Tag #127689 - Interview #89861 (Dan Mizrahy)

Of course, we knew something had changed around us from the radio, from the press, and from what we heard from others. We had felt it, at least on the moral level, once we had been expelled from schools. It was a state of tension that kept growing, like a circle that was gradually tightening around us in a threatening manner. It was in that atmosphere that on 21st January 1941, towards noon, I heard the first gun shots in my life. The phones were still working. They were later confiscated from the Jews, just like the radio sets. This is how we found out from my mother’s younger sister that the radio station in Bod, captured by the rebels, had announced that a dissident division of the army, led by General Dragalina, was heading for Bucharest. At the same time, the Bucharest radio station was announcing the decisions of General Antonescu [8], who was dissociating himself from the Legionary movement, as well as the actions taken in order to annihilate this movement. I remember the exact words: ‘From now on, no other uniform than the military and the police.’ But in those very moments, the police, which had been divided in two until that day – the regular police and the Legionary police – was fighting fiercely, both at the prefecture, and at the barracks on Geneva Alley, where the policemen, encircled by the Legionaries, were defending themselves. At the same time, the army was trying to conquer the Legionary headquarters on Roma Street. Our house lay at only a few hundred meters from the above-mentioned locations, in a straight line. We could hear the shots coming from there. We kept getting news on the phone about the horrors that took place in the Jewish houses of the Vacaresti and Dudesti quarters. On the evening of 21st January 1941, one of my father’s sisters, who lived on Banu Maracine Street, called us to tell us that the Spanish temple ‘Cahal Grande’ was in flames. We soon found out that, at the beginning of the Legionary rebellion, they had emptied many canisters of gas inside and outside the temple, and had set it on fire. It burnt to the ground. The ruins survived for many years, a testimony of the tragedy that occurred that night.