Iaşi

Iaşi is the place invoked by a deportee as the site of a pogrom in which thousands of Jews were put onto a train and carried through a journey of deliberate attrition. The city’s significance in this passage lies not in a visit but in a warning transmitted between passengers: its remembered violence changes how the father of the twins understands every pause in the train carrying him and his family. Through the account, Iaşi becomes both a specific place associated with mass death and a fearful precedent that shadows the present journey.

A Place Recalled in Transit

The reference to Iaşi arises during a conversation among people confined in a deportation train. A fellow traveler asks the father of the twins whether he is Romanian. He says that he is; the other man replies that he too used to be Romanian, but is now a stateless former Romanian. The wagon holds many people in the same condition, picked up in Paris or elsewhere in France. Iaşi enters their conversation as a place one of them knows, but the exchange also makes the city a point of connection between people whose nationality and security have been stripped away.

The father initially resists the comparison. When told that there was a pogrom at Iaşi, he answers that war is raging there as it is where they are, and that there is no need for pogroms as well. His response treats the violence of war as already sufficient to explain what can happen; the other passenger insists on naming a distinct, organized atrocity. The disagreement matters because the father does not yet understand the train’s movement as evidence of a deliberate method. The other traveler’s account forces that possibility into view.

The Journey Described

The traveler says that thousands of Jews were loaded onto a train at Iaşi, which was set rolling for an extended journey. Passengers died one by one from heatstroke, thirst, and hunger. At every station where the train stopped, corpses were unloaded, and the train continued with those still alive. Sometimes it went back in the direction from which it had come. According to the account, the train was not taking its passengers toward a destination: stopping at stations and removing the dead was the journey’s sole purpose.

That detail gives the train a terrible inversion of its ordinary function. Movement offers no promise of arrival or escape; even reversal does not return the passengers to safety. The stops do not mark progress but provide occasions to take bodies from the wagon before the survivors are carried onward. Iaşi is thus recalled through a pattern of transport in which the railway serves not to deliver people somewhere, but to prolong their exposure to conditions that kill them. The account’s sequence—rolling, stopping, unloading, moving again—makes the violence cumulative, while its lack of a destination makes the journey itself the instrument of destruction.

The Present Journey Under Its Shadow

The father answers the comparison by pointing to the apparent differences: the train he is on is moving rather than stopping, and the weather inside its situation is cold rather than hot. The traveler’s reply is that it is just like Iaşi. The exchange does not establish that the two journeys are identical; instead, it sets the father’s immediate observations against a passenger’s knowledge of what a train can be made to do. The comparison becomes frightening precisely because the details do not match. Different weather and a train still moving cannot reassure him once he has heard that a journey may be intended to continue until its passengers die.

After that conversation, each halt in a siding carries a new possibility. The father worries that the train might turn back, stop at a station, and leave the dying, children, and old men on the platform. The remembered route at Iaşi has altered his reading of the present: an interruption in movement is no longer merely a delay but a sign he fears may precede the removal of the vulnerable. His repeated helpless question about what he can do is sharpened by this knowledge. He has a duty to protect his children, but the account has shown him a form of violence in which even the train’s direction offers no reliable clue to what will happen.

Narrative Significance

Iaşi functions as a place-name that carries a story from one group of deportees to another. The father does not witness the pogrom or the earlier train journey; he receives the account from a fellow passenger, and the narrative shows its effect through his subsequent fear at every stop. This distinction keeps the city both concrete and mediated: it is named as the site of a particular atrocity, while its relevance to the father arises from what he has been told and from the resemblance he can no longer dismiss.

The episode also turns historical memory into an immediate pressure on perception. Before the conversation, the father sees the train’s cold interior and forward movement as reasons to reject the comparison. Afterwards, a siding can summon the possibility of corpses being unloaded and survivors being carried on. Iaşi therefore shapes the present scene without being physically reached: its remembered train supplies the pattern through which the father imagines the danger facing his family. The city’s narrative force rests on this passage between places, as a report of past violence becomes a warning that changes how a father watches the journey still unfolding around him.