The Jews in Herța during the Holocaust

The presence of Jews in Herța is mentioned since the 18th century when Jewish craftsmen and merchants settled here. In the same century, the existence of a self-help association that maintained a school for orphans or the poor, as well as a synagogue, built at the end of the same century, is indicated. The number of Jews in Herța gradually increased due to the Galician and Ukrainian Jews who settled here. The available data mention that in 1803 1,200 Jews lived in the city. In 1859, their number was 1,554, and in 1910 it reached 1,939.

The 1930 census mentions 1,940 Jewish inhabitants, which was a quarter of the total population.

In most of the localities where Jews lived in 1821 and through which the etherists passed (the Greek revolutionaries of 1821), there were victims among the members of the community. Herța was not protected from such crimes either. After arriving in the city, they killed both men as well as women and children. The descriptions in the works published in the 19th century show a terrible image: “The etherists, in addition to slaughtering many Jews from Herța, committed such the most heinous atrocities, slashed the bellies of pregnant women and took out live children, which they then threw up and caught with their spears. ”

In the middle of the 20th century, persecutions of Jews began in June 1940, when the city was taken over by the Soviets. Bourgeois Jews were targeted. After being deprived of property, 38 families were deported to Siberia. Romania’s entry into the war for the recovery of the territories ceded in 1940 showed its consequences as early as June 22nd, 1941, the first day of the war, when the military objectives in the city were bombed by the Romanian artillery.

On July 5th, 1941, the first patrols of the Romanian army entered the city, which meant for the Jews of Herța the beginning of a campaign of mass murder, mental and physical terror. From that day on, the officer in charge of the patrols asked the Jews to stay in their homes. Those who dared to meet the Romanian troops were beaten and humiliated. On the same day, a new mayor was appointed and a “civil guard” was formed. Its duties: identifying and arresting Jews with the support of the army.

The process proceeded quickly. Within a day, 1,500 Jews were identified. All were imprisoned in synagogues, at the town hall, or in cellars. According to Marius Mircu, the elders had been allowed to sleep in their homes. But they were obliged to return the next day, early in the morning, to the places where the other Jews were. A few days later, on a Monday, a Romanian army major read a list of 65 people, men, women, and children, who had been designated as suspects by a “member of the Civil Guard”. According to Marius Mircu, “some were shot at the mill, with rifles, the others at Obor, with machine guns”. Of the 65, a 7-year-old girl survived the shooting, who was in the group at the mill, where the women with small children and the elderly were executed. The girl was also killed shortly afterward: “A soldier shot the girl twice and did not hit her. She was shot by the lieutenant in charge of the platoon”. The fate of the other young Jews was the same. They were forced to dig their pits, and “then they were lined up in front of the graves and shot dead”. 

Liviu Beriș, one of the survivors of those moments of horror, presented in an interview the way in which the events of July 5th, 1941 took place: “All the Jews were put in synagogues, in a cellar. We were first put in a basement under the town hall, where it was a fantastic heat, so we took turns at the cellar door to get some air. Then they took us out and took us to a synagogue. All the Jews from Herta were arrested, if I may say so. I can’t remember what I ate for three days, but I remember there was a water problem. After three days they came and shouted some lists. The shouted were taken out, recognized by a local brought by the gendarmes, and about 100 were shot near the Kislinger mill in a ditch. The Romanian gendarmes fired, there was no trace of any German in Herța. I did not witness the executions, I was there when they were taken. About 100 were executed there and another 31 in the yard of a householder”.

In addition to those group executions, some individual ones took place. The rabbi from Herța and his family were killed in their own house.

In addition to these executions, numerous rapes took place. A member of the same civil guard “forcibly removed the young Jewish girls from the synagogues and handed them over to the soldiers, who raped them”. While executions were taking place and Jews were being held in the synagogue, their homes were looted by civilians and the military. Some of the things fraudulently appropriated were sent by soldiers and officers to their places of residence. Those who survived were released but were forbidden to leave their homes for more than an hour a day. They could only go to the market to buy their daily food.

Three weeks later, however, at the end of July 1941, 1,600 Jews were deported to the Edineț transit camp, and then to Transnistria on October 14th, 1941. Two years later, about 450 Jews were still alive, the rest having died during the period of deportation.

Comisia Internațională pentru Studierea Holocaustului în România [International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania], Raport Final [Final Report], Iași, Polirom, 2004, pp. 127-128. 

Marius Mircu, Pogromurile din Bucovina și Dorohoi [The pogroms in Bukovina and Dorohoi,], București, Editura Glob, 1945, pp. 104-106.

Ana Bărbulescu, Herța, accessible online at http://www.inshr-ew.ro/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Herţa.pdf 

Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, „Gertsa”, accessible online at https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Gertsa 

Petru Clej, Acum 80 de ani militarii români ucideau evrei în masă în Basarabia, Bucovina și Herța [80 years ago, the Romanian military killed Jews en masse in Bessarabia, Bukovina and Herta,], accessible online at https://www.rfi.ro/reportaj-rfi-135979-acum-80-de-ani-militarii-romani-ucideau-evrei-masa-basarabia-bucovina-si-herta 

M. Schwarzfeld, Comunitatea din Herța. Descriere istorică [The community of Herța. Historical description], în Fraternitatea, anul VI, nr. 29/1884, p. 230.