Antisemitismul și Holocaustul din perspectivă comunistă. Un caz de distorsiune ideologică (I)
Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust from a Communist Perspective. A Case of Ideological Distortion (I)

Summary/Abstract: This study follows the biography of a leftist militant who, as a communist and a Jew, confronted antisemitism and state persecution during the interwar period, the Holocaust and the communist regime. The biography of Emanoil Safir is unremarkable; he was not an important character in the history of Romania, but his encounters, memoirs and photos of atrocities display relevant information about the interplay of antisemitism and anticommunism, in the interwar period, and the competitive narratives of the Holocaust. Safir witnessed the Legionary rebellion and the Bucharest pogrom and kept a detailed, unpublished diary, stacked at the National Archives. After the war, he worked for the People’s Tribunal as an investigator and documented several massacres perpetrated during the Holocaust, in Iași (June, 1941), Odessa (October, 1941) and Râbnița (March, 1944). He was particularly interested in photos of atrocities and collected hundreds, which are kept in archives, and some of them remained unpublished till today. Although he was a privileged witness of important historical episodes, his perspective is not an exact reflection of history, but a refraction through the ideological filter of communism. This introduces a discussion of how communists militants and the communist regime treated topics such as antisemitism and the Holocaust.

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