Tag #120046 - Interview #87381 (Simon Meer)

I don’t remember them having organized any special events here, in Dorohoi, I couldn’t say they have. I only remember this, that the legionaries and the head of Security [4] from the Police station, commissioner Mercur, entered the synagogue during a Jewish wedding. There was a chuppah in the synagogue for performing the religious ceremony. And as the chuppah was of a dark red color: “That is the Bolshevik flag.” And they arrested everyone in that synagogue attending the wedding – one of my brothers-in-law was among them –, they gathered them, took them to the police station, boarded them on a train and sent them to the Targu Jiu Labor Camp. There was a labor camp for political prisoners there, for communists. As it were… They convicted you for being a Communist without your being one. Who knew then what communist politics was, what Bolsheviks even were? For them, Bukovina [5], Bessarabia [6] especially was Bolshevik; they were on the border with the Russians, the Soviet Union. For my wife – she was a child of 10 – tells me that where she was taken in Transnistria, near the Bug river, there was a German occupation, and if the Germans heard you were from the Romanian Old Kingdom, they didn’t treat you the way they treated those who were from Bukovina – for they were considered to be Bolsheviks, all those who were from Bukovina and Bessarabia.