Search

The paper uses letters – some unpublished – from the mid-1940s and the second half of the 1970s exchanged by Mattei Dogan and Henri H. Stahl, to render the way sociological education was organized at the University of Bucharest immediately after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mandatory labor was the policy implemented by the Antonescu regime by which the Jews of Romania were forced to work for the needs of the State. The harshest kind of labor was in work detachments in which Jewish men aged 20-40 were sent in groups of anywhere between 20 and 500 to do hard labor on stone quarries, forestry, and infrastructure maintenance on roads and railroads. This paper tries to make the point that in order to better understand the institution of mandatory labor that, firstly, it should be organized into two categories: forced labor, namely the work detachments, and mandatory labor in which Jews aged 18-19 and 41-50 had to do more rudimentary jobs in local factories or businesses. Secondly, even though forced labor involved the degradation and dehumanization of Jews, it was never used as a policy of mass extermination and that therefore it should not be taken as a dimension of the Holocaust in Romania. Lastly, this paper attempts to showcase the region of Banat as an example of a region in which Jews had better treatment than in other regions of Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effervescence of the interwar period also contains the sad story of a brilliant young generation, but lost - intellectually - in the destructive passion of politics. Their search for philosophical, spiritual and political renewal inclined them to fascist doctrines, while their concentration on ethnic, nationalist, Romanian Orthodoxy led them to the legionary movement and anti-Semitism. The present paper offers an overview on the delicate issue of anti-Semitism in interwar Romania and exemplifies it with several successful stories of individuals who managed to escape, just in time, the terror of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]