Diana Dumitru, Peasants’ perceptions of Jewish life in interwar Bessarabia and how this became interwoven into the Holocaust
This article analyzes the imagery shared by interwar Bessarabian peasants about their Jewish neighbours and traces the role that this imagery played in determining gentiles’ attitudes or behaviour during the summer of 1941. It is built on a vast array of sources, including, over three hundred testimonies of Jewish survivors, and archival materials studied at the National Archives of the Republic of Moldova and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. During the start of the war, civilians had brief interregnum allowing them to act on their own, unrestrained by local authorities. At this time, robberies in Jewish towns and villages occurred on an unprecedented scale across the region, with open involvement of numerous groups of civilians; sometimes these robberies were accompanied by assaults and murders. This paper argues that the plunder of Bessarabian Jewry was something more complex than war banditry.