Now here we come to 1939, 1940 the beginning of the war, under German pressure the Romanians lose northern Transylvania to the Hungarians. And this is a great blow to the state. And the Jews aren't held to be responsible. King Carol's position is so much weakened. And he is overthrown and the leader Antonescu comes to power with the help of the Iron Guard. And the massacres begin. Pogroms begin, this is before the large scale killing of Jews. The Romanians also lose Bessarabia. So the loss of Bessarabia, and the loss of especially of northern Transylvania in each case results pogrom. Of the pogroms take place in above all in Balakia. Bucharest is of course the capital and the combination of Balakia and Moldova represents the old Romania. And it is Moldova which has the strongest anti-Semitic tradition. And pogroms take place in Yasi, you see up there. And the loss of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union results in a series of pogroms. So these pogroms take place before Romania enters the war in 1941. And it is then that the great massacres begin. It's interesting for us to compare of what is happening in German occupied territories versus in Romanian territories. In Romania, the massacres are much less well organized. In Romania, the massacres are not as thorough. It's easier to escape. In Romania the massacres are more brutal. It's more person to person. In the Romanian case the soldiers participate in the massacres. In the Romanian case there is enormous amount of looting. And at the same time, in the Romanian case there is a great deal of more opportunities for corruption, that is buying your way out, buying your way to freedom. In the Romanian case also the state cannot do without some Jewish expertise. And so there is this remarkable situation that Jews are massacred in the eastern part of the country with enormous brutality, really surpassing the Germans on the one hand. And on the other, individual Jews continued to play a role in the economy of the land because they are so much needed. So then, in 1941, Antonescu, of course, gladly joins German invasion of the Soviet Union. And the Romanians regained Bessarabia, this is the territory, now it says Moldova, today it's a separate state. [COUGH] But this territory came under Romanian occupation and really mindless terror. [COUGH] In one way of killing, deporting people and putting them on trains and the trains just go around and around and around, until people die. Romanians occupied Odessa, of course the major Russian city, and immediately carry out the pogrom. This is in the early fall of 1941 in which tens of thousands of Jews are massacred. And then Jews are put in, well, concentration camps. And in the camps they receive no food. The situation is such that typhus spreads. Not only the Romanians, but the Germans are afraid that this will infect their own people, and so the way to prevent that is simply massacring them, killing them. Altogether, approximately 50% of the Romanian jews were killed. We are talking about between 3 and 400,000 Jews were killed by the Romanians, which was the largest number of Jews killed with of course, the exception of the Germans. Let me stop here for a moment before I turn to the [COUGH] great turn around of Romanian policy. Well, basically what I am saying is that the Romanians do their business in a disorganized fashion and inflicting enormous suffering. And sometimes the Germans are taken aback by what they see. There are cases where they attempt to get rid of the Jews and they want to send them over to, we can't see it here. On German occupied territories and the Germans are attempting to sell. Send them back and they go back and forth until they get shot. So if you like real horror stories, it's Romanian occupied territories, we are talking about 1941 [COUGH] and then at the end of 1942, the fall of 1942, the Romanian's Antonescu who is the [COUGH] conducator stops. Now why? Why did he change policies? This was before the major German defeat at Stalingrad. [COUGH] Antonescu was the general and he may have understood that once the Blitzkrieg did not succeed, even before Stalingrad he could have foreseen that the Germans are not going to win this war. And so. Antonescu's policies change, the mass murders stop. Some of the people who had been deported to the East are allowed to return. It's not that Antonescu becomes a fan of the Jews. In fact [COUGH] he continues to believe that Romania should be a homogeneous Romanian state and wants to get rid of Gypsies and Jews in particular. But the plan now is to allow Jews, in exchange for payment, to go to Palestine. So if you were a clever Jew, [COUGH] in 1940, you escaped from Romanian controlled territory to Hungarian controlled territory. And then [COUGH] after March 1944. You escaped from Hungarian controlled territory into Romanian controlled territory. Very few people were so clever because, after all, we cannot foresee the future. Let me stop here and get a minute before I turn to my second subject. [COUGH] Well, the second subject, it seems I can talk about it very briefly. And here we are now at the end of 1944. All the extermination camps by that time were closed down. Kulmhof was the first to be closed down, but it was reopened for a short time [COUGH] in 1943. But the major ones, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka are all closed down at the end of 1943. And really the only one which is working in full strength is Auschwitz. Now, the smallest of the camps, Majdanek. Unfortunately we don't, this is a different, we can't see it here, was actually captured by the Red Army in the summer of 1944. This was the first camp which was liberated and the Germans did not succeed of blowing it up and everything the evidence and of course, the red army, the Soviet authorities, had every incentive to publicize what they found in Majdanek. And Majdanek, this was outside of Lublin which is a major city, was really the only camp which was liberated intact. In the case of Sobibor, Treblinka, and Bełzec, successful attempts were made to erase the evidence. They blew up everything, and they wanted to cover up the land, to agriculture land, and plant the trees and what not. Well, of course this was a very difficult task because there were hundreds of thousands of corpses underneath and since the local population would come and try to find something there. They would dig up things and they would find arms and legs.
