Lists of Romanian Jews from Bucovina and Bessarabia
Deported to Transnistria

Background

Of the more than 160,000 Romanian Jews deported to Transnistria, there are approximately 2,400 people whose names appear in a volume compiled by the Senior Archivist and Historian at Yad Vashem, Dr. Jean Ancel (1940-2008). Dr. Ancel compiled a 12-volume work entitled Documents Concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry During the Holocaust. Volume V deals with the fate of Jews from Bucovina and Bessarabia (see: http://czernowitzbook.blogspot.de/2017/02/documents-concerning-fate-of-romanian.html.

Edgar Hauster made the documents in Volume V available over the internet and linked them to English descriptions of the individual files. The original documents are mostly in Romanian, but German and French also occur. Many of the documents do not provide any names of individual Jews but a few contain lists of people.

Source Documents

The lists of documents in Volume V, as described by Hauster, are described below; the description of file 245 was augmented with additional information by the transcriber of the lists for JewishGen. See http://hauster.de/data/Ancel/17020501Ancel.pdf for a description of all files in Volume 5. The names from these lists are searchable in the JewishGen Holocaust Database.

* Note: file refers to the filename given by Hauster to the document that contains the indicated contents; in some cases, Hauster’s file contains several documents, e.g., file 245 described above contains Ancel’s documents 245 through 253.

Additional Transcriber’s Observations and Comments

An additional 16 names of Jews in Romania appear in the documents. These names have been included in the database despite the fact that there is no indication the 16 people were deported.

If you think you may have found a relative in a list, it is suggested you download the original document. Go to http://hauster.de/data/Ancel/17020501Ancel.pdf, find the document of interest, and click to download. Study it to see if there are additional fields of information that were not indexed. Also, study it for context. For example, what is the date of the document? What kind of list is it? One of the lists is of people deported for disobeying the forced labor law. Others are lists of people in Transnistria being considered for repatriation to Romania. In this way, you might get some glimpses into what happened to your relative.

There are several handwritten lists in Ancel 245 that are difficult to read. Only some of these lists have been entered into the database. Researchers may wish to examine the original documents to determine if there is information about family members.

Database

This database consists of 2,420 Romanians from Bucovina and Bessarabia that were deported to Transnistria.

The fields for this database are as follows:

• PDF page number
• File number
• Surname (See Note A below)
• Given name (See Note A below)
• Age
• Gender
• Profession (See Note B below)
• Family status (See Note C below)
• Town
• Current location
• Status (See Note D below)
• Father’s Name
• Mother’s Name
• Orphan of (See Note E below)
• Location where parents died (See Note E below)
• Comments

Note A (Names)

Names are written in a variety of languages, e.g., you can find Meir and Meer and Meier. All accents in the names were eliminated in this compiled database except for certain letters in Hungarian names where the alphabetization of the name depends on the presence or absence of an accent (for example, Honig and Hönig are separate names because o is a different letter than ö). Mostly, the information given in the lists is name, town, sometimes age and sometimes profession. Only in some lists is the head of family versus member of family specified. In a few lists, the names of orphans’ parents, the names and addresses of orphans’ relatives, whether the person has been vaccinated, and additional information is provided. Thus, for many of the names you may not be able to identify previously unknown relatives with certainty because of lack of detail, but you may get some information about what happened to your known relatives and some hints about who else may have been in the family.

Occasionally two given names are separated by "zis" or "zisa". In Romanian, zis and zisa mean "said". Hence, Samuel zis Shmuel would be Samuel known as (said to be) Shmuel. (Another translation of zis is "nickname".)

Note B (Profession)

In some cases, profession is given in Romanian. A list of professions and their English equivalents is given in the table below.

Note C (Family status)

This is the role of the person in the family. The field called family status has two possible entries: head of household (cap familie) or member of family (membru, or membra for a female). The original document is not consistent in using the feminine form for females - often the generic membru was used for males and females alike.

Note D (Status)

In most cases, the entry is "missing" but in a few cases it is "alive in Berezovca" (in Transnistria) or "alive in Vladislavca" (in Transnistria).

Note E (Orphan of)

Ancel file 245 contains this field in the list. Possible entries are mother, father, double. An entry of "orphan of mother" means the mother is deceased, "orphan of double" means both parents are deceased. The next column in this list was chopped off on the right when the document was scanned so that the entries are not complete. However, it is clear that the column gives the place(s) of death of the parent(s). In some cases, one can see "Sarg" or "Sargo" which presumably means Sargorod, the town where the people in the list were held. In another list in Ancel 245 there is a field that is titled "showing if both (parents) are dead". In all cases, this field contains "dead". I entered "both parents are dead".

Acknowledgments

As described in the "Background" section of this Introduction, the material for this database comes from Dr. Jean Ancel’s 12-volume work entitled Documents Concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry During the  Holocaust. Edgar Hauster made Ancel’s work available and without his efforts this addition to the JewishGen Holocaust database would not have happened. The database was created by John M. Hoenig, a Professor of Marine Science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William & Mary.

We’d also like to thank Mike Kalt, HTML Volunteer, for placing this description online, and to Nolan Altman, Director of Special Projects and Coordinator of the Holocaust Database, for his continued devotion and dedication to JewishGen’s important work.

Nolan Altman
Coordinator-Holocaust Database
November, 2021

Searching the Database

This database is searchable via JewishGen's Holocaust Database, the JewishGen Romania Database, and the JewishGen Unified Database.