Heroes and Victims by Maria Bucur

Author:Maria Bucur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press

In addition, many of those who were accused in the trials held in Bucharest (citizens of wartime Romania) and Cluj (citizens of wartime Hungary) were judged in absentia. Around 1,300 people were prosecuted and 668 sentenced. Of these, among the first 185 to be tried, only 51 of the accused were actually in custody during the trials.37 The less than 30 percent reflects the general ratio of presence among the accused at the trials. This meant that, for many of those who came before the tribunals as victims or witnesses, the trials brought little closure. On the contrary, given the politicized and heavy-handed manner of the Peoples Tribunals, I suspect that fear, rather than any sense of satisfaction from having acted as witnesses on behalf of truth or justice, dominated the experience of those called to testify in these trials. In the similar case of Jedwabne, Poland, a Peoples Tribunal helped create a document that served as the explosive starting point for reconsidering that atrocity’s history and memory over half a century after the trial. Jan Gross’s book reveals the kind of unease witnesses had about that record. They were neither relieved about having a public record of their recollections, nor eager to resurrect those memories when the émigré historian came inquiring in the 1990s.38Through their experience of recollecting their painful memories of the war in public, victims were victimized once again, rather than seeing retribution for their suffering.

The trials themselves were publicized heavily in the official media, with large front-page pictures of the accused and official transcripts from the interrogations by the public prosecutors and reports on the radio. Thus, even if they didn’t offer emotional closure for victims and witnesses, these trials became an important component of the emerging Communist regime’s attempt to create a public image of strength and legitimacy in its work to wipe out any traces of the wartime fascist regime. As such, the trials became the foundation of the official remembrance of the war, but also the basis for counter-memories that were created in the shadow of this official discourse.

Three important elements stand out in the way the trials shaped official war commemorations. To begin with, the pro-Nazi factions in Hungarian-controlled Transylvania were pursued more aggressively than their Romanian counterparts. This unevenness made it clear from the beginning for the Hungarian and German minorities in Transylvania that they wouldn’t be treated in the same way as ethnic Romanians; nationalist suspicion of their wartime collaboration would hang over these two ethnic minorities after Transylvania came under Romanian rule again. For instance, atrocities committed by Hungarians against Romanians at the beginning of the retrocession of northern Transylvania in August–September 1940 were fully publicized and heavily prosecuted. Yet atrocities committed by ethnic Romanians against Hungarians during the same period of chaos were summarily swept under the rug of public forgetting. Looking at the number of sentences passed in Cluj versus in Bucharest (481 versus 187), a great discrepancy was already visible in the treatment of war criminals along ethnic and regional lines.

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