Cartea Neagră Papte si Documente Suferinţele Evreilor din România 1940-1944 – the most comprehensive documentation of the Holocaust of Romanian Jews, compiled in the first years following World War II, by Matatias Carp, Secretary of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania – Published by Atelierele grafice Socec, Bucharest 1948-1946. Complete copy – all three parts (in one volume, separate title page for each part) – The first and rare edition that was removed from shelves during the communist regime in Romania. Romanian. Numbered copy (532). A copy with a signed dedication by the author to the researcher Katty who assisted him in obtaining the materials used for the book, dated 1948.
“The persecutions and fascist terror inflicted upon the Jewish population within the borders of Romania … were carried out in the most horrific forms…”.
This is the most comprehensive documentation ever conducted on the hardships, suffering, torture, and murder endured by the Jewish communities of Romania during World War II. Written in Romanian shortly after World War II by Matatias Carp, and published in Romania, the edition before us is the first and rarest edition, originally published gradually between 1946-1948 in three volumes with a foreword written by Rabbi Dr. Alexandru Șafran.
Part I: (Legionarii şi rebeliunea) includes a general overview and the course of events during the Legionnaire rule, the Legionnaire rebellion, and the Bucharest pogroms.
Part II: (Guvernul Antonescu şi războiul) covers the period of Ion Antonescu’s rule and the Iași pogrom.
Part III (Tragedia Transnistriană) deals with the tragedy of Transnistria during the German occupation – the deportations and mass murders. Transnistria was occupied by the Germans and Romanians in the summer of 1941. Before the war, about 300,000 Jews lived in the area. Tens of thousands were murdered by Einsatzgruppe D under the command of Otto Ohlendorf, and by German and Romanian armies. After its occupation, Transnistria became a concentration site for Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and northern Moldova (that part of Moldova that remained under Romanian control), who were deported by the Romanian authorities under the direct order of Ion Antonescu.
The author describes the monumental scope of the work in the introduction: “All the statements included in this work are reviewed, verified, and based on evidence, most of which are irrefutable: statements, testimonies, official announcements of the communities and associations of the Jewish communities, official documents, official orders – text copies or copies signed by all administrative hierarchy from the Marshal down to the department head or the last office head, photographs and all kinds of other documents (orders, publications, telegrams, sales documents, declarations, court sentences, etc.), investigation reports (the robbery by the Legionnaires… was investigated… by a committee consisting of about 30 Jewish rabbis, who were given this task by the Federation of Community Associations)… Some indications were verified and completed with the help of the investigation results conducted by the research committee of the World Jewish Congress, Romania section, whose support enabled us to publish this work…”.
All three volumes are accompanied by harsh photographic plates documenting the pogroms carried out against the Jews from the beginning of the war. Among them are photographs of the bodies of Jews murdered in the pogroms with signs of severe torture, photographs of important Jewish figures who were murdered, documentation of the destruction of synagogues and sacred objects in Romanian cities, arrests of Jews in the streets, facsimiles of official order documents dealing with the persecution of Jews, and many more.
Matatias Carp, who was the Secretary of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania during the presidency of Wilhelm Filderman, began collecting the documentary material for the book as early as June 1940 and moved to systematic organization in the spring of 1943. The book presents countless sources and precise references to documents and laws from the period.
It is undoubtedly the most comprehensive research conducted in the early years following World War II. After the communists came to power in Romania, copies of the book disappeared from the shelves, no further editions were published despite the demand, and the few copies preserved in a few central libraries were kept for reading only in restricted sections, inaccessible to the general public. According to the “Foreword” written by Matatias Carp, the comprehensive work was supposed to consist of a total of four volumes, but the planned fourth volume (Ardealul de Nord), concerning Northern Transylvania, was not published. (In 1996, fifty years after the first edition, a second edition was published by Diogene Publishing. In that edition, editor Lia Benjamin re-examined the origin of all the documents presented in the book. In all her examinations, only one mistake was found, where a statement by Mihai Antonescu in the government was attributed to Ion Antonescu).
A voluminous volume of three parts: XXXII, 379, 168, XVI, XVI, 476 pages + [1] folded map of the regions affected by massive deportations in Transnistria. Very good condition.
