Radu Ioanid has capitalized on his unique, decades-long experience collecting archives worldwide on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and building the museum’s collections of survivor testimony to produce the most authoritative study of the Holocaust in Romania available today. The responsibility of Romania’s violently antisemitic Antonescu regime and the complicity or indifference of most Romanian elites and the broader public emerge with a clarity that is often absent in studies of the Holocaust elsewhere. The agony of the victims is powerfully presented, in their own words as well as in reports generated by military and civilian authorities seeking to document their contributions to a national priority. Ioanid’s attention to the victimization of Roma, minority religious sects, and other groups completes the frightful picture of Romania’s Holocaust-era crimes and serves as a warning that if we fail to learn from history, what happened to Jews during the Holocaust can happen to anyone.
— Paul A. Shapiro, author of The Kishinev Ghetto 1941–1942: A Documentary History of the Holocaust in Romania’s Contested Borderlands and member of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (2003–2004)
Comprehensive, terrifying, magnificent, Radu Ioanid’s book is the most complete history of the Holocaust in Romania ever published. This work truly reveals the extent of the Holocaust in Romania—the methods of persecution and murder, the decision-making processes of the Antonescu regime, the categories of victims—and completely identifies the perpetrators. It is also a mirror of the Romanian present and past from the perspective of responsibilities.
— Alexandru Muraru, Special Representative of the Romanian Government for Promoting the Policies of Memory for Fighting against Antisemitism and Xenophobia
Radu Ioanid tells in detail the full story of the Holocaust in Romania, inspired by Nazi Germany but largely carried out by willing Romanian executioners. Antisemitism was not new to Romania; it had existed for centuries with violent outbreaks, the most horrendous carried out by the fascist Iron Guard in January 1941. To this day, the horror remains a stain on Romania. No one is better able to tell the story of the slaughter of Romania’s Jews than the distinguished Holocaust historian Radu Ioanid, Romania’s ambassador to Israel.
— Ambassador Alfred Moses, former national president of the American Jewish Committee
There is no one more qualified to tell the history of the Holocaust in Romania than Radu Ioanid. He brings to this difficult story the professional perspective of a stellar historian and the personal perspective of a Romanian whose life was impacted by these events and their aftermath. Teachers and students will be relying on this work for a very long time to come.
— Deborah E. Lipstadt, Emory University; author of Denying the Holocaust