Ахіллесова діра

The review article discusses Raz Segal’s monograph Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914–1945 (Stanford, 2016), which tells the story of Jewish-Rusyn coexistence in Transcarpathia from the outbreak of the First to the end of the Second World War. Acknowledging the importance of this study for the history of the Transcarpathian Jews and their Holocaust, Gyidel also points out how negatively the book was affected by its author’s complete lack of knowledge of Ukrainian-and Russian-language sources on the history of the region. Using examples from such sources, Gyidel casts considerable doubt on almost half of the monograph, namely its depiction of relations between the Transcarpathian Jews and Rusyns from the end of the nineteenth century until the Hungarian occupation of 1939-1944, as well as the roles that Segal assigns to anti-Semitism, Magyarization, Czechization, and Ukrainian Nationalism in the history of this relationship.