The Jewish Files of Rădăuți

In answer to the request of the Police Chief to restrict the purchase of milk by Jews, the Mayor of the city of Rădăuți stated:

"Following the evacuation of the kikes [Rom.: jidanilor] from Rădăuți, the market now has sufficient milk supply."

He meant the Jews of Rădăuți, a small town in the Bukovina near the present Ukrainian/Romanian border, once a center of Jewish life. He says "evacuation", but that's just an euphemism, as in the fall of 1941 more than 10,000 Jews (men, women and children) were deported from Rădăuți to Transnistria, an area limited by the Dniester and the Southern Bug rivers, conceived by the Romanian ruling powers as a collective concentration camp for the Romanian Jews. Two out of three of these poor people perished under deplorable conditions.

The request of the Police Chief and the answer from the Mayor take up less than ten lines on a document from the "Jewish Files of Rădăuți", but presents - together with other documents from the Romanian National Archives, Suceava County Branch - a microcosm of the Jewish suffering in Romania:persecution, deportation, extermination.

Other substantial documents still to be translated, are for example:

• International interventions in favor of Romanian Jews,
• Forced Labor,
• Ban on Jewish Travel,
• Concentration and Liberation,
• E. Patac, Advocate for Jews,
• Economic Suppression,
• Loyalty Declarations,
• Police Assaults,
• Siret and Dorohoi Jews,
• Social Democrats and Communists,
• Transnistria Camp Edineți.

Copies of these documents have been requested by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.