Ever since it emerged on the political scene, and especially since coming into power, the Romanian communist party controlled the way history is being written. All events in which it was involved or to which it was merely contemporary have been interpreted as it best suited that party's interests. The December Revolution has restored our history to us. We have now recovered the right to write our history as it really happened, observing only one rule: that of truthfulness.

The way in which the anniversary of the legionary rebellion and the anti-Jewish violence of January 1941 have been inflated is even more deplorable under these circumstances; today's rulers have issued statements on those events and have affixed labels at a time when the historians are far from having reached a verdict.

So far all we have heard is one side of the case. Let us listen to the other side. That is why we print here the opinion of a man who was a member of the legionary leadership, and who consequently has inside knowledge of those events. We believe that this can give rise to discussions that will lead to the discovery of truth.

For the last 50 years, a strange trial takes place. I call it strange because, while the plaintiffs can say anything they fancy, the defendants have been silent, for they are gagged.

In 1947 Petre Pandrea, distinguished penal code specialist, published a technical book in which he cites cases of "collective psychosis and dementia" from the times of the French Revolution and from the time of the so-called "legionary rebellion" of January 1941.

Two years later we shared the same political prison cell at Ocnele Mari; I was there because I had been a legionary; he was there because he had been "an imbecilic collaborator" (to use his own words). I had read his book and I asked him what sources he used when he wrote about Jews having been cut up and hang up in meat hooks at the Bucharest slaughterhouse. He answered: "A book with the title On the Brink of the Precipice, of which much later I learned that it had been written by Eugen Cristescu, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. I was to learn about its author (Pandrea continued) shortly before I was thrown in political prison, from the head doctor of the slaughterhouse himself."

Petre Pandrea had met that doctor in the house of Lucreþiu Pãtrãºcanu, and he learned from him at that time that toward the end of November 1940, the doctor had received in his office the visit of a team of "mysterious" policemen, who asked his permission to photograph some "aspects" of the inside of the slaughterhouse. The doctor was puzzled: what was there to photograph, and for what purpose? However, two months later he was to unravel that mystery when he saw the photographs in that infamous collection of lies, stage-settings, fabrications, and calumnies, that were to be used in order to tarnish the reputation of the legionaries forever at home and abroad. The story that Pandrea told about the slaughterhouse made the round of that political prison. Ten years later I met Pandrea again, this time among the political prisoners in Aiud. And I asked him to repeat the story of the Bucharest slaughterhouse, this time in the hearing of Prince Ghica and Petre Þutea.

However, suppose the story told in On the Brink of the Precipice is not discredited only by Pandrea's report of the facts. Even so, a few questions remain unanswered:

1. Why was not even one single legionary involved in that alleged horrendous crime of the Bucharest slaughterhouse? Note: not one was involved! And I refer here to legionaries known as such, not to rabble from the outskirts of the town who in those troubled times in Bucharest could put on a legionary's green shirt and in that disguise could enter private homes and steal and even murder. Antonescu was merciless in his dealings with the legionaries, who had to pay with their lives for the dethronement of mad King Carol II, which paved the way for Antonescu's own accession to power on September 6, 1940. The numbers of the young people imprisoned, some of them for imaginary acts, were in the thousands. Many were put to death. Yet, I repeat: none of them was accused of what happened at the slaughterhouse! Not one legionary was accused in 1941 of having perpetrated any crime against any Jew!

2. How could the legionaries find the time and what would have been their motive to start breaking into the stores and the houses of the Jews in those hectic days of the so-called rebellion, when their political future and even their lives were at stake?

3. Why was not that site of alleged martyrdom, the slaughterhouse, turned into a monument, a symbol of the holocaust, like Auschwitz, for instance, after August 23, 1944? Why have the allegations of a "pogrom in Bucharest" surfaced only now, fifty years later?

It is easy to answer the first question. The Jews were not a major threat for the legionaries, but the military coup d'etat of January 21, 1941 was, whose author was General Antonescu supported by a foreign power, namely Hitler's Germany. For it was only with Hitler's support that Antonescu acted, which is not praiseworthy in him. It is the most base abandonment of the quality of a citizen of Romania to seize power or to stay in power with foreign aid (I learned that from Corneliu Codreanu).

I leave it to people who are more competent than I am to answer the other questions raised here. Their answer must contain the minimum results of a penal inquiry: the names of the victims and of the perpetrators, as it is well known that nothing prevented that a detailed penal inquiry be conducted at that very time. On the contrary, the authorities were eager to publish the complete lists of the "crimes" of the legionaries. Did they do that? If not, why not?

His Eminence the chief Rabbi of Romania is periodically concerned because of certain signs of anti-Semitism in Romania. That would, indeed, have completed the dire picture. It is not enough, it seems, that we are criticized for not observing the rights of the national minorities.... To allay His Eminence's fears, let me remind him that there are not enough Jews in Romania now to justify the assertion of a real Jewish problem. I mean, His Eminence agitates himself needlessly, nay even unreasonably, on the ground of the Romanian anti-Semitism, since there is no reason for fears of that nature; unless, of course, there is a hidden reason we are not aware of.

SIMION GHINEA