Marta Caraion travels to the end of Romanian darkness

Squeezed between two rivers, the Dniester and the Bug, Transnistria was a territory conquered by Nazi Germany which entrusted its administration to its Romanian allies. It existed from August 1941 to January 1944 and was a vast butchery where local Jewish populations were exterminated. In the list of countries which then competed in the massacre of Jews, Romania occupies second place. Have we forgotten it? Did we ever know? Having fallen into a black hole, these crimes emerge thanks to a story by Marta Caraion, professor of French literature at the University of Lausanne. We are both impressed by the finesse of the analysis and overwhelmed by the family history it traces; his “Geography of Darkness” is a major book.

Marta Caraion rewinds the thread of a story that was that of her grandfather Isidor, his wife, Sprinta, and their daughter, Valentina (her mother): Romanian Jews who, in the fall of 1940, decided to leave Bucharest where anti-Semitism is unleashed. A wandering through increasingly thick darkness begins. First in Chisinau. Then in Odessa came under the control of the Romanians who were going to deport the Jews. A forced march takes the family across Transnistria, towards the mass graves installed on the banks of the Bug where Isidor will be shot. Before that, the fate of the two women had become dissociated from his own. An opportunity had presented itself to convince a Romanian officer that they were not Jewish. Valentina grabbed it; they will be saved.

The question of choice haunts the book. How is the decision to leave everything made? What items to take with you? Returning to the testimonies left by her mother, Marta Caraion “unfolds” them meticulously to question what they say and what they keep silent. What she tries, by going as close as possible to what her family experienced, is to grasp these momentous choices (she herself fled Romania with her parents in 1981) at the moment they are being made, in the opacity of the event that occurs.

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