Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (25 page)

G
HEORGHE
A
LEXIANU
was a missionary of sorts. He was a member of the hopeful generation of 1918, the group of young men and women who witnessed the creation of “Greater Romania” at the end of the First World War. Romania had been a victor power in that conflict, and to the victor went the spoils: the territories that his generation of Romanians saw as rightly belonging to their own nation-state. He looked toward a bright future in which the newly gathered lands—territories such as Bessarabia, Dobrogea, Transylvania, Bukovina, and the Banat, absorbed into the Romanian kingdom from its defeated or defunct neighbors, Russia, Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary—would be transformed into a Romanian-speaking paradise.

Alexianu was born in 1897 in the county of Vrancea, an ancient district of the old kingdom of Romania. Once the kingdom expanded to include lands acquired in the postwar peace settlements, he set out, like many of his generation, to the new eastern frontier. These corners of Greater Romania were Romanian in name only. Each had sizable populations of ethnic Romanians—even majorities, depending on how and whom one counted—but there were minorities too: Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, and, especially in the districts that had formerly been part of Russia’s Pale of Settlement, Jews. Many men and women of Alexianu’s generation saw their supreme duty as bringing Romanian culture to the benighted lands of the east. They signed up as schoolteachers, university professors, regional administrators, agronomists, journalists, and any other profession that would help to develop—and make truly Romanian—the lands that had once been captive to Romanovs and Habsburgs.

Alexianu ended up as a professor of administrative law at the university in Czernowitz, a once thriving Austrian-controlled city located in the district of Bukovina, in what is today western Ukraine. What he encountered there was different from what he expected. Far from being truly Romanian, the city seemed overwhelmingly German-speaking and Jewish. It was, in fact, one of the great centers of Jewish culture in central Europe, home of the future German-language poet Paul Celan (born 1920) and a haven for provincial intellectuals and artists.

Gheorghe Alexianu (standing) at a formal dinner.
Romanian National Archive, I/6003.

Alexianu’s task, like that of other professors, schoolteachers, and local administrators, was to “romanianize” the city and its hinterland, to make the mélange of peoples and cultures into loyal citizens of the Romanian state. School curricula were reworked to tell a Romanian version of history. Minority languages were suppressed. Jews were excluded from universities and restrictions placed on their participation in civic life. His skill and enthusiasm attracted the attention of the central authorities, and in 1938 he was named
rezident regal
—the Romanian king’s personal representative and the effective governor—of all Bukovina and several surrounding counties.

When Stalin annexed Bessarabia in the summer of 1940, part of Bukovina was included in the bargain. The Soviet invasion had a galvanizing impact on local nationalists like Alexianu, who fled grumbling and vengeful back to Romania. His adopted city, Czernowitz, was now overrun by the Red Army. The Romanian-speaking peasants whom he had lauded as the repositories of an ancient national ethos were punished as imperialist stooges by the new Soviet masters. Jews in the city likely saw the Soviet arrival as a form of liberation, or at least something of a relief compared to the intense nationalism that, for some two decades, had promoted Romanians and Romanian culture at their expense. Stories circulated of locals jeering and spitting at Romanian troops as they pulled out in advance of the Soviet arrival.

Once Romanian armies joined Hitler’s push to the east in the summer of 1941, Alexianu was a reasonable if not obvious choice for governing the newly “liberated” lands. He had never had more than a provincial administrative appointment, but his nationalizing zeal and direct experience as a professor in one of the kingdom’s border provinces gave him a certain familiarity with the methods necessary to rebuild what the Soviets had destroyed. He knew how to get things done in a Jewish city. His major achievement as an administrator in Czernowitz seems to have been outdoing the central government in its anti-Jewish legislation. Before he had been in office a year, he had forbidden local citizens from using Yiddish in public.

In August of 1941, even before Romanian and German troops had secured effective control of Transnistria, Alexianu was named the region’s
guvernator
, at the head of an array of local prefects, police units, and eventually the mayoralty of the province’s new capital, Odessa. Thick-waisted and balding, with a penchant for fine suits and a tiny Hitler-style mustache, Alexianu was obsessed with hierarchy and protocol. Even his preferred form of address revealed the social anxiousness of a provincial arriviste. Right up to the end of the Romanian occupation, he always signed his letters and decrees as “Professor” Gheorghe Alexianu. He set up his office in Count Vorontsov’s old palace overlooking Odessa’s port. The large mural of an avuncular Stalin amid a gaggle of dancing Soviet children—left over from the days when the palace served as headquarters of the Communist children’s league, the Young Pioneers—disappeared beneath several coats of paint.
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In the fall of 1941, as the
represalii
were winding down and the bureaucracy for rounding up Jews was coalescing, Alexianu allowed himself a moment of reflection on the historical significance of Romania’s eastern project. In a rambling and flowery letter to Antonescu, he proposed resurrecting the Preobrazhensky Cathedral, leveled by the Soviets in the 1930s, as an homage to Romania’s eastern expansion: “As ever did our Princes of old after a victorious battle, so should we ourselves signify the most glorious moment in the life of our people, when the expansionist might of Romanian warriors has caused our country’s banner to be hoisted on the walls of Odessa.” He saw himself as part of a great historical pageant. It trailed back to the sword-wielding princes of the Middle Ages who had stood valiantly against Slav, Mongol, and Turk. It marched forward to a time when people would look on what the nation had achieved in Odessa as “a most magnificent icon, from age to age, of times past, of the exalted life of Romania.” As the country carried on with its mission, it should therefore be conscious of how it would be judged by history—which Alexianu believed would necessarily reveal Romania’s selfless and humanitarian response to the call to greatness.
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But then it was back to work. Alexianu, like his superiors in Bucharest and his colleagues in the military and gendarmerie, was deeply concerned with identifying Jews. Senior officials looked on the eastern province as a territory inhabited first and foremost by blood-defined groups, not by individual people. Determining the size and membership of each of these racial or ethnic groups was a basic task of administration, much like registering automobiles or issuing licenses to liquor shops. German comrades in the Wehrmacht liaison office and SS detachments in Transnistria no doubt approved of and even encouraged that process. But Alexianu had long experience with such matters from his time in Bukovina. Administrators were also convinced that finding Jews—or, by process of elimination, first identifying all non-Jews—would somehow contribute to the security of the city. If Jews were crypto-Communists, and if Communist agents had been responsible for the explosion at the military headquarters, sorting out which Odessans could be trusted became a principal task of government.

Alexianu and his team devised an entire system of checking and verifying identity, especially that of men. At its core was a registration system in which, if proper documentation could not be produced in other ways, Odessans might provide witnesses to their identity. The form provided by Alexianu’s administration made the task simple:

Alexianu was at times fulfilling orders given by Antonescu himself, but as a man who paid attention to details, he took particular care to shape the way in which orders were applied. His personal margin notes can be found in the periodic reports on the deportation of Jews from the city, often with stern comments evidently meant to encourage or reprimand his subordinates. Once the deportation of Jews was under way, he reminded the gendarmes that any Jewish children left behind by deportees were not to be taken in by Christian families; a special orphanage would be constructed for them in the camp at Berezovka. When the chairman of the evacuation commission reported that Jews were still thought to be hiding outside the ghetto in other parts of the city, Alexianu’s orders, jotted down in pencil in his economical script, were clear: “Raids are to be conducted and sanctions applied.”
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Nevertheless, his own conception of identity could be as slippery as that of the grotesque and quixotic province he helped create. Sometimes Jewishness depended on blood. Sometimes it depended on faith. Following a policy established by Antonescu, Alexianu decreed that Jews who could verify they had been baptized as Christians would not be subject to deportation. He personally intervened in at least one instance to save a baptized, presumably ex-Jewish woman at the request of her priest.
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But that was one of the many terrifying features of the government over which he presided with officious passion. With the life and death of individual Odessans and other Transnistrians determined literally by the stroke of his pen, Alexianu possessed a power that not even Antonescu—busy mapping troop movements and taking salutes—could exercise with the same pinpoint accuracy.

W
HAT DID THE
R
OMANIANS
think they were doing in Transnistria? The answer would have depended on which Romanian one asked and when. Sometimes officials were simply copying the Nazi experience in the General Government or the Reich Commissariat Ukraine—killing, deporting, confining, and then killing again—even though survival rates in Transnistria were an order of magnitude higher than in some German-controlled areas. Sometimes they were creating their own micro-empire on the fly, a poorly organized and inconsistent effort to have their own colonial possession in the Slavic east, which could supply labor and raw materials for the motherland.

At still other points, they were crafting a distinctly Romanian project, preparing the groundwork for a postwar state that would be even larger and ethnically cleaner than the one created in 1918. Romania’s borders had already been changed by force, and there was some expectation that at least a portion of those changes would remain in place after an Axis victory. The friendly Germans had awarded a sizable chunk of Transylvania, in Romania’s north, to equally friendly Hungary around the time the enemy Soviets had grabbed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Surrounded by such acquisitive friends, the Romanians reckoned, securing Transnistria might be an insurance policy against the permanent loss of Transylvania—a much more valuable piece of the Romanian heartland that remained the preeminent territorial concern throughout the war.
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Cultural antisemitism, formalized by the institutions of the Romanian state, was fundamental to these efforts. By September of 1942, Antonescu and Alexianu finally got around to closing the circle by outlawing Jewishness itself: ordering that Judaism would henceforth be considered an illegal religion while also prohibiting cultural Jews from espousing other faiths.
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One of the newly established newspapers, the Romanian-language
Gazeta Odesei
(Odessa Gazette), tried to capture the transformative power of Romanian rule and its relationship to the Jewish question:

But there were other motivations beyond anti-Jewish sentiment. Romania was bound by a vague sense of manifest destiny to its east and by the desire to create a territorial buffer zone around a liberated Bessarabia and Bukovina. Once the state began the large-scale deportations, it took on a set of responsibilities that it was both unable and unwilling to meet. In the end, with Jews and Roma/ Gypsies lying hungry and diseased in atrocious facilities, the Romanians got rid of the problem by turning it over to someone else—in many cases the ethnic Ukrainian and German villagers in whose laps the deportees had been dumped. Emboldened and outfitted by the Nazis, local ethnic Germans, or
Volksdeutsche
, descendants of the sedulous German farmers originally invited to the region by Catherine the Great, sometimes killed the starving people they had never really thought of as neighbors anyway. The desire to unburden the state of human encumbrances was often one of the most powerful and grotesque sources of Romanian behavior.
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