Seattle author uses intimate family memoir and vigorous historical research to tell the story of Romania's role in the Holocaust. In Romanian-controlled territories, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews, plus some 12,000 Roma, were killed during the war.
Goldenshteyn, 33, whose family moved to the U.S. as refugees from the former Soviet Union in 1992, says he heard fragments of his family’s past while growing up, but he never linked it to one of humanity’s darkest chapters.
His starting point was to interview his grandfather, Motl Braverman, in his Seattle home over a series of weekends. Braverman, who died in 2015, languished as an adolescent with his family in the remote Pechera death camp, which became known to many prisoners as the “death noose.” A late 2021 study by the National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania “Elie Wiesel,” showed that 40% of respondents were not interested in the Holocaust. Nearly two-thirds of the 32% who agreed that the Holocaust took place in Romania mistakenly identified the deportation of Jews to “camps controlled by Nazi Germany.”
In a push for wider public awareness, Romanian lawmakers passed a bill last fall to add Holocaust education to the national school curriculum, a move that was applauded by many. But it was met with controversy in January when the far-right Alliance for Romanian Unity, which holds seats in parliament, called it a “minor topic” and an “ideological experiment.”
“It’s important for any country with a dark past to confront it,” said Goldenshteyn, the father of two small children. “Because it’s impossible to chart the way forward without knowing where you’ve been. There is not enough knowledge about what happened during the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.” At the Pechera camp, the gates of which sported a wooden sign that read “Death Camp,” hunger was such that cases of cannibalism were reported. As an adolescent, Motl Braverman would evade guards and take perilously long roads in sub-zero temperatures to return with small amounts of food to keep his family alive. He would later help others escape from the camp to head to relatively safer ghettos.
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