Traian Popovici
Traian Popovici (17 October 1892 - 4 June 1946) was a Romanian lawyer and mayor of Cernăuţi (now Chernivtsi) during WWII known for saving 20,000 Jews of Bukovina from deportation.
Popovici was born in Ruşii Mănăstioarei village of Suceava county. In 1908, while a high school student, he crossed the Austrian-Romanian border to see Nicolae Iorga who was visiting the town of Burdujeni, in spite of Austrian government prohibition. When WWI started, he went to Romania and enlisted in the Romanian Army, fighting until the end of the war.
Ion Antonescu asked him to become mayor of Cernăuţi, but he initially refused being unwilling to serve his fascist government. He changed his mind, however, based on advice from his friends. A few days after acceptance, he was ordered to create a ghetto for the Jews of Cernăuţi, but he refused to use medieval methods such as barbed wire. After some long discussions, the governor accepted his point of view. Due to his defending the Jews, he earned the nickname "jidovitul", used by some of his political adversaries.
In 1941, the new governor announced his decision that all the Jews of Cernăuţi must be deported to Transnistria. After talks with the governor, he agreed that Popovici would be allowed to assemble a list of 200 Jews that may be exempted from the deportation. Unsatisfied with the results, he tried to talk directly with Ion Antonescu, this time arguing that the Jews were an integral and important part of the Cernăuţi's production and that he would have to halt it until other people would be found to replace these Jews. He was then allowed to make a list with about 20,000 Jews that were allowed to stay in Cernăuţi.
He was honored by Israel's Yad Vashem memorial as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations", an honour given to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust.