human barter in communist Romania
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“Les Exportés”, by Sonia Devillers, Flammarion, 276 p., €19, digital €14.
Who was he really? A new Oskar Schindler, savior of Romanian Jews victims of communism, or a cynical profiteer from their tragedy? A Jew of Slovak origin, a businessman based in London, Henry Jacober (1918-1994) traded at a high price the right to freedom of tens of thousands of people, whom the communist regime forbade from leaving, for breeding pigs or breeding chickens, so many essential goods for the modernization of a failing collectivized agriculture.
“Jews and oil are our best export products”, admitted Nicolae Ceausescu about this somewhat particular trade, started in the 1950s, before he came to power. Remained discreet for a long time, this “state barter”as the historian Radu Ioanid calls it in Securitatea si vânzarea evreilor (“The Securitate and the Sale of the Jews”, 2015, untranslated), only appeared in its full extent with the opening of the archives, after the “revolution” of December 1989.
Always elegant, Henry Jacober was a regular at the Athénée Palace in Bucharest. “A strange smuggler, both benefactor and wheeler-dealer”says Sonia Devillers in The Exportedthe beautiful story that she devotes to her grandparents, Harry and Gabriella, who left Romania in 1961 with their two children, including the author’s mother, exchanged for “high yielding animals”as a regime official put it at the time. “They didn’t flee, we let them go and they paid a fortune for it”, notes the journalist at the start of this fascinating dive into the tragedies of Romanian Jewish memory. For a long time, she was uninterested in it. “I grew up with a hole in the middle of Europe, a shapeless nation that I barely knew how to locate”she acknowledges.
Reduced to pariah status
This past was the business of his mother, who left at the age of 14 and remained forever scarred by this wrenching. It was above all the story of his grandparents, educated and wealthy, who always kept the nostalgia for Bucharest between the two wars, despite violence from local Iron Guard fascists. They had welcomed communism as a liberation, before the stark reality of the new regime’s oppression and anti-Semitism came into full view. Accused of “cosmopolitanism”, they were expelled from the party, reduced to the status of pariahs. As in all other similar cases, the sum was paid by family members and friends who had already taken refuge in France. The debt was fully repaid.
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