The Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest was built on the site of former Ministry for Internal Affairs in downtown Bucharest. It is dedicated to the collective memory of the victims of the Holocaust in Romania, as between 1940 and 1944, hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews fell victim to the systematic persecution of Jews by the Romanian authorities.
The monument was made by the artist Peter Jacobi and was unveiled in October 2009. According to Wiesel Report - commissioned by the Romanian government to investigate the Holocaust in Romania and published in 2004 - no country outside Germany was responsible for the deaths of more Jews than Romania. The report assessed that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered or died under the supervision and as a result of the deliberate policies of Romanian civilian and military authorities led by the Prime Minister Ion Antonescu. Over 11,000 Romani were also killed.The memorial itself comprises a column on which each side is written a single Hebrew letter. Taken together they read zachor (remember). There is also a hall of remembrance, and a number of plaques containing the names of many Romanian Holocaust victims.
These photos were taken in March 2019 during the visit to the Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest organized by the EUROM / European Observatory of Memories and the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Bucharest. These two institutions organized the travelling seminar “Romania’s entangled traumatic pasts”. According to the official website of EUROM this travelling seminar “dealed with the memories of the Holocaust and the communist past in Romania and consisted of a series of speeches and guided visits to some of the most emblematic places of commemoration and memorialization in Bucharest and Jilava. It was co-organized by the EUROM and the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Bucharest and included the participation of master students and experts from the University of Bucharest and the University of Barcelona.”
