Framing the Silence: The Romanian Jewish and Romani Holocaust in Filmic Representations

Abstract

Cultural memory or remembrance is a process that reflects the way a society deals with its past and is itself subject to historical change, according to Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (2005, 262). The avoidance and absence of memory work also reflects on a society, its rigid thinking, and its refusal to accept responsibility for its past. In post—World War II Romania, one can speak of a double silence regarding the pogroms and the deportations to Transnistria: the official and the personal one. Officially, the Holocaust in Romania was not acknowledged during the Communist years, and according to Liviu Rotman, a “chain of silence” was created that included victims, perpetrators, and bystanders (Rotman 2003, 205) This silence prompted Elie Wiesel to remark during his first return to Sighet in 1964: “[Sighet] seems almost petrified in its forgetfulness and in the shame that springs from that forgetfulness.”³ As a result of this silence and misinformation, “[f]or fifty years, for numerous educated adults, the tragedy of the Jewish population did not exist; neither did the dead of Iaşi or Dorohoi. Transnistria was a simple geographic reference, not a location on the Holocaust map” (Rotman 2003, 214).⁴ Since 1989, however, Romania has made great strides in acknowledging the suffering of the Romanian Jews.

Silence is the antiworld of speech, and at least as polyvalent, constitutive, and fragile. The necessary refuge of the poet, the theologian, and the intellectual, it is equally the instrument of the bureaucrat, the demagogue, and the dictator. Silence can be the marker of courage and heroism or the cover of cowardice and self-interest; sometimes, it is the road sign of an impossible turning. Silence resembles words also in that each production of silence must be judged in its own contexts, in its own situation of enunciation. Silence can be a mere absence of speech; at other times, it is both the negation of speech and a production of meaning.

—Peter Haidu²

I would like to thank Ileana Marin for reading an earlier version of this article and Camelia Lazăr for having procured all the Romanian movies, even those that had not been released.