Romania

Romania recently dedicated a memorial in memory of the 300,000 Jews and Gypsies killed in the country during the Holocaust. Since WW II, Romanian governments, including the Communist Pary, have denied or ignored the fact that a holocaust had occurred in Romania. President Basescu said at the ceremony that it was the "nation's duty to recognize the genocide."

Romania was also in the news recently for being the birthplace of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. German novelist Herta Muller, who received death threats in her native Romania after she refused to become an informant for the secret police during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime, had a father in the Waffen SS, the crack combat troops of the Nazi Party.

The Library has some recent novels about Romania and a diary written during the holocaust in Romania.

Blood of Victory by Alan Furst
Espionage in war-torn Romania and France.

Journal, 1935-1944
Diary of a Romanian Jew

Little Fingers by Filip Florian
A young archeologist investigates a mass grave filled with skeletal remains that is discovered in a small Romanian town.

Train to Trieste: a Novel by Dominica Radulescu
Like the heroine of her debut novel, Dominica Radulescu escaped from Romania in the early 1980s to come to the US.

Zoli by Colum McCann
Beautifully written story chronicles the imperiled world of the Slovakian Roma from World War II through the establishment of the Communist bloc.