Studii și Materiale de Istorie Contemporană, vol. XXIV, 2025

Claudia-Florentina DOBRE,  Narațiuni dominante și reprezentări feminine despre cel de-Al Doilea Război Mondial și Holocaust în România comunistă și post-comunistă  [Official Narratives and Women’s Representations about World War II and the Holocaust in Communist and Post-communist Romania] [SMIC, XXIV, 2025, pp. 109-131] 

https://www.doi.org/10.62616/SMIC.2025.24.07

The full text is available on CEEOL/ Textul integral al studiului poate fi accesat prin CEEOL: https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1419321 

The memorialisation of World War II in Romania during the communist era was heavily influenced by the political and ideological agendas of the ruling communist party. Initially, the Soviet Union was celebrated as a liberator, but this narrative shifted after 1958, when the official portrayal of the Soviets transitioned to that of mere „friends” who assisted the Romanian army in reclaiming territories occupied by Hungarian authorities and Nazi forces. After 1960s, a glorification of the Romanian military, a near rehabilitation of Ion Antonescu and his generals, and a significant downplaying of Holocaust victim numbers occured in the official narratives. After the fall of communism, the official rehabilitation of Ion Antonescu was enshrined by the Parliament in 1991, the denial and trivialization of the Holocaust surged in public discourse, while the monumental public space was reconfigured through the relocation of Soviet army monuments from central locations to the peripheries. Another notable shift occurred in the 2000s, when Romania acknowledged its role in the Holocaust against Jews and Roma, culminating in the prohibition of fascist figures, and symbols.

In contrast to official discourse, the recollections of ordinary individuals mark a clear distance from both communist and post-communist master narratives. Drawing on oral history research, I argue that women who experienced the war as children or adolescents articulate memories that stand in tension with the abstracted and totalizing representations of the Second World War embedded in official memory. Their recollections are rooted in everyday experience and therefore resist incorporation into institutionalized mnemonic frameworks. The war itself is not recalled through a political lens and is not remembered as a rupture in individual life stories; instead, women narrators locate the decisive biographical break in the subsequent installation of communist power. From their perspective, official narratives of the Second World War fail to converge with their lived experiences of the war. The exclusion of direct witness testimony from cultural memory thus produces a structural divergence between communicative memory and dominant public narratives.

Keywords: Official Memory; Gendered memory; Monuments; Textbooks; Holocaust; Negationism