The parliamentary leader of Moldova’s Communist Party has asked for a criminal investigation into the publication and distribution of an antisemitic history book by Moldovan historian Paul Goma, which justifies the Holocaust, according to a November 14, 2003 report by the Jewish News Agency (AEN). In a November 13 speech to the parliament, Viktor Stepanyuk accused members of the nationalist Christian Democratic People’s Party of promoting the book—“The Red Week of June 28-July 3, 1940, or Bessarabia and the Jews”—which Mr. Stepanyuk and other critics say asserts that “Jews invented the Holocaust.” The book has been on sale in Moldova for six months, despite protests from the Jewish community.

Mr. Stepanyuk reminded the parliament that Stefan Sekeryan—a member of parliament from the Christian Democratic People’s Party—recently distributed several hundred copies of the book in the village of Koseliya Mare. Mr. Sekeryan was quoted in the AEN report defending his action as “just a gift to a school in his [Goma’s] home village” and warning that Mr. Stepanyuk wanted to censor literature and stifle free speech.

AEN also quoted historian Pyotr Shornikov on Mr. Goma’s book: “Goma is attempting to give a new appraisal of the Great Patriotic War [WWII] by following an original course of logic—‘If the Jews were enemies of Romania and its regime, then how can anybody criticize [Romania’s WWII dictator] Antonescu, who set lose a genocide against the entire Jewish population of Romania and Bessarabia?’”

It is not clear from the report how Mr. Goma’s book squares the contradictory logic of both justifying the Holocaust and denying that it ever took place.

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