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Name of the town: Pădureni (commune)
Region, country: Vaslui County, Moldova region (Romania)
Date of deportation: May 1942
Excerpt from testimony:
“An order came from Bucharest to take us to the Bug. ‘There they will give you land, they will give you animals’… but we were being taken there to die. They came in groups of 20 or 30, patrolling all around; they walked and looked—the dugouts were full of people, and there were also dead who were not buried. When we went outside, we had to make our way among the corpses. There was a large pit, and they were thrown into it. If someone died in a dugout, they would bring them there; they would tell the policeman that there was a dead body, bring it, and throw it into that pit like a dog.”
Romanian archives (if they exist):
During the census of May 1942, the Vaslui Police Prefecture identified 19 nomadic Roma (4 encampments with 4 carts) on the territory of the city of Vaslui, who were deported to Transnistria at the beginning of May 1942 (Romanian national archives (ANI), Iași Police Precinct No. 6 fonds (Fond Circa a VI-a de Poliție Iași), file no. 5/1942: ff. 7-9). It is possible that these nomads came from the commune of Pădureni, located near the city of Vaslui.
Historical note on the Roma:
Pădureni, the seat of the commune of the same name, lies in an area bearing traces of human habitation as far back as the Neolithic period (Cucuteni culture). Significant data appear in princely documents only from the feudal era, records which local scholars later used to draft brief historical monographs. According to these accounts, the villages that today make up the commune of Pădureni are old settlements, most of which already existed by the middle of the 15th century.
No specific public historical documents attest to the exact date or year when the Roma community first arrived in the commune of Pădureni, Vaslui County. The first large waves of Roma (then enslaved) were brought to, or recorded in, Moldavia beginning in the 15th and 16th centuries, many of them given by the ruling princes to monasteries or boyars as a labor force. Historically, most rural Roma communities in Vaslui County settled around the former boyar or monastic estates.
Historical note on the deportation:
Nicolae’s family worked in wood and bone. They made household objects out of wood and combs from animal bone, traveling from village to village by cart to sell their wares. They also worked in silver. In the course of May 1942, the family was arrested by gendarmes and escorted from one locality to the next, along the Oancea–Tiraspol route, toward Transnistria.
Once in Transnistria, the interviewee’s family was settled near the locality of Moldovka, in Golta County, close to the Bug. All their belongings (carts, animals, gold) were confiscated upon arrival. The deportees lived in dugouts dug halfway into the ground, in a camp surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and guarded by gendarmes. The Roma were subjected to a regime of forced labor, being made to go to the nearby forest to cut wood in exchange for meager food rations (flour and potatoes). Despite the harsh punishments, some of them slipped out of the camp in search of food, at the risk of being shot by the gendarmes. German troops patrolled the area and sometimes entered the camp to commit abuses (beatings, rapes, etc.). Many deportees perished from the cold, the lack of food, and typhus, and their bodies were buried in a mass grave nearby.
The repatriation of the Roma took place in the spring of 1944, following the Romanian and German troops retreating from Transnistria in the face of the advancing Red Army. The journey back to Romania was full of hardship, and many Roma perished from the cold and exhaustion.
Brief note on a Roma subgroup:
Argintari Roma (silversmiths), who made objects and utensils out of silver, wood, and bone.
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