My road to Romania
Operation Barbarossa: 1941-2022. The Toad World festival in Kamenets-Podilsky. Coked-up Romanian restauranteur in wartime Kiev. The Fuhrer and the Conducător.
60% earn 300 euros or less. 10% earn 50 euros or less. Foreign companies love Romania – Romanians don’t. All the foreigners come here.
These were some of Dan’s first words to me, a truck driver I met at a Bucharest cafe. But first, how I got there, which might take some time.
Today’s a bit of a travelogue. From Kiev at the dawn of war to sleepy west Ukraine with its toad festivals and Operation Barbarossa cosplays. Then I get side-tracked by Romania’s in Odessa, October 1941. Hopefully we’ll get to modern-day Romania in the end, which was meant to be the topic, and is meant to be topical at the moment. In any case, something seems to have been pulling me towards Romania, past and present.
February 27, 2022
When the war started I was in Kiev, and three days in I ended up in the car park of a large upscale apartment block nearby. I’d seen an African milling around the shop not long before curfew, and started chatting to him - some Africans in Kiev didn’t know there was a war going on, because of the language barrier, at least on the first day. I wrote here a while ago about my Zimbabwean friend, Ralph.
Anyway, the Ghanan guy was one of the relatively wealthy west Africans in Ukraine - himself a music producer, his wife a Chinese loan shark. She said she came to Ukraine because her company charged interest rates illegal in China.
Soon the conversation became much livelier when a man bearing a bouquet of expensive cheeses and salami burst into the abandoned carpark:
I’m Romanian but I’m the most patriotic man left, everyone else has left the building but I’ve been sitting up in the penthouse doing coke and watching the missiles fly!
I found this restauranteur very interesting. I forget his name, let’s say Cristian. I went up to his penthouse, filled with empty bottles and white powder. A beautiful view of the city, where the previous night a Russian tank column made an adventurous but unsuccessful march down ‘Victory Prospect’, the vast highway the penthouse overlooked.
Cristian said he was off to take some western journalists to the frontline again. We had some entertaining chats amidst the general paranoia and confusion. He was full of amusing stories and hyperactive energy.
He told of how a Ukrainian rival in the restaurant business sent the secret services against his restaurant a few years ago - they tried to extort him with the classic ‘sponsor of pro-Russian separatist terrorism’ charges.
‘But I’m Romanian, I know how to deal with corruption’
At this point the city was essentially surrounded by the Russian military, and I was pondering the prospects of a Mariupol scenario. At one point we were having a cigarette on the balcony, and I asked him whether he realized we were about to die in a hyper-mediatized siege of Mosul. That we might enjoy the honor of having our deaths broadcast on CNN as ‘foreign citizens killed by Putler’.
Cristian switched off and agreed. Then he showed me all the death threats he’d received that day from an instagram story calling for a ceasefire.
Train, Operation Barbarossa 2.0
Sometime around the end of February we got out of Kiev on a train. It took 6 hours or so of waiting at the capital’s main train station.
My partner’s friend’s mother took a liking to me, advising me to ‘be as aggressive as you can pushing through these crowds, these babushkas will push you in front a train if necessary’. I didn’t take her advice, but I do remember one middle-aged woman screaming at a young man trying to get on an evacuation train - ‘my son is defending the city, and you parasite are trying to escape!’
On the positive side, I also remember a group of Vietnamese who kept together amidst the chaos, guided by a small red flag:
Here’s another photo I took. Who knows what the smoke was from
Eventually we managed to get on a train, where I promptly collapsed and slept on the aisle. The past week of telegram addiction and 3 hours of sleep a night had taken its toll. After a couple hours of being walked over, I woke up to be force fed a disgusting egg-chicken sandwich by my new foster mother. She then proceeded to explain in great detail the military exploits of her male lineage - herself from Donetsk, her father had been a Soviet naval officer in Sevastopol, and her grandfather had played a significant role in the Tsarist army, as well as being a member of the landed gentry, as well as….
We eventually got to the west Ukrainian town of Kamenets-Podilsky. I’d visited it once or twice over the years with friends. Like all of west Ukraine, very poor but with a strange mix of imperial genealogies.
When we got to the station at 11pm, it was long past curfew, and the masked men with large automatic weapons were fairly bemused at our attempts to lie in Ukrainian that we had family about to pick us up (we actually had a taxi waiting to take us to an apartment we found online, but our host had instructed us to call her our aunt for curfew-reasons). When we called ‘our aunt’, one of them wryly commented ‘are you sure she’s your aunt’.
We eventually got to the apartment, dodging potholes that seemed like they had come from artillery shells (they hadn’t). The taxi driver said something about the need for peace. The apartment host turned out to be entertaining to the point of schizophrenia, rattling off to my girlfriend some incomprehensible story about a woman from Kharkov (east Ukraine) who suspected the host was a killer/scammer, who then retorted that she usually had a gun, but not today.
Anyway, the woman from Kharkov might’ve been right, since we paid about 5 times more for a shabby room than it should’ve cost.
The thing I remember most from Kamenets-Podilsky were two posters. First, an ad for the ‘TOAD WORLD’, a festival taking place in the Jubilee shopping centre from October 25 to November 7:
Another poster was a historical adaptation:
SUPPORT THE ARMED FORCED OF UKRAINE
IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST NEO-BOLSHEVISM
I knew the original, from 1941, Lithuania.
FIGHT BOLSHEVISM!
A COMMON FIGHT - A COMMON VICTORY!
At the summit of the Romanian rock
We decided to go to Romania. Closer, and not as packed as the Poland crossings. I remember taking a photograph of the grey farmland as the radio played the latest updates on ‘killed orcs’, but sadly the photo seems to be missing.
The crossing itself was fairly uneventful. Stood in a line for a couple hours. One interesting thing that happened was accidentally captured in a selfie - visible behind us is a well-known trans Ukrainian vlogger (an apolitical Ukrainian, not Ashton-Cirillo). She was first refused crossing because her passport showed a man, which my partner found out on instagram. But then, by however means, she was across the border the next day. I’m not a citizen of Ukraine so I had no such issues, though funnily enough I had been considering acquiring citizenship for whatever reason on the eve of the war.
I’d entered a country with a great deal of history. Dacians, Romans, Ottomans, there’s no doing justice to it. But they also played a major role in Operation Barbarossa. Romanian troops occupied a huge swathe of Ukraine. Then-dictator of Romania, Ion Antonescu, had this to say on 26 August 1941:
National Socialism will give Europe a long epoch of peace, longer than the Pax Romana. The Führer and Germany have demolished the prejudices and the obstacles . . . . For 2,000 years we have been crushing every wave of invasion. For centuries the Slav masses could not reach the summit of the Romanian rock in their marauding waves . . . . It is my wish for the National Socialist future and for the great Führer that they can unite and elevate the whole of Europe with their grand creative and innovative ideas.
— Dennis Deletant: Ion Antonescu, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally
Not without a great deal of losses (and German derision), they occupied Odessa after a two month siege:
Soviet casualties were estimated at over 20,000. On the Romanian side, their losses since crossing the Dniester rose to over 98,000 (almost 19,000 dead, 68,000 wounded and more than 11,000 missing).
As wikipedia laconically conveys, During the first week of Romanian occupation of Odessa, the city lost about 10% of its inhabitants.
Here’s a fragment from the Deletant book on the October 1941 Odessa massacre:
On the evening of 22 October 1941, the former NKVD headquarters in Odessa on Engels Street, where General Ioan Glogojanu, the Romanian military commander of the city had set up his base, was blown up by Soviet agents. Romanian records show that there were 61 victims, including General Glogojanu, 16 officers, 35 soldiers and 9 civilians. Four German naval officers and two interpreters were also among the dead. No trial of the suspects was considered; Antonescu went straight ahead and ordered swift and indiscriminate reprisals:
a) For every Romanian and German officer killed in the explosion, 200 communists were to be hanged; for every soldier, 100 communists; the executions will take place today; b) all the Communists in Odessa will be taken hostage; similarly, one member of each family of Jews. They will be informed of the reprisals ordered as a result of the act of terrorism and will be warned, they and their families, that if a second similar act takes place they will all be executed.
The order was transmitted to the military authorities in Odessa during the early morning of 23 October, and over the next 48 hours several hundred Jews and Communists – one source puts the number at 41734 – were hanged or shot.35 In addition, many thousands of Jews were force-marched to Dalnyk, a few kilometres outside the city. On the intervention of Odessa’s mayor, Gherman Pântea, and the acting military commander, General Nicolae Macici, the column was sent back to Odessa, but not before those Jews at the head of the column were herded into four large sheds and machine-gunned to death, after which the sheds were set on fire. How many Jews were killed in this way is not known, but a figure of 20,000 was mentioned at Macici’s trial in May 1945. This is close to the figure in a German officer’s report that ‘on the morning of the 23 October, about 19,000 Jews were shot on a square in the port, surrounded by a wooden fence. Their corpses were doused with gasoline and burned.
I don’t know what the Romania of 1941 looked like. The best book I read on the Romania of the time was ‘the Green Shirts and the Others’, by Nagy-Talavera. Based on that, probably not too different from the present. Less concrete and fewer storeys - more mud huts and Jews - but the same vibe. The present will have to wait for the next installment of this series.
Wow! There are Vietnamese people in Ukraine too? That's very interesting. I knew about Vietnamese people in Russia but had not heard about much about Vietnamese people in Ukraine.
Sorry I haven't been able to read much recently since I've been busy over the holiday period, but I will subscribe again soon to catch up.