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| THE ROBBERY OF THE ROMANIAN NATIONAL BANK 31/05/2010 |
| (2010-05-31) |
| Last updated: 2010-06-01 15:47 EET |
At 8:00 am on the July 28th 1959, an unusual event took place near the Romanian National Bank branch in the Giulesti district in Bucharest. A group of people wearing masks, four men and a woman, were robbing the armoured bank truck, stealing the equivalent of 280,000 US dollars in lei. After almost two months, on September 17th 1959, the police arrested the four men and another accomplice of theirs. The robbers were tried and five of them were sentenced to death and executed in February 1960, while the woman got a life sentence forced labour.
There was no media coverage about this unusual case either at the time of the bank robbery or in the following period of time, which can be explained by the fact that in a communist regime a bank robbery was unthinkable. The prospect of fleeing abroad with the money was weak, and remaining in the country was doomed to failure. The communist press was obsessed with secrecy, and the public would definitely be kept in the dark over such a case. Even the details of the investigation represented sufficient reasons for veiling that case in total secrecy. The six perpetrators were communists of Jewish origin who had lost their positions which they had had in the state structures of repression or in the party structures. They were said to have been followers of the Zionist movement, which recruited immigrants for Israel. There were even voices who claimed that the robbers’ connections went as far as Minister of the Interior Alexandru Draghici and to other members of the state and ruling communist apparatus. All these and many other things were not to be made public.
The group of the bank robbers was made up of engineer Igor Savescu, the mastermind of the robbery, who was a Comintern agent, a saboteur who had tried before the war to blow up the Barbosi bridge, near the city of Galati in eastern Romania. His wife, Monica Saveanu was a journalist. The couple had two children. Two brothers Paul Ioanid, engineer, an expert teaching ballistics at the Military Academy, and Alexandru Ioanid, a former police officer and weapon specialist, joined the gang. Joining the gang were history professor Sasha Musat, a close friend of Igor Saveanu, and journalist Heinrich Obedeanu. In 1995, the Oral History Centre with the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Paul Lupascu, who had first hand information about the case. He told us about the purposes of the bank robbery, as told by Monica Saveanu, the only survivor of the group.
“She persuaded me that the only ones who were in a difficult financial situation was the Saveanu family who had two children at that time, and had no other source of income. They wanted to go abroad and could not leave, because they had worked in various sectors of activity, and some even continued to work in those sectors of activity where they had no chance to leave the country legally. They tried to do that by getting the money, which they believed could help them acquire an airplane. As a matter of fact, they were in negotiations with an aviation officer. I asked her what they wanted to do with the money and she answered that she would have bought carpets, icons and other things”.
Paul Lupascu underscored the accusations of Zionism leveled at the six during the investigation, as well as during the ensuing trial.
“Those who initiated and led the action, obviously not professional gangsters, were naive enough to think that if they declared political motivations– they actually said they did all that to serve the Zionist cause – Israel and the United States would intervene and have them released. She told me that that was a huge blunder, because if they had been indicted for robbery, even one as serious as that, they would have been tried by a civilian court, with witnesses and lawyers, and things could have been made public to a certain extent. However, the result was precisely that the investigation authorities were given the opportunity to set up a political trial.”
A propaganda movie with the members of the gang was made after that, screened in a close circuit, only for the communist party higher-ups. Paul Lupascu also recalls other consequences of these events.
“In 1964, when political prisoners were released, Monica Saveanu was set free as well. A few years later, she was granted permission to leave. Some say she cooperated with the Securitate. What was the explanation for what they did? In my opinion, the events that followed Stalin’s death, after Hrushtchev exposed Stalin’s crimes, after the events in Hungary, a great many people, even those who were fond of those regimes, realized what actually happened and wanted to flee the Socialist heaven. What followed was that the regime used this foolish deed to act on certain anti-Semitic feelings that had started to manifest themselves in a pretty serious way among party higher ups from Romania. As a consequence of that, the vast majority of the Jews working for the police, Securitate or the Prosecutors’ Office, got the sack.”
In 2004, film director Alexandru Solomon made the documentary ‘The Great Communist Robbery’, inspired by such a case. Yet despite all that, some of the questions remained unanswered.
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2026-06-08
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