The Iaşi Pogrom Museum, organised by the “Elie Wiesel” National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, in collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was inaugurated in order to commemorate 80 years since the tragic events of 28-30 June 1941. The Iaşi Pogrom was an operation devised at the top of the Antonescu administration and put into practice by Romanian and German army units, with the participation of some of the civilians in the city. The anti-Semitic psychosis, deliberately fuelled by the civilian and military secret services, contributed decisively to the preparation of the Pogrom of June 29, 1941. The digging of mass graves in ...the Jewish cemetery in Păcurari, before the violent anti-Semitic outbreak, proves the planned nature of the assassination. The Prefecture, the Police Headquarters, echelons of the Romanian army and gendarmerie, the railway company regional office in Iaşi have contributed to the killing in cold blood of over 13,000 out of the total of 35,000 Jews living in Iaşi in those years. The Police Headquarters yard and the two death trains were the main places of extermination for the Jews of Iaşi. Of the 4,400 Jews aboard the two cargo trains, 2,590 died. The first train, travelling from Iaşi to Călăraşi, left on Monday, June 30, and after six and a half days on a convoluted route, it reached its destination. The second train, Iaşi – Podu Iloaiei, covered a distance of 20 kilometres in eight hours. There were no stops on this route, but the train moved so slowly that the escort often walked along the moving train. In October 2010, a team of historians, archaeologists and communicators from the “Elie Wiesel” Institute, armed with archival documents and the testimonies of locals, discovered a mass grave in the Vulturi Forest, in the village of Popricani, Iasi county. A total of 36 civilian victims were found and extracted: 12 children, nine women, 15 men aged between one and 80. An investigation was carried out by the Iaşi Military Prosecutorʼs Office in file 271 / P / 2010 and by the Military Prosecutorʼs Office attached to the Bucharest Military Court of Appeal in file 12 / P / 2014. In June 2019, another team found a second mass grave in an area close to the place where the first had been found. The investigation showed that it appeared to contain 22 civilian victims – six children, 12 women and four men. The most probable hypothesis: the victims were Jews arrested in Sculeni, the Republic of Moldova, and taken inside Romania by the Romanian army (6th Infantry Regiment) during the Barbarossa operation. The exhibition halls dedicated to the Iaşi Pogrom contain photographs taken during the Pogrom, a hologram, survivors’ testimonies, documents and artefacts.
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