Iscah 𓂆 יסכה 🪬@jess_ih_ka
🔴SNAPSHOT OF HISTORY
- Romanian authorities' mass annihilation of 11,000 Jews with chilling speed — and devastating efficiency.
July 16, 1941: Axis forces entered Kishinev, Romania.
Romanian army, police, German units, and local collaborators began carrying out executions.
• Jewish men were rounded up and shot in the streets
• Homes were looted and burned
• Synagogues were desecrated
• Arbitrary executions took place in courtyards and public squares.
Thousands were murdered within days.
Then began Phase Two.
Killings became more methodical.
Large groups of Jews were:
• Rounded up
• Marched outside the city
• Shot into pits and ditches
Execution sites included the outskirts of Kishinev and nearby villages.
Some were forced to dig their own graves.
German Einsatzgruppen units operated in the region alongside Romanian forces, but historians emphasize that Romanian authorities independently organised and executed mass killings on a massive scale.
By late July 1941, surviving Jews were confined to a ghetto in Kishinev.
They faced severe overcrowding, starvation, forced labor, beatings and epidemics.
The ghetto functioned as a short-term holding zone before Jews were deported East to Romania-controlled Transnistria.
Some were forced to walk (known as death marches), while others were packed into trains with no water.
Many died en route.
Those who made it to Transnistria were placed in camps and ghettos where:
• Mass shootings continued
• Typhus spread rapidly
• Starvation was widespread
In this month alone, July of 1941, Romanian forces wiped out approximately 11,000 Jews in Kishinev.
Tens of thousands more were deported to Transnistria, where many perished.
Before the war, Kishinev had a Jewish population of approximately 50,000.
By late 1941, Jewish communal life had been almost completely destroyed.
This is but one chapter of Romania's contribution to the destruction of the Jewish people during WW2.
Romania was responsible for hundreds of thousands of murders of Jews.
It is of the utmost importance to note that these crimes were not German-directed operations.
Romanian military and civil authorities played a central and initiating role.
PHOTO: Jews of the Kishinev ghetto assembled for deportation to Transnistria
