Were These Holocaust Survivors Forced Into a Ghetto?

What happened in [the Romanian city of Iasi] has been described as “the best-known event in the history of the Romanian Holocaust," but what exactly [Frances] Flescher went through is still being debated. Specifically, was her experience in Iasi after the pogrom — in which her and her family's movements were curtailed by regulations and threats, but not by walls — mean that she lived in a ghetto? Though it may seem like mere semantics in light of the specifics of the suffering, the answer could even today have an immediate effect on Flescher's daily life, and that of roughly a thousand other people, too.

That's because, under the complicated structure of compensation and restitution that has been established for Holocaust survivors over the intervening decades, those who were in a concentration camp or ghetto can receive a monthly pension from the German government, whereas many other survivors (those who fled before the Nazi advance, for example) were eligible for a one-time payment. The Jews of Iasi did receive such a payment, back in the 1950s, but their representatives believe that they are in fact owed the pension instead.