Hiding Patterns: Evasion and Postwar Justice between Romania and the Soviet Union

This lecture is part of the Socialist Studies Seminar.

As Soviet forces returned to Bessarabia in 1944, many Holocaust perpetrators sought to evade postwar accountability through flight, concealment, or crossing the Romanian border. This paper follows forty perpetrators implicated in the July 1941 massacre of over 300 Jews in a Bessarabian village, who were split between Romanian and Soviet jurisdictions by the postwar border. What determined whether evasion succeeded: citizenship, mobility, local ties, or the structures of the pursuing states? One crime, one cohort, divided by a single border. What accounted for their radically different fates?

Co-sponsored by the World History Center and Jewish Studies Program at Pitt and the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University