Romanian president Ion Iliescu has admitted his country's complicity in the Holocaust, thus ending decades of denial that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in the country when it was an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II. “We must not forget or minimize the darkest chapter of Romania's recent history, when Jews were the victims of the Holocaust,” Mr. Iliescu told a joint session of both houses of parliament to mark Romania's first Holocaust Remembrance Day. As late as last year, Israel and Jewish leaders were angered by a Romanian government statement denying the Holocaust took place on its territory. The diplomatic clash prompted a revised line from Romania, which is eager to please its new Western partners and join the European Union.
In an address to MPs and Jewish leaders, Iliescu acknowledged that death trains, mass deportations and pogroms took place in Romania and that anti-Semitism was a state-sponsored ideology even before the war started in 1939. About 420,000 of Romania's 750,000-strong Jewish community were killed during the war. The number includes about 100,000 Jews who were deported to Auschwitz from Transylvania, then part of Hungary, which was also a Nazi ally.
