While the story of Nazi-established ghettos during World War II in Poland and elsewhere has largely been researched and told, this is the first time attention is directed to the short-lived (July 1941–March 1942) saga of the Chișinău (Kishinev) Ghetto. The ghetto was set up immediately upon the entrance of the Nazi-allied Romanian troops into the town and liquidated but for a few exceptions in late October 1941, when the last major deportation of ghetto survivors to Transnistria ended.

In his preface, the author traces the history of the first attempts by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to obtain from the post-communist Romanian authorities documentation on the Holocaust in Romania. Shapiro shows how the initial reaction, particularly from the National Archive and its then-director, Ion Munteanu, an admirer of war-time leader Ion Antonescu and the first acting president of the Ion Antonescu Foundation (89), was to both deny access and display a continuation of communist-authorities' efforts of Holocaust denial.

That Munteanu and his like failed was due to changing international circumstances, all of which are briefly sketched by Paul Shapiro, and the proof of the failure is displayed in the impressive selection of documents presented (141–256), some of which are for the first time made available in English. Shapiro's own 90-page long study, helped by the chronology, sets the events in the book within eastern Europe's specific forms of antisemitism, which adds to, rather than subtracts from, the Nazi genocidal orgy. Of particular relevance are the orders issued by Marshal Ion Antonescu (even before the actual invasion of Soviet territory) for the “cleansing of terrain,” which was the Romanian equivalent of the Nazi Sonderbehandlung. Hand in hand with the “cleansing of terrain” went the order by Transnistria governor Gheorghe Alexianu to apply the so-called “Alexianu” solution to those who (for whatever reason) could not continue on the enforced marches toward the Transnistria deportation zone (between the Dniester and Bug Rivers), which is to say have them shot on the spot and buried (58).

The Chișinău Ghetto was thus from the start envisaged only as a temporary solution. It was preceded by atrocities committed by the Romanian army and police on their march toward Chișinău and the “cleansing of terrain” continued during the ghetto's brief existence. This included mass executions such as the massacres perpetrated at Visterniceni (August 1, 1941, when 411 of some 250 men and 200 women selected “for labor” where shot; and at Ghidighici (August 7, 1941, when the authorities removed from the ghetto 500 men and 25 women, executing the majority of them).

Most of the deaths that occurred before the last deportation, however, were due to the abominable sanitary conditions in an overcrowded environment, lack of medication, and starvation. On top of this, corruption was rampant among those in charge of the ghetto, which meant that Jews were robbed of goods they had managed to salvage. Circumstances arguably reached their climax on the eve of the deportation, when Jews were required to offer enormous bribes just to have deportation postponed. The Chișinău garrison commander, Eugen Dumitrescu, was the head of the illegal operation. After a commission of inquiry set up by Antonescu in December 1941 revealed his and others' blatant enrichment schemes, he committed suicide (74). Of course, what Romania's wartime Conducător objected to was not the plundering of the victims, which legislation passed under his rule legitimized as “Romanization” of property, but the fact that instead of reaching the coffers of the state, the plundered goods made it into the pockets of those in charge of the plunder. Shapiro shows how up to the last minute, Jews were forced to exchange their lei at disadvantageous rates into rubles (which they similarly had to exchange into lei upon the entrance of Romanian troops into Bessarabia) or into the German occupation currency called Kassenschein, valid beyond the Bug River (78–79).

The Chișinău ghetto had included, at different stages, between 10,000 and 11,000 Jews. Even the few who remained alive with the authorities' permission after the ghetto's liquidation began to be hunted again in March 1942. Very few managed to escape. By December 1942, over 55,000 Bessarabian Jews had been deported to Transnistria, of which 12,240 were still alive. “Long before murder ceased to be the principal goal of Romanian policy toward Bessarabian Jews” (1943), “most of the Jews of Chișinău were dead” (88).