In this podcast episode, we present the story of two Romanian boys, Sorel and Marcu Rozen, and a simple postcard. The Rozen family, made up of a grandmother, parents and two children, were deported from Dorohoi (a town in Northern Romania) in October 1941 to the Ghetto of Shargorod in Transnistria (now a Russian occupied part of Moldavia). Marcu and Sorel were 11 and 5 years old.
The living conditions in the Shargorod Ghetto were dire and starvation and diseases rampant. Within months after arrival, the grandmother and parents died of typhoid, the boys were left alone. Desperate for help, Marcu wrote a postcard to his uncle in Bucharest, with the message to “do everything in your power to take us out”.
This postcard is now part of the collection of The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, in Bucharest.
Featured guest: Ana Bărbulescu, Senior Researcher and Head of the Research Department at the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania.
Ana will tell the story of Marcu Rozen and the postcard to his uncle.
Interview of Marcu Rozen is from the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. For more information: http://sfi.usc.edu/
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions
Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).