Ransom of the Jews

Radu Ioanid was born and grew up in Bucharest. He studied at the University of Bucharest; at the University of Cluj, where he received a PhD; and at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris, where he received a doctorate in history. He was vice president of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania headed by Elie Wiesel from 2003 to 2004. He has been a Starkoff Fellow at the American Jewish Archives and director of the International Archival Program at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is now Romania’s ambassador to Israel. His books include The Holocaust in Romania and Le Pogrom de Jassy.

This extraordinary book blew the cover off the secret of a shameful deal that ended up, perversely, in freedom for Jews in Romania, including myself. In 1965, my mother and I were bought by the state of Israel from Ceausescu’s Romania for about $3,000 each. In other words, Israel bought our freedom from the misery of his dictatorship. When the ransom was paid, ethnic Romanian Jews were robbed by the state of all their possessions and allowed to leave the country. The details of this affair are carefully and deeply researched in Radu Ioanid’s splendidly written account of that spectacular Cold War drama. I learned from this book how my fate was decided early in the 1960s in one of the few countries under Soviet control and am both grateful and saddened for those who had to fight decades longer, in the USSR and elsewhere, for the right to travel freely. This book reads like a thriller, but it is journalism at its best.

• Acknowledgments Foreword by Elie Wiesel Preface to the Second Edition Introduction Lost and Found 1 “The Jews Are Our Misfortune” 2 Voting with Their Feet 3 The Zionist Enemy 4 Barter 5 An Uneasy Relationship 6 The Money Trail 7 The Washington Equation 8 “Why Did You Drain My Soul?” Primary Documents Appendix Notes Index About the Author