After Sighet’s Jewish men are rounded up on the night before the Sabbath and subjected to collective humiliation by the commanding officer of a newly arrived detachment of the SS, Ernst decides to escape the oppressive absurdity that now reigns in the town, taking refuge with a family of Romanian peasants in the hills. And it is from the hills above the town that he witnesses the progression from absurd humiliation to extermination, when Sighet’s Jewish population is first confined to a ghetto and then transported by train to a destination unknown. At the end of the war, when Ernst comes out of hiding and descends once more to the town, he is promptly arrested by an officer of the Red Army – the representative of another regime that reduces individuals to labels and types: enemy of the people, kulak, bourgeois, rootless cosmopolitan, etc. – on the absurd grounds that an arrest quota has to be met, regardless of who is arrested. In other words, another dehumanising denial of human individuality. Ernst is herded into a freight car with the other prisoners who make up the quota and transported to the labour camps of Siberia.
Unlike Ernst and Hannah, the protagonist of The Rag Doll, Ludovic Bruckstein did not manage to elude the train to Auschwitz, but like them both, he was to lose almost his entire family to the gas chambers. Prisoner A37013, Ludovic Bruckstein escaped the gas chamber only because, as an able-bodied young man, he was transferred to forced-labour camps in Hildesheim, Hanover, Gross-Rosen, Wolfsberg and Wüstegiersdorff, where he was made to repair the damage to railway tracks caused by nightly Allied bombing. Liberated by the Red Army in May 1945, he made his way back to Sighet, where he edited a Yiddish newspaper, Unzer Lebn (Our Life) and wrote a highly successful play, Nacht-Shicht (Night Shift), which was performed in Yiddish theatres in Bucharest and Jassy from 1948 to 1958. The play tells the true story of the Sonderkommando revolt at Crematorium IV in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which took place in October 1944.
Ludovic Bruckstein went on to write twenty plays in both Yiddish and Romanian, including The Grinvald Family (1953), The Return of Christopher Columbus (1957), An Unexpected Guest (1959), Land and Brothers (1960), for which he was awarded the Prize of the Union of Writers and the Order of Labour, An Unfinished Trial (1962), and As in Heaven, So on Earth (1968). At the same time, he wrote short stories for the literary press, which were collected in the volume Panopticum (The Wax Museum) in 1969. The following year, he applied for an exit visa to emigrate to Israel, where his younger brother, the only other member of his family to survive the camps, had emigrated in 1947. In the year and a half before he was finally allowed to leave the Romanian Socialist Republic with his wife and son, he was forced to resign his job and found himself ostracised as a traitor to the communist regime.
Settling in Tel Aviv, Ludovic Bruckstein continued to write fiction, mostly in Romanian and sometimes in Yiddish, which, rather than Hebrew, were the first languages of émigrés from Romania. His short fiction, collected in the volumes The Destiny of Yaakov Maggid (1975), Three Histories (1977), The Tinfoil Halo (1979), As in Heaven, So on Earth (1981), Perhaps Even Happiness (1985), The Murmur of the Waters (1987), include both timeless parables, full of humour and Hassidic wisdom, and stories of the concentration camps, which, no matter how harrowing, always convey an abiding love of humanity, of the unique human individual that cannot be reduced to a label or type.
In communist Romania, however, the name Ludovic Bruckstein was erased from the official history of literature. Even after the fall of communism, his novels and short stories, written in Romanian, but published in Israel, are almost entirely unknown to readers in his native country. It is a paradoxical situation for so important a twentieth-century Romanian writer, but to read the powerful, symbolically charged novellas The Trap and The Rag Doll is to understand how it could not have been otherwise.
Alistair Ian Blyth
THE TRAP
1
The train crawled eastward, snaking along, black and sleepy. Inside the crowded goods wagon, with his knees to his mouth, Ernst listened to the monotonous clack-clack-clacking of the wheel beneath him. ‘Halt! Stoi! – Halt! Stoi! – Halt! Stoi!’ the wheel seemed to say. And the steel of the other wheels in the other three corners of the wagon made muffled reply: ‘Halt! Stoi!’ Stop! Stop! Stop!…
The train did not stop. Except rarely, on sidings, in deserted stations. And the doors did not open.
The war was over. ‘What joy!’ said Ernst to himself, sardonically. His anger had since evaporated. What else could he do except be angry, or not be angry? He could change nothing. Absolutely nothing… The lump in his throat had dissolved and now he felt like laughing. Yes, he felt like laughing, nothing less!… The wheels of the train clacked. He sank into a torpor. Inside the crowded goods wagon: the monotonous breathing of some sixty people, sitting like parcels on the plank floor, with their knees to their mouths. And a sour, stale stench of sweat. Among them was that very same young man in black uniform, a uniform now shabby, without epaulettes, without tabs. Or was he mistaken?… Nonetheless, the slicked chestnut hair was the same, the delicate profile was the same, the razor sharp nose, the greenish eyes were the same. He was yet to utter a word, but if he had opened his mouth, Ernst would have recognised that strident voice of his:
‘Halt! Stop!’
At the time Ernst had worn a yellow star sewn on his back. And on his chest. At first he had been furious, outraged. And then depressed. Why that stigma? Merely because a man was of a different nation? Of different ethnic origins, as they put it… When timid, frightened creatures began to appear on the street, with yellow stars on their chests and backs, it became somehow comical.
From above, from the crests of the surrounding mountains, you could see the town in the valley, like an island between the waters of the Tisza and the Iza: the town of Sighet, not a very large town, but an important one, the county administrative seat; indeed, it had a courthouse and a large prison, five Christian churches: Catholic, Uniat, Orthodox, Reformed and Russian Orthodox; a few Protestant prayer and meeting houses; five synagogues and around thirty Jewish prayer houses; a large hospital with many wards; a mental asylum; six primary schools; four lyceums; a large café that served Turkish coffee and tea in the front salon and which had rooms for billiards and cards at the back; a hotel with twenty rooms on the upper storey, pretentiously named The Crown; two small cake shops on the Corso, which was the main street; a brothel at the edge of town, which was named the Jardin for some unknown reason, since there was no garden nearby, but only a yard at the back, rank with weeds; and a Palace of Culture in the select district, which, with its four turrets and massive wrought iron gate, imitated a mediaeval castle, in the late, grandiloquent style of the Austro-Hungarian Empire… It was from in front of the wrought iron gate that the strident command had rung out:
‘Halt! Stop!’
The train came to a sudden stop, its brakes screeching. Through the bars of the small window could be seen a patch of bluish sky. Inside, in the semi-darkness, the crowded, monotonously breathing bodies were barely distinguishable. From up ahead the locomotive gave a protracted whistle, and then the train set in motion, its metal creaking once more…
It had been Saturday and Ernst was hurrying to get home in time for lunch. He was determined to avoid tedious reproaches. All week he would eat sporadically, where and when he could, as his time allowed or his stomach demanded, but on Saturdays all the members of the family had to take their turn washing their hands in fresh water drawn from the well in the yard, they had to sit around the table, festively laid with a white damask cloth and gleaming crockery of glass and porcelain, all of them had to sit down together. His parents and the family tradition allowed no one to be late. And so Ernst was hurrying to get home in time for lunch, when all of a sudden he heard behind him a strident voice, like a military order:
‘Halt!’
Ernst stopped. It was as if he could feel eyes boring into his back, into the spot where his yellow star was sewn. He turned around. The greenish