Parallel Worlds of the Holocaust in Romania: Legitimizing, Witnessing, and Avoiding Death
Parallel Worlds of the Holocaust in Romania: Legitimizing, Witnessing, and Avoiding Death

Summary/Abstract: Seventy-four years ago, Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria, territories under Romanian authority at the time, became the scene of mass-murders, tens of thousands of men, women, and children being killed for being Jewish. The events are well-documented by historians today, so my interest was in the reconstruction not of the historical facts, but of the social and symbolic worlds and, consequently, the parallel realms built up by the three categories of actors (perpetrators, bystanders, and victims). The approach I propose is a structuralist one, while the explanatory model I construct uses Agamben’s and Goffman’s theorizations.

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