Читать книгу Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands - Группа авторов - Страница 20

The first Soviet rule (28 June 1940–5 July 1941) destroyed much of the traditional urban culture. Thousands of people were arrested and deported. Soviet threats and German propaganda prompted Germans to leave. The new border through Bukovina separated many families. Russian and Ukrainian became official languages and the Cyrillic alphabet was introduced. Streets were renamed and Romanian memorials replaced by Soviet ones. On 27 June 1941 the Soviet authorities celebrated the first anniversary of “The liberation of Bessarabia and North Bukovina from the yoke of the Romanian boyars.”46

In the first days of Romanian-German power in July 1941 the Temple was set on fire and thousands of prominent Jewish men were murdered. On 11 October, a ghetto was sealed off in the “lower” town. Fifty thousand persons were located in an area that had previously housed five thousand inhabitants.

Already in November, 28,000 Jews were deported to Transnistria.47 Before being dismissed from his position in spring 1942, the city mayor Traian Popovici, maintaining some “Czernowitz spirit,” managed to save from deportation 19,000 Jews, including the poet Paul Celan, on the grounds that they were needed in the city. Thereafter, persecutions resumed and in June 1942, 5,000 Jews, including Paul Celan’s parents, were deported to Transnistria, where the majority perished.48

After the Soviet army recaptured Cernăuţi on 29 March 1944, the Sovietization process resumed. Poles were transferred to Poland and around 30,000 Romanians (Braun 2005: 77) escaped to Romania within its new borders (cf. Brenner 2010: 112–13). From 75–80% of the population had vanished, but the built environment was relatively unscathed. Most of the conductive layers of culture, science, and business were gone, as was the special spirit of the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic city. German and Romanian were no longer viable languages. The surviving, mostly German-speaking Jews left, when possible, for Romania and later Palestine or even Germany or Austria. In the first postwar years, around 50,000 Ukrainians (Braun 2005: 78) were deported eastwards, reducing even further the number of persons with local roots. By 1959, as a result of immigration from other parts of the Soviet Union, Chernivtsi already had 150,000 inhabitants. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, 20% of them were Jewish, mostly without any roots in Bukovina.49 By 1989, in Soviet Bukovina, 66.5% were Ukrainians, 17.8% Russians, 7.5% Romanians/Moldovans, and 6.1% Jews (Hausleitner 2005: 78).