During the Second World War, on the order of Colonel I. Murgescu, commandant of the Vapniarka concentration camp in Transnistria, the detainees – most of them Jews – were fed nearly exclusively with grasspea. Consequently, they became ill from lathyrism.

•  isurvived.org: The Holocaust in Romania Under the Antonescu Government, by Marcu Rozen.

A team of doctors among the inmates, led by Dr. Arthur Kessler of Cernăuţi, reached the conclusion that the disease presented all the symptoms of lathyrism, a spastic paralysis caused by the oxalyldiaminopropionic acid present in the pea fodder. Within a few weeks, the first symptoms of the disease appeared, affecting the bone marrow of prisoners and causing paralysis. By January 1943, hundreds of prisoners were suffering from lathyrism. The inmates declared a hunger strike and demanded medical assistance. As a result, the authorities allowed the Jewish Aid Committee in Bucharest to supply them with medicine, and the prisoners’ relatives were allowed to send them parcels. It was only at the end of January that the prisoners were no longer fed with the animal fodder that had caused the disease, but 117 Jews were paralyzed for life.

• “Dr. Arthur Kessler (1903-2000)”, in Lathyrus Lathyrism Newsletter, Vol. 3, pp. 3–4
• Dennis Deletant Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania, 1940-1944. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2006, ISBN 1-4039-9341-6, p. 197; Kornis, pp. 228–229

The Holocaust in Ukraine

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• Internment camps
• The Holocaust in Transnistria
• The Holocaust in Bessarabia and Bukovina
• Holocaust locations in Romania

From Wikipedia where the main page was last updated July 29, 2021