Four days after the start of the Israel-Lebanon conflict (12 July 2006), we decided to visit the Holocaust Museum. The decision didn't have much to do with the conflict itself, but with our effort to see as much Washington as possible before leaving it. This was definitely the most guarded museum I've been to: while in other museums the guards search the bags manually with a stick, the entrance of this one looked like the passenger screening in airports (fortunately without the requirement to take off the shoes). They even asked Lida to drink from her water bottle. No photography was allowed inside, but I couldn't resist taking a picture of a panel describing the holocaust in Romania, where an estimated 750,000 Jews used to live before the WWII. I partially reproduce it here because I think Romanians have to be aware of and acknowledge what happened to the Jewish community in Romania, especially in Iaşi.

      In 1938, before its alliance with Nazi Germany, the fascist regime in Romania enacted anti-Jewish laws paralleling those of Germany. In 1940, Jews were expelled from professions and excluded from Romania's commercial life. A program similar to Germany's "Aryanization" provided for expropriation of Jewish property.
      In January 1941, anti-Jewish riots took place in Bucharest for three days. Houses and shops in the Jewish section of the city were destroyed, and 121 Jews were killed.
      On June 25 of that year, Romanian authorities staged a progrom in the city of Iaşi in which more than 8,000 Jews were killed. On June 29, 4,332 Iaşi Jews were put on two trains, which were then sealed. After days of travel without food or water, 2,650 had died. During the following months, Romanian army units and Nazi mobile killing squads ranged through the regions of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, conducting massacres of Jews.
      That summer, Germany gave Romania a border region of the Ukraine, Transnistria, which included the port city of Odessa. On October 23, in reprisal for acts of sabotage, Romanian army units burned 19,000 Odessa Jews alive.
      Most of the Jews remaining in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina after the summer and autumn massacres were deported to camps and ghettos in Transnistria. Many died on the way, and two-thirds perished in Transnistria from epidemics, famine, and shooting.
      HELD FOR RANSOM
      The Romanian government had agreed to the deportation of Romanian Jews living in Germany and France. But by the end of 1942, it was becoming evident that Germany would lose the war. Wanting to present a more positive image to the Allies, Ion Antonescu, the Romanian dictator, resisted Nazi pressure to deport most of the 292,000 Jews remaining in Romania to the Belzec extermination camp. The Nazi plan was never carried out.

First they came...