The two books considered here, by Diana Dumitru and Raz Segal, are outstanding examples of the growing trend among historians of the Holocaust toward regional studies. In The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust, Diana Dumitru examines the Holocaust on the Romanian-Soviet borderlands of Bessarabia and Transnistria. Raz Segal examines a similar borderland region, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, in his monograph, Genocide in the Carpathians. Alhough the two historians frame their work slightly differently, the two case studies make a splendid analytical pair.
Diana Dumitru builds the argument of her book around a puzzle. When Romania declared war against the Soviet Union on the side of Nazi Germany, its army reoccupied Bessarabia and then marched alongside the Germans into Soviet Transnistria. In Bessarabia, the occupation unleashed a paroxysm of spontaneous violence against Jews. Bessarabian peasants killed their Jewish neighbors in villages and towns across the province with pitchforks and hoes. They raped Jewish women and plundered Jewish homes. But these scenes were not repeated in Transnistria. According to Dumitru, there is “no evidence of anti-Jewish episodes of mass-violence by civilians anywhere in Transnistria's villages, towns, or cities” in 1941 (182). Even after the initial invasion was over, local Transnistrians were far more likely to help Jews than to commit opportunistic acts of violence against them, although ethnic Germans, eager to demonstrate their political reliability to the SS, were the exception to this pattern. The Jewish communities of both Bessarabia and Transnistria were destroyed in the Holocaust, but the response of local citizens to the slaughter could not be more starkly different.
How could this be? Dumitru argues that the answer lies with the radically different social policies of the Romanian and Soviet states in the interwar years. In Romanian Bessarabia, state-builders tried to integrate the region into the greater Romanian state, giving preference to ethnic Romanians in education and employment and discriminating against Jews as exploiters of the Romanian people. These policies legitimized the popular belief that Jews were undeserving aliens who prospered unjustly. They also made local Bessarabians receptive to extremists who wanted to impose ethnic “justice” by force. In 1941, the war created conditions for these resentments to explode into violence. Soviet rule in Transnistria produced a very different outcome. There, party officials declared antisemitism to be counter-revolutionary and “anti-Soviet.” They also adopted social and economic policies that promoted greater Jewish integration into society. Dumitru is careful to note that anti-Jewish prejudices did not vanish entirely. She also insists that her book not be misread as an “ode to the Soviet system” (17). Dumitru concludes, however, that the effects of Soviet rule on ethnic relations were real. By the late 1930s, a new generation of Transnistrians had been educated as Soviet citizens to see their country as a multinational society. These attitudes endured into the early wartime years and account for the dramatic absence of pogroms in 1941.
The legacy of interwar politics is also decisive in Raz Segal's study of Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Before World War I, Ruthenia was one of the most remote regions in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Its peoples were poor and mostly illiterate. Jews and Christians alike shared a common culture shaped by belief in the power of magic and mysticism and by similar family and occupation structures. Unusually for eastern Europe, many Jews worked in subsistence agriculture alongside their Gentile neighbors. There was little animosity between Jews and non-Jews. This social order only began to break down after World War I.
Segal assigns the blame for this development to the sequence of state-building projects imposed on the region after 1918. Czechoslovakia was the first to try to modernize the region. Their policies produced widespread local resentment, politicizing ethnic differences for the first time. These fissures only widened after Czechoslovakia was dismantled at Munich. In 1938, a short-lived autonomous Carpatho-Ukraine gave national activists from outside the region a chance to stoke ethnic resentments against Jews, who were seen by many as Czechoslovak loyalists. Months later, Hungary won control of the region and began to remake local society again, imposing ethnic Hungarian hegemony and violently marginalizing Jews, Roma, and other Carpatho-Ruthenians. When German and Hungarian authorities, acting jointly, began to deport the region's Jews to Auschwitz, the vast majority of their neighbors did nothing. Some even applauded. Three successive attempts to remake the region's society divided its peoples along ethnic lines and destroyed a shared culture. Genocide in the Carpathians was the result of a much longer process of ethno-nationalist state-building. Segal argues that this history demonstrates the need to interpret the Holocaust in Hungary in a wider conceptual and chronological context.
Both books raise important questions. Diana Dumitru's claims about the long-term impact of Soviet policy and propaganda on ethnic relations are provocative, but they also beg for a systematic comparison of local responses to the mass murder of Jews in other parts of the occupied Soviet Union. (Dumitru addresses this in a short section in chapter 5.) Similarly, Raz Segal is certainly correct to say that the history of the Holocaust in Hungary is only properly understood within a longer and more comprehensive history of Hungarian ethnonationalist policy. Even so, local responses to the deportations in provinces elsewhere in wartime Hungary were not significantly different from those that Segal sees in the region that he studies, leaving the reader wanting to hear more about how this case should reshape our understanding of the Holocaust in Hungary more generally.
These observations take nothing away from the important contributions that these two books make to our understanding of the Holocaust in eastern Europe. In particular, Dumitru and Segal show that state-builders in the region shaped attitudes towards minorities like Jews with laws and regulations, creating and stoking resentments or promoting solidarity in lasting and consequential ways. Their books show that a timeless notion of antisemitism is useless as a tool of analysis. Both also demonstrate the overwhelming importance of interwar ethnic politics for understanding the messy social reality of how and why the Holocaust unfolded as it did in specific locations across eastern Europe. Making sense of the variations requires careful attention to the history of local social relations. Future scholars would do well to take these two books as models of how to proceed.
