Dr. Stefan Cristian Ionescu, Associate Professor (History) and Associate Director of Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, is the author of Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Ionescu’s work examines the relationship between Jews and gentiles and investigates “what happened with the confiscated Jewish assets, the owners, and their communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust.”

The Voice of Wilkinson sat down with Dr. Ionescu to discuss what he hopes readers will learn from his book, giving us more insight into his work and the personal connection he has from growing up in Bucharest, Romania.

Voice of Wilkinson: What dictated your choice to write your book about post-Nazi Romania? Where did your interest in post-Nazi Romania begin? 

Stefan Cristian Ionescu: I am a legal historian of Eastern European history, focusing on the history of ethnic/religious minorities in that region, especially the Jews of Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine. I started thinking about the broader topic of Jewish–gentile relations during my MA program in Jewish studies and history. I narrowed my topic to the idea of investigating Jewish–gentile relations in 1940s Romania and the dispossession of minorities by the Antonescu regime in the city of Bucharest. The present book expands this topic to discuss what happened to the confiscated Jewish assets, their owners, and their communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust. When I grew up in the city of Bucharest, Romania, I was not aware of its history as a thriving Jewish community before World War II in spite of the widespread antisemitism. I was intrigued by the disappearance of this history from the textbooks I studied in high school and wanted to find out more about the lives of Jews in Bucharest.

VoW: Do you think Romania is forgotten/overlooked when studying the aftermath of WWII?

SCI: I think that for a long time, Romania was severely overlooked in the historical studies examining WWII in Europe. Perhaps this is because of the perception of South-Eastern Europe as a rather marginal and unimportant region in the history of WWII, or because of the harshness of the Stalinist-like and communist-nationalist regimes that isolated Romania between the late 1940s and 1989. This went hand in hand with the refusal by the government, to acknowledge the participation of the Romanian state, its institutions, and some citizens in the persecution, dispossession, displacement, and murder of their minority neighbors, especially the Jews.

VoW: Do you think that perspective has changed over the years? 

SCI: The neglect of this history has gradually changed during the last few decades, with the emergence of several scholars researching and writing about Romania’s participation in the Holocaust and the Romanian democratic government’s acknowledgment of the mass crimes of the Antonescu regime. The government addressed its history by establishing the Elie Wiesel Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and in 2005, the Elie Wiesel Holocaust Institute. The latter supported various programs of Holocaust research and education throughout Romania.

VoW: You said in your introduction that “post-Antonescu governments were reluctant to rapidly return all the confiscated properties to their former Jewish owners.” Did their reluctance stem from antisemitism? 

SCI: The antisemitism plaguing Romanian society, including many of its political-economic elite, was one of the main factors that prevented a rapid postwar restitution of Jewish property confiscated during the Antonescu regime. Other factors had to do with the post-Antonescu political and socio-economic context, including the difficulty in identifying all the seized properties and their Jewish owners (due to war destruction, and lack of registers). The post-Antonescu government also wanted to avoid antagonizing wartime profiteers – especially before the crucial November 1946 elections. Additionally, some of the postwar decision makers – including the pro-communist Prime Minister Petru Groza – benefited from the wartime and postwar nationalization of Jewish property which further hampered Jewish efforts to recuperate their assets. Eventually, the postwar governments implemented a significant level of restitution, although reluctantly, because they wanted to formally conform to the international obligations of Romania, such as the September 1944 Armistice Agreement, and obtain a better deal for Romania at the peace treaty negotiations.

VoW: What was the most difficult part of your research?

SCI: The most difficult part of my research was finding primary sources relevant to the process of restitution via the court system, as the Romanian court archives related to the early postwar litigation for Romanianized Jewish property are not open for research. As a result, I had to look for court restitution decisions elsewhere, in legal journals of the era and scattered archival collections to corroborate these decisions with the ego-documents of the Jewish and gentile eyewitnesses involved in Holocaust property litigation.

VoW: What would you like your readers to take away from this book? 

SCI: I would like my readers to learn about the courage and resilience of the Romanian Jewish survivors, who in the aftermath of the tragedy that was the Holocaust and its traumatic consequences, found the strength to rebuild their lives and communities by working tirelessly to recuperate their rights through legal means, especially litigation and petitioning to state ministers and agencies. Additionally, I would like my readers to be aware of the importance of living in democratic societies that respect and protect the rights of their citizens and the dangers of living in authoritarian societies by understanding that most Jewish survivors lost most of their properties only a few years after the war. This happened when the fragile post-Nazi transitional society ended up under the control of a communist regime that established another dictatorship and implemented several waves of confiscations of property and civic rights that affected several groups of citizens, including the Jews.

VoW: Do you have a next project in mind?

SCI: At the moment I am working on several smaller (article/chapter length) projects that examine the history of minorities in 1940s Romania, including specific cases of confiscation of property, postwar restitution, and the sexual violence faced by Holocaust survivors when they encountered the Red Army.