Steve Ranson:From Romania with love

Romania is still a mystery to many Americans.

My Baby Boomer generation knows the country as a former member of the Warsaw Pact, which was established by the Soviet Union in 1955 to counter the influence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Allies aligned with each superpower — the United States and Soviet Union — engaged in a 44-year Cold War. During this time, geopolitical tensions put each bloc of nations at odds with each other from 1947 to 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a symbol of the division between East and West.

Eight countries belonged to the Warsaw Pact including Romania and its neighbor, Bulgaria, now NATO allies. With other Iron Curtain countries now members of NATO, it’s easy to see how the world’s complexity rapidly changed.

Furthermore, our proxy wars raged in Korea and then Vietnam, skirmishes in Africa, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, protection of American allies in South and Central America and the defense of the Panama Canal.

Romania and five other countries joined NATO in 1994 and have remained steadfast allies from Eastern Europe.

The tensions between the two blocs during the Cold War was very real. On a smaller scale, look up the tensions and boycotts that affected the 1980 and 1984 Summer Olympics.

Military instruction in the United States was very Soviet-dominant. As a young Army lieutenant enrolled in an officers’ basic course in the early 1980s, I, along with my fellow officers, received hours of instruction on the Soviet Union’s Red Army, its allies and the tactics used on the battlefield.

The Cold War is re-emerging, but it’s been disturbing when a small group of politicians from one political party don’t view the importance of NATO and the threat from Russia as much as their predecessors. A book on the Cold War and edited by Derek C. Maus is a comprehensive account of nuclear diplomacy and deterrence and should be a must read.

A sordid past also occurred during World War II involving Romania.

The importance of International Holocaust Remembrance in January and what it represents should never be lost on anyone. Man’s ethnic cleansing of another group of people — no matter who they are — is wrong.

I began my long journey to Fallon after being invited to spend time with a Nevada Army National Guard MP detachment at a NATO base. The air base is near the Black Sea, which, local military officers said, has an eye on Ukraine and Crimea. While waiting for the Constanta train to Bucharest, I heard the whistle’s shrill, the same sound we hear in the documentaries when the Jews were crammed into box cars and taken to the concentration camps.

My comparison from this January afternoon to the 1940s may not be totally accurate, but for a journalist who has attended Holocaust presentations and written about the people who were survivors or liberators for our “Legacies of the Silver State” book, I thought of my subjects.

While most people remember those Nazi atrocities, the Romanian government was actively rounding up thousands of Jews during the late 1930s and early 40s.

From part of an article written by CJ Krysnk:

“Between 1941 and 1944, Romania was responsible for exterminating approximately 300,000 Jews, giving it the sinister distinction of ranking second only to Germany in terms of the number of Jews murdered during the Second World War.

“Marshal Ion Antonescu, military dictator of Romania from 1940-44, advocated a policy of ethnic cleansing to purify the Romanian nation no less radical than Hitler’s own racial ideology.”

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., research shows the Germans occupying Poland murdered at least 3 million Jewish citizens. A Polish historian of the Holocaust, Dr. Jan Grabowski, said Poland’s government is trying to whitewash some of the history of Holocaust in that country.

Another author, Jan Tomasz Gross, observed in his book the Poles killed more Jews than the Germans. Consequently, Poland’s government accused Gross of insulting the Polish people.

Grabowski is this year’s speaker at the Day of Remembrance program on April 18 at the Atlantis Casino Resort Hotel from 7 to 9 p.m. His program focuses on “Denial: How Activists, Politicians, and Educators Are Trying to Rewrite the History of the Holocaust.”

Admission is free. RSVP at https://bit.ly/holocaust 23.

Steve Ranson is Editor Emeritus of the Lahontan Valley News and a retired Army officer who served with the Nevada Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve in Panama.