Article by Elena Guritanu

In twentieth-century Europe, there are places whose names are inextricably linked with the atrocities committed there. Auschwitz, Majdanek, Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen… But not all of them sound German or Polish. The family trajectory of survival and exile that Marta Caraion traces in Geography of Darkness. Bucharest-Transnistria-Odessa, 1941-1981 [Editor’s translation from French original], reveals another toponymy of fear. Transformed by Marshal Antonescu’s Romania into a laboratory for ethnic cleansing, Transnistria is its darkest node. This intimate and brilliantly documented account unravels this knot, thread by thread, exposing the long-obscured memory of the Romanian Shoah.

Pogrom is the term by which the memory of persecution in Eastern Europe has found its way into Jewish memory. But when did it appear, and how was it used? For this text, Elena Guritanu delved into the dictionaries of the last two centuries, in order to trace the history of this term which, because it designates an undeniable horror, has itself been the object of omissions and denials.