That Sunday

(Author: Lyonel Fliss, Vol. 77, #3, Spring 2022)

The year 1941 was a disastrous one for Romania. In Western Europe, World War II had already been underway for two years following the German invasion of Poland.  Romania had been carved up the previous year by the Vienna Diktat, which forced it to cede northern Transylvania to Hungary, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the USSR through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the south of Dobrogea (Cadrilater) to Bulgaria.

Romania had been one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe. It was the last to grant citizenship to the Jews after World War I and this only after it was forced to by the Great Powers under threat of their rejecting the union with Transylvania. This created a new wave of antisemitism, on the grounds that the Jews had used blackmail to forcibly obtain citizenship. Romania’s tragic situation in 1940 contributed to the exacerbation of the persecutions against the Jews by throwing the blame on them for all the misfortunes inflicted by others on the country. Hundreds of antisemitic decrees and laws were promulgated during this period, making the life of the Jewish population a real hell.

In the summer of 1941, Romania became Hitler’s ally and together with Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Romanian troops crossed the border over the river Prut, the justification being the recovery of the Romanian territories occupied by the USSR a year before. The cruelties to which the Romanian troops indulged in against the Jewish population of Moldavia, Bessarabia, Bukovina and Ukraine sometimes surpassed even the Nazi atrocities.

During this period, I was living with my parents in Iași, my hometown. The provincial capital of Moldova, Iași was located about twenty km from the border imposed with the USSR on the Prut. I was six years old when World War II broke out on the Eastern Front.

Iași is the cradle of Romanian culture and one of the most important university centers. The Romanian students at that time were ultra-nationalist and antisemitic, demonstrating these feelings through their affiliation to the fascist Legionnaire movement and giving themselves to acts of violence against the Jews of the city – but especially their Jewish colleagues, whom they bloodily beat up before throwing them out of the universities.

My parents were very worried about the rapidly growing antisemitism, but especially so when in June 1941 they saw the first German troops entering the city. An atmosphere of threatening anxiety permeated the air when on 22 June World War II on the Eastern Front was triggered by the Romanian army crossing the Prut while the German army crossed the borders of the Soviet Union on a very wide front to the north in a co-ordered invasion called Operation Barbarossa.

To me as a six-year-old child, the sight of the German troops in Iași elicited great admiration, because the German soldiers were young and strong, sure of themselves, in immaculate uniforms with shining weapons, drove modern military cars of a type never seen before and marched in disciplined formations. Even the Romanian troops impressed me, although they did not look quite as smart as the Germans. It was the beginning of the war, when the Romanian-German military alliance was at its peak. What would follow in the next two to three years did not even cross the minds of the military, politicians and ordinary population but from now on they could freely unload all their hatred on the defenseless Jews, under the benevolent eyes of the authorities.

Iași, “THAT SUNDAY” June 29, 1941

We lived in an apartment in a block of flats on Bratianu Street, on the first floor. At dawn on 29 June, we were still sleeping when we were awoken by the sound of shooting from the street, followed by shouts and wails. My mother immediately realized what was going on and screamed in horror: It’s a pogrom! I had not heard this word until then and did not understand what it meant but realized that it was not anything good. My mother told us to hide under the bed in the parents’ bedroom, and all three of us did so on the spot. She cautioned me not to talk, sneeze or cough or move. That I did not find difficult to do since many times before when playing hide and seek, I’d done the same.

It was not long before we heard powerful blows on the entrance door to the apartment and a voice shouting for to open. It was the voice of Enache, the caretaker of the block. When we did not open, he began to swear and threaten, then left to return with an axe with which he broke the door and then entered, swearing loudly that he could not see us. What he was going to do to us with the axe wasn’t hard to guess. We meanwhile lay hidden and trembling under the bed while Enache looted the flat. Eventually he left, swearing, with a bundle made of the cover of the bed over us. We remained hidden under the bed even after his departure, afraid that he may return with the axe.

Not long afterwards were heard from the stairwell the footfall of boots and shouts in a language unknown to me. These were the German soldiers I had admired the previous day and who now entered our apartment, the door being left wide open by Enache. These soldiers were professionals trained in house searching, not just ordinary thieves like Enache, and the first thing they did when they entered the bedroom was to turn the bed upside down, exposing us to the ‘glorious’ German army. I can’t fathom to this day why they didn’t shoot us on the spot as we lay there on the floor. Instead, they ordered us to get up and go out on the stairwell.

In front of me was my mother led by a German and behind me my father. When we got to the stairs my mother, who lost sight of me in those moments of panic, turned around to look for me. Then the German, who was now face to face with her, pushed her over the steps behind her and she lost her balance, rolling a whole level to the ground floor before coming to a stop against a wall. Terrified, dad and I went down the steps in a run to help her get up, because she was lying moaning with pain, bleeding and motionlessness. Again, I wonder why the Germans did not shoot us on the spot, saying that we were trying to run away. We lifted her up and helped her walk, limping. Later the doctors found that she had broken a kneecap, which she suffered from for the rest of her life.

At the order of the Germans, we went into the street, as ordered with our hands raised. We were herded from behind by a German soldier with his rifle pointing at us at point blank range, yelling all the time and having fun hitting my father in the back with his boot and rifle butt.

The soldier took us along Bratianu Street towards the police station (Chestura), where Jews were being ordered to present themselves on that Sunday ostensibly to be searched but in actuality to be murdered. Along the way my arms started to hurt from being continually kept up and I let them down. Immediately, the German yelled something at me that I did not understand (my mother later explained to me that he was shouting Hande Hoch, meaning ‘hands up’, that being my first-ever lesson in foreign languages). I turned round to explain – in Romanian of course, because I thought that everyone spoke Romanian – that I could not hold my hands up anymore, as they were hurting. When he saw that I was not obeying his order and even talking back to him, he cocked his rifle, ready to shoot. In desperation, my mom told me to raise my hands immediately as otherwise he would shoot me. This didn’t scare me because I was used to playing cops and robbers, where we kids would point our index fingers and ‘shoot’ each other while screaming ‘pac-pac’ without anything happening to us. I listened to her however and raised my hands, but father and mother then helped me by each holding up one of my arms with one hand while keeping the other one raised. The German, with rifle ready to shoot us in the back, appeared to be satisfied with the compromise. In this formation we reached the street Vasile Alexandri, where the soldier handed us over to a Romanian comrade-in-arms and then disappeared, probably to bring other Jews like us in for “searching.” We were put in the line for the police station.

The queue on Vasile Alexandri Street was long and untidy, occupying the entire width of the street and guarded by armed Romanian soldiers and policemen. After a fairly long time we all three arrived in front of the police courtyard gate, where Jews were being brought inside in groups by Romanian and German soldiers armed with bats. From inside the courtyard, we heard shooting. When the gate was opened, I saw a mound of corpses, and a man soaked in blood sitting on the pavement and leaning with the back against this mound, begging to be shot again to end his agony.

My mother realized what was going to happen to us and approached a Romanian officer who was “keeping order” after a fashion at the entrance. She knelt in front of him, took his hand and kissed it and said to him crying, “Officer, you can let me and my husband pass through the gate but [pointing to me] keep this child outside, take him and adopt him and he will love you all his life.”

The officer, a young man completely unknown to us, helped her get up and said, “Madam, please do not cry anymore. I will try to help you.”

And he kept his word. He took my mother by the hand, she took mine, I took my father’s, and we were led back, slowly, slowly, against the stream of people, to the rear of the queue, where the officer left us. In this way we were given another chance of survival that really came true, because a short time afterwards it was announced that an order had come from the government to stop the massacre and to allow the women and children to return to their homes. My mother said goodbye to my father, who remained where he was, took me by the hand and together we made our way to my grandma’s house, being afraid to return home lest we encounter Enache with his axe.

My father was held prisoner for another day and a night in the basement of the police station before being returned safely to us. Again, this was a heavenly miracle as most of the men detained at the police station were taken to the railway station where they were boarded in cattle wagons with the ventilation openings sealed – the notorious “Death Trains”. In these Death Trains, where most of those inside had a terrible end through thirst and suffocation, were two of my uncles, one of whom sacrificed his life giving in a last gesture to the other the most precious gift he had at that time: his life-saving urine.

The following months we passed with the whole family in my grandmother’s house, going out into the streets very rarely. Jews were at the outset identified by yellow stars compulsorily attached to their chests and exposed to attacks by Legionnaires or any antisemitic passerby. As for schooling, during the war Jewish children, being excluded from public schools, had to learn in harsh conditions, especially in winter, in synagogues. Thus did the next three years of war pass, until the front line began rapidly to approach Iași, and we were able to depart by train as refugees to Bucharest.

The memory of the Iași Pogrom remained imprinted in the minds of the survivors, who for the rest of their lives would mourn the over 13 000 victims.

On that Sunday of 29 June 1941, remembered by the survivors as “That Sunday” rather than the pogrom, my mother saved our lives three times: First, when she realised a pogrom was underway and we hid under the bed escaping Enache’s axe, next, when she told me to keep my hands up when the German soldier was ready to shoot me and finally when she begged the Romanian officer to save me.

This was a time when good and evil showed themselves together in their most extreme forms and in the same space. The fact that an unknown Romanian officer, without any reward and at high risk to his own life saved us from death is something I still find inexplicable. I therefore began to believe it was an ‘Act of God’, the anonymous officer being the messenger of the Lord and our guardian angel. Against this was the human beast in the form of the German soldier who pushed my mother down the stairs, injuring her badly, and then herded us along the streets with our hands raised, beating my father and threatening to shoot a child unable to keep his arms up was to me the devil incarnate.

On That Sunday I, a six-year-old child who directly experienced all those extreme situations, matured in a single day. I understood then what evil and good actually is, that what looks beautiful can actually be ugly, and further what it means to be responsible for yourself and your family. What I knew from the children’s stories about good and evil – Prince Charming the good-hearted hero fighting with killer Dragons with flames coming out of the nostrils to save the Fairy Princess – I saw now with my eyes of a naïve child, taking the form of the gallant Romanian officer who saved us at the risk of his life and the German soldier who threatened us with his rifle. It was during those moments when I began to mature. This forced and sudden transformation of my childhood has had good and bad effects until this day: Good, because I started to judge things and people with the eyes and mind of a mature man who had passed through an inhumane (but also an extremely human) experience. Bad, because I lost the trustfulness of childhood, and was pursued by the nightmare of what I have seen That Sunday for the rest of my life.

With regard to the expression ‘That Sunday’, this is how survivors came to refer to the Iași Pogrom when speaking among themselves and sharing their stories of how they had escaped alive from those horrors.

Seventy Years later – Iași 29 June 2011

The 70^th commemoration of the Iași Pogrom took two days. On the first day, participants visited the mass graves in Podul Iloaiei and Tirgul Frumos, where the victims of one of the Death Trains had been unloaded and later at the Iași Jewish cemetery. The ceremonies at these huge tombs were very impressive, with wreaths of flowers laid by Romanian officers, foreign dignitaries giving speeches, prayers recited by a rabbi and military honors with guard and fanfare. The next day commenced with the ceremonies of unveiling the commemorative plaques at the former Police Station and at the Railway Station. I think it was the first time that such a crowd had gathered in these two places of awful memories in seventy years.

In the afternoon, there was a visit to an art exhibition with a pogrom theme in the center of Iași. To our horror, an antisemitic demonstration took place outside in the street, which police intervention was needed to disperse. From this, it could be seen that seven decades after That Sunday, the roots of antisemitism were alive in Iași.

After a conference at the university on the topic of the day, the stage moved to Hotel Moldova. Here, an official gathering was held on the occasion of the commemoration of the Pogrom, with speeches by officials and the awarding of the title of Honorary Citizen of the City of Iasi to five still living survivors of the Death Trains.

On this occasion I witnessed two utterly out-of-the-ordinary speeches which impressed me deeply. The first was by the Mitropolit (Bishop) of Moldavia and Bucovina Teofan, who began his speech with Psalm 131. I have listened to this Psalm many times in Hebrew and English, even sung, but now for the first time was hearing it in Romanian and it sounded to me, as a Romanian speaker, even more emotional: “Look, how good and pleasant it is when brothers are living together in harmony”.

What particularly impressed me was the generalized interpretation given to this Psalm by Teofan, referring to the Romanian Christians and Jews as brothers and urging them to live together in harmony. In the original version the author of the Psalms, King David, was referring 3000 years ago only to the Israelite tribes that he united in his kingdom. In my view this Psalm, in the brilliant interpretation of Teofan, should be the inscription above the podium of the United Nations General Assembly Hall.

The second utterance came from one of the five survivors of the death trains. Four of the five, some known people of culture, said with tears in their eyes that they did not carry feelings of revenge towards the population of Iași that allowed and even collaborated in the Pogrom, when thousands of their fellow citizens were massacred just because they were Jews, but that those guilty of this genocide should be tried and punished as deserved for their crimes.

The fifth, Leizer Finkelstain, a simple man and a carpenter by trade, said only a few words of deep wisdom: “The only thing I want is that what happened on That Sunday will not happen again”. I noticed that the way he expressed himself, with his heavy Moldavian accent, was the same way my father used to speak to me when I happened to make a mistake. Leizer treated those who participated in the pogrom against the Jews in Iași as a father addressing his erring children, asking that it not happen again.

Following the official ceremony, the guests of honor were invited to a banquet. I noticed at a table next to mine the representative of the German Embassy in Bucharest, who I had seen at the Death Trains commemoration at the mass grave at Podul Iloaiei where, humble with his head down covered with a kipah, he laid a wreath of flowers on behalf of the German government. At one point during the banquet, I approached his table, introduced myself in English and exchanged cards. I said to him:

“Sir, I would like to tell you that you are the second German with whom I have a discussion in Iasi. Would you like to find out who was the first?”

To this he replied, “With pleasure! When do you want?”

“Right now. I would suggest we go into a room next door so as not to disturb the others at the table”.

“OK, let’s do it”.

The room was empty, and we faced each other across the table. I commenced telling him my story of the Pogrom from the moment when the German soldiers found us hiding under the bed, injured my mother and took us into the streets before handing us to the Romanian troops. Further, as indicated, I focused on my first ‘conversation’ with a German in Iasi, the beast who screamed at me to walk with my hands up and who cocked his rifle ready to shoot me when I told him that my arms hurt, and I couldn’t hold them up anymore. Then I described how my terrified parents each held one of my arms up while holding up their other arm to satisfy the German with this compromise, thus saving my life.

All this time the diplomat looked down at the table, not showing any emotion or saying a word. Then when I’d concluded, he cracked a dry “Thank you” and left the room without another word. I was simply shocked by his lack of feelings or even interest in one of the most dramatic moments of the tragedy at whose commemoration he had been sent to attend, as a representative of a party participating in the pogrom, as described to him by a former child survivor. At that moment, his image appeared in my mind, humbly standing during the laying of the wreath in the name of the German embassy at the epitaph, as the embodiment of hypocrisy. I remained seated, pondering this meeting, then returned to the banquet. As I did so, I passed the table where I saw the diplomat having great fun, joking and laughing loudly despite the tragic story he had just heard from me a few moments before. At this sight, I wanted to vomit and feeling the need for fresh air I went outside, where it was raining finely in the evening.

Without thinking, I started to walk slowly as if driven by an instinct towards Bratianu Street, where seventy years before, a Nazi beast had herded us with blows and shouts and threats to shoot me. The street was empty in the rain and darkness. Suddenly, it felt as if a ghost was following me, rifle at point blank, and instinctively I raised my hands. That’s how ‘we’ – him and I – arrived at Vasile Alexandri Street, where on That Sunday I had stood in the queue outside the police station. Arriving in front of the entrance of that notorious building, I stopped, and the bright image of our saving angel appeared in my mind, that unknown Romanian officer who led us back to life.

At that, I calmed down and headed back to the hotel. Soaked by the rain I entered the lobby from where I could see through the open door the banquet hall where the waiters were already cleaning the tables.

I took the elevator up to the 7^th floor and entered my room. Without turning on the light, I walked to the window, where the lights of the city twinkled through the wet glass. In my tearing eyes, those lights in those moments were as the souls of those who had perished That Sunday and the raindrops trickling down the window like the tears of those who survived.

Lyonell Fliss is a Rumanian-born civil engineer and Holocaust survivor now living in Johannesburg. In 1969, he and his wife Liliana escaped from Communist-ruled Rumania and moved to Israel, where he was involved in the building of the water tower on Mount Scopus, today widely regarded as a symbol of the Hebrew University. He then immigrated to South Africa, where he was chief engineer for Murray & Roberts. Mr. Fliss’s article ‘The Triple D and the Jerusalem Tower’ appeared in the Pesach 2019 (Vol. 74, #1) issue of Jewish Affairs.