Jews exchanged for pigs. Of the best breed. Tens of thousands of Romanian Jews were exchanged since the 1950s and for decades 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 pigs that were forbidden to them. Also by 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.
During Ceausescu’s time, Jews were impoverished Romania’s second export product after oil. Entire families, like the grandparents, mother and aunt of the French journalist Sonia Devillers, who unites family memory and history in the painful, poetic and precise Los exportados (Impedimenta). A book in which the degrading nature of that sale is eclipsed by the unimaginable and atrocious horror that hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews suffered years before in the Second World War, during the regime of Marshal Antonescu, at the hands of their compatriots, without Hitler’s need.
A Romanian Holocaust with pogroms in Bucharest or Iasi, in which those who managed to escape ended up on freight trains whose carriages did not allow air or light to pass through. More than 5,000 corpses emerged from them. “The idea of ??death trains, another Romanian innovation,” Devillers ironically says. In Odessa, occupied during the war by Romanian troops, 8,000 Jews were hanged from lampposts and balconies. Another 4,000 were shot in the back of the head.
And once Antonescu’s pro-Nazi regime fell, the Romanian communists did not take long to carry out anti-Semitic purges and expel Jews from 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 in it. 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.
Sonia Devillers learned the story of her family’s exchange thanks to the work of historian Radu Ioanid. “For my mother it was a shock. She knew they had paid $12,000 for the family, but she couldn’t imagine they had been traded for pigs. From there I needed to better understand who my grandparents were in Romania, their history, their exclusion from the communist party, why they had to leave.”
The businessman who created the exchange network with the Romanian Securitate was a British Jew, Henry Jacober, from whom it is not clear how rich he became. He traded animals and machinery with a Romania that he could not afford. Until the barter arrived. In the case of the Devillers family, a friend put up the money she bought pigs in 1961. With the arrival of Ceausescu, it would only be dollars.
“When Ceausescu came to power in 1965 and discovered this secret trafficking that not even he himself knew about, he was extremely angry: if it was discovered, the country’s reputation would be tarnished internationally. So he kicks out the middleman and contacts him. But within two years, in 1967, he needs the money so desperately that he gets the traffic going again with it. But here the Mossad comes into play: it threatens Jacober physically to prohibit him from continuing to do business with him. “Israel needs a population at that time and there is a large Jewish community in Romania, although it is a dilemma for them that the crook Jacober has to intervene, who is the one who has an irreplaceable agenda in the Romanian government and agents on the ground.”
Regarding the anti-Semitism of the communist regime, he points out that the party, which many fascist militiamen joined after the war, “rewrote history, did everything to erase the fascist heritage” of a country in which, 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 following the Nuremberg model.”
And he concludes by remembering that Antonescu “obtained from the Nazis the right to fix the Jewish issue of the country himself. It was a massacre of unprecedented atrocity. And the responsibility belongs entirely to the Romanians. That was erased and today the country finds it difficult to face its past. Anti-Semitism is still present. And the ignorance regarding the history of the Jews is immense.”
