Situația medicilor și a farmaciștilor evrei din România în perioada Holocaustului
The Plight of Jewish Doctors and Pharmacists in Romania during the Holocaust

Summary/Abstract: The creation and development of Greater Romania entailed, on one hand, the gain of civil rights for the Jewish population in Romania during the first two decades of the 20th century and, on the other hand, it entailed the gradual increase of the various anti-Semitic currents that would turn into effective measures of discrimination and exclusion, plans of population displacement, forced deportations, and mass murders. As of 1938, Romanian authorities actively implemented anti-Semitic policies, through the numerous regulations and measures taken by the Goga-Cuza government, by the governments of the royal dictatorship and by the Antonescu dictatorship. The Jewish population, left without civil rights, dispossessed and lacking sources of income, was excluded from public institutions and from Romanian or forcibly “Romanianized” companies, having faced political, social, economic and cultural discrimination. Excluded from military service, they were forced to work for free in the “public interest” and to pay additional taxes. Thus, Jewish military doctors were eliminated from the sanitary service of the Romanian Army, taken over by the Draft Circles and distributed to forced labor detachments, prison camps, as well as to various military formations. This paper seeks to provide an overview of the harsh conditions that the Jewish medical staff was forced to endure because of discriminative Romanian official policies. The wide range of persecutions, from eviction, losing jobs to imprisonment, forced labor and executions, bear witness to the absurdity of the anti-Semitic governments that persecuted a vital category of Jewish people relevant not only for the health of the Jewish community, but also of the entire Romanian society, that is Jewish medicine staff.

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