User:Anonimu/Bernat Andrei

Andrei Bernat (born Andor Bernát, September 15, 1908 - March 17, 1944) was a Romanian communist militant and leader of the youth wing of the Communist Party of Romania (PCR). Part of the Jews from Romania-proper deported to occupied Transnistria by the Nazi-aligned Ion Antonescu dictatorship, he was assassinated by retreating Nazi troops during the Râbnița massacre.

Bernat was born in Kerelőszentpál (nowadays Sânpaul, Mureș County) to a working class family. Admitted to the Târgu Mureș high school through the efforts of his parents, the lack of material means prevented him from pursuing his studies after his second year. To earn his keep, Bernat began to work as an apprentice in a carpentry workshop,in the process becoming involved in the workers' movement. His organizational and rhetoric skills were appreciated by the local communist cell and in 1927 he was admitted into the clandestine Union of Communist Youth (UTC). His active role in the December 1930 apprentices' protest that followed the shutdown of the local workers' hostel led to his arrest and a three months prison sentence.

After serving his sentence Bernat rejoined the communist movement; his activism, while leading to further arrests and convictions, also helped him raise through the ranks of the communist organisation. Consequently, in 1935 he was selected as secretary of the Central Committee of the UTC, as well as the representative of the UTC in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. His leadership was however short-lived, as he was apprehended the same year by the Siguranţa, Romania's secret police. Tried along other leading figures of the communist youth movement, Bernat was ultimately sentenced to 9 years and 10 months in prison. He was held in several prisons across Romania until 1942, when he was transferred, along several communists of Jewish background, to the Vapniarka concentration camp, in Romanian-occupied Ukraine. The deportation was part of the larger scale Romanian participation in the Holocaust, which resulted in up to 300,000 deaths among the Jewish population of Bessarabia, the Transnistria Governorate and, to a lesser degree, of Romania proper.

In Vapniarka, Bernat emerged as a leader among the interned, organizing political and cultural activities. Fearing the organization of the deportees would hinder the administration of the camp, the Romanian occupation forces decided in October 1943 to transfer several political prisoners, including Bernat, to the Rîbnița prison. The success of the Soviet spring offensive of 1944 led to a general retreat of the Axis forces on the Ukrainian front. As the Romanian administration fled, a group of the Kalmykian Voluntary Cavalry Corps, tasked by the German command with cleansing the back of the front of potentially subversive elements, took over the prison. Bernat dismissed attempts to escape from the prison in the confusion, believing a Soviet liberation of the area to be imminent, and was to die, along other 51 Romanian political prisoners and over 300 imprisoned Soviet partisans, in the massacre perpetrated by the Kalmykian auxiliaries.