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Dennis Deletant, "In Search of Romania" (Hurst, 2022)
00:53:25
An interview with Dennis Deletant
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- [00:02]
Roland Clark
The world moves fast, your workday even faster.
- [00:05]
Professor Dennis Deletante
Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data.
- [00:08]
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- [00:12]
Roland Clark
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- [00:21]
Professor Dennis Deletante
Summarize so you can cut through clutter.
- [00:24]
Roland Clark
And clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot toast the holidays.
- [00:32]
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- [01:30]
Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
Roland Clark
So hello, My name is Roland Clark. I'm here on the New Books Network, and it's my pleasure to be speaking to Professor Dennis Deletante today, who's the author of In Search of Romania, a book recently published with Hearst and Company, as well as Romania 1916-1941, A Political History, which will be out with Routledge in August. Dennis taught Romanian studies at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies between 1969 and 2011 at the University of Amsterdam between 2003 and 2010. He was the Jan Ratio professor of Romanian Studies at Georgetown University from 2011 until 2020, and he's just been appointed a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson center next year. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1995 and was awarded the Order of Merit with the rank of Command for Services to Romanian Democracy in the year 2000 by President Emil Konstantinescu. That's not the least of his that's not the end of his awards. In 2016, he was awarded the Order of the Star of Romania Officer Rank by President Claes Johannes. And as you might expect from someone so highly decorated, Dennis is the author of numerous works on the history of Romania, including Ceausescu and the Securitate Romania under Communist rule, Communist terror in Romania, and John Antonescu, Hitler's forgotten ally. And I mention all this because today we're talking about an autobiography or a memoir. So Dennis, this is a memoir and I'm sure that there's a lot that could have gone into this book that didn't. We don't get many details about your personal life in search of Romania. There's no juicy anecdotes about errant colleagues you've worked with in the past, and you don't actually tell us much about your life in the UK at all. What made you want to write a memoir that was mostly about Romanian politics and society?
- [03:29]
Professor Dennis Deletante
I would emphasize that it is a memoir, as you've pointed out, Roland, and it's not an autobiography. I didn't set out to write an autobiography because I wanted to keep my focus very much on Romania and on the fact that it had shaped and has shaped my professional life. There is indeed a great deal of detail that I could put in to an autobiography about my early life and my career at seas, and I'm leaving that for hopefully another volume which will deal more with my background. I just say briefly that I came to East Central Europe in general really out of curiosity. I was very influenced by my contact with George Ruday, who had taught at our Holloway Comprehensive School. I was born in Norfolk, but at a very early age my parents brought me to London and I suppose you would call me a child of working class background. I studied at the secondary level at Holloway Comprehensive School and one of our teachers of history in 195859 was George Ruday, who was a very influential character on me simply because he talked about the value of liberty, Wilkes and liberty. His research had led him to study the crowd in the French Revolution in the late 1940s and he indeed spend a year in Paris. I think it was in 1949. But what I didn't realize at the time 5859 was that he was a paid up member of the British Communist Party. Not that that would have influenced me in any way because his main interest was looking at history from below, as he called it. And this is evidenced in his publication what I what I and I think many of my colleagues in the history classes we had at Holloway School admired in Roudet was his balanced, his equitable approach to history. Of course he had his political views, we realized, but he didn't allow them to influence his teaching. And one of the factors which again I would say endeared him as a teacher to his students was the fact that he taught about slavery. We're talking, we're talking here about 1958. 59. And I've read some rather strange comments in the British press recently about the legacy of slavery being unknown and overlooked in teaching. Well, I can tell you that from my own experience, Rude spent several sessions talking about William Wilberforce, about the numbers of slaves who were transported to the New World. And of course this was a great eye opener for us. And as I've just said, it was yet a factor that made us respect very much Rude's contribution to our own education. Regarding my personal life and juicy anecdotes indeed, I have very many, but I'd need to be very careful in this day and age of repeating some of them, I'm afraid. The comments were. Some of the comments of my colleagues back in the late 60s when I was appointed in early 70s would be libelous. So some of the comments that I would make about them, I dare not repeat them at the moment. I probably need to take leave legal advice before I put some of my reminiscences in this regard on paper or.
- [07:45]
Roland Clark
At least before a posthumous expose comes out.
- [07:49]
Professor Dennis Deletante
Yes, exactly. Yeah.
- [07:51]
Roland Clark
It's not everyone that had a chance to be taught by someone like Roudet in high school. So just for our listeners who don't know, George Rudet is one of the foundational historians of the 1950s and 60s in British historiography. He, he launched this particularly Marxist and very communist influenced way of reading history, looking at the ordinary people. And his study of crowds in the French revolution and of 18th century France in general was just groundbreaking. So Dennis, you were first introduced to the idea of state socialism by rude in 58 and then in 1964 you started learning Romanian and you eventually got to Romania for the first time in July 1965. What sort of preconceptions did you have about the country before you went there for the first time? What sort of place did you expect to find?
- [08:47]
Professor Dennis Deletante
It was curiosity that drove me to choose Romania. Curiosity in the sense that first of all I was very interested in linguistics or the linguistics of linguistic history of the Latin languages, neo Latin languages, of which Romania of course is one. But also I was curious to know how state socialism would impact what was basically a Latin people. How did the Romanians cope with the imposition of a very rigid doctrinal ideology. And this led me to want to see for myself how that interaction took place again in 1964. There was hardly any literature available that I could find, at any rate, even in London, on contemporary life in Romania. I mean, certainly there were some books about Romanian history which were published in the interwar period. And I was also intrigued by the fact that several of those who'd written about, even professional historians who'd written about southeastern Europe in general took a somewhat flippant attitude. I remember going to a bookshop on Charing Cross Road, secondhand bookstores. It was full of Charing Cross Road in London, where central London was full of second hand bookstores. Just trying to look for books on southeastern Europe in general and on Romania in particular. And I remember one published, I can't remember the author, but it was entitled Travels in Romania. And then the subtitle was Best Forgotten. I think that was summed up, if you like, a popular attitude that there was toward southeastern Europe and including Romania, of course, and was again an extra reason for me to find out a little more about the country and in particular how it influenced the ordinary person. Again, the ordinary person, my view, had been partially shaped by rude there and trying to see what did communism mean for the ordinary. Inverted citizen, inverted commerce citizen in Romania.
- [11:18]
Roland Clark
In the book you have some very entertaining stories, quite funny stories about interactions with diplomats, bureaucrats and border guards, especially during the 1970s and 80s. Quite a lot of them are quite funny and border on the absurd. What do you think it was about Romanian state socialism that made it so entertaining?
- [11:41]
Professor Dennis Deletante
I think it was this entertaining, if you like, this curious or idiosyncratic nature of communism in Romania. It was one that wasn't unique to Romania. I would point to Bulgaria, where there were similar. I have a limited experience of Bulgaria, but I have been there and there were similar instances where in fact I remember once driving into Bulgaria and foreigners, I.e. westerners were supposed to get their petrol from, or gas from particular gas stations, from pumps that were reserved for foreigners. But you couldn't pay in cash. You had to have these tokens and you could only get the tokens at the border when you crossed. The problem was that when I crossed into Bulgaria and other Westerners crossed, there were no tokens available. So you ended up going to the petrol gas pump, explaining to the attendant that you couldn't pay in the tokens for the gas. And thankfully, several of the pump attendants in Bulgaria laughed and were understanding and allowed us to pay in local Bulgarian levard, the Bulgarian currency. Well, in Romania, I think there was a similar. There was very much a similar attitude. People sought to balance their public and private personae and they introduced these defense mechanisms and humor was one of them. We pretend to work and the state pretends to pay us. This was a phrase that I heard in Poland, I heard it in Bulgaria, I heard it in Romania, and doubtless it was uttered very frequently in the Soviet Union. So I think the attempt to bypass or at least deal with, cope with rigid rules was one of the mechanisms that citizens in the state, socialist countries employed in order to lead their lives. The other factor I think, which is very important to bear in mind when we're looking at East Central Europe as a whole, is the public attitude to law. I mean, law in the history of these countries has generally been used to oppress the people. And therefore there's a suspicion of law that people have. And the rigid system of law, of course, introduced by states socialism, merely exacerbated this suspicion that citizens had of the law in Romania. I mean, there are numerous instances we can point to of the law being avoided in Romania in the interwar period. Again, corruption involves, of course, in most cases, the perversion of law. So I didn't find this particularly surprising given my limited knowledge of Romanian history in the interwar period when I went to Romania in 1965. Although, as I point out in the memoir, is extremely difficult in the summer of 65 for me to meet Romanians of my own age.
- [15:07]
Roland Clark
And I think that comment about the humour actually comes from Romanians. It's not unlike some books. I'm thinking of things like, no, Better Not Names, where Westerners are laughing at East Europeans. This is actually East Europeans laughing at their own political and legal system. And that's the sort of humor that comes out in this memoir as well. One of the highlights of the book, and I suspect, of your life, is your marriage to Andrea, which suggests that you did eventually manage to meet someone your own age. Can you tell us a bit about how being married to Andrea has shaped your scholarship over the years?
- [15:55]
Professor Dennis Deletante
This marriage to Andrea, and getting to know, of course, her friends and family enabled me to discover really the degree to which communism and the imposition of communism and intruded in the lives of citizens of the state and the iniquitous way, the iniquitous imprint it left on persons. I think it's the effect that state socialism had in terms of the individual's fate and the legality of the measures that were introduced. I mean, we tend to forget that the Securitate, the state security police in Romania, in its founding charter there is a clause which specifically says that the sekuritate is there to defend the conquests of the Romanian people and the Romanian People's Republic so effectively in its founding charter in August 1948, it is certifying itself as a police state. Romania is a police state in August 1948 and. And continues to be a police state, really, right up until the overthrow of Ceausescu. We still don't have complete access, as you yourself, Roland has often pointed out, to the archives of the secretate. But my contact with Andrea enabled me to meet her parents. Her father in law was apolitical. He'd been non political in interwar period. He did study in Germany, in Nazi Germany, and told me a lot about his years as a student there. But he was in fact quite left wing, however, nevertheless, he was arrested in 1950 simply because he was the son of what the Romanians call a demnitar, that is, someone who'd held public office in the interwar period. And he spent 18 months in the labor camp. He was never tried. And on his. When he was released, he was given no documentation. He was just allowed to leave without warning after 18 months and walked several kilometers to a railway station. And there there was a very moving encounter, which he related to me, of him turning up with his. With his beard or unshaven, looking very haggard in the clothes in which he'd entered the labor camp 18 months before. And he had no money, and a complete stranger came up to him and offered him and gave him his ticket and said, I know where you've come from. You need this ticket more than I do. And for me that summed up the generosity of spirit of many Romanians whom I came to meet. Despite their own personal suffering, their own personal difficulties, they preserved their humanity, and this allowed them to overcome the sufferings that they had endured. My father in law was never a member of the Communist Party, and yet because of his training in Germany, he was a very prized engineer. And he was involved in the construction of the. Of the railway bridge and road bridges over the. Over the Danube. And I learned a lot from him and from other members of the family who had suffered as a result of the repressive actions of the Communist Party. He introduced me to fellow political prisoners, and of course, there was very little material in English about the camps in Romania, labor camps, or the prisons. And so even then, from the 70s, I began talking to these people, such people with this background. And it was through them that I met some of the people whom we would call dissidents today, people like Anna Blandiana, Mirce Dinescu and Several other people, Andre Plesher, of course, I'm talking about with Andre Post 1985 and so on. But it was really that contact with dissidents in the broadest sense, that led me to develop my interest in the Securitate itself.
- [20:47]
Roland Clark
And of course, the dissidents come up very strongly in the chapter called Countdown to Revolution, because the book goes through the socialist period. And then you get to the dissidents such as Miccio Dinescu, Silvio Brukan, Mircea Rachiano and others, as well as campaigns like Operation Village's Remains. With all this going on, how long before 22 December 1989 did you realize that Ceausescu's regime was about to collapse? Were there signs that it was doomed?
- [21:18]
Professor Dennis Deletante
No, I would say, as you point out in your note to me before our interview, historians are not good at, notoriously bad at predicting the future, and I count myself amongst them. I didn't predict the fall of Ceausesco. I did believe, given the events in the rest of the Communist bloc, that his end would come, but not at the point when it did come. So I thought he would hang on. Given the degree of, we might say, acquiescence on the part of Romanians towards the regime, and also given the effectiveness of the Securitate, we often overlook the fact that the efficiency of a security police depends very much on cooperation from the population, and this is borne out by the Gestapo. If we look at the records of the Gestapo, the records of, as far as we can, of the kgb, records of the Stasi, records of the Securitate, the population, to a certain degree, did their work for them. And so the use of informers was widespread throughout the Communist bloc in Romania. It was notorious, I would say, and therefore the dissidents were extremely brave people, raising their head about the parapet and really risking a great deal in their activities to draw attention to the abuses of the regime. Let me just give you an example. I became very friendly with Doyna Cornea, although I did not meet her personally until after the revolution. But I. I did try to see her in 1988, when I was in Cluj, but I was prevented from doing so. Anyway, in January 1990, there was a huge gathering in Alba Iulia, December 1, to mark the anniversary of the union of Transylvania with Romania. So, December 1, 1990, and when Duenna Cornea stepped up on the stage to address the crowd, she was booed. She was whistled by a large section of the crowd. And for me, that emphasized the difficulties that dissidents had in Romania, they were fighting, not just the regime, but fighting a perverted mentality. And that was again, another reason why I tried to help, as best I could, dissidents after 1990, because these people were still on a blacklist of the sri, the successor to the Securitate. And I felt it was important that we, as intellectuals in the west, and indeed Western government, should be aware of the pernicious influence that lingered for a while in Romania after 1990.
- [24:40]
Roland Clark
And of course, yeah, regimes don't change overnight and people don't change overnight. And in the book you write about how you served as an international observer at elections in Romania and Moldova between 1990 and 1996. Just thinking about change over time, what did you notice about how freedom of speech and electoral processes in these countries changed during the 1990s?
- [25:04]
Professor Dennis Deletante
I think there was a massive change, and this was due to a large degree to the influence of Western agencies, Western governments. In fact, if we look at change in Romania since the revolution, most of it is driven by the west, by the need to satisfy the conditions of entry to NATO, to the European Union. Without that carrot, one might say without that stimulus of incorporation and integration subsequently into the Euro Atlantic structures, I think change in Romania would have been very, very slow. Let's just take the example of Romania's difficulty in adhering to the justice clause of the Achi Communitaire. It still doesn't satisfy the criteria in terms of justice that it signed up to in January 2007. It still is in breach of those conditions, which is why we have in place still the cooperation and verification mechanism of the European Union. And without the continued existence of. Of Western institutions, without the very courageous work of people in the corruption in the Corruption Directorate, in the work of the Prosecutors General, especially the work of Laura Covesi, much of the gains that have been achieved in terms of respect for human rights, in respect of transparency and equity in the judicial system, would not have been achieved. I think we still need to make sure that Romania follows its undertakings that it gave regarding admission to the European Union in 2007, and to continue to support those figures of light in Romania who are trying to eradicate what I would call the remnants, the vestiges of a communist mentality there.
- [27:30]
Roland Clark
Yeah, that's very true. Just sticking with the 1990s again, one of the things that made me most jealous when reading this is your books on the Securitate were largely researched and written before the archives were open to the public, thanks to the fairly serendipitous intervention of Virgil Maguriano in 1993, who. Who was the director of SARAI at the time. Why do you think it was that SEDE decided to open their archives to historians in 93? And when they did, what made them like. Why would they wanted to give one or two people access first before they opened them properly?
- [28:06]
Professor Dennis Deletante
Well, in my case, it was purely, I would say, accidental, because I'd been asked. I was a member of the British government's Know How Fund, which was set up to help Eastern Europe, set up by Margaret Thatcher, in fact, in 1989, Poland was the first country admitted to it, Romania in the spring of 1990. And when the Know How Fund, which was designed to help Romania in terms of its bureaucracy, is streamlining its bureaucracy, introducing legislation which would enable the freedom that so many Romanians aspire to when they overthrew the Communist Party and Ceausescu. These measures, this policy, was one that included helping lawgivers in Romania. And I was asked by our Foreign Ministry to be a member of the Know How Fund, but with special relevance to Romania now. Virgil MergerianU asked in 1993, he addressed our request to the British Embassy in Bucharest for assistance from Britain in terms of dealing with young offenders, and he asked for a corpus of legislation in that regard, which the British could send or should send to Romania. And then one of the Ministers of State at the Foreign Ministry asked me, as a member of his committee, but not a diplomat, he stressed this. He asked me if I would take these eight volumes of laws to Mogarianu. And he explained to me that the British knew of Mr. Mogarianu's background, and he didn't want to entrust this role to a British diplomat, but asked me if I'd be willing to pick up the legislation which was sent through the diplomatic pouch from Bucharest, and take it to Magurianu. And of course, I jumped at the chance because I knew who Magurianu was, and I did this in the summer of 93. So I took these, I accompanied these documents, I picked them up from our embassy in Bucharest, took them to. To Mr. Magurianu, and he thanked me very much for bringing them. And at the end of our conversation, he asked me, well, you've done me a service. What service can I do you? And just on the spur of the moment, I said to him, well, Mr. Magurianu, I've down the years been interested in the Securitate. And he smiled. And I said, could I. I asked, could I see some secretati documents? And he took a sheet of paper, gave me A pen. And he said, pick four themes that you would like to study and give me a call on my mobile. Remember, this is 1993. Not everyone had a mobile and we'll see what we can do. And so I asked, I chose my four topics, which were one, the organization personnel of the Securitate in August 1948. The second one was the trial of Lucrezio Petroscano. The third one was a trimester report from any of the regional directorates in the Securitate from the year 1950. I wanted to see how they reported on the state of affairs in Romanian. Staria de spirit was the term that was used. And the fourth and final topic was the resistenza munt. So resistance to communism in the mountains, which dealt with this little known. These little known pockets of resistance to communism that began to be active in the late 1940s. And two months later I rang up Mr. Mogurianu, I went to Bucharest, I rang him up and he sent a car for me and took me or I went to his headquarters and he said, all of these topics have been approved. You must meet a colleague of mine. And he picked up his phone and called a colleague, a colonel. And he said, the colonel will bring documents on these four topics to the State Archives in Tishmi Jiu, and you should be there tomorrow at six o' clock in the morning. So I said, okay, fine. And I went at 6 o' clock in the morning. It was, I think, in the late summer. And I waited and a car drew up and the chauffeur driver got out together with the colonel. They opened the trunk of the car or the boot of the car, and I helped them carry in these boxes of documents. And there was an archivist waiting at the door. She'd opened the door to the archives, and remember, the archives are under control of the Ministry of the Interior. Anyway. And the colonel said to him, I remember Dr. Deletant has permission from the director to see these archives. You will show them to no one else. When he's finished with each volume, you will lock it away in one of the cupboards which were there in the reading room that I was shown to. He will sign nothing. Now I realize the significance of that, because when I opened the first volume, there was what they call a foie de consultare. So there was a grid, and everyone who consulted the volume had to sign. And the only person who'd signed any of the volumes that I saw was Alexandru Dragic, the former Minister of the Interior, probably the second most powerful man in the Romanian state, or the third most powerful man after 1952 in the Romanian state. He was the only person who would sign these documents. And so obviously I was very impressed. My Romanian friends later were very suspicious of me because they thought I must have been in some sort of relationship, negative relationship, with the SRI to get access. But I explained to them how I come to get access. And when I'd finished, I asked Mr. Mogurianu if I could if the documents or some selected pages from the volume could be microfilmed. And he said, yes, talk to the colonel about this. And the Colonel said it would cost me $1 for each page. Well, I was self funded. I had no grant for doing this. So I thought, well, I can afford $600. So I chose $600 pages. And again, a few months passed, I went back, I rang up Mr. Magurianu, and he invited me again to his headquarters. And he gave me the microfilm. And I asked him, how much do I owe you? And he said, you owe me nothing. It's a gift from me. And So I said, Mr. Magaranu, I'm intrigued to know why did you allow me to see these documents? And he just said, because I trust you. That's all. He said, yeah. And I gathered from that, because I met him on subsequent occasions. We had beers together. And he said to me he just didn't trust Romanian journalists. He said so many of them had been informers and continued to be operational. Remember this word, operational? And he said to me, you're still operational. So when we talk about access to the Sekuritate files, we are talking about the Securitate, we're not talking about access to the SRI files. And I think what he told me, what he said to me was in a way, rather disturbing. Although consolidated, it confirmed what I felt about the ease with which the Secretate in the communist period was able to monitor people's activities. A large segment of the population did the work of the Securitate for it for itself.
- [37:19]
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- [39:02]
Roland Clark
So really it was your SA file that made you trustworthy. What someone had written in there?
- [39:08]
Professor Dennis Deletante
Probably. Possibly. That's possibly. I think it's the fact that like Mr. Mogariani said, he trusted me. So he felt that I was a balanced observer and someone who was critical. He knew I was critical, of course, as a communist regime, and we joked about that. But he regarded me as a constructive critic, not a negative critic. And not only he, but several other senior figures in the communist regime whom I was able to interview, including Mr. President Iliescu and Petre Roman and Bru Kahn, and a whole list of them, General Stunkulescu. I mentioned them in the memoir, but several of them said to me it was very, of course, gratifying for me to hear them say that. Similar things that they regarded me as very objective and as a true friend of Romania. And they stress Romania not necessarily of Neo Communism, but a true friend of Romania.
- [40:16]
Roland Clark
In the book you talk about the trauma of reading one's own Securitate file because you find out about people you thought were friends who informed on you and you see how ordinary things that you did were misinterpreted. So eventually you did get a chance to see your own Securitate file. What was the most exciting thing or surprising thing you found in there?
- [40:40]
Professor Dennis Deletante
The most surprising thing was the fact that under the cultural agreement between Britain and Romania, the two countries exchanged language lectors. So the British, depending on the period we're talking about, sent up to three English language teachers to Romanian universities, and in return, the Romanians sent one Romanian lector. So a native speaker, a teacher from a Romanian university who could help with the teaching of Romanian. And Romanian was taught principally at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where I was but one day a week, the lector went up to Cambridge to teach a class, a couple of classes on Romania, on the Romanian language there. And what, in a way surprised me rather pleasantly in my file was the fact that all of these lectors, who were required under the terms of their appointment by the Romanian side, because they had to be vetted by the Securitate, they were obliged to write reports about the institutions that they were assigned to by the British or the French or the Americans or the Germans, as the case may be. But in my case, nearly all of them wrote in a very dispassionate and positive way about the cooperation that I had with them regarding the teaching of Romanian language and literature. And I felt this was said a great deal about the character of these people, given the fact that they were living under. Working under these ideological constraints.
- [42:32]
Roland Clark
That's very interesting. Just moving on to your book about Hitler's forgotten ally, which really challenged the way that most people think about the Antonesco regime. You started working on the Holocaust in Romania during your fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in the year 2000. And back in 2000, very little had been written on the on the Holocaust in Romania, which was before the early Weisel Commission's report came out, and the same year that Radu Iwanid's book on the Holocaust in Romania was published. Were you shocked when you started looking into the details of this story?
- [43:10]
Professor Dennis Deletante
Yes, I was. First of all, just a few words of introduction as to how I got to the Holocaust Museum, in fact, was largely through the good offices of Ernest Latham, a good friend of mine, a former US cultural attache in Romania in the 1980s. Ernest introduced me to Paul Shapiro, Dr. Paul Shapiro at that time, who was that time director of the center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. And I went along and had a chat with Paul, and he knew of my interest in Romanian history anyway. And of course, he read a couple of my books published in the 90s, and he said, look, we can find money for you to look at this specific topic of the Holocaust in Romania. We're particularly interested because we have received or we have bought. I ought to stress this. We have bought from the sri, large corpus of documentation about the Holocaust in Romania. And we haven't got sufficient people to really examine these documents and to create, first of all, a finding aid, that is, a small catalog of these documents. So when I got there in 2000, one of my tasks, and this was agreed with Dr. Shapiro, was to create a finding aid, which meant that I had to look through thousands of pages of documents. And I did so with the help of Radu Yuanid, with whom I became a great friend because he was the Director of International Acquisitions and had great knowledge, detailed knowledge, of how the Romanians had acquired. Sorry, how the Holocaust Museum had acquired these documents. So the advantage for me of looking through these documents was to realize the extent of the holdings of the museum. And in 2001, the Romanian. The Holocaust Museum had acquired 600,000 pages from the Romanian state or from Romanian authorities, largely via the SRI of documents about the Holocaust in Romania. And many of these documents, I understood, had not been seen by Romanian scholars. So I began work with Radu. In fact, Radu left it largely to me to go through the. If you like, the details of some of the collections. There was no way I could read 600,000 pages. At the same time, there was another Romanian scholar who. Viorel Akim, who was. Who'd published a great deal about the Roma or Gypsies in Romania. And so we agreed to split the task of looking at the treatment of Roma and Jews in Romania, as evidenced by this great quantity of documents that the Holocaust Museum had recently acquired. And I spent a good deal of time reading these documents. The extent of the repression and maltreatment, the deportation was complete revelation to me. And I stress here, I'm not talking about international, non Romanian documents. These are documents, for example, on the deportations and the shootings of Jews, drawn up by either the Romanian gendarmerie or by the Romanian army, and then passed on to the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs. In fact, one of the figures who supervised the collection of such documentation from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria, these were the three major areas to which Jews and Roma were deported. The person who was responsible, in a way, in a sense, for the guardianship of these documents was Mihai Antonescu, so the vice president of the Council of Ministers in Romania. And these documents gave the names of people who've been deported to Transnistria in particular. And when we're talking about deportation to Transnistria, it's not A question just of the several hundred thousand Romanian Jews who were deported there, but also the Ukrainian Jews in Transnistria who were deported internally from Odessa and other parts, who were deported to the Eastern extremities. These were the notorious camps where tens of thousands of Jews died. The names of some of these Jews who died are there in the record. Certainly the names of those who were sent to the various ghettos which I was particularly interested in, they were included. And one detail again amongst the many which struck me was that the Romanian Jews names and their addresses in various centers in Romania from which they've been deported were recorded. But Ukrainian Jews who lived alongside them in some of the ghettos, their names, they were anonymous, they weren't recorded. And that's because the Romanian gendarmes didn't know Ukrainian. And of course, the Ukrainian Jews didn't know Romanian, or most of them didn't know Romanian, so they became anonymous. They were the anonymous Jewish victims of deportation, as opposed to the nominalized or named victims of the Holocaust in Transnistria.
- [49:39]
Roland Clark
And yeah, and your research in that book and in others has really shown the details and the horrors of what was going on there. Just to finish the In Search of Romania book, the book finishes with some fairly depressing reflections on the state of corruption in Romanian politics over the past decade. So taking your historians hat off for a moment and thinking about the future rather than the past, do you imagine that this state of affairs will continue? Do you see some hope for the Romanian political landscape in the future?
- [50:15]
Professor Dennis Deletante
I see some hope in the sense that I come into contact with many younger Romanians. And of course, still occasionally I do some teaching in Romania. So I'm aware there's a great deal of talent that lies really are unexploited in Romania. And I think one of the tragedies of Romania today is that the corruption is driving many of these talented Romanians abroad. That where you've got a political class that puts its own personal interest above the interest of the state. So you're going to discourage and disillusion a younger generation. And that's why I think Western. First of all, the members of NATO and the European Union need to keep pressing away at this problem of corruption, of combating this mentality that exists that I can milk the Romanian state. Now, unfortunately, there are still many politicians in Romania who regard acts of an ignominious nature as creditable. They see this as being schmecker, as something to be proud of. And just to illustrate that problem, I remember talking to a former Mayor of IAS Just three or four years ago, I was with a group of my friends in Iasia, I have many there, and they invited me along to have lunch with the former mayor of ias, and he told me this story. He was the manager of a couple of restaurants in Ias, and he was constantly being defrauded by his employees. And he asked one of them, why are you stealing from me all the time? And the employee's reply was, if I don't steal, I don't feel that I'm a man. I thought, you know, this coming from a former mayor. So in Romanian, the reply was, numa simt hom daka nu fur.
- [52:31]
Roland Clark
So that's not about masculinity either. That's about humanity.
- [52:34]
Professor Dennis Deletante
It's about humanity. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And as I say, that's why I continue to be closely involved with what's happening in Romania, to follow events there and indeed have the opportunity to give my opinion when asked to figures in the European Union and indeed in in the United States. So I still feel I'm doing something worth worthwhile in my retirement, although it's really only semi retirement.
- [53:08]
Roland Clark
Yes, because it sounds like you're very busy with the new book coming out in August and the new fellowship in Washington next year. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today and for your very thoughtful and interesting replies. So I can highly recommend anyone who is in search of Romania picking up this book and having a read. And thanks again, Dennis.
- [53:35]
Professor Dennis Deletante
Thank you for the opportunity to join in the conversation. Sam.