Jews traded for pigs. Of the best breed. Tens of thousands of Romanian Jews were, starting in the fifties and for decades, exchanged by the communist government to allow them to leave the country. First for “high performance” animals. Then, for money. Initially, as if it were a macabre joke, they were exchanged for the forbidden pigs. Also for Friesian cows, mechanized chicken farms and Australian sheep. Later, for between $2,000 and $50,000 depending on age and profession. Money paid mainly by the Israeli secret services. At the time of Ceausescu, the Jews were the second export product of impoverished Romania, after oil. Entire families, such as the grandparents, mother and aunt of the French journalist Sonia Devillers, which unites family memory and history in the painful, poetic and precise Los exportados (Impedimenta).
A book in which this denigrating sale is overshadowed by the unimaginable and atrocious horror that, years before, hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews suffered in the Second World War, during the regime of Marshal Antonescu, at the hands of their compatriots, without need of Hitler
A Romanian holocaust with pogroms in Bucharest or Iasi, where those who managed to escape ended up in freight trains with wagons that let neither air nor light pass through. More than 5,000 corpses came out. “The idea of ??death trains, another Romanian innovation”, quips Devillers. In Odessa, occupied during the war by Romanian troops, they hung 8,000 Jews from lampposts and balconies. Another 4,000 were shot in the back of the head.
After the fall of the pro-Nazi regime of Antonescu, the Romanian communists did not take long to return to the purges and expel the Jews from the jobs and the party. That they wanted to emigrate en masse. Their exit was blocked until the business was seen. “There were about 750,000 Jews in Romania before the war. Half died there. Of the 350,000 that remained, when Ceausescu fell there were 10,000 left. It is the story of a country emptied of its Jews. First deported, then exported”, says Devillers.
She learned about the history of her family’s exchange thanks to the work of the historian Radu Ioanid. “For the mother it was a shock. I knew they had paid $12,000 for the family, but not the exchange for pigs. I needed to understand who my grandparents were in Romania, their history, the exclusion from the party”.
The businessman who created the exchange network with the Romanian Securitate was a British Jew, Henry Jacober, from whom it is not clear how much he got rich. He traded animals and machinery with a Romania that he could not pay. Until the exchange arrived. In the case of the Devillers family, a friend put in the money they bought pigs in 1961. With the arrival of Ceausescu, it would only be dollars. “When he comes to power and discovers this trafficking, he is very angry: if it is discovered, the country’s reputation will be tarnished. Takes out the middleman. But in two years he desperately needs the money and starts the traffic again with the same. And here the Mossad comes into play: it threatens Jacober physically to prohibit him from continuing to do business for them. Israel needs population and there is a large Jewish community in Romania, despite the fact that it is a dilemma for them that the scoundrel Jacober, who has the best contacts, intervenes.
Regarding the anti-Semitism of the Romanian communist regime, he points out that the party, to which many fascist militiamen joined after the war, “rewrote history, did everything to erase the fascist heritage” of a country where between the world wars, he recalls, “the Legion of Saint Michael the Archangel was born, an authoritarian, fascist and anti-Semitic movement, the second fascist movement in Europe. And in 1937 Romania was the second country after Germany to enact racial laws”. And he concludes by recalling that Antonescu “obtained from the Nazis the right to fix the Jewish issue in the country himself. It was a slaughter of an unprecedented atrocity. And the responsibility belongs entirely to the Romanians. This was erased and today the country is struggling to deal with its past. Anti-Semitism is still present. And the ignorance regarding the history of the Jews is immense”.
