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Judith Thomas remembers Romania's mass killings in Transnistria. She is now with the US State Department (photo: Matt Harris)

WASHINGTON (Tiraspol Times) - Speaking at a school near Washington D.C. this week, a Holocaust survivor from what was then known as Transnistria recalls her experiences of Romanian atrocities.

The lecture by Judith Thomas, today a State Department supervisor, comes shortly after Romania ruled that the actions were legitimate and ten days after Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a strongly worded statement siding with victims of the Transnistrian holocaust.

Judith Thomas has first hand experience of the abuses following the Nazi-supported Romanian invasion of the territory which is today officially named Pridnestrovie. She was four years old when her family, with 10 minutes warning, was shipped off to a concentration camp.

As reported by The Evening Sun, PA, she is originally from Cernauti in Ukraine, where she lived with her parents, Moshe and Klara Koppellmann, her sister Silvia, who was 10 at the time, and her aunt, Rachel. The family was unprepared to be taken away since her father had a special permit to stay. But, when the Nazis rounded up a group to ship off to a labor camp, the soldiers couldn't find her uncle, who was on their list for the camp. So, to make their quota, they grabbed the next family of Koppellmanns.

" - We had the same name," she told the students at Spring Grove Area Middle School where she gave a lecture Friday about her experiences as a Holocaust survivor. "To them, one Jew is as good as the next."

Segregation and discrimination

" - We were sent to a concentration camp," she told the students. "It was a labor camp, not an extermination camp. "It's what Hitler called the Final Solution," Thomas said.

About 25,000 gypsies were deported, and half of them were never heard of again. Half of Romania's population of more than 800,000 Jews, the third largest Jewish population in Europe at the time, also perished. Most of them died in what Romania decided to call "Transnistria" - meaning "beyond the river Nistru". This artificial name had no geographical equivalent at the time, and covered an area which had never been part of Romania or Moldova at any time in history.

When German guards came to Transnistria for inspections, Thomas's parents hid her. Once, she hid in a duffle bag. Her parents told her not to move or make any sound, no matter what. The Nazis came into the barracks for their inspection. They poked around at the luggage, even her duffle, with bayonets, and found nothing.

Now 69, Thomas is a language-training supervisor with the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Service Institute. Thomas teaches diplomats now, and said in her job, she hopes to prevent this from happening to another child.

" - We need to learn how devastating hate can be, and how powerful love can be," she said. Current residents of Pridnestrovie - today's name for what Romania artifically called Transnistria - would like some of that love as they for 17 years have been denied official recognition by the international community. To the international system, the Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublica does not exist, and its passports are not recognized. The 555,000 inhabitants of the self-declared country are stateless unless they can achieve citizenship from a neighboring state.

Some in Tiraspol, the country's capital, have compared the current discrimination by the international system with segregation and apartheid. One historian even went as far as to draw parallels with the Nazi treatment of Jews in World War II, as they were segregated in ghettos, forced to wear a Star of David, and prohibited from foreign travel.

Pridnestrovie's population is equivalent to that of Montenegro, the latest country to obtain United Nations membership. It is also twice the size of Iceland, when compared by number of inhabitants. Unlike neighboring Moldova, where Slavs are a distinct minority, Pridnestrovie is majority Slav and has no significant historical or traditional ties to Moldova.

Holocaust denial as official Romania justifies actions in Transnistria

Territorially, "Transnistria" was the Romanian fascist designation of 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.

Another Holocaust survivor from the killings fields of Transnistria, Dr. Felicia (Steigman) Carmelly, says that during the last five decades Romania's governments did not assume responsibility for the annihilation of about half of its Jewry. That chapter in the country's history was constantly ignored. She is concerned by the fact that Romanian politicians, historians, and writers are currently trying to whitewash the atrocities inflicted on the Jews by altering, or even entirely denying certain historical facts.

Today a resident of Canada, Carmelly says that the whitewashing is done by attempting to attribute the wartime abominations to a fringe of the population. It is also helped by official court decisions such as the recent ruling by the Bucharest Appeals Court that dictator Ion Antonescu's invasion of Transnistria was legitimate and justified.

Even today, Romania still feels that what Ion Antonescu - their own Hitler - did in Transnistria was OK. Although a few consider him a dark spot in the country's past, most Romanians positively revere him.
Antonescu made it to number 6 in the Top 10 of the Greatest Romanians in a vote on a Romanian TV show last fall.

Shortly thereafter, a Romanian court decision declared Romania's invasion of Transnistria in 1941 legitimate. The Bucharest Court of Appeals delivered the decision in December 2006. As a consequence of the ruling, members of the Romanian government who had been condemned in 1946 for their decision to attack Pridnestrovie (Transnistria, in Romanian) together with the Nazis were pardoned of any war crime of invading foreign territory.

Pridnestrovie at the time was part of the Soviet Union, whose successor state - Russia - today feels that the ruling by the court runs counter to accepted principles of international law as well as common, human decency and morality.
" - Pardoning an accomplice of the Nazis, whose crimes against the civilians from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union cannot be forgotten, contradicts the logic and essence of peace accords," the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in an official statement issued 1 March 2007. (With information from the Hanover/Gettysburg Evening Sun)

See also:
» Transnistria, the artificial name for "the Romanian Auschwitz" [1]
» Romania whitewash of Transnistria invasion angers Holocaust survivors [2]