This is the most epic and most serious post so far.
In order to get into the mood, please click the play-button on the next video.
As the Naziz and their allies and collaborators implemented plans to destroy the jews of Europe (which would come to be know as the Holocaust or Shoah), the Romanian state unleashed its own systematic persecution of the jews, which was heralded by the antisemitic legislation of 1940.
The pogroms in Doroholand Galați, in June 1940, as well as those in București, in January 1941, and in Iași, in June 1941, left thousands dead and marked the beginning of the organised destruction of Romanian jewry.
In october 1941, the regime of Ion Antonescu began deporting the jews of Basarabia and Bucovina to Transnistria, launching a genocidal campaign to eliminate the country's jewish population. Between 1940 and 1944, the Romanian state was responsible for the deaths of at least 280,00 Romanian and Ukrainian jews. Twenty five thousand people of Roma origin were also deported to Transnistria, where 11,00 died. In the spring of 1944, the occupying Hungarian authorities in the northwestern regions of Romania deported 135,00 Transylvanian jews, who were murdered in Auschwitz by the nazi Germany.
Memorialul victimelor holocaustului din Româniă
autor Peter Jacobi
8.10.2009
The Romanian nation and their government erected this memorial as a permanent place of remembrance and as a warning addressed to future generations.
The star of David is the symbol most commonly associated with Judaism and the Jewish people. The nazis and their allies marked the Jews with the yellow star of David as a way to separate them from the rest of the population and to target them for persecution.
In many towns and villages, Jews were murdered and burried in mass graves.
To this day these graves remain unmarked and forgotten.
The Roma wheel evokes the Romani Indian heritage.
The sixteen-spoked wheel adorns the Romani flag and symbolises travel and fire.
During the Holocaust in Romania, freight railcars were used to transport Jews and Roma to their deaths. Many Jews from Bucovina and half of the Roma from the Old Kingdom were deported to Transnistria by train.
In Iași, two death trains left in 1941 for Călărași and Podu Iloaiei and carried 4,432 Jews of whom 2,594 perished. all Jews in northern Transylvania were deported by train to Auschwitz.
And no, my dear readers, this is not a chimney.
It's Coloana memoriala.
Each side of the column contains a single hebrew letter which taken together spell the word zachor (remember).
