Victor Lupu: deported from Budeni-Dolhasca to Transnistria, 1942

More than half of the 36,000 Roma — the elderly and children among them — who were deported to Transnistria never came back. They died near the Bug, far from home, of hunger and disease. One night the militia gathered them without warning and forced them into cattle wagons without telling them where they were being taken. They were told only that they would be given land. It was never given.

This is the account of Victor Lupu, an elderly man from Budeni-Dolhasca, of the deportation ordered under Marshal Antonescu.

On 15 August 1942 gendarmes swept into the village. Acting on accusations made by the local council against certain residents, they gave everyone three hours to pack, gather their families and children, and report to the village centre, leaving behind their homes, their land and their animals. People were terrified and refused to go; the sick and the weak were dragged out of their houses. They were taken to Dolhasca station, where they found other Roma from Gulia who had been treated the same way.

At the station, groups of thirty to forty families were loaded into cattle wagons. For three days and nights they were held without food, in filthy conditions. Several people suffocated or died of the conditions; a boy who had been badly beaten died there at Dolhasca. One family, the Bejaus, had a daughter of twenty-three; because she resisted the gendarmes, they beat her to death and threw her body into a ditch. A child of six was also found dead and thrown from the wagon.

They were promised food at Pașcani. Instead their wagons were joined to others carrying Roma families from across the country, making a convoy of thirty. At Pașcani they were given not even water. Children died of hunger, the elderly suffered, and they were forbidden to buy anything; what little money they had was confiscated. More wagons were added as the train moved towards Iași and the border.

At the Ungheni border they were held two days. From Ungheni onwards the guards struck the wagons at random, hoping to kill someone. Victor Lupu recalls ten to twenty people dying every night. When inspectors came to check the wagons, the dead were thrown out.

By Tighina they were starving. His child, a year and a half old, cried from hunger until there were no tears left. Lupu found a small piece of beet on the ground, cleaned it and tried to feed it to him; the boy died with the beet still in his hand. His wife did not outlive the child by long. They were not allowed to bury either of them. From Tighina they were driven on, under beatings, to Tiraspol. Of the 2,800 people who began that stretch, 1,700 arrived.

At Kovaleovka typhus broke out. Dead children were left behind as their parents wept over them. Two deep pits were dug with a furnace beneath, and the bodies were burned. Ten to twenty people died each night. Three carts went from house to house each day collecting the dead. Lupu describes finding bodies stripped bare inside the houses and stacking them one on top of another in the carts. After ten or fifteen had been tipped into the pit they would gather thorns to cover them, and the bodies were set alight. They would make the sign of the cross and leave.

After six or seven months they were moved on to Varusina. A group arriving from Moscow, priests among them, who had heard that Roma bodies were being burned, ordered the practice stopped and two bodies buried together in each grave instead. When Lupu went to check the houses along the convoy's path, he found the dead being eaten by the living. In one house someone had set fire to a quilted jacket and roasted the flesh of the person who had died beside them. Those who did this often killed themselves afterwards.

Mykolaiv-Vavorovka was the last stop. People were dying of starvation everywhere. His wife's aunt was there, and her six-year-old child had just died. Lupu carried the child's body thirty kilometres on his back, because they were not permitted to bury him and not permitted to stop.

On 20 August 1944 the front collapsed and someone came to say they were free. They walked to Odessa. From there, with eight others, they travelled inside an empty petrol tanker and nearly suffocated. He recalls longing to reach Romania as though it would be paradise. It was not paradise, he says, but it was home.

He reached Dolhasca by train. The weeds had grown as tall as the houses; there were mounds of earth, ditches, destruction. He learned that his father and his four brothers had all died during the war. From that point he had no family left. He was alone.