“… and where does the name of the bus station come from?” I asked the girl on the hostel desk. Earlier, when I had read the name of the station, I had heard the slight ringing of a tiny bell, somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness. I was in Iasi, Romania’s second city squeezed up against its north-east border with Moldova, and was asking the girl about how to get to the bus station. I was planning an expedition for the next morning to a little village called Husi. I was on a little heritage tour.
My great-grandparents were from this part of the world. Born in Husi, my great-grandfather, a Jew, sailed to the United States to start a new life in 1900. My great-grandmother, about eighteen years old at the time, joined him a year later. Settling in Milwaukee, Wisconsin they became Americans and half a century after leaving Romania my dad was born, as American as apple-pie. He later moved to London where he met my mum who took him back here, which led to me to being born as Kiwi as… a whitebait fritter?
I had spent my first evening in Iasi walking the magnificent and leafy Boulevard Ștefan cel Mare. I sat on a broken bench outside the stately Grand Hotel Traian, starlings flocking overhead in a sky slowly turning from pink to purple, and read my book on Romania. I had been saving the chapter on Iasi until getting here, so that I could get a little historical thrill from reading and then strolling past the monuments and places described. To my disquiet, in one of the first sentences I read, Robert Kaplan told me that Iasi in the first half of the twentieth century, was “one of the worst places in Europe for a Jew to have been born”.
It was in Iasi 1927 that the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael was born. The Legion was later to be known by its more familiar name, the Iron Guard. Ion Codreanu, its founder, heard the voice of God calling him from an icon of the Archangel Michael instructing him to create a fascist Romania and be a dick to Jews.
Codreanu was strangled to death in 1938 on the orders of King Carol II after Adolf Hitler told Carol, to his face, that he would prefer Codreanu to be the dictator of Romania. Later the Romanian Orthodox Church would proclaim Codreanu a “national saint”.
The Guard was one spooky organisation. Organised around ‘nests’ of thirteen members, to join a recruit first had to suck the blood of the all the other members, then write an oath in his own blood vowing to obediently commit murder when ordered. They were commanded to wear packets of Romanian soil around their necks and before a mission each man in a nest had to let an ounce of his own blood into a common goblet, out of which all would drink.
Kaplan writes, “Prayer, mysticism, and authoritarianism, combined with an aspiration to a vitally pure ethic of sorts made the organization more like an Eastern Orthodox version of al-Qaeda than of the Nazi Party”. This wasn’t exactly the sort of historic thrill I was looking for. Walking down the boulevard at ambling couples and parents with excited children I felt a creepy shiver.
But then Romania switched sides. Considering that Hitler might not in fact win after all, Ion Antonescu, Romania’s war-time leader, realised that a radical change in Romania’s Jewish policy would be necessary if the West were to consider an alliance. He began to cooperate with attempts to save Jews and even helped smuggle them to Palestine. So while Antonescu was directly responsible for the deaths of as many as 300,000 Jews in ethnically Romanian areas captured from the Soviets he simultaneously kept up to 375,000 within Romania’s actual borders from local slaughter and transport to death camps. It’s difficult to know what to make of that.
The next morning I embarked fresh and early from the Iasi bus station. I noticed the woman across the aisle make the sign of the cross. Soon we were winding south through low hills and I happily watched out the window as we passed small villages of tin-roofed houses with apple trees and overgrown yards, fields of corn and brown sunflowers, burnt from the sun.
Two pleasant hours later I was deposited in the middle of Husi into a hot afternoon. A noisy truck rumbled past. Husi, to my eye, seemed like an absolutely unexceptional small town in provincial Romania. The main road runs through a centre consisting of a handful of cafes and orthodox churches with their onion domes glimmering in the sun. There is a scattering of parks where old men play dice games on benches next to statues of obscure historic figures. Incongruently, I saw a crazy woman, half-dressed and shouting to herself, stumbling around and pushing some small piece of rubbish into the gap in a manhole cover.
I stopped at a café for lunch where young people sat around smoking and playing on their phones. The thing I was looking for was the Jewish cemetery, apparently the only remaining trace of Jewish life in Husi.
Here I should point out, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I’m not actually that Jewish. Mum isn’t Jewish. Even on my dad’s side my Nobel Prize-winning Ashkenazi genetics are seasoned with a dash of Native American and a healthy serving of Irish.
I was raised secular, for one thing. Apart from some well-intentioned attempts by my (Catholic) mother to light some candles on Hannukah, we celebrated Christmas, ate chocolate on Easter and from about as soon as I was ready to decide such things I knew that the religion business didn’t hold much appeal for me.
So yeah, I’m Jewish in the same way that Hawaiian pizza is Italian, or that Mariah Carey is a gospel singer. My Jewiness is limited to my surname and occasional kvetching. But now that I was here, with the scent of history swirling around me, I was on a mission.
I asked one of the café staff about the cemetery. He called over a friend of his. The friend scratched his head. He remembered something about a graveyard over on the road out of town. After consulting they gave me some directions, pointed to it on google maps and I headed off into the afternoon, feeling intrepid, to track down my ancestors.
Walking up the road I could see, through the gaps between houses, the grapevines starting at the edge of town and stretch up the hill in the sunlight. I found the municipal stadium, green paint peeling from the ajar metal door. On entering I had it to myself, aside from the chugging sprinkler set at one end of the pitch and a set of colourful football shirts drying on the fence in the sun.
I headed out into the suburbs, past gardens of roses and dusty chicken coops and the ubiquitous apple trees and grapevines. I noted the public wells on the corners with their buckets that you lower down through the wooden hatches. A horse and cart clopped down the asphalt street. I walked on and on, the morning’s coffee energy slowly morphing into a mid-afternoon fatigue, feeling my skin beneath my backpack dampen with sweat as an hour stretched into two. This ancestry adventure was starting to become a challenge.
I stopped at a corner shop to ask for directions, using my phone to translate. The motherly, fast-talking lady behind the counter urgently interrogated, in turn, the half-blind old man with dark glasses outside drinking beer then the tiny old lady who had just come in to buy bread. She spoke quickly and rattled off questions while I stood there dumbly, smiling apologetically.
Suddenly she grabbed me by the elbow and hustled me out to the street. A minibus had stopped, apparently operating a taxi service, and she gave intense and precise instructions to the driver, who then relayed them to all the passengers inside. I had no idea what was going on.
The lady motioned me to climb inside and, sweating from the hot afternoon and all the attention, I sat in a seat perspiring and smiling back at the other passengers and feeling like a shitbag while we rolled back in the direction that I had come from. Moments later, not at all knowing where we were, the minibus stopped at an intersection where one of the passengers, a balding middle-aged man with a crisp short-sleeved checquered shirt, grabbed my arm and disembarked me without paying. I cried a thank you over my shoulder to the driver as the man hurried me across the busy road and whisked me through some sliding doors where I found myself in an indoor vegetable market.
Indicating for me to follow him we weaved through the table to two white doors. I guessed they led to the manager’s office. Nobody was there. I followed him outside where he asked a guy in a fedora and blue smock. He put aside his broom for a moment and looked at me. The guy had a full, dark moustache. In fact he looked, in my opinion, just like a Romanian sweeping a vegetable market ought to look.
He shrugged. Shit out of luck, he seemed to say with his eyes. Well, that was that. I thanked my helper, grasping my two hands together in an ‘oh well’ expression of genial commiseration that I hoped communicated gratitude, though it may have resembled penury. The guy was a real mensch.
And that’s how my quest for my ancestors would end. It was a half-hearted attempt and it was hot and I wasn’t too upset I didn’t find it. Content that I had tried and wondering what had just happened, I bought a can of coke from a shop and made my way back to the park to sit until it was time for my return bus. A group of children were dancing and playing around the statue. Parents sat on the benches and gently rocked their prams. A peaceful, congenial and, now, homogenous community.
I walked to the bus station on the outskirts of town, the other side of the disused train tracks where a motley collection of chickens pecked around in the rubble. I had to wait for the unshaven man to return to the counter, breath smelling of alcohol.
When I got back to Iasi the evening was still warm and the sky glowed orange above the train station. I bought a ticket for the next morning’s train and walked plaintively back to the hostel. Pulling up a chair beside my bunk bed I decided to do some further reading. I found the Wikipedia page of Ion Codreanu.
Go figure. The notorious founder of the Iron Cross, favourite of Hitler and the scourge of Romania’s Jewry was from Husi, the village of my great-grandfather.
In 1921 there were 43,500 Jews in Iasi, over 40% of the population. In 2013 there were 350. Before the war there were 137 synagogues. Now there are two.
The name of the bus station, by the way, was Codreanu station, but the girl on the hostel desk didn’t know where it came from.
Sources:
Kaplan, Robert. In Europe’s Shadow; Balkan Ghosts.
