Wednesday, July 3, 2019

More human remains found near Holocaust grave


Marcel Gascon Barbera
July 3, 2019

BUCHAREST -- The Romanian military prosecution office has opened a criminal case after more human remains were discovered near a mass grave found in 2010 close to the city of Iasi.

The remains were found on June 29 by experts working for Romania’s Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust near Popricani, a small municipality close to Iasi.

Prosecutors inspected the area on June 30 and also found “a grenade and an 82-mm mortar shell”, the Iasi branch of the military prosecution said.

Researchers believe the discovery may lead to another mass grave containing the remains of dozens of Jews killed by Romanian troops during World War II.

They believe it may have been dug by the same perpetrators responsible for the mass grave discovered in 2010.

Experts estimate that about 15,000 Jews were killed in pogroms around Iasi during World War II, when Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu joined forces with the Nazis and contributed to Hitler’s “final solution”.

Between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were killed in total during the war in territories under Romanian administration, according to the Elie Wiesel Institute.

Romania had a Jewish population of around 800,000 before the war, one of the largest in the world. The Holocaust and emigration to Israel and Western countries during the Communist time decimated the community, which numbers less than 10,000 today.

Romania has struggled to come to terms to this grim chapter of its past, as many in the country still deny Romanian implication in the genocide.




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