The Trap & The Rag Doll are two novellas by the Romanian writer
Ludovic Bruckstein, that have remained undiscovered for many years.
Both narratives are concerned with extraordinary stories of survival and
struggle within the multicultural Transylvanian region during the time
of Nazi occupation.
The Trap is the story of Ernest, a young Jewish student from Sighet,
who went into hiding in the mountains surrounding the town, when
anti-Semitic persecutions began. From his hiding places he witnessed the
fate of the Jewish population of the town until they are all sent away,
in May 1944, in four long cattle-train transports to Auschwitz. Shortly
thereafter, the Russian soldiers 'liberate' the town, and Ernest eagerly
returns to his parent's house. However the Russians, suspicious of a
young man that suddenly appears in town, out of nowhere, arrest him and
exile him to a prisoner camp in Siberia! Critics saw in this last novel
of his an allegorical rendering of the situation of many Jews, who, like
himself, after World-War II, readily joined the "World-Wide Communist
Revolution" to avenge the atrocities of Nazism, only to find themselves
trapped in cruel, dictatorial regimes that became suspicious of them and
refused to allow their assimilation and integration, quite like the
regimes before the war.
