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Name of the village: Commune Țânțăreni
Region, country: Gorj County, Oltenia region (Romania)
Date of deportation: September 1942
Excerpt from testimony:
“[…] The Roma were dying of hunger, typhus, some were so starving that they ate corpses. They
buried the dead 100 meters from the stables. The Roma themselves had to dig the graves. Elderly
people died from illness, and children died from starvation. They received small rations of potatoes and bits of bread, but it was not enough to feed everyone.
Civilians sometimes brought food. After it rained, parents collected water from puddles to drink. The interviewee’s sister, Constanța, who was two years older, died. They were moved to a village 5 kilometers away and once again placed in a stable. When they arrived, they found trenches dug into the ground, covered with wooden roofs. They all slept together in these dugouts on straw—multiple families, 20–30 people per shelter. Every morning, when they woke up, they found 2–3 dead bodies among them […]”
Unfortunately, no archival documents related to the interviewee’s family have been identified.
At the beginning of the 1900s, Țânțăreni was part of Dolj County and had a total population of 1,056 (MDG 1902, V: 681). The 1930 general census recorded 1,656 inhabitants in the commune,
including 260 Roma (RGP 1930, vol. 2: 168–169). Most of these Roma were sedentary, spoke
Romani, and many practiced traditional crafts, particularly brick–making.
along with their mother, sister, and two brothers, were taken from their home by gendarmes (the
father was not deported as he was mobilized and fighting on the front). The Roma were not allowed
to take more than the bare necessities, and their belongings were nationalized. They were escorted to the Țânțăreni train station, loaded into freight cars, and transported towards Craiova. These cars
were later attached to the special train E8 Turnu–Severin–Tighina, which departed for Transnistria on
September 12, 1942. After a difficult journey under horrific conditions, the train reached its
destination nearly a week later (ANI, IGJ Fund no. 126/1942: f. 213–214v).
The deportees were moved from village to village until they arrived in Tchakova (possibly
Țvetkova, Berezovka County). They were crammed into a stable and forced to work in a kolkhoz
under gendarme supervision. Living conditions were horrific: food rations were insufficient,
firewood was scarce, and typhus spread, leading to many deaths. Violence and abuse by the
guards—including rapes, thefts, and summary executions—further dehumanized the deportees.
According to the interviewee’s testimony, some Roma resorted to eating corpses to survive.
The same witness recounted the sadistic methods used by the guards to terrorize and execute
deportees. In one instance, a group of Roma who attempted to escape were forced onto a makeshift raft and pushed into the middle of a river, where the raft fell apart, and the escapees drowned. This episode resembles the myth of the “paper boats” (for more details, see Furtună 2015: 15–23).
Repatriation to Romania took place in 1943 or 1944, aided by false documents obtained from a
Roma man in Craiova. Once back in Țânțăreni, the interviewee’s family was unable to reclaim their
nationalized property.
Brief note on a Roma subgroup: In Țânțăreni, several Roma families were brick–makers
(cărămidari).
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