The Ransom of the Jews

This extraordinary book blew the cover off the secret of a shameful deal that ended up, perversely, in freedom for Jews in Romania, including myself. In 1965, my mother and I were bought by the state of Israel from Ceausescu’s Romania for about $3,000 each. In other words, Israel bought our freedom from the misery of his dictatorship. When the ransom was paid, ethnic Romanian Jews were robbed by the state of all their possessions and allowed to leave the country. The details of this affair are carefully and deeply researched in Radu Ioanid’s splendidly written account of that spectacular Cold War drama. I learned from this book how my fate was decided early in the 1960s in one of the few countries under Soviet control and am both grateful and saddened for those who had to fight decades longer, in the USSR and elsewhere, for the right to travel freely. This book reads like a thriller, but it is journalism at its best. -- Andrei Codrescu, author of The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution
The suffering of the Jewish people throughout history is no secret to anyone. From persecution and exile to progroms, from forced conversion to genocide, the Jews have experienced it all. Radu Ioanid takes us on a journey into the most unbelievable: The selling of the Jews by the communists in Romania. Pigs, dogs, sheep, money—everything Romania needed—was offered in order to get the Jews to Israel. Ioanid has excavated one of the most incredible stories of the twentieth century from the archives of the Securitate: that after the Holocaust, the worst atrocity humanity had seen, there were people who were willing to buy and sell entire families with a clear price tag on their heads. Only a master of research could accomplish what Radu Ioanid did with this incredible story. -- Attila Somfalvi, journalist and senior political commentator