TIRASPOL (Tiraspol Times) - There never was a real place called "Transnistria" and, despite appearing on non-local maps, there still isn't such a place. At least not if you ask the people who live there.

The word is a foreign import, never used by anyone living in the territory. Although Romanian and Moldovan in origin, not even the ethnic Romanians and Moldovans who live there will use it. It is, however, still used by the current governments of Romania and Moldova, and also by other outsiders who are simply unaware of the origins of the name. But no one local, including a local-born ethnic Moldovan who lives in Pridnestrovie, will ever use the word 'Transnistria.'

Transnistria was a geographic invention, but a historic reality. The name was coined by Romanian fascists in World War II to designate a territory chosen for the annihilation of Jews deported from Romania. It was an area situated in south-western Ukraine, between the River Dniester to the west, the River Bug to the east, the Black Sea to the south, and a line beyond the city of Moghilev-Podolsky to the north. In Romanian the river is called Nistru. TRANS-NISTRIA meant "beyond the River Dniester".

The name Transnistria was decreed into existence by the Romanian dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, in the summer of 1941.

Territorially, Transnistria was the largest killing field in the Holocaust. Many authors refer to it as "The Romanian Auschwitz". The name of that territory was in existence until the spring of 1944, when the Soviet Army re-conquered southern Ukraine. Ever since, the locals have tried hard to forget that such a word ever existed. The name alone brings back the worst of memories, and sends chills down the spine even for those who never lived through it but only read about it in history books.

Pridnestrovie means "near Dniester" (by the Dniester). Transnistria means "beyond Nistru" (on the other side of the Nistru). Both names refer to the same river, called Nistru in Romanian, Dnestr in Russian and Dniester in English.

The name Transnistria alone betrays its roots as a foreign import. For anyone living in the area, it makes sense to say "we live by the Dniester"; i.e. Pridnestrovie. The name used by the outsiders is "that area over there, beyond the Dniester"

Transnistria, conquered by Romania for a short period of time during the WWII, from USSR, is unfortunately "famous" for being the site of the largest ever Romanian extermination camps. The prisoners were mostly Jews from Romanian Moldova, from Bessarabia (now called the Republic of Moldova), and from Bukovina (today part of Ukraine).

Transnistria, an artificial name

Never part of Romania or Moldova at any time in history, there was no natural Romanian name for the traditionally Slavic/Russian territory which Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu invaded. Not willing to use the region's traditional Russian name, he decided to invent a new, artificial name.

The region which Romanians invented the name "Transnistria" for was part of the Soviet Union, located in western Ukraine, across the Dniester River from what was then the far border of Romania. Although never formally incorporated into Romania, in World War II it was occupied by Romanian troops who were allied with Hitler's Nazi Germany. After it was occupied, Transnistria became a concentration ground for the Jews of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and northern Moldavia, whom the Romanian authorities deported on the direct order of Ion Antonescu.

The deportations of Jews from Romania began on September 15, 1941, and continued on-and-off until the autumn of 1942. Village after village and town after town were emptied in a standard manner: Jews went to bed in peace. Nothing unusual had happened to alert them. After midnight they were awakened by the beating of drums in the streets. People went outside, not knowing what was afoot. Jews were told that they must be at the railway station by 3 a.m. at the latest which meant that they had two hours to put some bundles together, lock up, and leave. At the station they handed over their house keys and their residency papers, and were given in exchange a personal identification number. Then they were put on a train. They did some of the journey by train, the rest on foot, and crossed the Dniester on boats.

Pridnestrovie had always been old Slavic territory before the arrival of the Romanians. Two thousand years ago, it was settled by early South Slavs. A thousand years ago, it was part of Kievan Rus, the forerunner to today's Russia. Throughout history, and even before the Kievan Rus legacy, the Dniester river had served as an important international border for the Slavic people. It was always majority Slav, albeit with an important Jewish population and a somewhat smaller minority of Moldovan immigrants in some of the villages of the region.

The artificial geographic term Transnistria, which was created in World War II, referred to the part of the Ukraine which had been Russian since 1792 but which was conquered by German and Romanian troops in the summer of 1941. Before the war this area had a native Jewish population of 300,000. Tens of thousands of them were slaughtered by Einsatzgruppe D, and by German and Romanian forces. When Transnistria was occupied it was used for the concentration of the Jews of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and northern Moldavia who were expelled on the direct order of Ion Antonescu. The deportations began on September 15, 1941, and continued, until the fall of 1942. Most of the Jews who survived the mass killings carried out in Bessarabia and Bukovina were deported to Transnistria by the end of 1941. Also deported to Transnistria were political prisoners and Jews who had evaded the existing regulations on forced labor.

Sending Jews away to die

The pre-World War II territory of Romania was 113,918 square miles, and, according to the census of 1930, it had a population of 18,057,208. Of this number, 800,000 to 850,000 were Jews.
Romania's Jewish population was the third largest in Europe, after Russia and Poland.

Exact figures concerning the Jewish population of pre-war Romania are not available. The census of 1930 lists 759,000 Jews. During the period preceding, and immediately following the outbreak of World War II, there was a significant influx of Jewish refugees from neighbouring countries into Romania. That inflow brought the Jewish population up to approximately 850,000. Only about 400,000 survived after the war. These were mainly Jews living in counties where there were no mass deportations.

During the fall and winter of 1941, almost half of Romania's Jewish population was deported to Transnistria. Only about 54,000 of the original deportees survived that ordeal.

Most of the deportations to Transnistria took place on foot, via four transit points: Atachi (the principal transit point), Cosauti, Rezina, and Tiraspol.

On March 15, 1944, the Soviet army launched the liberation of Transnistria. By then, half of the Romanian Jewry had suffered annihilation.

Since the manner of annihilation chosen by Romanian authorities was rather disorganized and haphazard, the precise number of victims who perished during the many pogroms, on the Iasi Death Train, or of those who died at various "labour projects" and camps within Romania or in Transnistria, will never be known. Raul Hilberg mentions 270,000 dead. Estimates of other historians reach as high as 400,000.

Of the 150,000 Jews living in northern Transylvania (a Romanian region ceded to Hungary in August, 1940), 105,000 were murdered, mostly following their deportation to death camps in Germany and German-occupied Poland by the Hungarian Fascists.

Various sources estimate that of the 300,000 native Ukrainian Jews, living prior to the war within the territory which the Romanian occupiers dubbed Transnistria, between 150,000 and 200,000 perished. The killings were more brutal than anything carried out in Germany's own concentration camps.

" - There were cases when even the hardened German Nazis intervened to stop the slaughter perpetrated by Romanians, as such methods were too offensive to their sense of discipline," writes Jewish holocaust historian Raul Hilberg in his book The Destruction of the European Jews, p.486.

The ghettos and camps in the region were in the hands of the gendarmerie and the Romanian administrative authorities. In late November 1941 most of the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were herded into ghettos and camps in northern and central Transnistria. Following the Antonescu-ordered slaughter of the Jews of Odessa, the Romanian occupation authorities deported the survivors to camps in the Golta district: 54,000 to the Bogdanovka camp, 18,000 to the Akhmetchetka camp, and 8,000 to the Domanevka camp. In Bogdanovka all the Jews were shot to death, with the Romanian gendarmerie, the Ukrainian police, and Sonderkommando R, made up of Volksdeutsche, taking part. In January and February 1942, 12,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered in the two other camps. Another 28,000 Jews, mostly from the Ukraine, were killed by the SS and German police, with the help of local Germans in southern Transnistria. By March 1943 no more than 485 Ukrainian Jews were left in all of southern Transnistria. A total of 185,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered by Romanian and German army units.

The Romanians had no plans for the resettlement of tens of thousands of deportees from Romania, and their sole aim was to drive the Jews further east and north. No provisions were made for the most basic necessities. The winter of 1941 - 1942 was severe, with tens of thousands of deportees perishing. The deported Romanian Jews organized on their own and tried to establish mutual aid. The situation improved as the winter of 1942 - 1943 drew near, when the first shipments of aid from the Jewish communities in the Regat and southern Transylvania reached the Jews in Transnistria.

The name of fear and hate

There's a long list of geographically insignificant names which now instill fear, such as Drancy, Belsen, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Maidanek. They constitute individual chapters in history from now on. But first among these is Transnistria.

There is no such dominion, province, county or district indicated on one single map or geography textbook of Ukraine, Czarist Russia or the Soviet Union. Transnistria, as a geographical entry, had not existed prior to July 1941, and, of course, will never exist in the future. As the scene of an endless series of indescribable suffering, and the burial ground of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Transnistria will remain one of the terrifying chapters in history.

For three years part of the Ukraine, the rich and fertile soil north of the Black Sea as far as the Dniester and the Bug, was known by that name.

The territory consisted of about 132 Ukrainian towns and villages the names of which appear on maps. Hundreds of hamlets and settlements were too small to be noted on maps. However, all of them became concentration, transit, labour or annihilation camps. Furthermore, a camp could have been designated as a labor or death camp at one point in time, and at other times it could have been a transit or concentration camp.

Some of those who reached the crossing points were simply herded into the river and machine- gunned. The majority were transported across the Dniester on bridges, over-crowded barges or rafts. Romanian gendarmes supervised the crossing of the Dniester, while German officers stood around taking photographs.

Before World War II, the Jews between the Bug and the Dniester lived as human beings among human beings. On a per capita basis, Tiraspol at the time had one of the largest concentrations of urban Jews in all of Europe.

Meanwhile, in Moldova - which was part of Romania at the time - Jews lived in a more depressing atmosphere, a superficial and relative tranquillity, constantly interrupted by the bloody and violent manifestations of hatred through mobs encouraged by the Romanian leadership. World War II, which brought Adolf Hitler and Romania's Ion Antonescu together as allies, was also the first time any Romanian or Moldovan government crossed the Dniester to rule over what had always been traditional Slavic land.

This territory was subjugated, renamed Transnistria, and earmarked as the graveyard of both local and Romanian Jews. Today, the soil of Transnistria envelops the entire Jewish population of Odessa, found there by Ion Antonescu's army in October 1941, as well as a substantial proportion of Jews from villages and towns in the province. The bones of two thirds of the Jews deported from Romania in 1941 and 1942 can be found at the same place, following the murder of half of the Jews - before September 1, 1941 - living in the provinces affected by deportation (the counties of Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dorohoi).

Usage today of name evokes Nazi memories

It took until the spring of 1944 for this horrible outcome - more than 350,000 dead - to be realized through murder, massacres, execution campaigns, methods of barbaric persecution, torture, looting and the conditions maintained in camps (misery, disease and hunger). The methods of murder varied extremely, and the selection included almost everything invented by the human mind from ancient times until Hitler's day.

Starting from June 1940, and lasting until March 1944, the Jews of the counties of Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dorohoi, and later the Jews of Transnistria, perished as a result of being shot to death, poisoned, hanged, drowned, slaughtered, burned, and starved to death as well as from infectious diseases, the withholding of treatment, the total weakening of the body, and torture resulting in either the death or suicide of its victims.

Although signs of German Nazi methods, i.e. the cynicism and fraudulence of planning, the secrecy of preparation, and the brutality of the execution, can be observed, all the actions aimed at the deportation and extermination of Jews were the work of Romanian fascism.

The Red Army liberated Transnistria in early March 1944. The Soviet troops, which had set out from Uman county on March 10, crossed the Bug on March 16, and reached the bank of the Dniester in a mere four days. The speed of the attack, which dispersed the fascist troops and forced them to flee chaotically, pre-empted the final danger. The tired bodies and broken bones of the survivors of the Transnistrian hell had been saved.

Today, it is offensive to speak about Transnistria. Although it is a Moldovan word, even the ethnic Moldovan minority which lives in the region does not use this name. Instead, they call their unrecognized country the "Nistru Moldovan Republic", and do not stick the prefix "Trans" ("beyond") onto the name of the river which they live by.

" - I have to be honest, it is in very bad taste to see the Moldovan government use the name Transnistria on maps that it prints. I know that they have a territorial claim on us, but every time we hear the name, we get a chill. The name reminds us of the evils perpetrated here by the foreign invaders: The Romanians and the Nazis," explains Alexandru Buju, a historian. "It also shows how little they know of history, and how they completely lack any understanding of local sensibilities. But your actions today, especially your mistakes, determine how you will be able to work with the local population tomorrow. It is no wonder that Moldova today is rejected here by almost all of us."

Transnistria, the hated "slave name", is never used locally by any of the territory's inhabitants. For good reason.

See also:
» Jewish communities support Pridnestrovie's independence [1]
» Romania whitewash of Transnistria invasion angers Holocaust survivors [2]
» US State Dept supervisor lectures on Transnistria Holocaust [3]