Re: [Cz-L] Emailing:Antonescu's ezoneration

Below is a New York Times article from 2002 about the lionizing of Antonescu
and Elie Wiesel's campaign against this - Eytan Fichman:

Sighet Journal; Elie Wiesel Asks a Haunted Hometown to Face Up

By DANIEL SIMPSON
Published: July 31, 2002
Elie Wiesel is rarely at a loss for words.
But emotion almost got the better of Mr. Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor,
writer and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian teachings, when he
opened a Jewish museum in his boyhood home here. It is a simple house from
which his family was deported to Auschwitz, where his mother and youngest
sister perished.
Mr. Wiesel, who is 73, has returned to the remote town of Sighet on several
occasions, but on those visits he kept a low profile. This time he was
accompanied by the Romanian president, Ion Iliescu, whose government is struggling
to demonstrate to the world that the country is starting to face up to its
troubled history.
''I thought it was going to be just one more visit, especially with the
political implications,'' Mr. Wiesel said. ''But it was impossible to contain the
emotions.''
During his two-day trip to this country, Mr. Wiesel was at first subtle with
his message, but grew increasingly plain-spoken in appealing to Romanians to
acknowledge their country's role in the crimes of the Holocaust, and to
ignore the modern politicians who still make a hero of Marshal Ion Antonescu, the
leader who set in motion many of the World War II pogroms.
A crowd of about 5,000 cheering people welcomed Mr. Wiesel on Monday outside
Sighet's town hall, offering him bread and plum brandy. Mr. Wiesel began by
wondering aloud whether he should say anything at all. But he went on to
speak of the importance of remembering, a recurring theme in the 40-odd books he
has written.
More Jews used to live in this one town than all of the 12,000 who remain in
Romania today. Mr. Wiesel urged his listeners to find out more about the
events of early 1944, when the town was part of Nazi-occupied Hungary. Those too
young to recall, he suggested, should consult their parents and
grandparents.
''Ask them what happened when Sighet, which used to have a wonderful Jewish
community, all of a sudden became empty of Jews,'' he said in an almost
sepulchral monotone.
''Ask them if they shed a tear, if they cried, if they slept well. And then
you children, when you grow up, tell your children that you have seen a Jew
in Sighet telling his story.''
Marshal Antonescu, whose troops carried out the mass killings of Romania's
Jews, was executed in 1946, convicted as a war criminal by the Communists who
deposed him.
But, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Communists became increasingly
brutal themselves, killing and imprisoning thousands of opponents. In Romania,
the government increasingly sought a popular prop in nationalism; under the
dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who ruled from 1965 until his ouster in a violent
revolution and his swift execution in December 1989, Marshal Antonescu became a
figure of public reverence.
Statues across Romania immortalized the marshal because forces under his
command once reclaimed territory from the Soviet Union. Mr. Ceausescu, who
turned increasingly anti-Soviet -- and also increasingly repressive -- during his
own rule, sought to cast himself in the same mold.
To this day, therefore, there are Romanians who revere Marshal Antonescu as
a great patriot.
The most strident of these supporters are found in the ultranationalist
Greater Romania Party, whose flamboyant leader, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, polled more
than a quarter of the vote in the 2000 presidential election. He openly
lionizes the war-time leader.
Mr. Wiesel urged people not to be seduced by the distortions of history
promoted by Mr. Tudor's party, which include denying that Romanians killed Jews.
''I don't like the anti-Semitic things they say,'' he said. ''Antonescu is
also the past but unfortunately those who glorify him are in the present.'' Mr.
 Wiesel has long quietly urged Romanians to acknowledge that their own
people, not just Hungarians and Germans, murdered Jews. He has recalled the mass
pogroms in Bucharest, the northern city of Iasi, and the regions of Bukovina
and Bessarabia as exceptionally brutal.
The Jewish museum here, which Mr. Wiesel said had been Mr. Iliescu's idea,
does not directly seek to set the record straight on Marshal Antonescu.
Instead, it focuses on what happened in the Nazi-occupied region around Sighet.
Mr. Iliescu's government, responding to warnings that Romania's effort to be
admitted to NATO could be hurt by Antonescu busts and streets named after
him, passed legislation banning his image.
But the crackdown has not been popular. One statue in a Bucharest church has
merely been covered with a sack, rather than destroyed as the law demands.
Mr. Iliescu has, to Mr. Wiesel's disappointment, declined to come straight out
and say exactly what Marshal Antonescu and his troops did.
The government, which has a portrait of Marshal Antonescu hanging in one of
its buildings along with other leaders of Romania, says it would be
unrealistic to delete him from memory completely.
''You can attack the cult of Antonescu but you can't rewrite history,'' said
Adrian Nastase, the prime minister.
However, doctoring facts about the past was a favorite pastime of the
authoritarian rulers who governed Romania for much of the 20th century. There has
been little public debate about this turbulent period of history, and since
Mr. Ceausescu was put to death, many questions remain unanswered about more
than 1,000 deaths in the revolution that toppled him.
Mr. Wiesel said it was time for all this to change.
''Do not turn your back on the past,'' he advised, when the Prime Minister
asked him at dinner on Sunday night if he had any words of wisdom for Romania.
''Integrate it into your life and you will flourish. Forget it and you are
doomed.''

Correction: August 7, 2002, Wednesday An article last Wednesday about the
return of the author Elie Wiesel to his Romanian hometown, Sighet, to open a
Jewish museum referred incorrectly to Marshal Ion Antonescu, whom he cited as a
wartime figure not to be glorified. The marshal, whose troops carried out
mass killings of Romania's Jews, was deposed by King Michael I of Romania in
1944, not by the Communists; it was the Communists who convicted him as a war
criminal and executed him in 1946.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE0DC1E38F932A05754C0A9649C8
B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all accessed 12.16.2007

In a message dated 12/16/2007 12:02:08 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
emilhg_at_013.net writes:

Shortcut to: http://www.evenimentulzilei.ro/article.php?artid=292941


[Moderator's note: Article in Romanian language, Moderator Bruce]
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Received on 2007-12-16 19:54:57