MINELRES: Romania: Ethnic Minority Briefs No. 50

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Original sender: Mediafax <divers_buletin-admin@mediafax.ro> 


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No. 49 / March 31, 2003


DIVERS
- reporting ethnic diversity -

SUMMARY

1. "THE NATIONAL PROBLEM DOES NOT LIE IN THE MATTER OF PARTY ", DEEMS
UDMR LEADER
2. DISPUTES ON ALLEGEDLY HUNGARIAN WAR CRIMINAL
3. UNIVERSITY COURSES FOR ROMA STUDENTS

HISTORY
4. THEY FLED THE HOLOCAUST ONLY TO FIND IT WAITED AT SEA
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"THE NATIONAL PROBLEM DOES NOT LIE IN THE MATTER OF PARTY ", DEEMS UDMR
LEADER
BUDAPEST - "There is only one Magyar nation, and it encloses alike both
the right-side forces, as well as the left ones", stated Marko Bela,
chairman of Hungarian Democratic Federation of Romania UDMR, at the
Congress of Hungarian Socialist Party, which has taken place recently in
Budapest. According to the Romanian daily in Magyar language "Nepujsag",
Marko underlined that he does not believe the national problem is a
matter of party. "Yet those who think in such a manner jeopardize the
Magyar nation from Transylvania", said UDMR chairman. Marko Bela
appreciated that UDMR reacted well as in Romania he chose for
cooperation, instead of confrontation, indicating at the same time:
"Magyar-Romanian cooperation must be led more usefully, first of all, in
the economic field ". The UDMR leader also said that Romania's accession
as swift as possible is for the interest of ethnic Hungarians from
Transylvania, as in this way - at last - the frontiers between the
Magyar nation from Hungary and abroad will disappear. (DIVERS)


DISPUTES ON ALLEGEDLY HUNGARIAN WAR CRIMINAL
MIERCUREA CIUC - The denomination of "Vass Albert" primary and secondary
school in Mugeni locality will be changed at the order of the prefect of
Harghita county, as in this way the ordinance regarding the interdiction
of fascist and racist symbols and names, is violated. The Harghita
prefect Mircea Dusa said this education entity has been holding for
almost four years the name of "war criminal" Vass Albert. The
principality of the school in Mugeni (central Romania) has 15 days time
to change the name of the institution, otherwise the Ministry of Culture
and Faiths will implement the legal measures to penalize the unit. The
decision was made as a result of breaking Ordinance 31/2002, regarding
the banning of fascist, racist or xenophobe organizations and symbols or
promoting the glorification of persons guilty of some delinquency
against peace and mankind. Count Vass Albert was sentenced in year 1946
by the Romanian People's Court from Cluj under the charge of war crimes
in Romania's territory. In 1940, he seemed to have ordered the murder of
an orthodox priest together with his family and many persons taking
shelter in the church house because of horthyst terror. (DIVERS)


UNIVERSITY COURSES FOR ROMA STUDENTS
BUCHAREST - General Direction for Ethnic Minorities Language Learning
within Ministry of Education and Research (MEC) last week launched at
Bucharest University (UB), on the occasion of opening the Education
Fair, a number of seven University courses for Roma students enrolled in
Romani language teacher training courses within the Department for Open
Distance Learning (IDD). The courses are: History of Romani literature,
anthropology and folklore of Roma ethnicity, courses of Indian culture
and civilization, Romani language stylistics, morphology and syntax, as
well as Romani language practice on tapes. At present, a number of 177
students belonging to this ethnic minority take courses at Bucharest
University, in IDD system. According to MEC data, countrywide there are
14,000 Roma children studying this language, with 260 teachers of the
same ethnicity. Many of the students in IDD system are part of the
teacher who , at present, are working as unqualified teachers. (DIVERS)


HISTORY

THEY FLED THE HOLOCAUST ONLY TO FIND IT WAITED AT SEA
By Jonathan Rosen - New York Times Service

On Feb. 24, 1942, a ship crowded with Jewish refugees fleeing Romania
sank in the Black Sea. Of the nearly 800 men, women and children on
board who had hoped to reach Palestine, only one man, a 19-year-old
named David Stoliar, survived. The ship was the Struma and its tragic
story is the subject of Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins' compelling
book, "Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World
War II's Holocaust at Sea."

Though largely forgotten today, the Struma was the worst civilian
maritime disaster of the war. When the ship went down it became a
rallying cry for Zionists who blamed Britain for refusing to allow the
ship entry to Palestine or to grant it a temporary resting place in a
British colony. But as Frantz, former investigations editor and
correspondent for The New York Times, and Collins, a journalist who is
based in Turkey, make clear, it was also the murderous indifference of
Turkey, which set the ship adrift in the Black Sea without a working
engine, and the brutality of the Soviet Union, which actually torpedoed
the Struma, that share responsibility. And of course the story unfolds
against the black backdrop of the European war against the Jews. Tickets
for the Struma went on sale on Sept. 3, 1941, the day the Nazis began
experimenting with gas chambers at Auschwitz. In Romania, the Iron Guard
had begun slaughtering Jews even before the country entered the war on
the German side.

Frantz and Collins offer a useful introduction to the peculiar character
of the Holocaust in Romania - a country that had changed sides three
times during World War I and that had been awarded large holdings from
Russia and Hungary and Austria for finishing on the side of the Allies.

The new acquisitions greatly enlarged the Jewish population of a country
that was the last European nation to grant citizenship - in 1923 - to
its Jews. Remarkably, roughly half of Romania's 750,000 Jews survived
the war, but the country's early, spasmodic acts of anti-Semitic
violence stand out even in the general inhumanity of the Holocaust:
during a pogrom in Bucharest in early 1941, Jews were forced to crawl
through a slaughterhouse where they were butchered like cattle, beheaded
and stamped "fit for human consumption." The account of Romanian
brutality helps explain the willingness of Jews to risk their lives on
ill-equipped, overcrowded refugee ships. The Struma, which had been a
Danube cattle barge, was primarily carrying wealthy Jews who could
afford the exorbitant ticket prices, along with young men from Betar,
the right-wing Zionist youth group that helped organize illegal
immigration.

Frantz and Collins pack a great deal into their account, and rightly so,
because to understand the complex interplay of elements that produced
the sinking of the Struma they have to write not only about conditions
in Romania but also about previous attempts to smuggle refugees to
Palestine, along with the debate within the Jewish Agency in Palestine
about illegal immigration.

The two authors write in detail about the attitude of Britain, where the
White Paper of 1939 effectively rescinded the Balfour Declaration
promising a Jewish national home in Palestine, and where members of the
Foreign Office sent cables coolly discussing how to discourage "surplus
Jews" from leaving Europe.

It was at the request of Britain that Turkey, which had towed the Struma
into Istanbul when its engine failed, refused to allow the ship to leave
port. Turkey, a tenuously neutral country fearful of angering the
Germans or the British, interned the Struma in the winter of 1941-42
while the British debated its fate. The authors capture the pragmatism,
anti-Semitism, officiousness, fear of bad publicity and occasional
spasms of humanitarian feeling that informed those debates.

A last-minute plan to allow children on the Struma to enter Palestine
was finalized too late. The Turks would not allow the children overland
passage, the British balked at finding another ship and, by the time the
details were worked out, Turkey - following an earlier British
suggestion - had towed the ship of half-starved refugees into the Black
Sea, cut the anchor and set it adrift.

There were 101 children on board when a Soviet submarine - following
Josef Stalin's orders to sink all ships in the Black Sea to prevent
supplies from reaching Germany - torpedoed the Struma, despite its
obvious appearance as a refugee ship. Though only one man emerged from
the water alive, there were others who had embarked on the Struma when
it sailed from Romania who lived to tell their stories.

A woman who suffered a miscarriage while the ship was docked in Turkey
was allowed to recuperate in a hospital, and there were nine others
plucked off thanks to the combined efforts of an American in Istanbul,
the Jewish Agency in Palestine and a heroic businessman named Simon Brod
who devoted himself to helping refugees.

The authors do a good job rebuilding, out of only fragments, a sense of
the individual humanity not only of the passengers, but of those few who
reached out to help them.

Less effective, though useful as a framing device, is a contemporary
narrative centered on a young British diver named Greg Buxton, whose
grandparents died on the Struma and who became obsessed with finding and
exploring the wreck and who, in the process, rediscovered an emotional
link to the past. The weight of history is too great to make the slender
quest for closure sought by a young diver like Buxton enough of an
answering narrative. His minor bureaucratic setbacks are a faint,
trivial echo of the net that ensnared his grandparents and 6 million
other Jews, and his story is never comfortably integrated into the
larger tale.

But Frantz and Collins have performed a vital act of reclamation. By the
time the reader encounters the appendix at the end of the book, listing
the names and ages of the passengers, it is impossible to think of the
Struma without sorrow and outrage and a vivid sense of the men, women
and children on board, victims of murder and murderous indifference.

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