Grant T. Harward. Rev.: Alina Pavelescu, Serban-Liviu Pavelescu. Istoria orbilor: România în război, 1940-1945. București: Editura Humanitas, 2025. 1, 756. ISBN 978-973-50-8975-7

Abstract: Alina and Şerban-Liviu Pavelescu have written the first major history of the Romanian home front during the Second World War since the fall of communism. While geared toward a general reading audience, the book is an important intervention into the historiography of the conflict in Romania. The narrative sets out to detail the daily life and experiences of Romanians disrupted by the war and the Holocaust. In the end, however, it is more an account of the events from the perspective of the Bucharest elite.

Keywords: Romania, Second World War, Holocaust, home front, fascism, communism

Corresponding author: Dr. Grant T. Harward completed his BA in history at Brigham Young University in 2009, his MSc in the Second World War in Europe at the University of Edinburgh in 2010, and his PhD in history at Texas A&M University in 2018. He was an Auschwitz Jewish Center fellow, a Fulbright scholar to Romania, and a Mandel Center fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Cornell University Press published his book Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust in 2021, which won the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize in 2022. Editura Corint translated the monograph into Romanian in 2024. Email: granttharward@gmail.com

It was with some excitement when in the United States I obtained a copy of The History of the Blind: Romania in War, 1940-1945, which was published last year in Romania. The wife and husband team who wrote the book had set for themselves an ambitious project, to tell the story of civilians on the home front in Romania during the Second World War. This topic is a significant departure from the vast majority of Romanian military histories that focus on soldiers on the front. Moreover, the authors wanted to provide a complete picture, including the Holocaust, of wartime Romania. With over 700 pages of text, the authors had enough space to detail the complexities of Romanian society from royal dictatorship through a short-lived fascist regime and then the wartime Antonescu regime to a communist dictatorship. Unfortunately, I found myself largely disappointed and even frustrated with the book.

To begin with, the account is less a history of the Romanian home front, than of the Bucharest elite. The main source base is comprised of diaries and memories penned by people from the middle and upper classes, primarily inhabitants of the capital. Periodically, the narrative shifts to other cities such as Cluj, Iaşi, and Chişinău. Other sources also focus on the urban world such as archival collections focused on certain individuals and major newspapers. Consequently, there is practically no insight into the countryside – except for the occasional view from the provincial estates of the wealthy. Despite the peasantry representing over three-quarters of the population, the reader does not learn how the conflict impacted rural society. The view of the Bucharest elite is important because this group exerted greater influence than village elites on the governments making major policy decisions. Nevertheless, focusing on the capital with its well-educated and wealthy inhabitants rather skews the perspective of events, plus there seems to be a bias for the records of more liberal individuals. The authors should be recognized for also including many accounts written by Legionaries and Legionary sympathizers, such as Mircea Eliade. Yet it is Princess Martha Bibescu, a glamorous, anti-Nazi aristocrat, the first diarist introduced in the book, who the authors seem to want to represent Romania. In reality, with so many men away fighting on the front, the average Romanian was probably an impoverished, poorly educated peasant woman. I had hoped to learn more about her story, but this was not to be.

Nonetheless, I want to emphasize that I did learn a lot about the upper crust of Bucharest society during the war. In many ways, the book is an intellectual history, delving into the lives of writers, politicians, playwrights, scientists, etc. – both of the left and of the right. The book even details wartime academic squabbles. I also had no idea of the influence of Veturia Goga, the wife of the recently deceased antisemitic politician, and nationalist poet, Octavian Goga, in the social circles of the elite of the Antonescu regime.

Periodically, the book does descend from such elevated heights to examine wider society down below, although still focused on cities. The narrative includes urban development efforts, the founding of “Marshal Houses” for needy children, popular films, urban youth culture, religious matters, and other social phenomena. These were the parts of the book that I enjoyed the most and wished there were a lot more of, plus research into the countryside, to gain a better picture of what daily life was like on the home front in Romania during the Second World War.

While the focus of the book is on life on the home front, it of course addresses the fighting on the front in the USSR (and later after the “turning of arms” in Hungary and Slovakia). The military narrative recycles old myths such as claiming that already by fall 1941 all initial enthusiasm for the “crusade against communism” had dissipated in the ranks. The authors omit the important Romanian role in Axis victories in spring and summer 1942 when morale again improved on the front, and in Romania, as hopes raised that final victory was still possible. Instead, only the pitiful fate of Romanian soldiers fighting in Don Bend and on the Kalmyk Steppe during the battle of Stalingrad receives attention. The motivation to fight on seemingly broken after that defeat in this telling. Once again, the Romanian Army’s continued resistance in the Caucasus (the Kuban Bridgehead) and Crimea through 1943 into 1944 simply is not chronicled. The Anglo-American air campaign against Romanian cities receives attention. A bit surprisingly, the final battles with the Red Army from the spring to the summer of 1944, when front and home front became one and the same, do not really get much detail. The authors claim that civilian morale also cratered quickly in 1941, opposition to the Antonescu regime coalesced in 1942, and that many people were celebrating Axis defeats by 1943. I find this version of events implausible and believe that the reality is more complex.   

The Holocaust in Romania, including Transnistria (a swath of occupied Ukrainian territory between the Dniester River and the Bug River under Romanian administration), is incorporated into the book. The authors include some diaries and memoirs written by Jews who survived persecution in the core of Romania, including Mihail Sebastian, and genocidal polices in the periphery of the country and in occupied Ukraine. The fate of Jews in the “Old Kingdom” and southern Transylvania was quite different than those who were murdered in or deported en masse from Bessarabia and Bukovina to camps and ghettos in Transnistria. While the horrible situation facing Jews in Transnistria is addressed in the book, it is often done so vaguely or in generalities. The authors also give much attention to the minority of Romanian Jews deported to Transnistria who were then sent to labor in Reichskommissariat Ukraine where conditions under the Germans were even worse than under the Romanians. This comparison, while true, is presented in a way that seems designed to try to diminish the brutality of the antisemitic policies adopted by the Romanian state. The prioritization of the fate of Romanian Jews also means what happened to Soviet Jews in Romanian-occupied territory is largely omitted from the narrative. For example, there are pages and pages on the Struma disaster resulting in nearly 800 Romanian Jews downed in the Black Sea, but not one sentence on an estimated 76,000 mostly Soviet Jews shot in Golta County in Transnistria. While the authors assert that they wanted to directly confront the horrors of the Holocaust in Romania, they seem to have shied away from this goal in the end.

The narrative also weaves in stories about anti-Nazi espionage and the underground communist resistance. These claims of participating in cloak and dagger machinations, again based mostly on memoirs, often seem questionable. The importance of spying by members of the Bucharest elite seems to have been greatly exaggerated. The actual sabotage of the Romanian war effort by communist (or any other kind) of resisters was nil. Most Romanians supported the Antonescu regime and backed the “holy war” against “Judeo-Bolshevism.” The focus on the wartime activities of the Communist Party in Romania is useful for setting the stage for the final part of the book covering the Sovietization of the country, starting in earnest after the formation of the first pro-communist government in spring 1945. The examination of the seizure of power by the communists feels rushed and cursory. This is perhaps the weakest part of book.

The authors conclude by equating the fascistic war years and subsequent communist decades as two sides of the same totalitarian coin resulting in many victims in Romania, both Jewish and Christian. This assertion erases the uniqueness of Jewish suffering, however. The Antonescu regime singled out Jews for genocidal persecution, resulting in the deaths of approximately 300,000 (both Romanian and Soviet), not to mention other atrocities as well as the expropriation of property, compelling of forced labor, and extortion of special taxes. The communist regime targeted class enemies, among whom Jews were overrepresented, so many Holocaust survivors were revictimized after the war. The death toll from collectivization, imprisonment, and forced labor was also far less in Romania in the 1950s than in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s, with estimates into the tens of thousands. The simple numbers do not tell the full story as the Jewish population in Romania was roughly halved in four years (including the mass murder of Jews in Hungarian-occupied northern Transylvania as well) under the Antonescu regime. The Christian majority did not suffer a similar loss even after four decades under the communist regime. This is not to deny the terrible oppression of the country by the Romanian Communist Party. Still, the authors comparing the shortages of the 1980s facing all Romanians with the persecutions of the 1940s targeting just Jews (and Roma to a far lesser degree) seems inappropriate.

The book has a multitude of illustrations. Many of the photographs come from a collection gathered by Ottmar Trașcă who was kind enough to allow the authors to reproduce them in this volume. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes the pictures do not really relate to the text and seem to have been thrown in randomly. (The only mentions of the Romanian Army continuing to fight in the Kuban Bridgehead and Crimea are in captions of a couple of photographs.) Scans of newspaper front pages and advertisements offer a glimpse into the print culture of that era in Romania. In the back of the book, the authors included a political-military chronology of major events of the conflict around the globe as well as those linked to Romania.

The “blind” in the title of the book refers to how narrowly many Romanians today view the Second World War in their country, blinkered by four decades of national communist propaganda and then three and a half decades of nationalist apologia and neo-legionary mythmaking. The authors attempted to remove the blinders, and even if they were not wholly successful, they opened the view a bit more to the public in Romania. I hope in the future to see more Romanian historians examining the understudied home front to discover more about how society, politics, economics, and culture developed and evolved during the Second World War.

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