After 1948, the 370,000 Jews of Romania who survived the Holocaust became one of the main sources of immigration for the new state of Israel as almost all left their homeland to settle in Palestine and Israel. Romania's decision to allow its Jews to leave was baldly practical: Israel paid for them, and Romania wanted influence in the Middle East. For its part, Israel was rescuing a community threatened by economic and cultural extinction and at the same time strengthening itself with a massive infusion of new immigrants. Radu Ioanid traces the secret history of the longest and most expensive ransom arrangement in recent times, a hidden exchange that lasted until the fall of the Communist regime. Including a wealth of recently declassified documents from the archives of the Romanian secret police, this updated edition follows Israel’s long and expensive ransom arrangement with Communist Romania. Ioanid uncovers the elaborate mechanisms that made it successful for decades, the shadowy figures responsible, and the secret channels of communication and payment. As suspenseful as a Cold-War thriller, his book tells the full, startling story of an unprecedented slave trade.

The classic analysis of America's response to the Nazi assault on European Jews.

In 1930, 757,000 Jews lived in Romania; they constituted the third largest Jewish community in Europe. Today not more than 14,000 Jews live in Romania, most of them elderly. The record of the Holocaust in Romania includes many curious chapters of support and betrayal, but they have been largely unavailable until now. Radu Ioanid’s account based upon privileged access to secret East European government archives, is an unprecedented analysis of heretofore purposely hidden materials. Archival records, published and unpublished reports, memoirs of survivors, letters—Mr. Ioanid uses all these elements to build an accurate perspective on Romanian policies of racism, anti-Semitism, and Jewish extermination during the regime of Ion Antonescu. The publication of The Holocaust in Romania is timely as well as important, for there is now in Romania a growing effort to deny the government’s role in the tragedy. Mr. Ioanid sheds light on the reality of the persecutions, the cruelty of the perpetrators, their blatant opportunism and endless cynicism. The story is one of destruction and survival; of German dissatisfaction with Romanian ad hoc violence; of an elusive national policy and the strategies of Romanian authorities that allowed 300,000 Romanian Jews to survive the war. "Invaluable...monumental...no comparable work in any language has documented this important history with the thoroughness, skill, and analytical sophistication this book demonstrates.”—Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With 8 pages of photographs.

The world has recently learned of Oskar Schindler's efforts to save the lives of Jewish workers in his factory in Poland by bribing Nazi officials. Not as well known, however, are many other equally dramatic attempts to negotiate with the Nazis for the release of Jews in exchange for money, goods, or political benefits. In this riveting book, a leading Holocaust scholar examines these attempts, describing the cast of characters, the motives of the participants, the frustrations and few successes, and the moral issues raised by the negotiations. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined sources, Yehuda Bauer deals with the fact that before the war Hitler himself was willing to permit the total emigration of Jews from Germany in order to be rid of them. In the end, however, there were not enough funds for the Jews to buy their way out, there was no welcome for them abroad, and there was too little time before war began. Bauer then concentrates on the negotiations that took place between 1942 and 1945 as Himmler tried to keep open options for a separate peace with the Western powers. In fascinating detail Bauer portrays the dramatic intrigues that took place: a group of Jewish leaders bribed a Nazi official to stop the deportation of Slovakian Jews; a Czech Jew known as Dogwood tried to create an alliance between American leaders and conservative German anti-Nazis; Adolf Eichmann's famous "trucks for blood" proposal to exchange one million Jews for trucks to use against the Soviets failed because of Western reluctance; and much more. Tormenting questions arise throughout Bauer's discussion. If the Nazis were actually willing to surrender more Jews, should the Allies have acted on the offer? Did the efforts to exchange lives for money constitute collaboration with the enemy or heroism? In answering these questions, Bauer's book—engrossing, profound, and deeply moving—adds a new dimension to Holocaust studies.

Bauer confronts the tremendous moral and historical questions arising from JDC's activities. How great was the danger? Who should be saved first? Was it justified to use illegal or extralegal means? What country would accept Jewish refugees? His analysis raises an issue which perhaps can never be answered: could American Jews have done more if they had grasped the reality of the Holocaust?

He suggests that a disinclination to sully themselves in negotiations with the Nazis and a fear that any ransom would prolong the global conflict, caused the Allies to offer only token overtures to the Nazis on behalf of the Jews.

"The mid-seventeenth century witnessed an enormous wave of Jewish refugees and forced migrants from the wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who spread across the Jewish communities of Europe and Asia. A series of wars that hit the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth-the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648; the Muscovite invasion that begin in 1654; and the Swedish incursion from 1655 to 1660-all together forced many Jews out of their homes. Though not the direct targets of the combatants, within a short time many were deeply involved in the conflicts, some becoming victims of violence and some becoming arms-bearing participants. But most became refugees and forced migrants. These refugees posed a huge social, economic and ethical challenge to the Jewish world. In an unprecedented manner, the Jewish centers around Europe answered this challenge and, both individually and jointly, organized relief for the Polish-Lithuanian Jews in all the different places they now found themselves. The need for concerted action on behalf of the Polish Jewish refugees strengthened ties between communities across Europe, and significantly increased the range of communal co-operation. The book moves through the three different environments the refugees found themselves in. The first part looks at the refugees who remained within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, probing the local and regional policies of relief that would eventually prove so successful in helping them overcome the traumas of their past. The second examines the Jews who were brought to the slave markets of Constantinople, and then redeemed there by newly developed philanthropic systems that had raised the money to do so. The third examines the fate of the Jews who fled to Central and Western Europe, examining tensions that developed within the local Jewish populations between the need to help the refugees and a basic antipathy born of cultural difference. In each case, a web of inter-communal connections was created to help support the refugees-bringing different parts of the Jewish world into an extraordinary level of purposeful contact, and paving the way for similar organization in the future. As a result, the seventeenth century communities set in motion processes of change that would eventually be refashioned into the globalized Jewish world we know today"--