Jews en Detail: 2,200 for 3,300 USD

People talked about it around the corners during Ceausescu s Golden Era, but, like many of the legends that used to be heard at that time, the Jew sale by the Romanian state wasn t an official fact either. This continued until the Revolution in December 1989. We are referring to a part of the Romanian history that has been mentioned in the top secret files only.

LAW. The Judaic codex says that, for the salvation of the Jews, no effort must be done. The dream of creating a country of their own and of being free had been paid with cash by many of the Jews in Romania.

Neither in Bucharest, nor in Tel-Aviv, the men sale, which happened in Romania in the 20th century, has been taken out of the cover of the state s top-secret files. However, the beginning of the 90 s meant the first steps taken towards the opening of the archives and finding the truth. A document book, which is to be released in the first days of February, talks for the first time about these facts. The daily newspaper Jurnalul National acquired the manuscript and talked to its author.

INCITING. Radu Ioanid, Doctor of History, division director at the Memorial Museum of the Holocaust in Washington DC, is the author of an inciting book. The Ransom of the Jews The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain Between Romania and Israel is printed at the Polirom publishing house. Because it has been written in English (the book is being released in the USA these days), Ciprian Dumea and Mirela Mircea, two candidates for a doctor s degree from the Faculty of Letters of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, have translated it into Romanian.

The literary work, whose manuscript has been kindly awarded to us by the author himself, is as important as an official report regarding an event in the country s history. This is because, with the knowledge of the scholar, it connects files that no one before had the possibility to study.

INVOLVEMENT. Thanks to the support of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and of the Congress of the United States of America, Radu Ioanid managed to access top secret Romanian official reports that belonged to several secret services. In Romania I have been allowed to access top secret files, which don t exist officially. In the following pages, I have been forced to refer to them as being Files belonging to a Romanian archive that requested the preservation of its anonymity . The people who so kindly helped me see these files will understand for me not mentioning their names in here , confesses the author in the introductory chapter of the book.

HOME. After being the main part of the trade between states, many of the Jews who left Romania contributed to the development of their new country, Israel.

Radu Ioanid gathered data and concluded: the price of a Jew, how many had been sold, when, and with the help of whom. Sums of dollars, of millions of dollars are being brought into discussion. Sale offers dated in 1942 and even some ads in the American press regarding this matter (failed attempts) are recorded. When the news regarding the possible transaction appeared in the press, the Committee for a Jewish Army (CJA) of the Jews in Palestine and of the stateless ones, a Zionist organization in New York, published an announcement in the New York Times, on the 16th of February 1943. The announcement read the following: 70,000 Jews for sale to the humanity at 50 dollars each , the author writes.

THE TRUTH. The redemption of the Jews mentioned in the Judaic codex as pidion svuim (the liberation of the hostages n.e.), which means that the Jews in danger must be saved by the community. No effort must be done - human or material - for their redemption. This is how the huge sums of money for credible information regarding a soldier missed in action are explained. These huge sums were also awarded for the recovery of the bodies of the soldiers died on foreign grounds or for the recovery of men in limit situations.

The end of the Second World War has been some kind of a miracle for the Jews in Romania: 350,000 Jews approximately, most of them from the Old Kingdom, survived the Holocaust. Except the Soviet Union, Romania was the country with the largest number of Jews in Europe, Ioanid writes. However, the political environment that was to follow, made many of the survivors think that the only way to salvation was to go to the Holly Land. This is the fact that meant a huge profit for the Romanian authorities, starting from the beginning of the 50 s.

ORGANIZATION

On April 11, 1956, the Security has been reorganized in 11 directions and 7 departments. The External Information General Direction, which was highly represented in the External Affairs Ministry and in the External Commerce Ministry, was directly controlling Romania s people trade. At the end of the 50 s, Henry Jacober, a Jew merchant resident in London, was paying cash to the Romanian external information services. The cash came from private persons in the West, and were destined to obtain visas for their relatives to get out of the country. For these transactions, Jacober was using the services of two or three important Swiss banks, Ioanid writes.

The 1 Million Dollars Cash Suitcase Has Been Lost

An important event, which has its own thriller and comedy accents as well, perfectly shows the theme of the research work, which became this book. We will present it in the same way it is presented in Mr. Ioanid s book, as an introduction for his reveals. In 1974, a Romanian passenger, owner of a diplomatic passport, embarked for a flight to Bucharest from the airport in Zurich. The flight didn t meet any unusual happenings, but once arrived in Bucharest, the official realized that one of his suitcases the one an old friend gave to him short before the take-off was missing.

THE INTERMEDIARY. The Romanian official was General Gheorghe Marcu, one of the division chiefs of the General Direction for External Information (DEI), the espionage branch of the feared Security, the secret Police of the Romanian communist regime. The old friend that gave Marcu the suitcase was Shaike Dan, high counselor of several Israeli Prime Ministers and of the most reputed agents of the external information service of Israel. The suitcase that was missing had one million dollars cash, money that were given to Marcu in order to allow some Jews to immigrate in Israel.

SAD EPISODE. The meeting in Zurich between Shaike Dan and General Marcu has been precedent and followed by many others. The episode with the suitcase lost was only a comic footnote of the highest people trade in the 20th century: the selling of the Romanian Jews to Israel.