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The memory of the Holocaust in Romania (i.e. the Romanian authorities’ involvement in the atrocious crime of the Holocaust) was ideologically distorted and occulted during the communist dictatorship. This led not only to the impossibility of recovering the historical truth, but also to it acting as a deterrent when it comes to the depiction of the living memory (i.e. journals, memoirs), as well as of the artistic and cultural representations of this tragic moment in our recent history. It was only in the last two decades, more precisely after the discussions initiated by the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, and especially after the publication of the Final Report (2004), that the Romanian authorities’ accountability for the Holocaust timidly penetrated the public discourse. This paper looks into the history of memorial occultation of the Holocaust in Romania by seeking to explore and explain the difficulties that the Romanian public discourse has had (and continues to have) when integrating this event into its cultural memory. Through a comparative analysis of how the memory of the Holocaust was embedded in the Western and the Romanian public discourse, we could notice that in Romania, in the last decades, these complications may be explained primarily through an absence in the manifestations of a prosthetic memory encompassing cultural representations of the Holocaust. Besides identifying the postmemorial artifact (i.e. the act of cultural and artistic reconstruction of the trauma of the Holocaust) as the main element of the prosthetic memory, this paper also describes a possible corpus of such postmemorial artifacts (film, literature), steadily growing in the Romanian culture in recent years, to be minutely analyzed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the content of the cadre file of Henri H. Stahl preserved in the Archives of the University of Bucharest’s Rectorate. In the form in which it has been preserved after 1989, the personnel file of H.H. Stahl seems, from several points of view, atypical. If we compare it with the cadre files of the 1950s, it surprises by the apparent “goodwill” of the communist cadres towards H.H. Stahl. This ideological solicitude is manifested in the interpretation given to main cultural and political events in H.H. Stahl’s life. In other circumstances such political past could be labeled as unusable in a communist context. Equally curious and noteworthy is the issue of the ethnic origin attributed (and not necessarily real or assumed by the one described in the file), more precisely the issue of Stahl’s nationality ( Jewish) which was recorded in the file. Analyzing Stahl cadre file we can wonder if the integrity of this dossier has not been compromised by removing, extracting or modifying documents by the personel staff services or by someone else. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]