a God. The biblical word Shoah meaning calamity became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s. There is considerable debate amongst scholars as to whether or not the term also refers to the numerous other victims of Nazi persecution, such as political activists, homosexuals, the disabled and mentally ill, Slavs and Roma. In the light of the controversies surrounding the definition of the Holocaust, Holocaust Memorial Day consequently raises similar issues: are the other victims of Nazi persecution included in remembrance ceremonies? If not, is there, or should there exist, a specific day to remember each of the victim groups?

The Roma is one group whose memory has often been forgotten, yet it is believed that up to 500,000 died in mass shootings and Nazi gas chambers. There is a particularly high concentration of Roma in Romania and the story of Nazi persecution in Romania is one of those that has been less told. Following Romania’s attack on the Soviet Union, the dictator Ion Antonescu was able to recover the eastern region of Trans-Dniester (today mostly part of Ukraine), which became a depot area for Romania’s Jewish and Roma population.

In October 2003, a commission called the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, or commonly known as the Wiesel Commission, was established by the former president Ion Iliescu to research and write a report on the Holocaust in Romania and to make recommendations for educating the public on the issue. Led by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, it examined the persecution of Romanian Jews from December 1937 to May 1945, as well as the persecution of parts of the Roma population between 1942 and 1944. The report, published in November in 2004, claimed that the number of victims in Trans-Dniester is difficult to establish mainly because the lists of deportees were not systematically put together. Nevertheless, it is estimated that 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered or died as a result of the deliberate polices of Romanian civilian and military authorities and over 11,000 Roma were also killed.

The final report of the commission is available online on the website of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, which is Israel’s official memory to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust established in 1953.

For more information on some of the controversies surrounding Holocaust Memorial Day read our article, Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain
For an insight into the general debate surrounding the commemoration of historical disasters, read The Memory of Catastrophe