Deportation of Nomadic Roma from Stângăceaua – Translated

Shortly after their arrival, their horses and carts were confiscated. They were guarded by Romanian gendarmes, ‘Ukrainian soldiers,’ and the ‘police.’ They could go to the neighboring village, about 10 km away, to search for food, but only secretly. At the beginning of summer, when thousands of Roma were dying from hunger and cold, the gendarmes decided not to disperse the Roma in various villages: Golta, Trei Dube, Krivoie, Siriovka, Savran, Varvarovka, Libachovka…
[…] On the field, people were guarded by the gendarmes and lived in pits dug into the ground to protect themselves from the cold. Those who had no money ate corpses, as they had no salt and died from poisoning.”

Romanian Archives (if available): N/A

Historical Note on the Roma:

The interviewee was born in the commune of Stângăceaua, located about 65 km from Drobeta Turnu–Severin. At the end of the 19th century, the commune had 1,580 inhabitants (MDGR 1902, V: 471). Around 1930, the population dropped to 747 inhabitants, including 8 sedentary Roma (RGP 1930, II: 284–285). According to the interviewee’s testimony, there were also several nomadic Roma families in the commune who traveled seasonally to nearby villages to sell various aluminum objects.

Historical Note on Deportation:

The Roma from Stângăceaua commune were registered in May 1942 by local gendarmes. These same gendarmes began rounding up the nomads from the locality and surrounding areas starting in June 1942 and escorted them to the county seat. The interviewee’s family was detained in Flămânda commune (now Jiana commune). The gendarmes organized the nomadic Roma into convoys and escorted them from post to post to Transnistria, following the Iași–Tighina–Tiraspol route.
Deportees were not allowed to go into villages to search for food (those who violated this order were beaten and killed, with their bodies left unburied by the side of the road).
The nomadic Roma arrived in Transnistria during the summer and were placed in a field in the commune of Domaniovka (Golta County). Shortly after arrival, their horses and carts were confiscated, though they likely managed to keep their tents. The gendarmes who guarded them
forbade them from traveling through the villages to search for food, but some deportees secretly went to nearby farms to buy food. Some Roma, including the interviewee’s family, managed to hide their gold coins from the gendarmes’ greed. However, cold and hunger caused thousands of deaths among the deportees. Many lived in makeshift huts dug into the earth, and driven by hunger, they resorted to eating human flesh (leftover corpses). The interviewee managed to escape from Domaniovka and hide at a Ukrainian farm. The farmer took him in, and he married the farmer’s daughter, in exchange for helping with the fieldwork. However, he did not forget his family left behind in Domaniovka: he secretly returned three times and, with the help of a brigadier and an engineer, brought them food. The interviewee’s family likely returned to Romania in the spring–summer of 1944.