cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1014518

(Alternative link.)

Excerpt:

After a careful study of gentile behavior toward the Jewish population in these two regions, our research indicates that there was a remarkable difference between actions taken in Bessarabia and Transnistria.

On the basis of more than two hundred Jewish survivor testimonies, a mail‐in survey with Jewish Holocaust survivors, interviews with over one hundred non‐Jewish Holocaust witnesses located on the territories of Bessarabia and Transnistria, and archival material from the Romanian, German, and Soviet governments, we found the following: the Bessarabian population was more likely to commit abusive actions against Jews (for example, beatings, theft, murder, rape), whereas the Transnistrian population was both (1) less likely to commit abuse and (2) more likely to behave in a cooperative manner (for example, providing food and hiding Jews from persecution).

We believe that the prewar state policies encouraging either animosity or affinity between ethnic groups greatly contribute to our understanding of this outcome.

[…]

Above all, we believe that there was a clear and overwhelming political commitment by the governing communists to achieve interethnic cooperation and societal integration during this interwar period, and government policies flowed from this commitment.

These changes in policies, we argue, led to the construction of interethnic cooperation that came to be internalized by the gentile population and then led to continued cooperative behavior even after the Soviet Union was replaced by the anti‐Semitic Romanian forces during World War II.

[…]

One of the most remarkable findings from all our research in Transnistria was actually a nonevent: we did not find evidence of a single anti‐Jewish pogrom anywhere in Transnistria.

Pogroms in Bessarabia were reported by survivors and are referenced in archival material and secondary sources, but the same cannot be said for Transnistria, as we found no evidence of such activities in survivors’ testimonies, government records, or the secondary sources we consulted.

More generally, survivors made very different remarks when commenting on the people from Transnistria, which had been located in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Some survivors stated it explicitly: “In Ukraine the attitude was better than in Bessarabia.” Many of the survivors stated that “the Ukrainians did help,” that “the Ukrainians were not bad,” that they had “a compassionate attitude,” or that “the majority of them gave us bread.”

One survivor, a native of the town of Orhei (Bessarabia), stated that of his experience in Transnistria, “one [a Jew] could not feel too much hatred, with the exception of the collaborators,” and his impression was that “the majority [of the local population] did not perceive the Jews with alienation … but rather … the majority perceived the occupying power as alien, but the Jews as theirs.”

Another survivor, this time a native of Transnistria, concluded that the population of his city (Moghilev‐Podolsk) had a sympathetic attitude toward the Jews and that only a small minority was comfortable with the fact that the Jews were forced from the city to the ghetto.

Several survivors recalled that, during the long marches toward the ghettos, many locals in Transnistria threw food from a distance and some peasant women even left packages with food on the road in front of the columns of Jews approaching.

[…]

There were also cases of Jewish children being sheltered by Transnistrian locals in their houses. The Romanian counterintelligence reports confirm the occurrence of cases of Jewish children being adopted by the Ukrainian population in order to save them from deportation.

Hilda Schwartz, a survivor of Kopaygorod, described her escape to a neighboring village, where a woman housed her first and later her mother and sister as well. After the liberation of the camp, Hilda’s family continued to live with the woman for another two months.

While we did find individual cases of theft, beatings, and murder committed by the local population in Transnistria, the incidence was substantially lower than in Bessarabia.

More importantly, the level of cooperation was overwhelmingly apparent in all sources we consulted, which was in stark contrast to what we found for Bessarabia. This becomes clearer with a quantified picture of events, which we present in the next section.

(Emphasis added.)

There is more that I wanted to include, but the excerpt is pretty lengthy as it is. If you have the time, I encourage you to read the rest of the article (which is forty‐two pages long, excluding the preface), but I should warn you that it does quote some slurs and describe some violent incidents.

For a book on this subject, see Diana Dumitru’s The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union.