Maria Antonescu

In November, after the ghetto in Chişinău was sacked and its population deported to Transnistria, the authorities set aside confiscated property for the Patronage Council, for the Romanian Red Cross, for Romanian hospitals and the Romanian Army.

In August 1942, the Jewish entrepreneurs Max Auschnitt and Franz von Neumann donated 50 million Swiss francs to the same charity, a precautionary measure which may have played a part in the decision to indefinitely postpone transports from Romania to Nazi extermination camps. This event was notably recounted in a testimony by Ioan Mocsony-Stârcea, a member of King Michael I's entourage. The same month, Jewish Affairs Commissioner Radu Lecca, whose office implied regular extortion of the Jewish community, collected 1.2 billion lei from the ghettos through the government-controlled Central Jewish Office, of which 400 million were redirected toward Maria Antonescu's charities. The total sum passed by the Central Jewish Office toward the patronage Council exceeded 780 million lei. Lecca himself later stated: "The need for extra-budgetary money was continuously rising", arguing that, in addition to pressures from the part of Mihai Antonescu and German Ambassador Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, "Mrs. Antonescu asked for money for her patronage". This type of abuse also touched other communities. Thus, among the special provisions ordered by Governor Gheorghe Alexianu and affecting Ukrainian peasants in Transnistria, one set produce quotas for Maria Antonescu's project, as hospital meals for Romanian soldiers wounded on the Eastern Front. Read Less

She was kept under the provisions of "in secrecy" solitary confinement, and, according to the account of one of her fellow inmates, allowed to step out of her cell only at night, when she would collect and smoke the cigarette butts discarded by the guards.

After her release from prison, Maria Antonescu was assigned "obligatory domicile" on the Bărăgan Plain, within a wave of Bărăgan deportations. While in Borduşani, Ialomiţa County, she met and befriended fellow women detainees from the Blue Squadron. Another witness to her deportation was engineer Eugen Ionescu, who later escaped to Australia. Ionescu later retold his conversations with the Conducătors wife, specifically her complaint that Ion Antonescu had been refused trial by the International Military Tribunal.

The area was characterized by weather extremes. She complained of snowdrifts preventing her from leaving her home in winter, and spent much of her time knitting. According to one witness account, Maria Antonescu was also held in Giurgeni, and worked for the local state farm's cafeteria. Read Less