Public memory and remembrance: Jewish destinies from Bukovina

The fall of communism in Romania in December 1989 inaugurated a new period in the country’s history that would impact on public memory as well as on historiography. Romania’s history had to be rewritten or reinterpreted unveiling the abuses the persecution and the crimes of the communist regime during the last 45 years. Several publications and mass media products took over the task to re-establish for the Romanian people the historical truth. However many years after the regime change from 1990 little was done to come to terms with the period that preceded the Communist domination marked by the pro-fascist dictatorship of Marshal Antonescu a period during which the country’s leadership was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands Romanian and Ukrainian Jews. Refusing to make a distinction between individuals and the nation as a whole the ideologists of the Romanian national-communism preferred to keep the silence over the “forgotten Holocaust” as if had never happened. This book is a contribution of comming to terms with Romania''s recent history presenting the impact of the politics of the XXth century on private life in this part of the world.