Tormented by self-doubt and shocked by the sexual profligacy of King Carol II, the young Michael grew up as a silent, shy, and earnest teenager.
His mother introduced him to the spiritual riches of Eastern Orthodoxy. This attachment to Christianity grew stronger after he took some private classes with the maverick historian of Byzantium, Professor Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940) of the University of Bucharest. Later, Michael acquired a taste for the military uniform, while developing a real passion for planes and American cars.
Sandwiched between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Empire, interwar Romania tried very hard to maintain its traditional democratic allegiance towards Great Britain and the United States of America.
In the early 1930s, Europe witnessed the rise of tribal nationalism, led by populist parties dissatisfied with the parliamentary rule. Influential thinkers such as Carl Schmitt theorized the importance of political voluntarism, by which he meant the promotion of an “all-knowing leader,” who had a “direct connection” to the “soul of the nation.”
To his surprise, Michael discovered that many public intellectuals in Romania, as well as ordinary people, invested great emotional capital in the false promises of various political messiahs.
Bigoted demagogues and rabid anti-Semites, such as Corneliu Codreanu (1899-1938), were able to win many votes by promising swift delivery from the corrupt affairs of the political establishment. On September 6, 1940, the fascistic organization Iron Guard became the ruling party in Romania, under the strict command of General Ion Antonescu (1882-1946).
It was in this context that King Michael and the Queen-Mother Helen did their best to save as many Jewish lives as possible, by asking the German ambassador Manfred von Killinger (1886-1944) to stop all deportations to Transnistria. Because of their intervention, medical aid, food, and clothing were made available to those already put in the concentration camps.
This is why Yad Vashem recognized King Michael’s mother as a "righteous among the nations," stating that “she saved the lives of thousands of Jews,” including orphans sentenced to death by the SS officer Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962).
Mihail Neamțu
