From In Europe’s Shadow (Robert D. Kaplan, 2016) pp 215-8
SIGHET AT FIRST SIGHT was a scrap heap of a town, as if everything that had gone before, and all of history for that matter, had been erased, bulldozed over, and replaced by some of the cheapest prefabricated apartment blocks I have ever seen save for those from the Communist 1950s and 1960s. Grizzled peasants rattled by in horse-drawn leiterwagens beside economy cars and groups of Gypsies. People came out on balconies of these hideous buildings to hang clothes. Despite all the people I felt an emptiness.
In the center there was a mix of old and new-style architecture, almost none of it distinguished, with the occasional rusted baroque dome or two and a café with bad American pop videos playing on a wall monitor. The difference in the generations seemed profound, as young people in stylish dress strode past hobbling old people in headscarves and fedoras. The sight of people smoking was more noticeable than that of people using smartphones. I was deep in the provinces.
Markus Hari greeted me at the entrance to the handsome, Sephardic-style synagogue built in the mid-nineteenth century, located on a side street. I had called in advance for someone to let me inside. The yellow interior was majestic with its mass of benches surrounding the bima and the lofty balcony spaces for women. | could imagine the Sabbath here with the close and intimate scents of worshippers crowded together. Our voices echoed sharply in the emptiness and silence of the large space. “Seventy percent of Sighet’s population was Jewish before the Shoah [Holocaust],” Hari explained, “There were tens of thousands of Jews throughout the Maramures then, along with ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Ukrainians. This was one of eight synagogues in Sighet and one of three hundred in the region. This synagogue was once a lovely, crowded, and joyous place.” Pointing through a door, he said, “Elie Wiesel went to heder (Jewish religious school) in that room.” Hari, an old Jewish man with a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact demeanor, added, “Sighet now has a hundred and fifty Jews left, including twenty-eight children. The synagogue still functions.”
Elie Wiesel, the author, Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor, and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, grew up in a house down the street which is now a small museum of the Holocaust in northern Transylvania. Again, I had to call in advance to gain entrance. The exhibits inside told the story of how the Nazis and Hungarian authorities had methodically confiscated Jewish property here, had Jewish children removed from local schools, had Jewish adults fired from their jobs, forced all Jews here to wear yellow stars, herded all the Jews of Sighet into a ghetto, and, between May 16 and May 22, 1944 — after the Easter holidays that year — had four sealed “death trains” take 12,849 Jews of Sighet to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Polish Silesia. Of them, there would be 2,308 survivors after the war.
The museum contains an eyewitness account of the last days of the large Jewish community of Sighet, written by Father Grigore Dancus, a local Greek Catholic priest. The priest’s account is moving in its stark recitation of the facts. But it is the horror of the black-and-white photos of local adults and children being herded into one of the death trains outside Sighet that increases one’s sense of utter incomprehension—precisely because you are aware that this actually happened, not far from where you are standing, and happened in the intense, chromatic springtime of Maramures.
My next stop was Romania’s most comprehensive museum of the decades of Communist rule, located inside the country’s most notorious Cold War prison, which had happened to be here in the center of Sighet. For in this building adjoining a restored pedestrian promenade, prisoners were tortured while naked, fed miserably, and kept in damp cell rooms with only a bucket. Here in cell number “nine,” arguably the greatest Romanian politician of the twentieth century, Iuliu Maniu — who publicly opposed both the Nazis and the Communists — died in 1953.
Whereas the Jewish sites in Sighet are somewhat forlorn and opened only on request (at least when I was there), the prison museum functions as a lively, much-visited center of continuing education about the crimes of Romanian Communism. The walls are covered with the faces of individual victims, and each of the prisoners’ cells functions as an exhibit of a separate facet of Communist tyranny. Every subject is unflinchingly dealt with: the literally spine-breaking torture techniques of the Securitate, the deportations to the Baragan Steppe, the Danube Canal prison labor system, the repression of ethnic and religious minorities, the decimation of the intellectuals. The prison memorial came into being in the post-Ceausescu years largely because of the passion and energy of the poet and civic activist Ana Blandiana and her husband, the historian Romulus Rusan. Blandiana has famously said that “memory alone can be a form of justice.” The prison is vast. Sighet is a concentration of horror amid beauty all around.
Almost within walking distance at the northern edge of town, past streets with new and prosperous dwellings, is the Tisza River, crawling silently between beech and poplar trees, and alongside farm fields and fruit orchards. Here, too, each tree had an iconic quality. On the other side of the Tisza is Ukraine, literally a few feet away from where | was standing. The fact that this was a border seemed unreal, given the narrow and somnolent quality of the river. But states have to end some where, I thought. Beyond the river I spotted a few houses in the middle distance. There the language and many of the concerns of the inhabitants would likely be different. The struggle with Russia would have an immediacy it did not have on this side of the Tisza. This border, like so many others, had real meaning.
This was no longer an imperial world of looser frontiers. Empires were cruel in their way but also allowed a mechanism for inter-communal coexistence, where borders and identities built on race, language, and religion mattered less, since everyone obeyed the same sovereign. The horrors of the twentieth century in Europe had as their backdrop the collapse of empires and the rise of modern, uni-ethnic states, with fascist and Communist leaders replacing the power of traditional monarchs. We still lived in the aftershocks of that nightmare. No solution had as yet been found in the Middle East for the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Could the European Union endure to permanently solve the riddle of the collapse of the Austrian Habsburg Empire?
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