Popovici Traian

Popovici, Traian Dr. Traian Popovici was a well-known attorney from Cernăuţi / Chernivtsi (today Ukraine; Czernowitz in German), who also served as mayor until 1942. At the beginning he was not an opponent of Romania's ruler, Antonescu, and, as he wrote in his post-war memoir: "Like many others in this country, I believed in the myth of the strong man, of the honest, energetic, and well-meaning leader who could save a damaged country.". When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviets evacuated Cernăuţi, and early in July 1941 the city was occupied by German units and the Romanian army, which carried out a pogrom against the Jews and set fire to the great synagogue. Despite the antisemitic atmosphere that prevailed, the mayor, Dr. Popovici, treated the Jews as he did all the other citizens. He received every Jew who turned to him, helped the needy Jews and issued instructions to pay Jewish pensioners their full pensions. Bucovina, the official government newspaper, printed wicked, cynical articles about Popovici, and the Jews were called “Traian’s people.” On September 29, 1941, the governor of Bukovina, General Corneliu Calotescu, announced his plan to establish a ghetto for the Jews. Popovici was the only one at the meeting of the Bukovina administration who opposed the idea. On October 10, the governor notified Popovici that he had received an order to deport the Jews of Cernăuţi to Transnistria. This time too, Dr. Popovici displayed his courage, and without hesitating, he loudly expressed his objection to the deportation. On October 12, when Popovici realized that his protest was in vain, he tried to save whatever could be saved. He spoke about the rights of the Jews and their contribution to the culture and the development of industry and commerce in Cernăuţi and Bukovina, and demanded that changes be made in the deportation orders, and exceptions made for members of the free professions, such as physicians, engineers, lawyers, judges, and for pensioners, the disabled and discharged officers. The governor agreed and authorized Popovici to submit a list of 100-200 people, but this did not satisfy Popovici, and together with some others he applied pressure on Antonescu. On October 15, Antonescu agreed, in a phone conversation with the governor, to remove from the list of the deportees about 20,000 Jews, who met the criteria proposed by Dr. Popovici. Thanks to him, about 19,000 Jews remained in the city and were saved. Dr. Popovici issued thousands of permits, known as Popovici permits (Autorizaţiile Popovici), to entire Jewish families, and hid in his own home Jews who were in danger of being deported or who had managed to escape the camps, taking a great risk by doing so. In February 1942, General Calotescu demanded that the deportation of Jews be renewed. The deportations began on June 4, after Calotescu had fired the mayor, Dr. Popovici. Before his death in 1946, Popovici wrote a detailed testimony about his attempts to halt the deportation of the Jews of Cernăuţi. In his post-war memoir, Confession of Conscience, published in 1946, Popovici wrote: "As far as I am concerned, what gave me strength to oppose the current, be master of my own will and oppose the powers that be, finally to be a true human being, was the message of the families of priests that consitute my ancestry, a message about what it meast to love mankind. what gave me strength was the education I received in high school in Suceava, where I received the light of classical literature, where my teachers fashioned my spirit with the values of humnanity, which tiressly enlightens man and differentiates him from the brutes." On January 2, 1969, Yad Vashem recognized Traian Popovici as Righteous Among the Nations.