The Trap. Ludovic Bruckstein

      Ludovic Bruckstein’s The Trap and The Rag Doll are both set during the Holocaust, the first in Sighet, the second in a nameless town very much like it, both of them part of the unique Jewish and multi-ethnic milieu that developed over hundreds of years in the northern Carpathians and Transcarpathia, a geographic area encompassing Galicia, Ruthenia, Maramuresch and Bukowina, regions that lie within present-day Romania, Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia. The history of Sighet (Marmaroschsiget), situated on the border with the Ukraine in present-day Romania’s Maramureș region, encapsulates both this lost multi-ethnic world and the twentieth-century catastrophes that were to destroy it: fascism and the Holocaust, followed by Red Army occupation and decades of totalitarian rule. Although it was once home to a thriving Jewish community, no more than a dozen Jews now live in Sighet, a town famous today for its prison, where, in the Stalinist period, inter-war democratic political leaders and other ‘enemies of the people’ met a brutal end and were buried in unmarked graves, and which is now a museum and Memorial to the Victims of Communism. At the turn of the twentieth century, the town, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was home to sizeable Hungarian, Romanian, German and Jewish communities. In 1920, following the Treaty of Trianon, the southern part of the Maramuresch region became part of Greater Romania, and twenty years later it was annexed to Hungary consequent to the Second Vienna Diktat. After the commencement of Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s invasion of the Ukraine, the Horthy regime rounded up a part of Sighet’s Jewish population in August 1941 and sent them in freight cars over the border to Kamienets-Podilskyi, where they were massacred along with Jews from the local ghetto and deportees from elsewhere in Hungary. In 1944, German forces occupied Hungary and, with the collaboration of local fascists, herded the Jews into ghettos. Over the course of a week in May 1944, the around thirteen thousand Jews who had been confined to the Sighet ghetto, under armed guard and enduring squalid, overcrowded conditions, were deported to Auschwitz on four trains of freight cars. The deportees included Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), who was to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and Yiddish and Romanian-language writer Ludovic Bruckstein (1920–1988).

      Ludovic (Joseph-Leib) Bruckstein was born in Munkatsch (Mukachevo), a town in Ruthenia with a large Jewish population, some eighty miles north-west of Sighet, which during the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire became part of the newly established Czechoslovakia and then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the end of the Second World War. Like the Jewish population of Sighet, where the Bruckstein family moved after Ludovic was born, and of so many other similar towns across the region, the Jews of Munkatsch perished during the Holocaust, massacred by Einsatzgruppen or transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

      In Sighet, Mordechai Bruckstein, Ludovic’s father, established a business, exporting locally picked medicinal herbs and producing walking canes in a small factory. Ludovic Bruckstein began to write fiction at an early age, thereby continuing a long family tradition of Hassidic storytelling, which he was later to describe in the short story ‘The Destiny of Yaakov Maggid’ (1973). A maggid is a traditional Jewish storyteller, who narrates stories from the Torah and, in the case of the Hassidic maggidim, hagiographic tales of the movement’s founder, Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), or the Baal Shem Tov, which means “Master of the Good Name.” Chaim-Josef Bruckstein, Ludovic’s great-grandfather, was an early Hassid, a follower of the Baal Shem Tov, and the author of a book titled Tosafot Chaim (Life Glosses). His grandfather, Israel Nathan Alter Bruckstein, was a Hassidic rabbi in Pystin’, a town in Galicia, ninety miles north-east of Sighet, and wrote two books, Emunat Israel (Faith in Israel) and Minchat Israel (Gift of Israel).

      As a young man, Ludovic Bruckstein was to experience at first-hand the increasing atmosphere of anti-Semitism in Greater Romania and the hostile environment for Jews systematically created by Romanian officialdom, which he evokes in the novella The Rag Doll (1973). Even before the outbreak of the Second World War and the implementation of the “Final Solution,” Romania’s Jews were subject to harsh persecution, including the kind of senseless, soul-destroying, draconian bureaucratic requirements described in The Rag Doll, whose calculated, malicious purpose was to make everyday life all but impossible for Jews. In 1937–38, the government of nationalist poet and anti-Semite Octavian Goga (1881–1938) passed race laws rivalled in their severity only by those of Nazi Germany, whose measures included stripping a quarter of a million Jews of their Romanian citizenship, making them citizens of nowhere. After war broke out and Romania, under the dictatorship of Marshal Ion Antonescu, allied itself with Nazi Germany, the hostile environment for Jews further degenerated into the open violence of organised pogroms, including the Jassy Pogrom of 29 June-6 July 1941, in which more than thirteen thousand were murdered—shot, beaten and hacked to death, crammed into sealed freight cars and left to die of thirst and suffocation. By this time, Maramureș, and with it Ludovic Bruckstein’s home town of Sighet, was under the control of another Nazi ally and fascist regime, having been ceded to Admiral Horthy’s Hungary by the Second Vienna Diktat.

      Ludovic Bruckstein’s novella The Trap (1988), which he completed shortly before his death from cancer, describes the reactions of the protagonist, Ernst, to the anti-Semitic measures introduced by the Nazis and the Horthy regime, such as the compulsory wearing of the yellow star. Ernst, a university student, is shocked by the utter absurdity of it: Ultimately, it is ridiculous to reduce an individual human being to a yellow patch emblazoned with a letter of the alphabet, in this case, the letter J. Why not make Catholics and Lutherans wear the letter C or L? Or, to push the absurdity to its limit, why not have doctors and barbers wear an armband bearing the letter D or B? It will