Leonard Zăicescu, the last survivor in Romania of the Pogrom in Iași and of the death trains in 1941, ceased life on Friday, May 23, at the age of 98.
Leonard Zăicescu Photo: Israel Embassy in Romania/Facebook
“We say goodbye to Leonard Zăicescu, the last survivor in Romania of the Pogrom in Iași and the trains of death (June-July 1941)”, The Embassy of Israel in Romania said.
Leonard Zăicescu, born on March 27, 1927, tirelessly advocated to keep the Holocaust memory. He won at the European Court of Human Rights an open trial against a decision by which justice in Romania paid, in the 1990s, two war criminals.
After the war, Zăicescu became a journalist and wrote about the horrors he lived during the pogrom in the book “With the express train to death”. His book is one of the most important testimonies about the horrors experienced by the Romanian Jews during World War II.
The funeral will take place on Tuesday, May 27, at 11:00, in the Jewish Cemetery in Bucharest, with military honors.
Between 13,266 and 14,850 Jews were killed in the Pogrom in Iași, held between June 28 and July 5, 1941, according to the final report of the International Commission for Holocaust “Elie Wiesel”.
