On the evening of June 28, Romanian and German soldiers, members of the Romanian Special Intelligence Service, police, and masses of residents participated in an assault on the Jews of this town. Thousands were murdered in their homes and in the streets; additional thousands were arrested by patrols of Romanian and German soldiers and taken to police headquarters. In their homes, Christians posted crosses, icons, and inscriptions such as "Here live Christians, not Jewboys." The next day, "Black Sunday," Romanian soldiers shot thousands of Jews who had been interned in the police headquarters yard. The 4,330 survivors, and many Jews who had been rounded up from all parts of town, were packed into freight cars and vans; 2,650 of them died of suffocation or thirst, and others lost their sanity. On August 30, the 980 Jews who survived the torture were brought back to Iasi. The war-crimes tribunal court in which Romanian war criminals were prosecuted in 1948 ruled that more than 10,000 people had been murdered.
