JOURNAL 1935-1944: THE FASCIST YEARS (Jurnal: 1935-1944)

Diary by Mihail Sebastian, 1996

Sebastian's diary covers the not-so-glorious period of three anti-Semitic dictatorships in the Romanian national history: the dictatorship of Carol II (1938-40), which followed the short-lived, rabidly anti-Semitic government of Goga-Cuza (December 1937-February 1938); the dictatorship of Ion Antonescu in alliance with the Iron Guard (September 1940-January 1941); and the dictatorship of Antonescu without the Iron Guard (1941-44).

Of course Sebastian's diary was not the first literary description of the nazification of a European society seen through the eyes of a Jewish intellectual. Perhaps the closest example of a similar diary is Victor Klemperer 's I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941. Like Sebastian, Klemperer was in a brutal and merciless way rejected by this society only because he was Jewish. Like Sebastian, Klemperer registered the systematic shrinking of the physical and intellectual space around him. The comparison cannot go too far. If Klemperer lived in an ultimate Nazi society Sebastian survived in a world of opportunistic fascism. Like about half of the Romanian Jewry Sebastian remained alive because of the change of tactics of the Romanian authorities in terms of the solving of the "Jewish problem." When he saw that Romania might not win the war in alliance with Nazi Germany, Antonescu and his clique tried to win the war changing sides. From a population targeted for extermination the Romanian Jews became a bargaining chip, a possible way through which the Romanian authorities were hoping to buy the goodwill of the Allies.

The diary refers often to Sebastian's friends, but it represents more than that: It is the political chronicle of the free falling of the Romanian intelligentsia toward fascism. As the diary enters the war period the physical space around Sebastian gets narrower; many of his friends are deserting him, and the heavy anti-Semitic legislation makes him a pariah. Already in 1937 Sebastian did not have too many illusions about his friends who became Iron Guards. He continued to socialize with them, acknowledging that this represents for him something almost unbearable.

One of the closest friends of Sebastian who became rabidly anti-Semitic under the influence of the Iron Guard was Mircea Eliade, whose fanatical involvement with the Iron Guard Sebastian records in a subtle and sad way. A well-known journalist and novelist in interwar Romania, Eliade had after World War II an outstanding scholarly career at the University of Chicago as a historian of religions. Unlike other famous representatives of his generation Eliade never truly acknowledged his past as an Iron Guard ideologist and never regretted his involvement with this criminal organization.

Another close friend of Sebastian was the well-known novelist Camil Petrescu, who was a casual anti-Semite. He was not an Iron Guard, but he reflected perhaps better than anybody else the nazification and the opportunism of a great part of the Romanian intelligentsia during World War II. Sebastian was very fond of him and considered him one of the finest minds in Romania. During the war Petrescu bought heavily into official anti-Semitic propaganda clichés of the Antonescu regime that accused the Jews of being responsible for all the military misfortunes of Romania and therefore responsible for their own tragic fate. Accordingly Petrescu thought that the Jews from Bessarabia and Transnistria deserved to be massacred or deported because they allegedly fired against the Romanian troops and because the Russians committed the same atrocities when they built the Volga Canal. According to Petrescu the Jews, especially the American ones, were also guilty for the continuation of the war because they were making any compromise impossible.

Of course not all of Sebastian's friends were insensitive or sensitive anti-Semites. Several friends—such as the diplomat and politician Constantin Visoianu, one of the leaders of the Romanian post-World War II emigration in the United States; Prince Antoine Bibescu, his benefactor; and professor Alexandru Rosetti—supported him morally and materially at the height of the fascist terror.

Sebastian described with a fascinating accuracy the Romanian Holocaust. Like most of the Jews from Regat (Romania in its pre-World War I borders) Sebastian was not deported to concentration camps. Unlike the Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria who were deported and massacred en masse Sebastian was taken out to do forced labor, his radio and bicycle were confiscated, he was denied almost all income, he was heavily fined, and he was given tiny discriminatory rations of food, but was not ghettoized. He continued therefore to witness what was happening to the less-fortunate fellow Jews from Romania's periphery. Sebastian saw and described the beginning of forced labor in Romania. During January 1941 Sebastian accurately described the "bestial ferocity" of the pogrom of Bucharest, a sort of Romanian Kristallnacht during which 121 Jews were killed, some of them hanged on butchery hooks at the abattoir with "kosher meat" inscriptions on their bodies. During the spring of 1941 Sebastian witnessed the first roundups of Jews and the harsh conditions under which the forced labor of Jews took place. He recorded promptly in his diary the pogrom of Iasi from June 1941, which is described as "a dark, sombre, insane nightmare," and its death trains in which 2,683 Jews died because of lack of air and water. Sebastian also recorded—with rich details later confirmed by archival documents—the conditions under which the deportations of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria took place during the summer and the fall of 1941. Quoting eyewitnesses Sebastian describes in his diary the deportees as "a long wretched line of women in tatters, with small children equally ragged."

Sebastian's diary was published for the first time in extenso in 1996 in Romania (Jurnal 1935-1944 ). French (Journal, 1935-1944 , 1988) and U.S. editions (Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years, 2000) followed. The publication of the diary had the effect of a time bomb. Its explosion generated an ample debate in Romania and abroad about Romanian anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Romania.

—Radu Ioanid