Romania's role in the Holocaust was a complex and terrible one, overlooked in comparison to the rest of Europe and only now being reckoned with.
Dan Stone's remarkable new book tells the full story of Romania in the dark period during the Second World War, from when it joined the Axis powers until it switched sides in 1944. As a country with a large Jewish population and several other notable minority groups, the survival of almost half of this population has led many to infer that Romania had a milder attitude when compared to the Final Solution in German-held territories. But this obscures the extraordinary ferocity, particularly in occupied Transnistria (today's Ukraine), with which Romanian soldiers and civilians murdered their Jewish citizens. Drawing on a wide range of sources from perpetrators and victims, Stone sheds new light on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, as well as revealing the little-known aftermath of the Holocaust in Communist Romania.
Enlightening and shocking, The Forgotten Holocaust makes a lasting and important contribution to our understanding of the history of twentieth-century Europe.