Musica Prohibita

Human Freedom Versus Artistic Freedom

20th Century Totalitarianisms and the Fight for Freedom

Oppression, violence and territorial conquests have been and are constants of political actions from ancient times to today. After thousands of years of evolution, humanity has not found a way to definitively stop violence organized in the form of a state, but also the oppression and violence of totalitarian states against their own citizens, majorities and minorities.

In the last century, the founding of international organizations and alliances has led to the condemnation of any form of conquest, violence, oppression, terror of a state against another state, but also of a state structure against its citizens.

How has humanity resisted the roller of evil, hatred, terror and assassination for millennia? Fighting with the help of music, the development of the arts, science, literature and culture in general for freedom and justice.

Was culture and is it the opposite of dictatorship and abuse?

YES!

Because culture means freedom – collective and individual, the freedom to live, create, express and organize.

Human freedom cannot exist without artistic freedom.

Can oppression stop freedom of creation?

In many cases, yes, by oppressing creators. In music, less so because few oppressors understand the language of music, and can censor it. And the physical disappearance of the creator of musical pieces, symphonies, lieder and other creations does not lead to the loss of creation, but to its perpetuation.

The Holocaust was one of the greatest horrors experienced by humanity and thus remained in the collective memory. The policy of terror and extermination of the Jewish population in European countries promoted and carried out by Nazi Germany led to the murder of over 6 million people. Women and men, adults and children were systematically murdered by a dictatorial regime led by one of history’s greatest criminals – Adolf Hitler. Racial purity was the pretext for this immense massacre called the Holocaust.

In 2025, it will be 80 years since the end of the Holocaust.

Eight decades ago, the horrors against humanity committed by the Nazis were made public, forever changing the idea of ​​mass murder and extermination policy. The evidence was found and presented when the Allied armies entered the extermination camps, the Soviet ones in the camps of Majdanek (July 1944), Auschwitz (January 27, 1945), Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Stutthoff and Theresienstadt and the American ones in the camps of Buchenwald, Dachau, Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen and others.

A special page in the tragic history of the Jews and not only was written at the cost of the lives of over 6 million people. The horrors that occurred in the camps, the terrible death of the European Jewish and Roma population by starvation, physical exhaustion and gassing, were known to the whole world through radio reports and documentary films.

American General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Allied forces in Europe, visited the Ohrdruf camp, and his testimony remained in history.

“The things I have seen are beyond all imagination… I made the visit deliberately, in order to be able to provide direct evidence of these things, if ever, in the future, there should be a tendency to attribute these accusations to <propaganda>,” he wrote to General George C. Marshall in Washington.

Every trace of morality, of humanity, of respect for human life had disappeared in the Nazi camp system. The mass murder of the Jewish population was carried out using the most horrific means.

Ethnic cleansing was for years the official policy of Hitler and his regime, and the defeated and the allies complied.

Until the Holocaust, no one imagined that humans could murder their fellow humans in this way. The foundations of civilization and humanity were shaken upon learning of this collective tragedy, and especially the ways in which it was possible.

The persecution of Jews in most European countries.

Confinement in ghettos. Their transportation hundreds of kilometers in freight and animal wagons. Thirst and starvation. Death on the road. Death by exhaustion. Internment in labor camps and then in extermination camps. Gassing and cremation of corpses. … All this was part of an organized system. People for whom humanity, moral sense and any trace of decency had disappeared and who carried out all these extermination plans.

How was the Holocaust possible? The armies that liberated the camps, journalists and all of humanity asked themselves as soon as they learned of the unimaginable collective murder.

Through propaganda, censorship, the propagation of racial hatred, of ideas of a chosen race and inferior races: Jews and Roma. Planetary indifference, the indifference of neighbors, former colleagues and friends. Racism and indifference of the allied leaders of Nazi Germany. Lack of humanity – a characteristic of any war, taken to the point of defiance of the idea of ​​humanity.

All these unimaginable horrors happened during the years of World War II.

How did humanity resist the Nazi roller, a powerful, well-equipped army that conquered and killed?

With solidarity, with resistance, remembering the lost freedom and fighting for it.

The pogroms in Romania 1940 – 1941

The policy of ethnic cleansing also marked the war years in Romania, an ally of Nazi Germany. Discriminatory legislation appeared as early as 1939, becoming more acute in 1940. Romanian citizens of Jewish origin were gradually deprived of their civil rights, and were expelled from the central and local administration.

In June 1940, after the annexation of Bessarabia, pogroms took place in Dorohoi and Bucharest. During the legionary rebellion in January 1941, a pogrom against the Jews from the capital city was also carried out.

The Iași pogrom (June 27-30, 1941) remained in history as one of the most terrible moments. Accused of colluding with the Soviet enemy, on June 29, 1941, Jews from various neighborhoods of Iași were rounded up, robbed, beaten, and killed.

The survivors were loaded into freight cars that formed two “death trains.” The first one was packed with 5,000 Jews, of whom 1,011 survived, and of the 2,700 in the second train, only 700 survived.

We remember these atrocities committed against Romanian citizens of Jewish origin in Iași and honor their memory year after year.

Deportations of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria

Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were deported to Transnistria in September 1941, after this territory came under Romanian administration.

In Transnistria, camps were organized in the localities of Vertujeni, Secureni and Edineţ, where tens of thousands of Jews, the elderly, children, and women from Bessarabia and Bukovina arrived, with the men being used for forced labor.

Living conditions in Transnistria were inhumane, without sanitary housing, without heating, food, and medicine. Over 100,000 people were killed or died of hunger, cold, and disease in Transnistria.

The deportations were stopped in 1942.

At the end of World War II, the Jewish population in Romania numbered about 375,000 people, making it the largest in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Roma deportations in Transnistria

Little is still known about the deportations of Roma to Transnistria by the general public. There have been synthesis works, testimonies of those who survived, plays, novels, which tell the story of the abuses to which adults and children alike were subjected.

Seen primarily as a “social problem”, the nomadic Roma, but also the Roma population in general, came under the sights of the Antonescu regime after Romania entered World War II. The solution that the authorities of the time found to solve this “problem” was deportation to a remote area – Transnistria.

The deportations of Roma began in mid-1942, initially targeting only the nomadic Roma, who were gathered by the Gendarmerie in the county capitals and from there deported to Transnistria. The situation of those who arrived in Transnistria was extremely difficult, many died on the way, the transport conditions being inhumane. Once in Transnistria, they had no means of subsistence, food, water, shelter, and were forced to live in inhumane conditions.

Of the 25,000 deported Roma, 11,000 died during the deportation or during their time in Transnistria. The rest returned to the country at the end of 1944. 

The Holocaust of the Jews of Northern Transylvania under the occupation of Horthy Hungary

In August 1940, on the territory of North-Western Transylvania, occupied by Hungarian troops after the Vienna Arbitration (when Hitler decided and Ciano and Ribbentrop conveyed to Romania how much territory it should cede to Hungary), 164,052 Jews lived.

In the years 1940-1944, the entire Jewish population suffered ill-treatment according to racial legislation. They were imprisoned in ghettos, put to forced labor, forced to wear the yellow star on their clothes, beaten, tortured.

But the horrors began after the occupation of Hungary by German troops.

The first step was the ghettoization of Jews throughout Hungary, then the concentration in several large ghettos, after which came the deportation, without taking into account sex, age or health status.

The Hungarian army organized the Northern Transylvania Military Operational Zone. The Jewish ghettos in Northern Transylvania were in the cities of: Dej, Cluj, Baia Mare, Gherla, Oradea, Satu Mare, Şimleu Silvaniei, Bistrița, Sfântul Gheorghe, Târgu Mureș, Sighetul Marmației, Reghin. Starting with May 3, 1944, the Jewish population had been gathered in these cities.

From the ghettos, the Jewish population was loaded onto trains and sent to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Before boarding the trains, their valuables and identity documents were confiscated.

Boarded in cattle cars, in trains with dozens of cars, they traveled in inhuman conditions. Extreme brutality was manifested on the road to death.

In May-June 1944, 131,639 Jews left Northern Transylvania on 45 trains to the extermination camps. Over 90,000 were killed in the gas chambers.

Jewish artists and musicians from all over Europe died in the extermination camps.

Today they are remembered, and their works are performed.

Communism and political prisons

The communist terror in the Soviet Union preceded the Holocaust and was little known to the entire world. That is why communism and its egalitarian ideas attracted intellectuals and simple people, who did not understand that the “New Man” was the old one reeducated through terror and propaganda.

Romania gradually entered the Soviet sphere. At the Moscow meeting in October 1944, Stalin and Churchill discussed the fate of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Thus came the infamous “Percentage Agreement” by which Romania was placed 90% under Soviet hegemony.

The British Prime Minister wrote, on a piece of paper, the proposal that the spheres of influence be divided in percentages, as follows: ROMANIA: SOVIET UNION – 90%, GREAT BRITAIN – 10%.

In the fall of 1944, the Armistice signed in Moscow on September 12, 1944, transformed the Romanian state into one militarily occupied by the Soviets, Soviet control over Romania’s domestic and foreign policy, the payment of huge debts and the obligation to maintain the Soviet Army. The following steps led to the gradual Sovietization of Romania: the abolition of political parties and the arrest of their leaders; the forced abdication of King Michael I and the proclamation of the republic; the abolition of fundamental institutions and the emergence of new ones on the Soviet model; the purge of ministries, universities, the Romanian Academy, the central and local administration of professionals and their replacement with “working people”. In fact, the definitive overthrow of a world, for the creation of a new “Sovietized” or “Communized” world.

From August 23, 1944 to May 9, 1945, the Romanian Army fought for nine months alongside the United Nations. The war effort involved: 538,536 soldiers, of whom 169,000 were casualties in the war (dead, wounded and missing).

The Romanian soldiers fought their way across 1,700 km, crossed 12 rivers, liberated 3,831 localities, causing the enemy losses of 136,528 combatants (dead or captured). All these efforts were not recognized.

Between July 25 and October 15, 1946, the Paris Peace Conference was held, with the participation of the foreign ministers of the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain and France, in which peace treaties with Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary and Finland were discussed and drawn up. Romania was not recognized as a co-belligerent, participating for 9 months in the fight against Nazi Germany.

The draft peace treaty with Romania, adopted on October 10, provided, among other things, the annulment of the Vienna Dictate and the return of northern Transylvania, the reestablishment of the border with Bulgaria according to the Treaty of Craiova of September 7, 1940, the payment to Russia of 300,000,000 dollars as war indemnity, etc. At this time, the loss of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in favor of Moscow was also confirmed (according to the situation on June 28, 1940).

The next step in the communistization of Romania was the rigging of the November 1946 elections, which led to the political reconfiguration of a new – popular – communist regime.

Then, on February 10, 1947, the members of the Romanian delegation, Gheorghe Tătărăscu, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Ștefan Voitec and Dimitrie Dămăceanu, signed the peace treaty with the Allied and Associated Powers in Paris.

The treaty ratified the loss of the Quadrilateral, Bessarabia, the Herța region and northern Bukovina, but ceded northern Transylvania to Romania.

Romania was to pay Soviet Russia $300,000,000 in war reparations over the next 8 years.

The Allied armies were to withdraw within 90 days, with the exception of the Red Army (which justified its stationing in Romania by the need to maintain contact with Soviet troops in Austria).

The conclusion of the Paris Peace Treaties confirmed Romania’s entry into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.

In December 1947, under pressure from Moscow, King Michael was forced to abdicate (December 30, 1947).

The Kingdom of Romania becoming the Romanian People’s Republic.

The arrest and extermination in prisons of the Romanian political class, but also of the Romanian intellectual class, was part of the Soviet plan. The transformation of an independent and sovereign Romanian state, based on the Soviet model, into an occupied republic, into a Soviet “satellite”, was achieved in the years 1945-1948.

Romanian society was forcibly transformed through: nationalization, collectivization, the purge of the administration, schools, and the army. The freedoms that citizens enjoyed in previous eras gradually disappeared or were only disguised by the new regime.

Nationalization meant the confiscation of property: houses, land, factories, shops, personal belongings.

Collectivization meant the voluntary (extremely rare) or forced (through pressure, threats of imprisonment, even death) renunciation of small peasant property. Large properties had been nationalized previously.

The purge of public administration, ministries, universities, the army, the academy meant the removal of all those who had been part of the old administration, who had political orientations, who represented a voice, a personality, who criticized Soviet and local communist abuse.

The single party, the Romanian Communist Party, then the Romanian Workers’ Party – annihilated political freedoms and freedom of association; censorship and the closure of opposition publications annihilated freedom of expression; the ban on leaving the state territory suppressed freedom of movement.

Political prisons were organized on the Soviet model, being in fact places of extermination of the old political class, but also of the intelligentsia.

The Romanian people found themselves imprisoned in the “communist camp”, and democracy and individual freedoms were only mimicked by the new regime.

Hundreds of thousands of Romanian citizens suffered. Tens of thousands were imprisoned and died in communist prisons.

The fundamental transformation of Romanian society in the communist era was done gradually, on the Soviet model, annihilating the foundations of freedom and transforming them into pure propaganda.

The European communist regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Albania, the German Democratic Republic (the German state was divided into two different states, the German Democratic Republic – under Soviet domination, the Federal Republic of Germany – under American protectorate) claimed millions of victims.

The “Iron Curtain” gradually fell in the years 1945-1945.

The term was first used publicly by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a speech given in Fulton, Missouri, USA, on March 5, 1946.

“From Stettin, on the Baltic Sea, to Trieste, on the Adriatic Sea, an iron curtain descended across the European continent.”

For 50 years, the “Iron Curtain” divided Europe in two: Western Europe – free and Eastern Europe – communist and dominated by the Soviet Union.

Millions of victims had been made in the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1945. And by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, their number had increased.

The 20th century was marked by the two great totalitarianisms: communism and Nazism, by the Gulag and the Holocaust.

The stories of horrors committed by the two totalitarian regimes must be known to the young public who have difficulty understanding what the lack of fundamental freedoms they enjoy every day means: expression, information, movement, creation, property, and private initiative.

The Musica Prohibita project by the wonderful artists Diana Jipa and Ștefan Doniga brings to the public from all over the world the creations of contemporary artists who tell the story of the freedom to live and create through music. Some of them have been confronted with abuse and dictatorship, others with physical violence and assassination.

All of them have remained in history and in the history of music through their creations, results of work, talent and freedom.

Text by Dr. Cristina Păiusan