Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Edited by
Annette F. Timm
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Contents
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Uri S. Cohen received his PhD in Hebrew and Italian literature from the
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 2005. He is currently associate professor
of Hebrew Literature at Hebrew University and was previously Assistant
Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at Columbia University. His
scholarly writing includes the books Survival—Senses of Death between
the World Wars (2007) and The Poetics of Orly Castel Bloom (2011), both
in Hebrew.
Dina Porat, a Tel Aviv University professor of Jewish history, has served
as head of the Department of Jewish History, the Chaim Rosenberg School
of Jewish Studies, and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of
Antisemitism and Racism. She is now head of the Kantor Center for the
Study of Contemporary European Jewry (which includes the Moshe
Kantor Database for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism), the Alfred P.
Slaner Chair for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism,
and Chief Historian of Yad Vashem. She has written and edited a large
number of books and articles on antisemitism and the Holocaust. Her
biography on Abba Kovner won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award
and the 2012 Raoul Wallenberg Medal. She has been a visiting professor
at Harvard, Columbia, New York, Venice International, and the Hebrew
Universities, and she was awarded Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of
Humanities best teacher for 2004. She has been a member of the Israeli
Foreign Ministry delegations to four UN world conferences, and she has
served as the academic advisor of the Task Force for International
Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (2005–
10).
I must begin by acknowledging that this book would not have happened
without David Tal, former Kahanoff Chair in Israel Studies at the
University of Calgary and current Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel
Studies at Sussex University. The idea for the conference that inspired this
book was hatched over dinner in a discussion with Gideon Greif, author of
We Wept without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from
Auschwitz (2005), who was visiting Calgary to give several lectures on his
work. Having discovered a joint interest in the work of Ka-Tzetnik, the
three of us organized a conference at the University of Calgary (“Ka-
Tzetnik: The Impact of the First Holocaust Novelist in Israel and Beyond”)
in March 2013. Since then, David has provided moral support and
guidance in the process of moving from a conference to a book.
Lively discussions about our pre-circulated papers at the conference
itself convinced participants that this volume would be a worthwhile
enterprise. None of this would have been possible without the generous
funding of the Kahanoff family, which supports the work of the Israel
studies program at the University of Calgary. We also received support
from the Faculty of Arts and Dean of Arts Richard Sigurdson, and the
organizational details were expertly arranged by Jeromy Anton Farkas. I
would also like to thank those who participated in this conference as either
presenters or commentators: Assaf Derri, Cheryl Dueck, Gideon Greif,
Isaac Hershkowitz, Sara Horowtiz, Adrienne Kertzer, Susanne Luhmann,
David Patterson, Elizier Segal, and Florentine Strzelczyk. These
discussions were critical in helping us to find common themes to
investigate and to foster an interdisciplinary investigation of this complex
author.
I am grateful to Rhodri Modford for his faith in this project and to the
staff at Bloomsbury for their patience in seeing it through. And, finally, I
would like to thank Jonathan Jucker for answering the call for indexing
(despite being on parental leave) and for his keen proof-reading eye.
Introduction: The Dilemmas of Ka-Tzetnik’s
International Fame
Annette F. Timm
This book is the first of its kind: the first collection of essays in English
devoted exclusively to the writings of Ka-Tzetnik 135633, the author who
began his life in Poland in 1909 as Yehiel Feiner and died in Israel as
Yehiel Dinur in 2001.1 Dinur chose the penname Ka-Tzetnik 135633 to
underline the transformation of his identity and self-understanding that he
had undergone as an inmate of Auschwitz (with Ka-Tzetnik representing
KZ—the German abbreviation for Konzentrationslager or concentration
camp, and the number representing the identification label tattooed onto
forced laborers in Auschwitz).2 Why did it take so long for this author of
fifteen books, who is a household name in Israel and whose texts have
been part of the high school curriculum there, to be given an extended
scholarly treatment in English? As several of the authors in this volume
will demonstrate, there is no avoiding an uncomfortable answer. Although
Dinur always insisted that his books were not fiction but “chronicles” of
his experience during the Holocaust and as an inmate of Auschwitz, from
the 1950s until fairly recently, they were sold in English-speaking
countries as sensationalized pulp fiction. English-speaking scholars of Ka-
Tzetnik almost inevitably confront these sexualized images on their hunt
for used copies of the now out-of-print translations of his books, an
experience that those who read his works only in the original Hebrew are
largely spared. It is, therefore, useful to foreshadow some of the arguments
to come by describing the salacious marketing of British and American
presses of the novel with which Ka-Tzetnik had by far the most success
outside of Israel: his 1953 Beit habubot (House of Dolls).
The novel purports to narrate the story of the author’s sister, Daniella,
and it ends with a nightmarish account of the brothel in a concentration
camp where she was forced to serve and for which Ka-Tzetnik coined the
name “Joy Division.” After Moshe M. Kohn’s English translation first
appeared with Simon & Shuster in New York in 1955, several English and
American publishing houses picked up House of Dolls for inclusion in
their series of cheaply produced reprints—at least fifty printings by 1977.3
Through the 1950s and 1960s, these presses adorned the book with covers
that played to the appetite for various forms of exploitation in the pulp
fiction market of the day.4
The most common trope of the covers has an attractive woman baring
her chest to reveal the word Feld-Hure (field whore—the German label for
prostitutes who served soldiers) along with a six-digit number, which
sometimes precisely matches and sometimes slightly deviates from the
number in Dinur’s penname. As Pascale Bos will demonstrate in her
contribution to this volume, the image mimics some of Ka-Tzetnik’s
historical errors in House of Dolls since this branding of the word and
number onto the chests of prostitutes never occurred and since Jewish
women never served in the brothels of the concentration camps. But more
significantly for our purposes in explaining the author’s reception outside
of Israel, this image was a perfect stylistic match with a trend toward
sexploitation in the 1950s and 1960s that fed a slightly later trend of
Nazisploitation in the 1970s and early 1980s.5 After all, the 1956 Lion
Books version of House of Dolls was placed in a numbered series that also
contained titles such as Hot Date (1949), The Blond on the Street Corner
(1954), The Flesh Baron (1954), and The Big Rape (1956).6 Although
Lion Books and other purveyors of sleaze often republished novels that
were not intended to be sensationalistic (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
appeared in 1953, for instance, with a lurid cover hinting at rape), English-
speaking audiences unfamiliar with Ka-Tzetnik’s standing as a survivor of
Auschwitz could be forgiven for falling victim to this misleading
classification of his work—for consigning him, as Omer Bartov has put it,
“to the lunatic fringe.”7
The lurid marketing of Ka-Tzetnik’s books in the English language
press contrasts with the author’s respectable reputation in Israel during the
same period. By the time he finally revealed his real name and collapsed
during his testimony at Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem (an
event that is depicted on the cover of this book and that will be repeatedly
mentioned in the chapters to follow), Dinur’s sextet of novels, known
collectively as Salamandra: Chronicle of a Jewish Family in the
Twentieth-Century, had already made him famous. As Israeli scholar
Yechiel Szeintuch tells us, Dinur began writing under the name Karl
Tzetinski while he was recovering from his time at Auschwitz in a British
army hospital near Naples, Italy. Beginning with a poem and a volume in
Yiddish, both under the name Salamandra, Dinur started furiously
recording what he later represented as the history of his own family. He
wrote, says Szeintuch, with “a strong feeling of life running out while the
task of testimony is endless.” Seeing himself as an exegete (in the
Talmudic sense) and as a guerrilla fighter, Dinur consciously intertwined
literature with history and testimony in his writing,8 and he wrote with the
goal of explaining, not sensationalizing, the Holocaust. Shortly before the
Eichmann trial, Dinur described his urge to write in an interview with the
journalist Rafael Bashan:
When I arrived in Italy in 1945,1 felt that I had to tell the story. I did
not know if I would have enough strength; I did not know how long
I would still live; I did not know if I would manage to complete the
manuscript ... Then they gave me a little room, in the attic, that had
only three walls—the fourth had been destroyed by a bomb. I closed
myself up there and started writing—I write standing ... I hurried, as
if someone pursued me: the door was closed. I did not let anyone in.
They would hand me my food through a little window; I hardly
touched it. I came out of the room only after I finished the book,
Salamandra. And I say, why don’t others do the same? We have to
tell, and tell, and tell, without end or boundary, about all that
happened there. Not just for the archives. Not just for the basements
of Yad-Vashem. Millions of people in the world have to read and
know. Are we not the self-appointed guardians of the annals of the
Holocaust; have we not been called a sort of literary guerilla fighters
[sic] of the Holocaust? Why are we waiting for Tolstoy?!!!9
Notes
1 Dina Porat’s contribution to this volume provides a discussion of the debate
about Dinur’s date of birth.
2 Owing to variations in translation and transliteration from Yiddish and
Hebrew into the variety of languages into which Ka-Tzetnik’s books were
translating, various spellings of this pen name have been used, including
K.Zetnik, Katzetnik, K. Tzetnik, and Ka-Tsetnik. I have chosen the spelling
that has become most common in English writings.
3 This is Jeremy D. Popkin’s estimate in Jeremy D. Popkin, “Ka-Tzetnik
135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History 33, no. 2 (2002):
343.
4 I thank Guido Vitiello for his encouragement to include a discussion of the
book covers in this volume (conversations at the conference “Ka-Tzetnik:
The Impact of the First Holocaust Novelist in Israel and Beyond,” March 10–
11, 2016, University of Calgary) and Pascale Bos for agreeing to include a
summary of a forthcoming investigation into this question in her chapter in
this book. See also Pascale Bos, “‘Her Flesh Is Branded: For Officers Only’
Imagining/Imagined Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the
Holocaust,” in Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the
Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014).
5 For a useful collection of essays exploring these links, see Daniel H.
Magilow, Elizabeth Bridges, and Kristin T. Vander Lugt, eds.,
Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture (New
York: Continuum, 2011). See also Insa Eschebach, “Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-
Konzentrationslagern. Geschichte, Deutungen und Repräsentationen,”
L’Homme 21, no. 1 (2010): 65–74; and Silke Wenk, “Rhetoriken der
Pornografisierung: Rahmungen des Blicks auf die NS-Verbrechen,” in
Gedächtnis und Geschlecht: Deutungsmuster in Darstellungen des
Nationalsozialistischen Genozids (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2002),
269–96.
6 Lion Books had originally belonged to the publishing empire of Martin
Goodman, who also owned Marvel Comics and many other pulp series. Most
of these novels are now difficult to find but are traded through ebay and
collectors’ sites like “Pulp Trader”
(www.philsp.com/pulptrader/web/pulp_mag_liste2da.html, accessed
February 8, 2016).
7 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth
Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 54.
8 Yechiel Szeintuch, “The Myth of the Salamander in the Work of Ka-
Tzetnik,” trans. Daniella Tourgeman and Maayan Zigdon, Partial Answers 3,
no. 1 (2005): 102–3. As with Ka-Tzetnik, this more ephemeral pen name has
several spellings. Dinur also used the spelling Karol Cetinsky and Karl
Zetinsky, the spelling that Dina Porat favors in her contribution to this
volume.
9 Quoted in Ibid., 101–2 from Raphael Bashan, “K. Z. 135633 ‘Kulam Hayu
Eichmanim!’” [“K. Z. 135633 ‘They were all Eichmanns!’”] Maariv (Tel
Aviv), April 4, 1961.
10 Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and
Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 189–90.
11 See Bartov, Murder in Our Midst; Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism”; Popkin,
“Ka-Tzetnik 135633”, Amit Pinchevski and Roy Brand, “Holocaust
Perversions: The Stalags Pulp Fiction and the Eichmann Trial,” Critical
Studies in Media Communication24, no. 5 (2007): 387–407, esp. 393; and
Jeffrey Wallen, “Testimony and Taboo: The Perverse Writings of Ka-Tzetnik
135633,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 28, no. 1 (2014): 1–16, esp. 10.
12 Dan Miron’s 1994 (vol. 10) article in the Israeli journal Alpayim is
summarized in Wallen, “Testimony and Taboo,” 4. Bartov writes that the Ka-
Tzetnik prize was created when a father, grateful after a son’s reading of Ka-
Tzetnik helped pull him out of drug addiction, donated a sum of money to
Yad-Vashem. Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and
Modern Identity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
284, n. 129.
13 Quoted from Noah Kliger, “Haish Mi-kokav Haefer,” Yediot Ahronot, July
23, 2001, in Dvir Abramovich, “The Holocaust World of Yechiel Fajner,”
Nebula 4, no. 3 (2007): 20. In 2014, the Kestenbaum & Company auction
house sold a copy of this collection for $11,000, claiming that it was
“possibly the only complete copy extant of Ka-Tzetnik’s first publication,” a
claim that has since been disputed. See “KATZETNIK 135633. Auction 62.
June 26, 2014,” Kestenbaum & Company, accessed September 9, 2016,
www.kestenbaum.net/content.php?item=4463; and Menachem Butler, “The
Lost Poems of Ka-Tzetnik Are Found, in the Library,” Tablet Magazine,
accessed February 12, 2016, www.tabletmag.com/scroll/177165/the-lost-
poems-of-ka-tzetnik-135633.
14 I am very grateful to the late Israeli historian Gilad Margalit, who first made
me aware of the Stalags and provided me with copies of them after hearing
my presentation about the sexualization of the Nazi Lebensborn program at
the conference “Democracy and Intimacy: Toward a Moral History of
Postwar Europe” at the Université de Montréal, November 22–24, 2007.
These conversations spurred an interest in Ka-Tzetnik’s writings, which
started me on the path to editing this book.
15 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision, trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa
Herman (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), cover page.
16 Galia Glasner-Heled, “Reader, Writer, and Holocaust Literature: The Case of
Ka-Tzetnik,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 120.
1
An Author as His Own Biographer—Ka-Tzetnik: A
Man and a Tattooed Number
Dina Porat
Let us take a closer look at three stations of this complicated and twisted
route: the Jewish quarter in Sosnowiec and the ghetto; the “Escape”
(Bricha); and his first years in Israel.
those who came out of the crematoria chimneys know what they
want. We want to destroy streets of cities with tanks, and then
rebuild. Our task now is destruction ... Who would dare stand in our
way. We are Frankensteins, we will show the world, we who came
out of the destruction, we will undermine [the pejorative connotation
of] the name Jew in every language, and elevate it ... [May] the
words of revenge light our way, as long as even one of this race [the
“Aryan” race] remains alive, we will never rest.
Another member of the group spoke about the need to let the Yishuv, the
Jewish community in pre-state Israel, know what had actually happened
during the Holocaust, and continued with the same spirit of elevation that
Feiner-Zitinsky had begun: “this is the strength that Hitler instilled into
us.”24 They both emphasized that the partisans, who were indeed the
leading force in the Bricha movement, should go on leading those joining
the Bricha. Still, though the Auschwitz group did not, obviously, belong to
the partisans, they were represented in the Bricha leadership, and
Feiner/Zitinsky is included in a photo of the leadership that was taken in
Bucharest. Yet the Auschwitz group’s most important role, as its members
saw it,
was to insist upon revenge, which they felt was a duty that they, who
were so deeply humiliated and suffered the utmost agony, should
shoulder. They had not yet had the chance to prove themselves, as
the partisans and the ghetto fighters had, and they were eager to lead
the drive for revenge against the Germans.
Along with these very emphatic words regarding the necessity to take
revenge, and in some contrast to the oath of the Auschwitz group,
Feiner/Zitinsky took an additional one, which he called “the Auschwitz
Oath”: He swore to set pen to paper until the world of Auschwitz, “the
other planet” as he would later name it in his testimony in the Eichmann
trial, was described in writing.25 Feiner initiated a meeting between
himself and Abba Kovner, the poet and partisan, who had led the
underground in the Vilna ghetto and commanded Jewish battalions in the
Lithuanian Rudniki forests, and who was now head of the Bricha
movement. Feiner did not know that at that very time Kovner was forming
a clandestine group within the Bricha movement that was fervently
seeking revenge. Kovner had himself been a writer from an early age, and
he expressed sympathy with Feiner’s burning anxiousness to write.
Despite the crowded accommodation conditions, Feiner was given a place
of his own for this purpose. Edek Retman, a descendant of a wealthy
family from Bedzin who had also reached Bucharest, hosted Feiner in an
apartment he had managed to acquire in Bucharest, paying for all of the
writer’s needs.26 It was there, in the room in Bucharest, that the poem
“Salamandra,” which preceded the first part of his family saga written later
under the same title, was written, representing Feiner’s first post-World
War II literary output. Manek Londner, who had maintained a close
friendship with Ka-Tzetnik since the ghetto days, related how the
Auschwitz group witnessed the various stages of the evolving poem and
how Feiner asked him their opinion of it.
The poem is imbued with the desire to take revenge, and it describes
how this revenge was carried out by Salamandra, a fire monster that burns
for seven years, just a little longer than the six years the war lasted. The
monster marches, thirsty for revenge, all over the world’s continents,
casting an eternal curse “until revenge will not extinguish the fire in its
intestines.”27 The word “not” discloses the writer’s conviction that revenge
is a never-ending task.
The relationship with Kovner deteriorated, because Feiner wished to
make Aliyah (to immigrate to the Land of Israel), and Kovner could not
include him on the list of immigrants, which was initially limited by the
fact that the Yishuv emissaries had so far provided only one ship and could
therefore only accommodate the sick, the wounded, pregnant women, and
naturally children. Ka-Tzetnik later testified in very harsh words about
Kovner, his anger likely intensified by the mental agony that he continued
to suffer and his perspective weakened by strong medication. “Anger built
with time,” said Zvika Dror, a historian and member of the Ghetto Fighters
Kibbutz to whom Ka-Tzetnik dictated his testimony. Even in retrospect he
refused to understand that Kovner’s decision about who would be allowed
on board the first ship was taken out of responsibility for those who
needed urgent medical care and rest in Eretz Israel. Ka-Tzetnik forgot the
favor that Kovner had done in agreeing to provide a room for writing, an
enormous luxury in those circumstances in Bucharest. He also forgot his
promise to continue from Bucharest to Italy, following the route of the
Bricha, in order to get closer to the Jewish Brigade stationed there. The
plan had been for him to finish writing his poem “Salamandra” so that it
could be published close to the time and place where Kovner and his
avengers would perform a grand act of revenge. Years later, when Dinur
spoke to Dror in Tel Aviv, he did not even mention the money that the
Kovner group had provided to sustain him while writing in Italy.28
Despite these later lapses, Feiner did travel with the Bricha organizers
and with the Auschwitz group from Bucharest to Tarvisio, the town near
the triple border between Italy, Austria, and Slovenia where the Jewish
Brigade was stationed and gathered survivors. There he met Eliyahu
Goldenberg, an actor and director of the Entertainment National Service
Association group that came to entertain the soldiers, and the two traveled
together to Naples. He again got a place of his own, a tiny room with only
three walls left standing Allied bombardments. “All your needs will be
supplied by the soldiers,” promised Goldenberg, who was deeply
impressed by Feiner and his wish to write. It was there that he wrote the
first part of the family saga, Salamandra, “without a stop, without a
respite. He did not eat and did not sleep. He peeled off his own circle and
moved into the Planet Auschwitz that was moving in other orbits, outside
the limits-of-time.”29 A strong bond of friendship was forged between him
and Goldenberg, who later helped him to settle in Israel, and with whom
he remained close for many years thereafter. Feiner made Goldenberg
swear he would take care of the manuscript. When Goldenberg first saw
the title page, he wondered why the name of the author was absent. Feiner-
Zitinsky’s forceful response was that those who went to the crematorium
had written the book, and their name is Ka-Tzetnik. This is perhaps how
and when the pen name was born. Goldenberg brought the manuscript with
him from Italy to Eretz Israel, gave it to Zalman Shazar, later Israel’s third
president, who had it translated from the original Yiddish into Hebrew. It
was then revised by Yitzhak Dov Berkovic, son-in-law of the great author
Shalom Aleichem, and published in 1946 in a major publishing house,
Dvir. In other words, it was handled with great respect by extremely
prominent people, and it was translated and published before Ka-Tzetnik
had even arrived in the country.30
When the writing of Salamandra was completed, the avengers were no
longer in Italy. They had moved into Germany to prepare the groundwork
for their planned actions, and Feiner chose not to join them despite the fact
that he was, according to the group’s testimonies, committed to taking
revenge and was deeply disappointed when their plan did not work out.
We might speculate that this decision had less to do with him being in the
midst of a writing trance in Naples than with the fact that he was beginning
to harbor doubts and second thoughts regarding practical revenge as the
right course of action. In his book The Confrontation, parts of which were
published as a booklet under the title Revenge, his protagonist, Harry
Preleshnik—the main literary figure in the saga, who most probably
corresponds to Feiner/Dinur/Ka-Tzetnik—is described in the midst of an
act of revenge. He feels “terribly alien, dispensable and orphaned ... he did
not see any point in victory or in revenge,” about which he had dreamt and
for which he had yearned. Instead, he found a different channel of revenge,
to “cry onto the ears of the entire world the agony of the ghetto, which was
set on fire and has no voice,” and to write in Israel about the Holocaust and
the war, so that they are not pushed beyond the curtain of oblivion, and so
that he could be a part of the underground fight for the resurrection of the
people.31 These wishes show the change in his political views. After
arriving in Eretz Israel the views he had held as a youth in Poland
radicalized, and he began sympathizing with the right-wing Revisionist
party and with the activities of its military underground, the Etzel.
Once he realized that he would be choosing another direction, he turned
to God—the vengeful Biblical God—and asked him: if not now, when?
When he writes in Ha’Imut (the confrontation) about his first meetings
with the woman he fell in love with, later to become his second wife, he
describes how he warned her about his attitude to revenge: she should
realize, he said, that he had nothing in his body, except ashes and revenge,
yet she ended their conversation by speaking about the children they
would have, whose mere existence would indeed represent the true
revenge. Despite her comforting words, revenge proved to be a central
theme in Ka-Tzetnik’s writings over the years, beginning with his
descriptions of Salamandra, the vengeful fiery monster. It is a theme he
kept coming back to, in many forms, like an axis around which his main
protagonists circle, finding their own forms of revenge, each in his or her
own way. This was his way to fulfill the oath he took: to take revenge
through writing and thus prevent forgetfulness, and, as he said in the
Bricha meeting, to elevate the status of the Jewish people. He wished to do
that by interweaving in his works elements from Jewish sources, from
Biblical times to the Zionist writings, thereby confronting the Jewish
people with symbolic representations of their long history and forcing
them to face their murderers and collaborators, lest the Jewish people
engages after the Holocaust in building a new life, and starts forgetting the
horrors and those who perpetrated them.32
Notes
I would like to warmly thank my friends and colleagues: Dr. Avihu Ronen, an
expert on the Zaglebie area during the Holocaust, for valuable details and
insights; Dr. Joel Rappel, director of the Elie Wiesel Archives in Boston, for
sending me four letters of Ka-Tzetnik to Wiesel; and Prof. Dan Miron for
clarifying a number of issues.
1 Author’s conversation with Dorit Sharir, a relative of Ka-Tzetnik by
marriage, on March 29, 2014. Sharir knew him quite well and categorically
claims that the figures and names in his books are fictional and can indicate
no biographic details of any member of the family.
2 Yechiel Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiach Lefi Tumo: Śiḥot ʻim Yeḥiʾel Di-Nur
(Jerusalem: Bet loḥame ha-geṭaʾot, 2003) contains the protocols of telephone
conversations between them over seven years. Yechiel Szeintuch,
Salamandrah: Mitos Ṿe-Hisṭoryah Be-Khitve K. Tseṭniḳ (Jerusalem: Carmel,
2009).
3 I would like to thank Dr. Isaac Hershkowitz for the information on the river in
Jewish sources.
4 Conversation with Dorit Sharir.
5 The poem is reprinted in Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiach Lefi Tumo, 113.
6 See his birth certificate in Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiach Lefi Tumo, 23. The Hebrew
Language Lexicon mistakenly states 1917 as the year of his birth, but all other
sources state 1909. The later date is much more probable, since had he been
born in 1917, he would have published a book of poetry in 1931, when he
was only fourteen years old.
7 On the burning of the booklet, see Dan Miron, “Bein Sefer Le’Efer,” Alpayim
10 (1994): 196–224.
8 See an interview with Halinka in Iris Milner’s chapter in this volume.
9 Described in a letter from Dan Miron to me, January 11, 2014.
10 For a description of these two camps, see Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, ninth
printing (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1997), 101–11. See also Avihu Ronen, “Ovdei
Kfi’ya Bemahanot shel ‘Irgun Schmelt’ Be’Schlezia,’ 1940–1944” Dapim 11
(1994): 17–42.
11 About Sanya: in Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 9–138.
12 For example, Avihu Ronen, Nidona La’Chaim (Haifa: Sifrei Hemed, 2011),
65, 166, 253, 318, 322, 339, and 530.
13 Fredka Mazia, Re’im Basa’ar (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1964), 114–15.
14 Dina Porat, “First Testimonies on the Holocaust: The Problematic Nature of
Conveying and Absorbing Them, and the Reaction in the Yishuv,” in
Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and
Achievements, eds. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem: Yad
Vashem, and New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 437–60; and Avihu Ronen,
“Shlichuta shel Halinka,” Yalkut Moreshet 42 (December 1986): 55–80.
Halinka, later named Prof. Yehudit Sinai (1925–2013), fought in the 1948
War of Independence, was an officer in the IDF, served as a women’s
battalion commander in the reserve, and dedicated her professional life to
microbiology and pioneering research of cancer. Her brother, Nathan, found
the first vaccine against polio that was used in Israel.
15 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 81–5.
16 Moshe Ronen, “Hamra’ah Me’Hagehinom” Yediot Aharonot, September 24,
2013, p. 107. And in a conversation the author had with Manek, on May 21,
2014, during the Shiva on his brother, Ze’ev, who passed away that week, at
the age of ninety-two. The group included two more brothers, Kalman and
Eizik Belachash, Alther Brukner, Reuven (family name not remembered), and
a few others.
17 Ibid.
18 See the horrifying description of Harry Preleshnik (the character who
represents the author himself in his various writings), a few minutes before a
Russian tank arrives: Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 184.
19 In an earlier conversation of the author with Manek Londner on July 10,
2010.
20 Yonat Sened, Kazik (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uchad, 2008), 76.
21 Pnina Greenspan, Yameinu hayu Haleilot. Mizihronoteha shel Havera
ba’irgun Hayehudi Halochem (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters House and
Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1984), 140. Pnina, a Warsaw ghetto fighter survivor,
named the members of the Auschwitz group: Yechiel Zitinsky, Alther
Bruckner, the brothers Kalman and Eizik Belachash, and Manek (Pnina
spelled his name Majek) Londner.
22 In an interview with Zvika Dror, in Hem hayu Sham—Bimhitzat She’erit
Hapleita (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uchad, 1992), 76–7.
23 See Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 207 and 213.
24 Dina Porat, “Hativat Sridei Mizrach Eropa—Protocolim shel Yeshivote’ha,
April 4 ad Juli 23, 1945,” in Brichim shel shtika; sheerit ha-plita ve-eretz
yisrael, ed. Joel Rappel (Jerusalem: Masuah, 2000), 177–201, especially 183
and 186.
25 Ka-Tzetnik, Nakam (Tel Aviv: Ketsin hinukh rashi, Anaf hasbarah, Misrad
ha-bitahon, 1981), 35.
26 Conversations with Manek Londner, 2010 and 2014.
27 See the poem, in Yiddish and Hebrew, in Szeintuch, Salamandrah, 235–7.
28 Conversation with Dror in the Tel Aviv Bazel recuperation house, May 16,
1990. I would like to thank Dror for sending me the minutes of this
conversation.
29 Ka-Tzetnik, Nakam, 38. For Goldenberg’s testimony, see Szeintuch,
Salamandrah, 126–36.
30 In 2009, Szeintuch published a full Yiddish and Hebrew annotated edition of
the novel Salamandra. The actual translation was done by Y. L. Baruch. See
the cover in Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiach Lefi Tumo, 41. According to Szeintuch,
Ka-Tzetnik came to Eretz Israel on November 14, 1945, but I could not verify
this date.
31 Ka-Tzetnik, Nakam, 15, 80, 84, and 92.
32 Szeintuch, Salamandrah, 258–9.
33 For details about this meeting and relations with Nina, see Ka-Tzetnik,
Haimut (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad, 1975).
34 Lior Di-Nur, “Hishlamti et Hashlihuto shel Abba,” Yediot Hasharon, January
15, 2010.
35 Ibid.
36 See the letter, dated October 26, 1987, in the Elie Wiesel Archive, Howard
Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
37 Eli-yah Nina De-Nur, Shyarai (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1987). The poem about his
name is found on pp. 15–16. On her illness, see his letters to Elie Wiesel,
September 29, 1987, and November 26, 1987, the Elie Wiesel Archive,
Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. I would like
to thank my friend, Dr. Joel Rappel, director of these archives, for sending me
four of the letters Ka-Tzetnik had sent to Wiesel.
38 Letter dated August 15, 1961.
39 Letter dated November 26, 1987.
40 In a letter to Wiesel about E.D.M.A. (more on which later), dated September
29, 1987, Ka-Tzetnik tells how poets such as Haim Guri and Ya’akov Orland,
among the most known and appreciated in Israel, made efforts to convince
him to publish the new book by chapters in a column that poet Nathan Zach
had in Ha’olam Haze, a controversial but widely read weekly.
41 Tom Segev, Hamillion Hashvi’i (Jerusalem: Keter, 1991), 1–9. Segev
managed to speak with Prof. Bastians and hear an explanation of his methods.
42 Dorit Sharir was active in the distribution of his books by the Ministry of
Education.
43 Author’s conversations with Dorit Sharir and Yechiel Szeintuch, both of
whom had many conversations with Ka-Tzetnik.
44 Ka-Tzetnik, Kar’u Lo Piepel, reprint ed. (Tel Aviv: Am Hasefer, 1988
[1961]), 53–6. Yehuda Bauer warned in 1982 against the impact of Ka-
Tzetnik’s work (see Yehuda Bauer, Hashoah—Hebetim Hitoriim [Tel Aviv:
Moreshet-Sifriat Hapoalim, 1982], 81–3), and so did Omer Bartov in “Kitsch
and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the
Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 42–76.
2
Testimony in Holocaust Historiography
Annette F. Timm
At this point, both the prosecutor and the judge interrupted the witness in
order to coax him away from his poetic descriptions and toward answering
the questions for which he had been summoned—about having met
Eichmann in Auschwitz. Dinur uttered a few more phrases and then fell
into a coma-like faint.3 He had to be removed from the courtroom and
never continued his testimony. The scene was broadcast over Israeli radio
and was later frequently shown on television, becoming the most
memorable part of what was already the biggest media event in Israel’s
history.4
This scene provides an excellent metaphor for the themes of this
chapter. Dinur’s attempt to use poetry to express the meaning of his
experiences was a failure in this juridical setting. Although his words have
since been frequently cited in discussions of the difficulty of describing the
events of the Holocaust, they contributed nothing to the more pressing and
practical demands of providing material evidence. His emotion-filled
testimony and his desire to discuss the identity-transforming impact of
surviving Auschwitz found little resonance in a court of law.5 As judges
Moshe Landau, Binyamin Halevy, and Yitzhak Raveh put it in their
opening statement, “Holocaust survivors who [will appear] on the witness
stand and [will present] testimony in this courtroom will open the lock to
their hearts. Material of great value for the researcher and historian is
contained here. But for the court, these are only byproducts of the trial.”6
Although the prosecutors of Adolf Eichmann had set out to make up for
what they perceived to be the failures of the Nuremberg trials—where the
victims of Nazi crimes were hardly heard—they were bound to the
structures of the law and felt forced to contain Dinur’s poetic, emotional
outcry.7 But, perhaps more importantly, Dinur’s sudden inability to
communicate his experiences on the witness stand despite his publishing
success as the author of semi-autobiographical novels stands as an iconic
example of the complexities and variety of forms characterizing public
testimony about the Holocaust. It is, thus, not simply because it was a
media sensation that Dinur’s collapse and the Eichmann trial itself is so
often cited as a turning point; the event highlighted the conflicts between
the law, the public interest, and demands to take survivor testimony
seriously as both historical evidence and descriptions of individual
experience that contain ethical meaning.8
This chapter will provide an overview of the role of survivor testimony
in Holocaust historiography. Beginning with an analysis of the supposed
silence of survivors before 1961, and relying on recent studies of the early
efforts of “survivor documentarians,”9 I will question whether the
Eichmann trial really represented as dramatic a turning point as has been
supposed while tracking the place of testimony and its various definitions
in historical approaches to the Holocaust from 1945 to the present. This
exercise requires us to keep separate various levels of reception: the
popular and political, the scholarly, the archival, and the literary. In the
public sphere, the Eichmann trial was certainly a “formative event for
Israeli consciousness.” Sales of transistor radios skyrocketed as the
population followed the testimony,10 and Israelis today remember the
event as the occasion of “meeting the survivors as human beings” for the
first time.11 It also did begin a slow process of transformation in
historians’ appreciation of the value of first-person accounts, an approach
that had been explicitly rejected by early experts, like Raul Hilberg.12 We
can track a significant transformation in historians’ attitude toward
testimony after 1961, and the explosion of “memory studies” in the 1980s
and 1990s has often been remarked upon.13 This more intense focus on the
individual produced a growing willingness to tackle the theme of sexual
violence, which had been all but ignored by earlier historians. But, as we
shall see, thousands of testimonies had been collected before the Eichmann
trial, and authors like Ka-Tzetnik had written literary accounts of the
Holocaust in an explicitly testimonial mode.
Writing as Ka-Tzetnik, Yehiel Dinur provided an early window into
both the force and the difficulties of all first-person accounts of the
Holocaust, since the stories that he told, particularly the sexual themes that
were central to House of Dolls and Piepel, did not conform to modes of
Holocaust representation that were being established in both the political
and the scholarly discourses of his day. The fact that he chose the form of
the novel to convey his “chronicle” did not diminish his self-perception as
belonging to the group of “self-appointed guardians of the annals of the
Holocaust,” who would leave behind records “about all that had happened
there. Not just for the archives. Not just for the basement of Yad
Vashem.”14 To take Ka-Tzetnik seriously thus entails expanding our
definition of “testimony” beyond the courtroom, the archive, or the
historian’s interview. It might even require historians to expand their
overly concrete definition of “the archive” to include literary
representations. Although historians might be reticent to follow in the
footsteps of literary scholars who rely on Jacques Derrida’s psychoanalytic
theory of how “archives” are defined, created, and destroyed, we should
remain conscious of the contingency of our own definitions of evidence
and our tendency to valorize certain types of sources over others.15 Dinur’s
insistence that his literary writing was a form of witnessing is an invitation
to use his work as a lens through which to understand the role of testimony
in historical scholarship on the Holocaust.
Were the survivors ever silent?
Historians who lecture to undergraduates about the Holocaust frequently
assert that the Eichmann trial dramatically transformed the landscape of
Holocaust research, jumpstarting an interest in the experience of the
survivors and solidifying the terminology used to describe the destruction
of the Jews in Europe.16 This story is not entirely false. The trial certainly
did much to raise awareness of the crimes of the Nazis and to reveal the
specific experiences of the survivors even in Israel, where the focus of
remembrance up to that point had been on Jewish resistors and heroes.17
As late as 1959, the state of Israel instituted a National Remembrance Day
for the Holocaust and its Heroism (Yom Hashoah Vehagvura), and as Alon
Confino has argued, popular stories of the Holocaust emphasized heroism
and focused on “politically motivated narratives of well-intentioned but
deeply misleading clichés.”18 The presence of testimonies of
approximately one hundred survivors at Eichmann’s trial called into
question the heroism of survival. The collective impact of their stories also
“gave the genocide of the Jews faces and voices previously missing or
forgotten,” Eric Sundquist writes, while firmly establishing the use of the
word “Holocaust” to describe their experience and the polices that
Eichmann carried out.19 And yet this focus on the trial as turning point has
hidden from view the fact that enormous collections of Holocaust
testimonials were gathered immediately after the war. Historians now
working on Holocaust testimony emphasize collections like the Fortunoff
Video Archive at Yale (founded in 1981), Steven Spielberg’s Shoah
Visual History Foundation (founded in 1994), and the collections of Yad
Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. They have been less
likely to point out that the collection of survivor testimony began much
earlier, as the 7,300 testimonies gathered by the Central Jewish Historical
Commission (CJHC, founded in Lublin in 1944) and collected at the
Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH) in
Warsaw makes clear. Representing the largest single collection of written
testimonies from the Holocaust, the testimonies collected by the CJHC are
comprised primarily of narratives that researchers composed after
interviewing survivors who had returned from concentration camps or
hiding places in Poland in the immediate postwar years.20 Even these
testimonies, in other words, must be read as composed narratives—as
interpretations of witnessing recorded by interviewers with their own
perceptions of the questions that needed to be asked and the answers that
needed to be preserved.
How testimonies were collected and recorded has varied dramatically.
As Laura Jockusch has documented, organized efforts to collect survivor
testimony got underway in various countries before the end of the war and
attest to an immediate realization on the part of survivors and some
historians that documentation of the individual memories of suffering and
persecution would be a critical aspect of both historical reconstruction and
legal retribution. In the first phase of this process, Jews began gathering
testimonies and documents while they were still being persecuting,
following a tradition of khurbn-forshung (destruction research) that had
begun in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.21 The most famous
of the early efforts was the secret archive established by Emanuel
Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto on November 22, 1940.22 Isaac
Schneersohn, an Orthodox Jew who fled to France in 1943, created the
Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, which published
collections of documents about the treatment of Jews in Vichy France and
gathered tons of material in the interests of post-war justice.23 Similar
commissions were founded in wartime Poland and in post-World War II-
occupied Germany.24 A German Jew, Alfred Wiener, who fled to
Amsterdam in 1934, immediately started amassing a collection of
documentation that would become the Wiener Library in London. And in
the summer of 1946, Chicago-based psychologist David Broder conducted
over a hundred interviews with survivors in Displaced Persons (DP) camps
in Europe, later making the transcripts available to at least forty-five
libraries all over the world.25 Together, these efforts produced an
enormous trove of survivor testimony. Less than a decade and a half after
the end of the war, Jockusch tells us, the collective archive of these various
commissions and documentation included some 18,000 written testimonies
and 8,000 questionnaires.26
So with this wealth of survivor testimony, how did the myth of silence
ever arise? An obvious, though rarely mentioned reason for the scant
attention that historians paid to these documents in the early years is the
preponderance of Yiddish language materials. Mark L. Smith has
researched the extensive efforts of mostly amateur historians to document
the experiences of the victims in the immediate post-war period. A vast
amount of writing was produced: from monographs, to journal articles, to
one-page essays in popular newspapers and magazines. But much of the
early material on survivors was written in the language of the majority of
the survivors—Yiddish—and was thus inaccessible to many university-
based scholars of the Holocaust.27 Other factors are more specific to
national contexts.
Hasia Diner insists that the culture of post-war America had much to do
with this supposed “silence.” Her book, We Remember with Reverence and
Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–
60, investigates the outpouring of memory work conducted by American
Jewish communities after the war, research that contradicts the prevalent
view that survivors were not heard from until the 1960s. She attributes this
contradiction to the influence of the 1960s’ youth movement, which had an
interest in trumpeting their discovery of a “hidden” truth.
That fact, that the post-war generation had ignored the Holocaust,
allowed [the youth movement] to claim that not only had they
“discovered” it but also that they, unlike those who had directed the
organizations, institutions, schools, summer camps, community
centers, synagogues, and such in the post-war period, did so from an
assertively particularistic and uncompromising perspective which in
an unembarrassed manner asserted Jewish difference and
distinctiveness.28
In other words, survivors had not been silent but had launched a “frenetic,
global effort to transmit information about the Jewish catastrophe. If
anything, they succeeded too well, too soon.”36
This is the context in which we must view both the tone and the
reception of Ka-Tzetnik’s work. He was not alone in beginning to write
immediately after being liberated, nor in his vivid and unrestrained
description of the concentration camps. At least seventy-five memoirs of
survival were published between 1945 and 1949; fifteen of them were
written in Yiddish, thirteen in Hebrew, and twelve in Polish.37 Yehiel
Dinur was perhaps unique in publishing the second installment of his
Salamandra sextet, House of Dolls (Beit habubot) in 1953, a time when
there was a general lull in memoir literature.38 But to understand this, we
need to examine the specific Israeli context in which his books were read,
to which I will return below. Moving now from the efforts of “survivor
documentarians” to the work of professional historians, I will explore why
Holocaust testimony was initially discounted in scholarly literature and
how this changed.
Young took inspiration from critical theory to argue that interpretation was
not simply the purview of the historian, but also of the historical actors
under examination and their memories of what they had experienced. To
examine the myths, grammars, religious and linguistic structures in which
they framed their memories was thus not only to provide cultural context
but to uncover “the force of agency in these events: world views may have
both generated the catastrophe and narrated it afterward.”61
Together these arguments ask us to expand our understanding of
historical memory to include its poetic expression, which can help to
clarify the role of Ka-Tzetnik’s writing and its very popular reception. As
one of those compulsive and explosive outbursts that inevitably break
through strictly governed memory discourses, Ka-Tzetnik’s novels should
not be described as either mythical or even exclusively literary but as
constructive elements of a memory culture that helped produce historical
meaning.
The process of taking testimony and memory culture seriously was
somewhat slower in Germany than in English-speaking countries and was
characterized by the focus on the tension between scholarly and popular or
political modes of representation. This is not surprising, given the heat of
the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute), which highlighted the difficulty
of integrating the Holocaust into the German national narrative. (The
Historikerstreit erupted in 1986 when the philosopher Jürgen Habermas
objected to Ernst Nolte’s argument that the Holocaust was “above all a
reaction born out of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian
Revolution.”)62 Up until this time, German historians had tended to react
defensively whenever their professionally bestowed authority to
monopolize historical explanation (neatly summed up in German as
Deutungsmacht) was questioned,63 and memory, testimony, and the
contributions of eyewitnesses were often viewed with suspicion. As
Konrad Jarausch complained in 2002, many German historians viewed
“the whole ‘history and memory’-trend as nothing but hype,” a reaction
that he and Martin Sabrow at the Centre for Contemporary History at
Potstdam made an effort to undermine in a March 2001 conference entitled
“The Historicisation of the Present.”64 In his contribution to the resulting
conference volume (Verletztes Gedächtnis: Erinnerungskultur und
Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt—Injured Memory: Memory Culture and
Contemporary History in Conflict) Jarausch comments that eyewitnesses
had often been treated as the natural enemies of the historian, and he called
for a more “open admission of the experience-dependent nature of
contemporary history.”65 Meanwhile Hans-Günther Hockerts defined
memory culture as designating “the entirety of the not specifically
scholarly use of history in public—with the most diverse methods and for
the most diverse reasons,” and he warned that there would always be
tension between “contemporary history as personal memory, as public
practice and as scholarly discipline.”66
These warnings have not gone unheeded. Particularly the work of Jan
and Aleida Assmann and their differentiation between individual and
communicative memory (short-term memory) and political and cultural
memory (long-term memory) has prompted a reconsideration of the
tension between popular, scholarly, and political memory cultures among
German historians.67 Building upon the work of the Assmanns, along with
Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora, German discussions about memory
and the Holocaust have circled around the question of tensions between
the historical discipline and public memory. As is to be expected in the
land of the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust, and as Dirk Rupnow
discusses in his contribution to this volume, German historians have
slowly been forced to accept the existence and power of a strong memory
culture (Erinnerungskultur) over which they cannot exert seamless
control.68 By the early 2000s, the subject of history and memory had
received comprehensive attention, and in more recent years concerted
efforts have been made to engage in interdisciplinary discussions,
particularly with anthropologists and scholars of literature.69
In this regard, the work of American literary scholar Lawrence Langer
has been particularly important in pointing out the weakness in popular
memory culture. In various books about memory and the Holocaust,
Langer has critiqued the simplistic moral messages that analyses of
testimony sometimes promote.70 “In framing the Holocaust through the
lens of heroic rhetoric,” Langer argues, “Holocaust chroniclers exhibit
their own discomfort with the facts left to us by Holocaust victims, dead
and alive, and reveal the inadequacy of our language in the face of what
there is to tell.”71 Although more traditional historians are unlikely to be
persuaded, and although the historical and the literary approaches to the
Holocaust have up until recently tended to exist in isolated parallel, a slow
transformation was underway.72
These developments seem to have had a significant influence on the
willingness of historians to take testimony seriously, even when a strict
adherence to traditional modes of historical argumentation is maintained.
Having established his reputation as a meticulous archival researcher with
his book about the civilian police battalions and their involvement in the
murder of Jews on the Eastern Front, for instance, Christopher Browning
has more recently begun to rely on survivor testimony as a way of filling
in holes for which we have no archival evidence.73 Browning’s Collected
Memories rests on 173 survivor testimonies from the Starachowice slave
labor camp in Poland. An obscure camp about which little was previously
known, Starachowice left behind few archival traces. Browning explicitly
rejects analyses of testimony that focus more on their form (their modes of
representation) than on their content. (He distances himself from
approaches like that of Lawrence Langer.) His goal, he argues, was neither
to tell a story of suffering and endurance, nor to establish the
“authenticity” of the testimony nor to produce a “collective” memory.
Instead, he seeks to compare and analyze the testimonies en masse in order
to reconstruct a plausible narrative.74 He developed this approach further
in his more detailed history of the Starachowice in Remembering Survival:
Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp, for which he found additional
testimonies and conducted his own oral interviews, gathering a total of 292
eyewitness accounts. Here he insists on the necessity of finding ways of
reconciling the contradictions and “clearly mistaken” recollections within
witness testimony. “Such critical judgment of eyewitness testimony is self-
evident and commonplace for historians of other events,” he writes, “but it
is emotionally freighted in the study of the Holocaust, where survivors
have been transformed into “messengers from another world” who alone,
it is claimed, can communicate the incommunicable about an ineffable
experience.”75 While they are certainly taken seriously, the testimonies
retreat into the background behind Browning’s omniscient voice, not
unlike the way that archival documents disappear behind any other
historian’s narrative. Although he is certainly sensitive to the individual
stories he tells, what Browning wants from his survivors is what the court
wanted from Yihiel Dinur.
Saul Friedländer takes an entirely different approach to testimony. In
his already seminal two-volume exploration of the Holocaust, Nazi
Germany and the Jews, and particularly the second volume The Years of
Extermination, Friedländer choses a methodology that is a calculated
response to historians who seek to “normalize” the Holocaust—to treat it
like any other historical event and to use “scientific” methods to neutralize
its uniqueness.76 The Years of Extermination combines meticulous archival
research and a comprehensive chronological narrative of the political,
military, administrative, and ideological aspects of the Nazi regime with
frequent testimonies from its victims. The testimonies stand virtually
without comment; they are allowed to speak for themselves and to
intensify what Confino has called the “sensation of disbelief.”77 They
fracture Friedländer’s narrative while serving to create an “integrated
history” that combines testimony with historical chronology and
explanation. “[By] its very nature,” Friedländer writes,
the urge of youth to be told the truth about facts of life that adults
seem to be hiding from them, and their simultaneous curiosity about
and fascination with matters of sex and violence, make them into a
particularly receptive audience for representations of what could be
called “explicit sincerity,” namely the conscious or unconscious
manipulation of readers’ and viewers’ articulated or unspoken fears,
urges, and obsessions.92
When these books were originally published in Israel, in other words, they
filled two voids: a dearth of explicit investigations of the Holocaust; and a
thirst for knowledge about sex. I would dispute, however, Bartov’s claim
that this makes the books pornographic. While they might well have
provided titillation and the thrill of the forbidden for Israeli youth, and
they certainly described perverse sexual activity, their primary purpose
was to elicit empathy rather than revulsion or sexual arousal. Carolyn
Dean has argued that the term “pornography” has experienced a conflation
with non-sexual forms of “effaced dignity” in Western culture.93 We
describe something as pornographic not only when it titillates, but when it
depicts a moment of human depredation and creates a numbness to
suffering. (An example would be the discussions about whether images of
bodies falling out of the Twin Towers on 9/11 can be considered
“pornographic.”) As Dean argues,
Notes
1 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim
Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 4.
2 Quoted in Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas
in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 136. I
have followed Felman’s choice of spelling—K-Zetnik instead of Ka-Tzetnik
—in the quotation, but we have used the more common English spelling of
Ka-Tzetnik throughout this volume.
3 In an interview with Tom Segev in 1987, Dinur said that he had fainted
because this was the first time he had been asked to admit that he was Ka-
Tzetnik. Up until this point, he had remained anonymous and avoided all
public appearances. Segev, The Seventh Million, 5.
4 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 127; and Anita Shapira, “The Eichmann
Trial: Changing Perspectives,” in After Eichmann: Collective Memory and
the Holocaust since 1961 (London: Routledge, 2005), 20. Dinur’s full
testimony can be found on the website of the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum, “Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive,”
https://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=2285,
accessed August 16, 2016.
5 Rachel Auerbach, the director of the department for the collection of
testimony at Yad Vashem during the trial and herself a survivor, had pushed
for the inclusion of the victims’ perspective but was disappointed with the
result, saying that trial officials “wanted only official documents that could
serve as direct proof of [Eichmann’s] guilt. Witnesses, if any, would only be
those who could produce direct evidence as to his culpability.” See Rachel
Auerbach, “Witnesses and Testimony in the Eichmann Trial,” Yad Vashem
Bulletin, 11 (April–May 1962): 37–45.
6 Hanna Yablonka, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel:
The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials,” Israel Studies 8, no.
3 (2003): 1–24, 3. Yablonka’s English translation contained grammatical
problems, which I corrected.
7 For an excellent examination of how the dictates of criminal law courts can
conflict with the achievement of justice for genocidal crimes, not to mention
the goals of sensitively representing the experiences of its victims, see Devin
Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History and
the Limits of Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
8 “In the annals of public awareness of the Holocaust period,” a page about the
trial on Yad Vashem’s website explains, “nothing rivals the Eichmann trial as
a milestone and a turning point, whose impact is evident to this day.”
“Eichmann’s Trial in Jerusalem: Shaping an Awareness of the Holocaust in
Israeli and World Public Opinion,”
www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/eichmann/awareness_of_the_holocaust.asp
accessed August 16, 2016. Aleida Assman, one of the most important
historians of memory in Germany, includes the trial, along with the creation
of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in
Ludwigsburg in 1958 and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials between 1963 and
1965, as marking the second phase in Germany’s memory culture after a post-
war period of “communicative silence” between 1945 and 1957. Aleida
Assmann, “Wendepunkte der deutschen Erinnerungsgeschichte,” in
Gedächtnis—Identität—Interkulturalität: ein kulturwissenschaftliches
Studienbuch, ed. Andrea Horváth and Eszter Pabis (Budapest: Bölcsész
Konzorcium, 2006), 42–50, 44.
9 The term is from Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust
Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012).
10 Segev, The Seventh Million, 350. On the impact of radio on Israeli public
reception of the trial, see Amit Pinchevski and Tamar Liebes, “Severed
Voices: Radio and the Mediation of Trauma in the Eichmann Trial,” Public
Culture 22, no. 2 (2010): 265–91.
11 Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research: Birth and Evolution (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2012), 190. For a comprehensive exploration of the cultural
impact of the trial, see Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel Vs. Adolf
Eichmann (New York: Schocken, 2004). An account that focuses on the legal
drama of the trial can be found in Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial
(New York: Schocken, 2011).
12 Raul Hilberg cites absolutely no survivor testimony in his classic book: The
Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, [1961]
1985). I will address his methodology in more detail later in this chapter.
13 For an overview of the various phases of memory culture related to National
Socialism, see Arnd Bauerkämper, Das Umstrittene Gedächtnis. Die
Erinnerung an Nationalsozialismus, Faschismus und Krieg in Europa seit
1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2012).
14 Quoted in Yechiel Szeintuch, “The Myth of the Salamander in the Work of
Ka-Tzetnik,” trans. Daniella Tourgeman and Maayan Zigdon. Partial
Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 3, no. 1 (2005): 101
from Raphael Bashan, “K. Z. 135633 ‘Kulam Hayu Eichmanim!’” [“K. Z.
135633 ‘They Were All Eichmanns!’”] Maariv (Tel Aviv), April 4, 1961. I
provide a longer version of this quotation in the introduction of this book.
15 See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric
Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For an historian’s
reflection, see Peter Fritzsche, “The Archive,” History & Memory 17, no. 1–2
(2005): 15–44. Referring to visual rather than literary evidence, Elissa
Mailänder has recently insisted that historians branch out from their fixation
on the “positivist ‘extractive’ logic of the archive” to develop “a
complementary close reading of empirical sources, which rather than peeling
away their uncertain and subjective elements instead directly engages with
their ambiguous and contradictory meanings.” Elissa Mailänder, “Making
Sense of a Rape Photograph: Sexual Violence as Social Performance on the
Eastern Front, 1939–1944,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 3
(2017): 489–520.
16 For a description of standard assumptions about the “silence” of the survivors
before 1961, see David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, “Introduction,” in
After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, ed. David Cesarani and
Eric J. Sundquist (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–2. On the use of
the term “Holocaust” as compared to other terms, such as “Shoah,”
“genocide,” and “Judenvernichtung,” see Omer Bartov, Murder in Our
Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 56–60.
17 Segev, The Seventh Million, 70–71, 424, 440, and 479–80.
18 Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical
Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 19.
19 Eric J. Sundquist, “Silence Reconsidered: An Afterword,” in Cesarani and
Sundquist, After the Holocaust, 211.
20 The testimonies are now also available at Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum. For a discussion of the “polyphony” of these narratives—
the fact that the interviewers’ voices, questions, and intentions are somewhat
obscured and can overshadow the voices of the interviewees—see Beate
Müller, “Trauma, Historiography and Polyphony: Adult Voices in the
CJHC’s Early Postwar Child Holocaust Testimonies,” History & Memory 24,
no. 2 (2012): 157–95.
21 Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 19.
22 The archive is variously known as the Ringelblum Archive, Oneg Shabbat,
Oyneg Shabes, or Oyneg Shabbos. It is now housed at the Jewish Historical
Institute in Warsaw (www.jhi.pl/en/archives), and selections have been made
available in an online exhibition at Yad Vashem, “Let the World Read and
Know,” www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/ringelbum/intro.asp, accessed
August 15, 2016. For general accounts of the archive, see See Samuel D.
Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw
Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2007). See also Zoë Waxman, “Testimony and Representation,” in The
Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Houndsmills and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 490.
23 David Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence’: Postwar Responses to
the Destruction of European Jewry,” in Cesarani and Sundquist, After the
Holocaust, 15.
24 See Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence,’” for details.
25 Alan Rosen, “‘We Know Very Little in America’: David Boder and Un-
belated Testimony,” in Cesarani and Sundquist, After the Holocaust, 102 and
110. Rosen notes that even combined with other efforts to interview 7,000
survivors in Poland, 3,500 in Hungary, and 2,500 in Germany, only about 2–3
percent of DPs were every interviewed and that most did not want to speak
(102 and 110).
26 Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 11. By way of comparison, she writes that the
Shoah Visual History Foundation holds 52,000 testimonies (48,361 from
Jews); and the Fortunoff Video Archive holds 4,400 testimonies (p. 12).
27 Mark L. Smith, “No Silence in Yiddish: Popular and Scholarly Writing about
the Holocaust in the Early Postwar Years,” in Cesarani and Sundquist, After
the Holocaust, 55–65
28 Hasia R. Diner, “Origins and Meanings of the Myth of Silence,” in Cesarani
and Sundquist, After the Holocaust, 195. See also Hasia R. Diner, We
Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence
after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University, 2010).
29 Diner, “Origins,” 196–8.
30 Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 197–8.
31 This is true, for example, of accounts by resistors like David Rousett, Eugen
Kogon, and Pelagia Lewinska, who barely mention Jews in their books. See
also Janusz Nel Siedlecki, Krystyn Olszewski, and Tadeusz Borowski, We
Were in Auschwitz, trans. Alicia Nitecki (New York: Welcome Rain, 2000)—
the Polish original was published in 1946 under the title Byliśmy w
Oświęcimiu; and Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and
Gentlemen, ed. Barbara Vedder, trans. Barbara Vedder and Michael Kandel,
Reissue (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992)—originally published under the
title Pożegnanie z Marią in 1959.
32 Pieter Lagrou, “Facing the Holocaust in France, Belgium, and the
Netherlands,” in Lessons and Legacies VI: New Currents in Holocaust
Research, ed. Jeffrey M. Diefendorf, vol. 6 (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2004), 482–3.
33 Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence,’” 22–4.
34 Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 45. Cited from Lawrence Douglas, The
Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 12.
35 Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence,’” 29. The earlier quotation is
from Nehamiah Robinson of the Institute for Jewish Affairs.
36 Ibid., 32.
37 Waxman, “Testimony and Representation,” 493.
38 One might contrast Ka-Tzetnik’s success with the difficulties that Primo Levi
had in getting his memoir published in Italy. The manuscript of Se questo è
un uomo—“If This Is a Man,” but unfortunately changed in English to
Survival in Auschwitz—was rejected by six publishers before being published
in 1947 in a print run of only 2,500 copies by a press that folded soon
thereafter. See Confino, Foundational Pasts, 49; and Waxman, “Testimony
and Representation,” 496.
39 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 7 and 164. On the cultural construction
of trauma, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,”
in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron
Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 1–30. Cultural trauma is constructed,
Alexander argues, when a representative of a collectivity makes a claim that
goes beyond identifying guilt to address the broad social impact of the injury.
“It is a claim to some fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying
profanation of some sacred value, a narrative about a horribly destructive
social process, and a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic
reparation and reconstruction” (p. 11).
40 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Revised ed. (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1963), 6.
41 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 5 and 223–4. Felman points out that Dinur
did not volunteer to testify, but did so only very reluctantly as one of the few
material witnesses to have met Eichmann. Felman, The Juridical
Unconscious, 143.
42 In a German radio interview with Günter Gaus in 1964, Arendt described
how she and her husband refused to believe what they heard about Auschwitz
in 1943. The dawning realization of the extent of Nazi crimes later produced
existential trauma. “It was as if an abyss had opened,” she told Gaus. Quoted
in Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 150.
43 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 151.
44 Ibid., 153. Felman cites Claude Lanzmann’s argument that “[t]he worst moral
and artistic crime that can be committed in producing a work dedicated to the
Holocaust is to consider the Holocaust as past. Either the Holocaust is legend
or it is present: in no case is it a memory.” See Claude Lanzmann, “From the
Holocaust to ‘Holocaust,’” Dissent 28, no. 2 (1981): 194.
45 Michael Geyer and Konrad H. Jarausch, “Great Men and Postmodern
Ruptures: Overcoming the ‘Belatedness’ of German Historiography,”
German Studies Review 18, no. 2 (1995): 262–3 and 255.
46 Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the
Jews of Europe (London: Elek Books, 1956 [1951]), xiv. Quoted in Tony
Kushner, “Saul Friedländer, Holocaust Historiography and the Use of
Testimony,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul
Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies, ed. Christian Wiese and
Paul Betts (London & New York: Continuum, 2010), 67.
47 Raul Hilberg, “The Development of Holocaust Research—A Personal
Overview,” in Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges,
Polemics and Achievements, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 25–36, quotation from p. 29.
48 For a brief overview, see Kushner, “Saul Friedländer,” 69–70. The work of
Luisa Passerini in Italy and Paul Thompson and Raphael Samuel in Britain
was particularly significant.
49 See, for example, Saul Friedländer, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in
Historical Interpretation,” History & Memory 1, no. 2 (1991): 61–76.
50 Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
Final Solution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
51 Martin Broszat, “A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism,” in
Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate, ed.
Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 77–87. The term “morality-
free” is Confino’s. See Foundational Pasts, 33. Various summaries of the
debate and its later phases can be found in Dan Diner, ed., Ist der
Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit
(Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987).
52 Friedländer, “The ‘Final Solution,’” 32.
53 Confino, Foundational Past, 50. Browning, it should be noted, was quite
open to applying social scientific theories to historical arguments. See
Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and
the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper, 1993). But in the final
analysis, his methodology can still be described as following traditional
empirical methods. I will discuss his more recent research later in this
chapter.
54 Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York & London: W. W.
Norton, 2000).
55 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1975).
56 Hayden White, The Content and the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987), 21.
57 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 1.
58 Ibid., 8–9.
59 Ibid., 17. He particularly criticizes Arno Mayer’s methodological approach in
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
60 James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1988), 4.
61 Ibid., 5.
62 Ernst Nolte, “Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986. A comprehensive account that
dispassionately describes both the left- (Habermas) and the right-wing (Nolte)
sides of the debate can be found in Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past:
History, Holocaust, & German Nation Identity (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1988).
63 Dirk Rupnow’s contribution to this volume delves into this topic in more
detail.
64 Konrad H. Jarausch, “Zeitgeschichte und Erinnerung. Deutungskonkurrenz
oder Interdependenz?” in Verletztes Gedächtnis: Erinnerungskultur und
Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt, eds. Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow
(Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2002), 34.
65 Ibid., 10.
66 Hans Günter Hockerts, “Zugänge zur Zeitgeschichte. Primärerfahrungen,
Erinnerungskultur, Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Verletztes Gedächtnis, 41.
67 Aside from their individual publications, which are too numerous to list here,
see Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, “Das Gestern im Heute. Medien und
soziales Gedächtnis,” in Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die
Kommunikationswissenschaft, ed. Klaus Merten, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and
Siegfried Weischenberg (Munich: Westdeutscher, 1994), 114–40.
68 Rudolf Jaworski, “Die historische Gedächtnis- und Erinnerungsforschung als
Aufgabe und Herausforderung der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Verflochtene
Erinnerungen: Polen und seine Nachbarn im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed.
Martin Aust, Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, and Stefan Troebst (Cologne, Weimar,
and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 19.
69 See, for example, the three-volume study edited by Etienne François and
Hagen Schulze, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001);
Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit,
Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach
1945 (DVA: Stuttgart, 1999); Christian Gudehus, Ariane Eichenberg, and
Harald Welzer, Gedächtnis und Erinnerung: Ein Interdisziplinäres Handbuch
(Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2010). These are just a
few examples of a very rich literature that cannot be explored in detail here.
70 Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, new
edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). This book is an extended
exploration of the video testimonies housed at the Fortunoff Video Archive
for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University.
71 Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 31.
72 See also Allan Megill, “Two Para-Historical Approaches to Atrocity,”
History and Theory 41, no. 4 (2002): 104–23. A concerted recent effort to
bring historical and literary approaches into dialog can be found in Iris
Roebling-Grau and Dirk Rupnow, eds., Holocaust’-Fiktion: Kunst jenseits
der Authentizität (Paderborn: Fink, Wilhelm, 2015).
73 See Browning, Ordinary Men. This book certainly discusses the individual
experiences of perpetrators, but it relies on recorded trial testimony rather
than freely narrated accounts.
74 Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and
Postwar Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 38–9.
75 Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor
Camp (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 8.
76 He is specifically responding to Martin Broszat. For a description of the long-
running debate between these two historians, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi
Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London & New
York: E. Arnold & Routledge Chapman and Hall, 1993), 223; and Dan Diner,
“Between Aporia and Apology: On the Limits of Historicizing National
Socialism,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’
Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 135–45.
77 Confino, Foundational Pasts, 53–4.
78 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945: The Years of
Extermination (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xxv–xxvi.
79 Confino, Foundational Pasts, 53.
80 The original German version of this plea (cited in its English translation
above) was Martin Broszat, “Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des
Nationalsozialismus,” Merkur, no. 435 (May 1, 1985).
81 Ibid., 52 and 54.
82 The list of examples would be vast, but for a particularly influential example,
see Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, Opa war kein
Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt:
Fischer, 2002).
83 The history of emotions has also taken hold in German academia, as Ute
Frevert’s “History of Emotions” institute at the Max Planck Institute for
Human Development in Berlin makes clear. For a description of
methodological developments, see Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of
Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian
Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012):
193–220.
84 Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel claim that there is virtually no
reference to sexual violence in German documents. See their “Introduction,”
in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, ed. Sonja M.
Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Lebanon: University Press of New
England, 2010), 2. In light of more recent research, this claim certainly
requires revision. See the various accounts of documented sexual violence in
David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (London:
Macmillan, 2016); and Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldiers: On
Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret Second World War Tapes of German
POWs (London: McClelland & Stewart, 2012), esp. 164–75.
85 The experience prompted Saidel and Sonja Hedgepeth to begin work on their
collection of essays, Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust.
For an account of this experience, see Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua, “Silence
Surrounding Sexual Violence during Holocaust,” Haaretz, July 16, 2014,
www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/.premium-1.599099, accessed March 22,
2017.
86 One of the transcribers of the tapes of the POW conversations uncovered by
Neitzel and Welzer clearly found the discussions of incidents of sexual
violence so trivial that he stopped typing out the details of the conversations,
noting only the word “women” four times with time stamps at half-hour
intervals. Ibid., 170.
87 Ruth Seifert has argued that “one rule of the game [of war] has always been
that violence against women in the conquered territory is conceded to the
victor during the immediate postwar period.” See Ruth Seifert, “War and
Rape: A Preliminary Analysis,” in Mass Rape: The War against Women in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer, trans. Marion Faber
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 58. On rape as a weapon of
war, see Regina Mühlhäuser, “Reframing Sexual Violence as Weapon of
War: The Case of the German Wehrmacht during the War and Genocide in
the Soviet Union, 1941–1944,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 3
(2017): 366–401. On the myth that Rassenschande laws prevented rape, see
Helene Sinnreich, “‘And It Was Something We Didn’t Talk About’: Rape of
Jewish Women during the Holocaust,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of
Culture and History 14, no. 2 (2008): 1–22. On Rassenschande in general,
see Patricia Szobar, “Telling Stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: Race
Defilement in German, 1933 to 1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11,
no. 1/2 (2002): 131–63; and Alexandra Przyrembel, “Rassenschande”:
Reinheitsmythos und Vernichtungslegitimation im Nationalsozialismus
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003).
88 Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women’s Liberation
(London: Virago Press, 2000). Early and useful work on prostitution can be
found in Christa Paul, Zwangsprostitution: Staatlich Errichtete Bordelle Im
Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1995). I relied upon Paul’s
arguments in my two articles: Annette F. Timm, “The Ambivalent Outsider:
Prostitution, Promiscuity and VD Control in Nazi Berlin,” in Social Outsiders
in the Third Reich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 192–
211; and “Sex with a Purpose: Prostitution, Venereal Disease and Militarized
Masculinity in the Third Reich,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no.
1/2 (2002): 223–55. Important work on sexual violence as part of the
occupation of Eastern Europe (as opposed to within the concentration camps)
has been conducted by Regina Mühlhäuser. See her Eroberungen: Sexuelle
Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion
1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010); and Regina Mühlhäuser,
“The Unquestioned Crime: Sexual Violence by German Soldiers during the
War of Annihilation in the Soviet Union, 1941–45,” in Rape in Wartime, ed.
Raphaelle Branche and Fabrice Virgili (London and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), 34–46. See also Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and
Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
89 A volume currently in production and edited by Mark Roseman, Devin
Pendas, and Richard Wetzell will explicitly tackle the dominance of this
racial paradigm. See Beyond the Racial State (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2017). My contribution to the volume is entitled “Mothers,
Whores or Sentimental Dupes? Emotion and Race in Historiographical
Debates about Women in the Third Reich,” 335–61.
90 A focused, though not very convincing, argument about House of Dolls can
be found in Miryam Sivan, “‘Stoning the Messenger’: Yihiel Dinur’s House
of Dolls and Piepel,” in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the
Holocaust, 201–16.
91 It has perhaps become more common for survivors to acknowledge this
aspect of their experience. In the interviews conducted by the Shoah
Foundation, there are more than 500 that discuss rape. If we include other
forms of sexual violence and coerced sex, the number rises to 1,000. See
Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, “Introduction,” in Sexual
Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, 1.
92 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli
Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 47.
93 Carolyn J. Dean, “Empathy, Pornography, and Suffering,” Differences 14, no.
1 (2003): 92–8.
94 Ibid., 93.
95 For general accounts of these slave labor camps, see Ulrich Herbert,
Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des “Ausländer-Einsatzes” in der
Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1999);
Felicja Karay, Death Comes in Yellow: Skarzysko-Kamienna Slave Labor
Camp, revised ed. (Amsterdam: Routledge, 1997); and Mark Spoerer,
Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter,
Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa,
1939–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt DVA, 2001). The German
federal archives also provides a useful summary. “Zwangsarbeitslager /
Zivilarbeitslager,” Das Bundesarchiv, accessed August 16, 2016,
www.bundesarchiv.de/zwangsarbeit/haftstaetten/index.php?tab=27.
96 In earlier works, Sommer had only found 174 cases (see Robert Sommer,
“Sexual Exploitation of Women in Nazi Concentration Camp Brothels,” in
Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, 46–60, esp.
52), but by the time he wrote his book, he had uncovered at least
circumstantial evidence for around 200. See Robert Sommer, Das KZ-
Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in Nationalsozialistischen
Konzentrationslagern (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).
97 A similar argument might be made about other popular depictions of sexual
violence in the Third Reich, particularly the wave of Nazisploitation films
that were produced primarily in North America and Italy in the 1970s. Guido
Vitiello’s contribution to this volume explores this aspect of Ka-Tzetnik’s
reception in more detail. Silke Wenk argues, however, that the
“pornographization” of the Holocaust—the explicit appeal to emotions
through sexual themes—has the effect of fetishizing trauma and the female
body in particular in order to preserve the historical narrative from the
ruptures of the Holocaust. Silke Wenk, “Rhetoriken der Pornografisierung:
Rahmungen des Blicks auf die NS-Verbrechen,” in Gedächtnis und
Geschlecht: Deutungsmuster in Darstellungen des Nationalsozialistischen
Genozids, ed. Insa Eschebach, Sigrid Jacobeit, and Silke Wenk
(Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2002), 269–96, esp. 290.
98 Pascale Bos goes into more detail on this question in her contribution to this
volume, citing the work of Mühlhäuser, along with: Dalia Ofer, “Gender
Issues in Diaries and Testimonies of the Ghetto: The Case of Warsaw,” in
Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 143–68; and Katarzyna Person, “Sexual
Violence during the Holocaust: The Case of Forced Prostitution in the
Warsaw Ghetto,” Shofar 33, no. 2 (2015): 103–21, 156.
99 On the truth claims in Ka-Tzetnik’s work, see Iris Milner, “The ‘Gray Zone’
Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in Ka. Tzetnik’s Literary
Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (July 25, 2008): 113–55, esp.
115. On his techniques of literary realism, see Jeremy D. Popkin, “Ka-Tzetnik
135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History 33, no. 2 (April
1, 2002): 343–55.
100 Galia Glasner-Heled, “Reader, Writer, and Holocaust Literature: The Case of
Ka-Tzetnik,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 114.
101 The work of Dagmar Herzog has been path-breaking. See Dagmar Herzog,
“‘Pleasure, Sex and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and
the Sexual Revolution in West Germany,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998):
393–444; and Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in
Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
102 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 77.
103 He was interviewed for Jessica Ravitz, “Silence Lifted: The Untold Stories of
Rape during the Holocaust,” CNN, June 24, 2011,
www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/06/24/holocaust.rape/, accessed March
22, 2017.
104 It is striking that Langer seems to feel quite differently about the taboos
surrounding another form of violence that is notable in the testimonies he
explores but is rarely discussed in general accounts of the Holocaust:
cannibalism. In this case, he accepts that witnesses’ refusal to talk about
things “too terrible to describe” should not distract us from the fact that
cannibalism was a central component of the overall experience of the
Holocaust, in this case “the disruptive effects of hunger in the extreme camp
situation.” Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 213, fn. 28 and 208, fn. 18.
3
The Evil Spirits of the Shoah: Ka-Tzentik’s Literary
Testimony to Death and Survival in the
Concentrationary Universe
Iris Milner
Notes
1 Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
Final Solution (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992).
2 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive,
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 11–12. George
Steiner, among many others, expresses similar reservations, commenting that
“it is by no means clear that there can be, or that there ought to be, any form,
style, or code of articulation, intelligible expression somehow adequate to the
facts of the Shoah.” See George Steiner, “The Long Life of Metaphor: An
Approach to the ‘Shoah,’” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang
(New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 154–70. Quotation from p.
155.
3 Berel Lang, “Introduction,” in Lang, Writing and the Holocaust, 10.
4 “The suspension of disbelief integral to the reading of fiction runs counter to
the exacting demands one places upon testimony ... In the current critical
discussion, the facticity of history is frequently said to speak for itself ...
Literary representation remains suspect.” Sara Horowitz, Voicing the Void:
Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997), 20.
5 For a thorough discussion of the problematics of a literary representation of
the Holocaust, see Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “‘The Grave in the Air’: Unbound
Metaphors in Post-Holocaust Poetry,” in Friedländer, Probing the Limits of
Representation, 259–76.
6 See the use of these terms in James Young, “Holocaust Documentary Fiction:
The Novelist as Eyewitness,” in Lang, Writing and the Holocaust, 200–15.
Young mentions D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981) and Anatoly
Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel (1967) as examples of docu-
novels. The entire third section of Writing and the Holocaust, titled “Fiction
as Truth,” deals with relevant questions.
7 Rote Pops, Das Leed Fon Ghetto (Warsaw: Yiddish Buch, 1962). Joseph Gor,
the editor of Landsberger Lager Zeitung, a Yiddish newspaper published in
the DP camp in Landsberg, Germany, similarly referred to the “inflation of
poetry” (Inflazia fon poezia). See a discussion of the literary activities in the
DP camps and of Gor’s comments about it in the introduction to my book Ha-
narativim shel sifrut ha-Shoah (Ramat Gan: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008).
8 Ka-Tzetnik 135633 [Yehiel Dinur], Shivitti, trans. Eliyah Nike de-Nur and
Lisa Herman (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989). The book’s Hebrew title
is Ha-tzofen: E.D.M.A (Code: E.D.M.A.).
9 Yehiel Dinur, Salamandra, trans. Y. L. Baruch (Ramat Gan: Hakibbutz
Hameuchad, 1987 [1946]); and Ka-Tzetnik 135633 [Yehiel Dinur], House of
Dolls, trans. Moshe M. Kohn (London: Grafton Books, 1985 [1956]). Piepel
was originally published in Hebrew in 1961. It appeared in English both as
Piepel, trans. Moshe M. Kohn (London: Anthony Blond, 1961) and as Moni:
A Novel of Auschwitz, trans. Moshe M. Kohn (New Jersey: Citadel Press,
1963).
10 I borrow the term “concentrationary universe” from title of French survivor
David Rousset’s book L’Univers Concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions de
Minuit, 1965 [1946]).
11 On the reception of Dinur’s works as pornographic literature, particularly in
the 1950s, see Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other
Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2
(1997): 42–76.
12 Omer Bartov discusses these flaws in Ibid. For another harsh criticism of
Dinur in all these aspects, see Dan Miron, “Bein Sefer Le-Efer,” in Alpayim
10 (1994): 196–224.
13 Tom Segev relates some details of Dinur’s private life: his residence in a dark
cellar apartment in Tel Aviv and his habit of spending the nights on a bench
in Rothschild Boulevard; his marriage with Nina Asherman who had read his
novel Salamandra and had been determined to find its anonymous author; his
hiding from the public eye prior to and since the Eichmann trial; and his habit
of secluding himself for long periods of time in an empty hut in order to
write. See Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust, trans.
Haim Watzman (New York: Henry and Holt, 1991).
14 These theatrical gestures include his choice of the family name Dinur
(meaning in Aramaic “out of the fire”) and the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik
(derived from the German term Konzentrationslager); his habit of burning his
works upon completing them (Yechiel Szeintuch quotes Dinur on this subject
in his book Kemesiach Lefi Tumo [Jerusalem: Beit Lohamei Hagetaot & Dov
Sadan Institute, 2003]); his stealing and burning of library copies of a Yiddish
poetry book he had published in Poland at the age of twenty-two (Dan Miron
discusses this episode at length in his essay “Bein Sefer Le-Efer”); and the
recording and publication of his hallucinations in a post-trauma LSD
treatment he received in the 1980s (see Tom Segev on “Ka-Zetnik’s Trip,” in
Segev, The Seventh Million, 3–14).
15 The Preleshnik family possibly correlates, to some degree, to the author’s
family, originally named Feiner, although, as Dina Porat discusses in this
volume, there is great uncertainty about Dinur’s background. As Segev has
demonstrated, Dinur consistently refused to disclose any details regarding his
original family (Tom Segev, “Shiur Be-historia: Ha-achot She-hayta o lo
Hayta,” Haaretz, April 23, 2009). In a telephonic interview I conducted in
1999 with Prof. Yehudit Sinai, the half-sister of Dinur’s first wife Sanya
(portrayed in Salamandra as the little girl Lily), Prof. Sinai told me that in the
Sosnowiec ghetto Dinur lived in a small flat with Sayna and herself. Their
father, a wealthy shoe manufacturer, had left for Eretz Yisrael prior to the
war, to join his son who had studied in the Technion in Haifa. According to
Prof. Sinai, Dinur’s mother had died before the war, and his father lived in the
ghetto with Dinur’s younger brother and sister, Yitzhak and Malkale. Prof.
Sinai did not know if Dinur had another sister named Daniella or whether the
destiny of Moni and Daniella in The House of Dolls and Piepel reflects in any
way the fate of Dinur’s siblings.
16 Gorgio Agamben uses the term “new terra ethica” in this context. See
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 69.
17 Primo Levi uses this term in his book The Drowned and the Saved (I
sommersi ei salvati) published in 1986, written a short time before his death
by suicide on April 11, 1987. See Primo Levi, “The Gray Zone,” in The
Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage
Books, 1989 [1986]): 37–69.
18 Nazi racial laws prohibited sexual relations between Germans and Jews.
Thus, Jewish women could not be used in the concentration camps’ brothels,
which served German officers. According to Robert Sommer in his book Das
KZ-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen
Konzentrationslagern (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009), the women forced to
work in these brothels were of German, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, and
Polish origins, and none of them were Jewish.
19 Naama Schick, “Haguf Hamisken Hazeh—Hahitnasut Hanashit Al Pi
Haautobiografiot Shenichtevu Bein Hashanim 1946–2000 Al Yedei Nitsolot
Auschwith-Birkenau” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2004).
20 Iris Milner, “The ‘Gray Zone’ Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in
Ka-Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008):
113–55.
21 The issue of the acceptance of Holocaust survivors by Israeli society in the
first decades after the Holocaust is in itself a rather controversial one. Hanoch
Bartov has vehemently refuted the assertion that survivors were treated by the
Israeli collective (at the time highly devoted to the nation-building project and
to myths of heroism that supported it) in a paternalistic manner and denies
that they were blamed for their inability to fight back. See Hanoch Bartov,
“Hadiba Haraa’ al Adishuteinu Lashoah,” in Ani Lo Hatzabar Hamitology
(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1995), 26–36.
22 Saul Friedländer has commented that in the later decades of the twentieth
century, Israeli society had grown mature enough to confront the destruction
and desperation of the Shoah without attempting to place it within a
framework of heroism, as had been common in the first years after World
War II: “we can simply face [the Shoah] as it was, a catastrophe of untold
magnitude.” Saul Friedländer, “Roundtable discussion,” in Lang, Writing and
the Holocaust, 287–9. Quotation from p. 289.
23 Cathy Caruth, “Traumatic Awakenings,” in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative and History (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University
Press, 1996), 91–112.
24 Ibid., 102.
25 Lawrence Langer coined the term “choiceless choice” in his Versions of
Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University
Press, 1982), 72.
4
The Poetics of the Other Planet: Testimony and
Chronotope in Ka-Tzetnik’s Piepel
Or Rogovin
The past two decades have yielded a rich body of studies examining the
life and writing of Yehiel Dinur, who published the Salamandra sextet
(1945–87) under the name Ka-Tzetnik 135633. This is a significant and
encouraging development because, even today, the available scholarship
on Ka-Tzetnik is fairly limited, certainly in comparison to the vast and
unique body of his work and to the profound impact it left on the shaping
of Israeli Holocaust consciousness. The prolific use, in all types of Israeli
discourse, of the phrase the “Other Planet” to refer to the Nazi
concentration camps is but one example of such impact by a public figure
who, as Dan Miron observes, “fulfils in Israeli culture an almost official
role as the ‘spokesman’ of the Holocaust and its atrocities.”1 It is perhaps
because of Dinur’s iconic status and the testimonial value of his texts that
the poetics of his writing has received little scholarly attention. Although
Yechiel Szeintuch’s recent biographical investigation of this writer-
survivor is essential to any discussion in the field, it provides only a partial
examination of Ka-Tzetnik’s literary art, and it focuses on only one poem
and one book, both titled Salamandra.2 Dan Miron’s study of the 1993
scandal, which resulted when Dinur removed and destroyed an original
copy of his 1931 book of Yiddish poems from the national library in Israel,
zeroes in on Ka-Tzetnik’s persona and his work as a pre-war poet, while
the author’s craft in his Holocaust writing is of secondary interest.3
Although both Omer Bartov’s investigation of the author’s reception in
Israel and Iris Milner’s analysis of the ethical dimension of his writing
provide important observations on Ka-Tzetnik’s technique, neither focus
on poetics.4 While these and other studies certainly shed some light on
Salamandra’s narrative art, there has been a tendency to dwell too
narrowly on what has been described as “pornographic” descriptions or
“Kitsch and death” in Ka-Tzetnik’s narratives, to the detriment of serious
attention to the literary aspects of his writing.5 What is missing from the
existing scholarship, as valuable as it otherwise is, is a comprehensive
investigation of Ka-Tzetnik’s poetics: an attempt to identify the underlying
system of his writing, to formulate how the multitude of elements,
techniques, and dimensions of the Salamandra texts function
cooperatively to convey a worldview or experience and generate a readerly
effect. Such a system can reflect how Ka-Tzetnik’s vast textual project—
as well as the act of writing itself—is tied to extratextual factors, such as
the conditions of writing and the author’s biography, and it can allow for a
fuller integration of the literary text and the historical and cultural
circumstances of its creation.
A useful entry point into this system may be Yehiel Dinur’s brief
testimony at the Eichmann trial, most tellingly his denial of literary
calculation:
These lines are famous, especially since they were followed by Dinur’s
dramatic collapse on the witness stand, yet they are not usually analyzed
for their insight into his literary writing.7 In the context of his art, however,
the above-cited testimony proves especially valuable not as a metaphor but
literally as a key to what I propose calling the “Poetics of the Other
Planet.” By this phrase I refer to Ka-Tzetnik’s aesthetic mediation of the
world of the Holocaust, which, even if not conveying accurate historical
details, strives to generate within the reader a perception and
conceptualization of the camps as they were experienced “from within”—
at least in terms of Dinur’s own testimonial insights. How does Ka-
Tzetnik’s literary construction of the Nazi camps constitute a planet? What
forms this planet’s otherness? What is the poetic manifestation of these
“different laws of nature” that governed the camps? Answers to these
questions and others come to light when the “concentrationary universe” in
Ka-Tzetnik’s writing is examined against the background of historical
facts, on the one hand, and various textual articulations of these facts, on
the other.8 A close reading of the differences may reveal the principles that
govern Ka-Tzetnik’s textualization of the camp and, through them, the
perspective and experience that his poetics strive to convey. Piepel (1961),
the third book in the Salamandra sextet and perhaps Ka-Tzetnik’s best,
provides the richest possibilities for this analysis.9 With a plot that takes
place entirely within Auschwitz and with its multifaceted exploration of
the camp’s operations through the personal stories of its inmates, Piepel
constitutes the fullest realization of Ka-Tzenik’s perspective, experience,
and poetic vision.
The edges of the camp were invisible. Coils of mist shrouded the
upper rows of barbed wire. Now the camp seemed shrunken, again it
seemed boundless, covering the entire world.11
All the blocks are identical. Everywhere the same triple-tiered
hutches along the walls. Everywhere the same long brick oven
bisecting the entire length of the block, the same skeletons, five
hundred on the right, five hundred on the left.12
All around him they lay, as afar as the eye could reach in the dark:
camplings above him, below him, to his right, and to his left. He lay
amidst them like a single particle of sand bearing the seed of a huge
mountain. He lay among them in one of the blocks in one of the
endless camps of the Auschwitz planet, but the horror of
Auschwitz’s infinity has taken hold deep in his soul—whole and
undivided.15
Needless to say, the death camps were hostile and lonely spaces, especially
for a young boy such as Moni. But in Ka-Tzetnik’s writing these feelings
are not conclusions drawn from facts or given directly as testimony.
Rather, they are integrated into the descriptions of the character’s
experience and generated as a readerly effect by the construction of the
camp itself as alien, abstract, and undifferentiated space. In such spaces, as
Bakhtin observes, “man can only function as an isolated and private
individual, deprived of any organic connection with ... his own social
group ... He does not feel himself to be a part of the social whole. He is a
solitary man, lost in an alien world.”16 In the camp, the alienation of the
individual from the world means that the individual is lost, consumed,
extinguished among the endless blocks and masses.
Ka-Tzetnik’s construction of space becomes especially tangible when
contrasted with a representation governed by entirely different principles.
In the following passage, which opens the Wassermann section of David
Grossman’s See Under: Love (1986), Anshel Wasserman is taken to the
office of the camp commander, Herr Neigel:
Outside the barbed wire the lorries rode without cease. He knew
there was no “outside.” Outside it is the same as inside. Outside-
Germans, and inside-Germans. He’s been “outside.” That’s where
the Germans brought him from. He knew that “outside” no more
home or family existed. Not only his home, and not only his family.
Outside there were only Germans. Everything else was here, inside.
Everything ended on the inner side, at the barbed wire, at the electric
mesh.21
The day had unfurled over Auschwitz. A new Auschwitz day, but
familiar in every scent and hue. One just like it was here yesterday,
and one just like it will be here tomorrow—after you. Besides it,
there is nothing here. Everywhere-Auschwitz. As far as the eye can
see—an Auschwitz-latticed sky.31
In the agonizing and desperate experience of camp life, time and space
fuse into an indistinguishable, inescapable, and infinite sequence that
language can capture only from within: an “Auschwitz day,” an
“Auschwitz sky.” The Other Planet erases any different, previous, normal
existence, along with one’s ability to sense or even imagine such an
existence. There is only Auschwitz, from within and from without. There
is nothing but it, in time, space, and mind.
The temporal experience of the Other Planet distorts the conventional
perception and measurement of time. While the counting of hours
dominates the characters’ sense of time as their bodies collapse into the
irreversible stage of becoming Muselmänner, days, months, and years are
suspended in a world where, to quote Elie Wiesel, “the stomach alone was
measuring time.”32 And the stomach can only measure hours between
meals, leaving the hungry temporally disoriented and helpless, without a
concrete grip on the time that has passed and without the basic ability to
draw comfort from the length of survival or to make plans for the future.
The inhabitants of the Other Planet are as lost in time as they are in space.
Making this perception of time into a readerly effect is no simple task
given that writing about fictional or factual events of the Holocaust always
assumes a well-defined timeframe that stretches between 1933 and 1945.
Even readers only remotely familiar with the history of the Holocaust tend
to be aware of when plots located in the Nazi camps must end, and this
assumption holds even more strongly for Hebrew and Yiddish audiences.
Ka-Tzetnik approaches the challenge by extending the temporal
experience of the Other Planet from the declarative and thematic level into
his poetic design. Moni’s six-hour timeframe is a key factor in shaping his
line of plot, and his growing psychological distress as he observes the
hours pass in hunger is shared with the reader since the world of the camp
is discovered through this character’s mediating consciousness. Through
the coordinated reworking of these two opposing timeframes—accelerated
biologized hours and suspended longer units of time—Ka-Tzetnik
weakens his readers’ grip on the historical timeframe as they move further
and further into his story, replacing it with an experiential, inner sense of
time. Although describing a place with a familiar temporal setting and an
obvious date of termination, Ka-Tzetnik desynchronizes our—and his
characters’—sense of historical and camp time, allowing only the latter to
dominate the text. From a perspective that is interior to the camp, clock-
time quickly becomes obsolete, and the devastating otherness of the
Auschwitz planet and the sense of isolation and helplessness it imposes
upon its concentrationees is revealed.33 All that is left is the sense of the
rapidly collapsing body over a calendar that has frozen.
The temporal dimension of the Other Planet is observed most clearly
when considered against the background of the chronotope of the Greek
romance, which Bakhtin uses as a point of departure for his theoretical
discussion. In the abstract, interchangeable, and alien space of the Greek
romance, where no organic relationship between people and world can be
developed, characters are passive and lack initiative; they are constantly at
the mercy of the absolute power of chance. This vulnerability in space,
however, is balanced by the temporal dimension of a chronotope, in which
the order of events could be altered and even reversed while leaving
characters unaffected. “Greek adventure time,” Bakhtin observes, “leaves
no traces—neither in the world nor in human beings,” and characters can
continue to be thrown from one adventure into another infinitely and in
any order.34 Bakhtin’s definitions help us to understand the daunting
invincibility generated by the chronotope of the Other Planet. Its spatial
dimension is atypical of the modern European novel, especially the realist
novel, with its localized events and depiction of concrete details of a world
which is familiar or native to its dwellers, hence a world offering the
potential to empower characters and limit the absolute power of chance.
This type of space Ka-Tzetnik reserves for scenes set in the ghetto. In
contrast, his narration of the camp adopts the spatial dimension Bakhtin
observes in the Greek romance (with its interchangeable, alien, and
abstract space), which renders the characters powerless. Time in the camp,
on the other hand, does comply with the conventions of the European
novel in terms of having an impact on characters and in the way that the
author utilizes the theme of “becoming” and a “man’s gradual formation”
through developing experience.35 However, while European novels tend to
actualize characters’ growth in the form of “education” or “coming of age”
(as in the genre of the Bildungsroman), in the camp time has the opposite
effects almost exclusively. Even as every passing moment in principle
brings the Ka-Tzets closer to possible liberation and allows time to procure
a life-saving Funktion, it also weakens their bodies and minds. Every
moment on the Other Planet accelerates mental and physical aging toward
becoming a Muselmann. The intersection of time and space in Ka-
Tzetnik’s textualization of the camp constitutes a diabolic hybrid that
might be called a “concentrationary chronotope.” In the world governed by
this chronotope, the individual is powerless and isolated in an alien and
interchangeable space, always at the mercy of the absolute power of
chance and defenseless before psychological and physical formation. This
formation almost exclusively takes the form of dwindling spiritual and
biological resources to the inevitable point of collapse.
For they left me, they always left me, they were parted from me, and
this oath appeared in the look of our eyes. For close to two years
they kept on taking leave of me and they always left me behind. I
see them, they are staring at me, I see them, I saw them standing in
the queue.
Hundreds of human shadows drag by Moni, this way and that. Their
blank stares collide with him as they seek something, not
remembering what. They crawl down from their hutches, go out of
their blocks to the latrine, but they no longer know the way. They
cannot tell the front of the camp from the rear, where the latrine is
located. All blocks look alike. Everywhere are the same rows of
barbed wire and the same block gates.42
The rift between Moni and the Muselmänner in this passage is evident not
only in the fact that the child clearly resides in the domain of the living
while the Muselmänner have crossed the threshold into that of the dead.
Perceived against the background of the latrine and the camp, Moni and
the Muselmänner differ in their relation to space. For Moni the camp is an
alien world, an interchangeable space deprived of particularities, with its
endless duplicable blocks, wires, and masses, a space that has continuously
been closing in on him and that he has ceaselessly been trying to push
away. For the Muselmänner, this interchangeable space is not alien at all.
This is not because they have formed organic connections with it—of that
they are incapable—but because they share the qualities of this space and
have become part of it. “You could never tell the skeletons of one block
from the skeletons of another,” Moni observes upon entering a random
block, “just as you could never tell the hutch board of the left side from the
hutch boards of the right. All the boards of all the Auschwitz hutches are
identical, just like the skeletons lying on them.”43 Like the camp’s
topography, the Muselmänner are deprived of individual identities; they
are endless in number and identical in appearance, and they are threatening
in the type of death they epitomize, even more than the sentinels in the
towers, the beatings, and the disease. It is for the Muselmänner, Ka-
Tzetnik observes, that “Auschwitz was created: from the smokestacks to
the barbed-wire walls, from the block to the sentries in the watchtowers.”44
Most importantly, while Moni agonizes in fear of becoming a Muselmann
and constantly analyses the risks and possibilities around him, a single
mind seeking insights about the nature of the place, the Muselmänner
remain indifferent, patient, helpless but at peace with their fate. Their
actions reflect the end of the struggle, and their minds remain sealed for
both the reader and Moni, who seems to be fascinated by them and longs
for their tranquility.
The haunting, ghostly presence of the Muselmänner reflects the
dynamics of two interconnected minds. “I see them, they are staring at
me,” Dinur relates his unbreakable mental bond with the nameless
inhabitants of the Planet of Auschwitz. Just as they haunt him in his post-
Auschwitz life, his waking moments, and his nightmares, so they surround
his hero, little Moni, following every step of his struggle to survive in the
camp. These nightmarish figures, who haunt the author’s memory, also
haunt his characters’ present and determine the narrative’s substance and
shape. It is from this perspective that Ka-Tzetnik calls the Muselmänner
“human shadows.” In addition to capturing their mode of existence in both
the author’s remembrance of the past and in the life of his hero in the
narrative present, the phrase fuses the appearance of Muselmänner with
their conceptual status. As shadows they are between light and darkness,
as bodies they are between life and death, and in the conditions of
Auschwitz they are what is left of the living body as well as the reflection
of the dead body, which is about to emerge. Ka-Tzetnik’s poetics of the
Other Planet integrates the Muselmänner into the plots as shadows of the
living, accompanying them wherever they go in their physical presence,
but also acting as an intrinsic signpost of the inevitable and immanent end.
In another of Moni’s visits to the latrine, the narration of his experience
and stream of thought is interspersed with a description of a group of
Muselmänner, who appear out of the darkness:
Notes
1 It must be noted that despite the popular belief, the phrase “Other Planet”
does not appear in the testimony Dinur gave at the Eichmann trial, where he
uses the phrases “Planet of Auschwitz” and “Planet of Ashes.” The “Other
Planet” seems to have made its earliest appearance a decade-and-a-half
earlier, in Ka-Tzetnik’sfirst book, Salamandra (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1946), 216.
Yet, considering the phrase is merely given in passing in a large novel, it is
unlikely that it is from Salamandra that it made its way to public discourse.
Ka-Tzetnik’s most extensive use of the phrase is made in his final book,
Tsofen: EDMA (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz hameuhad, 1987), translated in English
as Shivitti, trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa Herman (New York: Harper &
Row, 1989); Dan Miron, “Beyn sefer le’efer,” Hasifriya haiveret (Tel Aviv:
Yediot Ahronot, 2005), 148. Originally published in Alpayim 10 (1994): 196–
224.
2 Yechiel Szeintuch, Salamandrah: Mitos Ṿe-Hisṭoryah Be-Khitve K. Tseṭniḳ
(Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009). For some of this study’s findings in English, see
Yechiel Szeintuch, “The Myth of the Salamander in the Work of Ka-
Tzetnik,” trans. Daniella Tourgeman and Maayan Zigdon, Partial Answers:
Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 3, no. 1 (2005): 101–32.
3 For more about the event, see Miron, “Beyn sefer le’efer.”
4 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth
Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 42–76. Iris
Milner, “The Gray Zone Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in Ka.
Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 113–
55.
5 Galia Glasner-Heled investigates reader responses to Ka-Tzetnik’s daring and
hard-to-bear descriptions of atrocity, and Howard Needler analyzes the
scriptural dimensions of Ka-Tzetnik’s use of Hebrew: Galia Glasner-Heled,
“Reader, Writer, and Holocaust Literature: The Case of Ka-Tzetnik,” Israel
Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 109–33; and Howard Needler, “Red Fire upon Black
Fire: Hebrew in the Holocaust Novels of K. Tsetnik,” Writing and the
Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes, 1988), 234–44. See also
Galia Glasner-Heled, “Et Mi Meytseg Ka-Tzetnik,” Dapim le-Kheker ha-
Shoah 20 (2005): 167–200. Rina Duday discusses Dinur’s use of fictional
writing as a protective barrier between him and the horror, a barrier that
enables his testimony. Rina Duday, “Kitsch vetraquma—mikre mivhan: Beit
habubot me’et Ka-Tzetnik,” Mikan 6 (2005): 125–42.
6 Dinur’s testimony is available in English at
www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-
068-01.html, accessed March 22, 2017. The website provides the complete
protocol of the trial. All quotes from Dinur’s testimony included in this
chapter are from this website, and in some cases, they have been slightly
amended to reflect the Hebrew original more accurately.
7 The most extensive analysis of Dinur’s testimony and court performance is
provided in Shoshana Felman’s The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and
Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2002), 131–66. Felman’s discussion uses “psychoanalytical vocabulary
informed by jurisprudential trauma theory” and conducts a dialog (146) with
Hannah Arendt’s report on Dinur in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil, revised edition (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1963).
8 The term “concentrationary universe” (“L’univers concentrationnaire”) is
David Rousset’s. See his The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New
York: Reynal & Hitchcok, 1947).
9 The Hebrew edition is Kar’u lo Piepel (Tel Aviv: Am Hasefer, 1961),
translated as Moni: A Novel of Auschwitz, trans. Nina De-Nur (New York:
Lyle Stuart, 1963). Throughout this chapter, I refer to the book as Piepel,
which is closer to the original Hebrew title, and I quote from Moni while also
providing the reference to the Hebrew original.
10 Ka-Tzetnik, Beit habubot (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), 172; House of Dolls, trans.
Moshe M. Kohn (London: Senate, 1997), 131.
11 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 176; Moni, 198.
12 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Piepel, 73; Moni, 85.
13 M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl
Emerson, revised ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 100.
Bakhtin’s vague definition of the term “chronotope” as “the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature” poses a continuous challenge to scholars (84).
Holquist and Emerson define the term in their glossary as “a unit of analysis
for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial
categories represented ... an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at
work in the culture system from which they spring” (425–6). Gary Soul
Morson and Caryl Emerson provide a thorough discussion of Bakhtin’s essay
in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1990), 366–432. More useful for our purposes is Bernhard Scholz’s
approach to the chronotope. He sees it as a “principle of sequentially and
appositionally ordering a manifold of events.” It must not be thought of as an
element of the work, but as a “principle of generating plots of narratives.” See
his “Bakhtin’s Concept of ‘Chronotope’: The Kantian Connection,” in The
Contexts of Bakhtin: Philosophy, Authorship, Aesthetics, ed. David Shepherd
(London: Routledge, 1998), 160.
14 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 224–5; Moni, 252.
15 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 72; Moni, 85 (translation with my modifications based on
the Hebrew original).
16 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 108.
17 David Grossman, See Under: Love, trans. Betsy Rosenberg (New York:
Washington Square, 1989), 187.
18 The use of the fantastic is one of the distinguishing markers of Holocaust
representation in the fiction of the second generation, where it serves as a
means of dealing with the taboos involved in writing about the topic. For an
elaborate discussion of the issue, see Gilead Morahg, “Breaking Silence:
Israel’s Fantastic Fiction of the Holocaust,” in The Boom in Contemporary
Israeli Fiction, ed. Alan Mintz (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1997),
143–83.
19 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 100–101.
20 Ibid., 243.
21 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 225; Moni, 252.
22 For discussions of time and routine in camp life, see, for example, Wolfgang
Sofsky, The Order of Terror, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 73–93; and Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice
of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them,
trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 73–80.
23 As we know from Dina Porat’s biographical essay in this volume, Dinur’s
testimony conflated the time that he spent in the main Auschwitz camp (about
six months after his arrival in August 1943) and the Auschwitz sub-camp
Günthergrube camp in Lędzin (then called Lendzin), from where he left on
the death march that led to his escape in January 1945.
24 The term Muselmann refers to inmates in the final stage of emaciation and is
commonly explained as an allusion to the fatalism or prayer movements of
Muslims. See Sofsky, Order, 199–205. The spelling of the term varies, and it
is standardized here following Sofsky as “Muselmann” in singular and
“Muselmänner” in plural. For a compelling discussion of Funktion, see Primo
Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York:
Vintage, 1989), 36–69.
25 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 32; Moni, 41. Italics in Moni.
26 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 205; Moni, 231.
27 Ibid.
28 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz hameuhad, 1987), 27; Ka-
Tzetnik, Sunrise over Hell, trans. Nina de-Nur (London: Corgi, 1977), 29. All
references are to these two editions. The first edition of the novel Salamandra
was written in Yiddish in 1945 and published in Hebrew translation in 1946.
In 1971, Dinur published a revised Hebrew edition, which served as basis for
the English translation.
29 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 211; Moni, 237–8.
30 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 84.
31 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 102; Moni, 119.
32 Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day, trans. Marion Wiesel
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 70.
33 “Concentrationee” is David Rousset’s term for the inhabitants of the
concentrationary universe, the Ka-Tzets. Rousset, Kingdom, 102.
34 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 106.
35 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, 392–3.
36 Felman, Juridical Unconscious, 147.
37 Piepel, 225; Moni, 252–3.
38 Aharon Appelfeld, “After the Holocaust,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed.
Berel Lang (New York: Holmes, 1988), 92.
39 Boaz Neumann, Reiyat haolam hanatzit (Heifa: University of Heifa Press,
2002), 208.
40 Zdzisław Ryn, “Between Life and Death: Experiences of Concentration
Camp Mussulmen during the Holocaust,” Genetic, Social, and General
Psychology Monographs 116, no. 1 (1990): 7.
41 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans.
Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier, 1961), 82.
42 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 43; Moni, 53.
43 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 73; Moni, 85.
44 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 43; Moni, 53.
45 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 199–200; Moni, 224–5.
46 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 203; Moni, 228. Ka-Tzetnik’s spelling is
“Mussulmanity,” which is standardized here according to “Muselmann.”
47 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 154; Sunrise over Hell, 210
48 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 205; Moni, 230.
49 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 154; Sunrise over Hell, 210.
50 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 247. For a concise discussion of the term
“chronotopic motif,” see Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin, 374–5.
51 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 247.
52 Ibid.
53 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 85.
54 Ibid., 107.
55 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 393.
56 M. M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of
Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and
Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. Mcgee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 23.
57 Ibid. Italics in original.
58 “Focal character” or “focal hero” is the character through whose perspective
the story is narrated. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in
Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 189–
98.
59 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 105, 81; Moni, 122, 94. See also p. 9 of the Hebrew for
descriptions of Moni’s eyes, which are not rendered in the translation.
60 Levi, Survival, 82. Another survivor describes the Muselmänner as having
sad faces and “vacant expression, eyes lacking luster did not react to their
environment.” Others describe them as “messengers of death in the camp”
and “apathetic ... seemed to be already dead, did not reflect the will to live,
but blind and vacuous hunger.” Cited in Ryn, Life and Death, 12.
61 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 43; Moni, 53
62 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 256; Moni, 286.
63 In the original Hebrew, the judge and Dinur use the phrase shem sifruti
(“literary name”) for “pseudonym,” hence Dinur’s reference to “writer of
literary material.” The most extensive discussion of Dinur’s enigmatic choice
and use of the name “Ka-Tzetnik” is Jeremy Popkin’s, who observes that
“‘Ka-Tzetnik 135633’ is not a pseudonym, but the real identity of the author
who wrote the words that were published as Salamandra and all the books
that followed. The continuous reenactment of the loss of identity that
occurred in Auschwitz is only part of the significance of Ka-Tzetnik’s
gesture, however. The other half is his insistence that the story he tells is that
of all the prisoners, and particularly of those who did not survive” (347). See
his “Ka-Tzetnik 135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History
33.2 (2002): 343–55.
64 For a discussion of the chronicle’s characteristics, see Philippe Carrard,
“Chronicle,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David
Herman, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 63–4;
Harry E. Barnes, A History of Historical Writing (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1937): 64–8.
65 The Hebrew original in fact reads that the chronicle is “out of” (Heb. mitoch
haplaneta) rather than “of” the planet, which strengthens Dinur’s inner view:
not a chronicle “of,” written in retrospect, but a chronicle “out of,” as if
extracted from the place.
66 The phrase the “Other Planet” appears in the 1971 Hebrew edition of
Salamandra (140), but is missing from Sunrise over Hell (188). The quote
“distanced from the land of men” appears in the Hebrew Piepel (53) but is
omitted from the English Moni (64).
67 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 243.
68 Ibid., 243, 85.
69 Ibid., 85. Bernhard Scholz, “Bakhtin’s Concept of ‘Chronotope’: The Kantian
Connection,” The Contexts of Bakhtin, ed. David Shepherd (London:
Routledge, 1998), 161.
70 Indeed, as Scholz indicates, “what Bakhtin actually does in all of his analyses
of historically manifest chronotopes” is to “reconstruct chronotopes and plots
as corollaries of each other.” Ibid., 160.
5
Sexual Violence in Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls
Pascale Bos
We cleansed our bodies and we are pure/We cleansed our spirits and
are at peace/death shall not frighten us/ ... /We served God in our
life/we shall know how to hallow his name in death/ ... Let the
unclean ones come to defile us/we do not fear them/before their eyes
we shall drink the cup of poison and die/innocent and pure, as befits
daughters of Jacob/ ... Wherever you are/recite the Kaddish for
us:/for the ninety three maidens of Israel.26
Both Bavli’s poem and the original letter were translated into English and
were widely disseminated through both communal publications and
sermons in American synagogues of all denominations. The poem was
republished in The Reconstructionist, the movement’s journal, another
poem and a short story based on New York Times account were published
in The Jewish Forum and in Opinion, both publications which nearly
exclusively reached Jews.27 The story was also repeated in several
editorials of Jewish communial publications, many of which added details
that were not in the original letter, such as the assertion that the girls were
taken to a Nazi brothel to be used as prostitutes for German soldiers or the
SS.28 Within a few years the story came to be included in the Yom Kippur
liturgy, and it played an important part in the early American Jewish
imagination about the Holocaust during the war when little accurate
information was available, continuing to exert an influence for several
decades after. Although the story eventually came to be read by most as
metaphorical rather than historical, Sara Horowitz suggests that the
popularity of the Bavli’s poem means that it “may be considered a core
component of an evolving Jewish American Holocaust folk canon.”29
Unbeknownst to contemporaries, however, the letter that formed the basis
for the New York Times article and that garnered such significant attention
within the Jewish community was fictional, an anonymously authored and
invented story designed to draw American attention to Nazi atrocities in
Europe and to the increasingly desperate plight of Polish Jewry.30
What made this narrative of sexual violence by Nazi men so compelling
is that it could serve so many purposes. First and foremost, the story of
sexual brutality and/or of immoral sexuality (depending on how one
interprets it) affirmed the Nazis’ purported depravity, as stories about
enemy rape tend to do. The Holocaust, imagined as the scandal of brutal
Nazi sexual enslavement of pious Jewish girls became a press agenda item,
a subject of political engagement. Politicizing sex and sexual violence
serves as a powerful ideological tool in nationalist wars, as a culturally
shared ideal of “respectability” is central to the construction of modern
European national identity, and a “normative” (heterosexual, consensual)
sexuality is pivotal in the solidification of this respectability, as George
Mosse has shown.31 Thus, some antifascist discourse deliberately
sexualizes fascism and fascist nations and pronounces them sexually
perverse, deviant, and sexually violent in order to politically discredit these
nations and their politics as culturally debased.32 Furthermore, with its
focus on young “innocent” females, the story generated a degree of
empathy for its victims that exceeded the reaction elicited by military
deaths or even summary execution of male civilians. As Nicoletta F.
Gullace has shown, a paternalistic appeal for intervention on behalf of
women and children has traditionally been effectively used as one of the
main justifications to get involved in military conflicts.33 Such a story
about sexual enslavement created outrage while serving as a call for action
to pressure the US government for intervention in Nazi Europe on behalf
of the Jews. In that sense, the story functioned much like accounts from
The Black Book of Polish Jewry, a large US-published volume from
December 1943 that contained information from eye witness accounts
(mostly affidavits and depositions made by refugees who escaped), press
reports, bulletins of the Polish Telegraphic Agency, and photographs,
recounting the Nazi persecution of Jews in Poland while it was still
unfolding. The purported aim of the volume was to inform a broad
American audience of the details of the ongoing massacre, to elicit
sympathy for the victims, “to awaken the hearts and conscience of the
nations of the world” and provoke outrage at the crimes and the
perpetrators, and to call for intervention to “save the remnants of Polish
Jewry.”34
In addition, the narrative’s focus on the girls’ devotion fit a traditional
religious interpretation: the story’s plot of Jewish resistance and the
confirmation of the values of piety and chastity could be read as spiritually
redemptive within the observant Jewish community. Because both the
news article and the poem touch only obliquely upon the horrors of the
Holocaust and end in self-chosen martyrdom, they confirm the strength
and resistance of the observant Jewish girls, rather than their
powerlessness in the face of Nazi violence. The horrors of the Holocaust
were thus made less threatening to the Jewish religious community. While
the suicides were tragic, the girls’ honor and the community’s honor
remained intact: “Theologically speaking,” Horowitz argues, “nothing ...
changed.”35 However, an interpretation that celebrates martyrdom in the
face of rape betrays a troubling vision of sexual violence as primarily a
transgression of Jewish law rather than as an act that causes emotional and
physical harm to its victims while implying that it is better to die than to be
raped.36
Finally, at a time when very little accurate information about the events
in Europe was available, this fictive story about sexual violence helped
bridge the gap of comprehension that separated an American (Jewish)
audience from understanding the devastating nature and scale of Nazi
atrocities, for which there was no historic precedent in Jewish history.
Horowitz suggests that sexual violation “domesticates the Holocaust,
diminishing its horror to something more ordinary.” It “universalizes the
experience of Nazi atrocity, making it more accessible to American
readers and writers.”37 While that may indeed be its effect, I argue that it is
the unprecedented nature of the violence that led to the use of this analogy,
rather than an actual intent to domesticate, familiarize, or universalize it.
Without an adequate analogy to convey the horror, this violence was
instead imagined in the form of rape or sexual enslavement, both of which
were crimes for which there was historic familiarity, thus making the
inconceivable conceivable.
Yet, picturing Nazi violence as sexual slavery in the context of a
traditional understanding of gender and sexuality—deeming men to be
“naturally” sexually aggressive and women passive and vulnerable—and
depicting forced prostitution as a sexual act rather than as an act of
violence through sexual means, would result in concrete consequences for
actual female Holocaust victims after the war. The broad dissemination of
a wartime narrative of Nazi sexual slavery of Jewish women and the
association of Nazi atrocities with sexual violence forged a powerful link
between the two within the American Jewish community’s (still
rudimentary) understanding of the Holocaust that proved difficult to
remediate even after 1945. The effect of imagining this violence as sexual
in nature and as common Nazi practice meant that all female survivors
were perceived as possible rape victims, which implied the accusation that
they must have “submitted” to rape in order to survive—indeed, that they
served as Nazi prostitutes willingly. As this story took hold, it came to
obfuscate the actual form that sexual violence took during the Holocaust—
within the ghettos and labor camps, it was often as likely or even more
likely for Jewish women to have experienced sexual coercion and violence
at the hands of other inmates, non-Jews as well as Jews38—and it silenced
survivors.39
This particular reading of the Holocaust with sexual slavery at its center
and Jewish communal honor and integrity at stake would become even
more pronounced as the story traveled to another Jewish community
removed from the Holocaust, British mandate Palestine, and later Israel.
The soldier assures her that her survival is deserved and that she is
welcome in Palestine, in “our land.” With a reference to the Song of
Solomon, he even suggests that her presence is a hallowed one: “Dark and
comely art thou, my sister. Dark, because seared by suffering/but comely,
more beautiful to me than all other beauty, holier than all holiness.” The
poem repeats the opening line almost verbatim, and the soldier continues:
“I know: evil people have tortured her and made her barren.” The poem
ends with another affirmation by the young soldier that she is wanted in
this land, and he suggests that it is for her and for other survivors that the
soldiers are risking their lives in war:
It is these famous last lines that have led to much critical discussion of the
poem since the 1990s, especially by younger so-called “new” or
“revisionist” Israeli historians who took Israel’s founding Zionist discourse
to task for the way that it had instrumentalized the Holocaust in order to
support the political and military goals of the founders of the Israeli
state.61
From a narrative perspective, what stands out in the poem “My Sister
on the Beach” is that the text and the subtext seem so clearly in conflict
with each other and that the poem is dominated by a strong gender binary.
On the surface, the text presents a scene of rescue and of homecoming.
The young sabra soldier states his love for the survivor. Yet what the text
also reveals is the soldier’s profound lack of patience and understanding
toward her—his presumptions about her experiences and feelings. The
authoritative voice with which the narrator/soldier recounts what she has
endured is remarkable: without the survivor having uttered one word, the
narrator states that he already “knows” what she has experienced. Indeed,
there is no need for her to tell her painful and presumably shameful story,
because it is already written on—branded in—her chest for all to see: she
served as a Nazi prostitute “for Officers Only.” The soldier thus “knows”
that she was tortured and made “barren,” presumably through
gynecological medical experiments, forced sterilization, venereal diseases,
or repeated rape. What is made visible here in a very literal sense is that
rape in wartime is in essence a form of communication between men, in
this case of Nazi men to Jewish men. As Ruth Seifert argues, “the rape of
women ... communicates from man to man ... that the men around the
women in question are not able to protect “their” women. They are thus
wounded in their masculinity and marked as incompetent ... [M]any men
regard their masculinity as compromised by the abuse of “their”
women.”62 Sadeh imagines his Jewish sisters as literally branded as Nazi
property, and his concern is what this humiliation will mean for the men of
his nation, rather than for the women. His answer is revenge: he and his
men will be “brave” and “cruel.” This cruelty is not directed at the
perpetrator, however, after all, the Nazis are already defeated. Instead it
needs to be understood as a warning, as an internal battle cry in the war the
Jewish nation will fight against the Arabs. This is what will happen (again)
to our women, if we are not careful, Sadeh’s poem warns, and the poem
therefore bears some similarity to “The Ninety-Three” in its function as a
cautionary tale.
Read by its contemporaries as a historical essay—as fact rather than as
a poem that bespeaks a very particular Zionist and gendered imagination
of the Holocaust in service of the present political and military situation—
this poem had a significant impact. The portrayal of the survivor and the
soldier is thoroughly structured by a gender binary that assigns positive
attributes to the male and negative attributes to the female.63 Whereas
Israel’s soldier is masculine, strong, rooted (native, at home), and hopeful,
the Jewish survivor from the Diaspora is feminine, vulnerable, uprooted
(foreign, homeless), and in despair. This binary gets likewise extended to
her morality and virtue: while the soldier is intact, virile, brave, and pure,
the survivor as prostitute is damaged, defeated, tainted, and to blame. The
image of sexual slavery does not elicit pity, but contempt. Tom Segev
argues that it is not a coincidence that the Holocaust is “symbolized by a
prostitute” as it is “a continuation of a common stereotype that depicted
[the Diaspora] as weak, feminine, and passive, and the [Y]ishuv as strong,
masculine, and active. The sabra represented a national ideal, and the
Holocaust survivor its reverse.”64 It is important to note that there is still
quite an imaginary leap from depicting European Jews as feminine,
vulnerable, and powerless (and in need of masculine protection) to their
portrayal as sexual slaves. Thus whereas the poem seems to suggest that
the survivor will be embraced by the new nation as a sister, a mother, an
equal, the subtext is one in which her survival—at the cost of prostitution
—makes her guilty and in which her (female) body bears the literal stamp
of her shame and complicity. It is the woman’s “defilement” that became
her “ticket to life,” as Idith Zertal puts it,65 while this very defilement
brings a humiliation to Jewish men that needs to be avenged, or as the case
may be, prevented in future wars.
The poem not only fits with how most survivors were perceived in
Palestine at the time: as “diminished” physically, psychologically, morally,
and as “pathetic creatures who had no control over their fate,”66 it also
confirmed a commonly held suspicion that many Jewish women had been
victimized by rape, sexual slavery, and sterilization. Such judgment hit
female survivors particularly hard. Once more detailed news about the
concentration and death camps became available, many in the Yishuv
found it simply impossible to imagine that young women could have
survived the camps at all and therefore assumed that they could have only
done so by “offering up” their bodies.67 Here, wartime rumor and
assumption led to the creation of a mythical narrative that was read by its
audience as truth, as historical fact.
In Sadeh’s patriotic Zionist narrative, the arresting “knowledge” about
the Nazi sexual violation of Jewish women transformed from a quasi-
religious eulogy on the ninety-three martyred maidens that still engendered
the reader’s compassion to a poem in which a female victim of Nazi sexual
exploitation symbolizes the physical and moral ruin of Diaspora Jewry.
Despite the soldier’s assertions, Sadeh’s “sister on the beach” is clearly no
longer “whole” nor “holy.” It is this view of survivors as weak and as
morally compromised that Dinur and tens of thousands of Jewish
immigrants from Europe encountered when they arrived in Palestine. Most
could do little to counteract this discourse, as they were as of yet “still
outside the social mainstream.”68 Yet as someone who was already
reasonably fluent in Hebrew, Dinur’s integration may have been somewhat
easier. His voice entered this discourse as one of the first survivors, and his
alternative vision of the Holocaust experience as recounted from within—
from the perspective of the survivor—was instrumental within Israeli
literature of the late 1940s and 1950s.
Notes
1 See Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans.
Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 5; Jeremy D. Popkin,
“Ka-Tzetnik 135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History 33,
no. 2 (2002), 343.
2 Today, Ka-Tzetnik’s works are difficult to find in English as many are out of
print.
3 While a German translation became available in Israel in 1960, Dinur only
allowed for the publication of House of Dolls in Germany after 1980; yet this
early edition contains significant changes from the original. See the review of
the first German edition in “Wie Flucht,” Der Spiegel, January 12, 1981.
4 Harry Preleshnik has the same inmate number as the pseudonym that Dinur
adopted, 135633, leaving the reader little choice but to interpret the work as
autobiographical. For more on the significance of this particular pseudonym,
see Popkin, Ka-Tzetnik, 343–55.
5 Nitsa Ben-Ari, “Suppression of the Erotic: Puritan Translations in Israel
1930–1980,” The Massachusetts Review 47, no. 3 (2006), 515. “Sublimation
became an integral part of Zionist ideology, both reinforcing the puritanical
character of the movement and reverberating with echoes of the past ...
Zionism continued to subscribe to the suppression of the erotic for the sake of
‘higher goals’” (Ibid., 523).
6 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israel Youth
Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 42–76; and
Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Bartov argues that what made
Dinur’s literature so appealing to a young readership is the work’s “obsession
with violence and perversity” and that the novels resemble juvenile literature.
Bartov, Mirrors, 189.
7 The US mass marketing of paperbacks began in 1939 as a copy of the UK
model of Penguin paperbacks: by bringing inexpensive editions of hardcover
books on the market outside of the traditional literary marketplace (in
drugstores, newsstands, stations, and grocery stores). The genre only really
took off when American publishers added attractive, colorfully illustrated
covers. Following World War II, other publishing houses joined this market,
and as books could now be published directly as paperbacks (the so-called
“Paperback Original”), this allowed for the publication of more risqué
storylines and cover art. This new genre of cheap, delinquency-oriented
novels was heavily influenced by the presumed reading taste of the GI and
geared toward the male customer more generally, as editors assumed that “If
we can make this interesting for the boys, we don’t need to worry about the
girls. The boys will accept them, and the girls won’t have any choice. The
girls always go along anyway.” Ann Bannon, “Foreword,” in Jaye Zimet,
Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1949–1969 (New York:
Viking Studio, 1999), 9. This “fed a broader range of fiction exploiting
deviant behavior of all sorts; books sensationalizing sex, drugs and illegal or
salacious activity of every kind found their way onto paperback racks, their
title and cover art fighting each other for attention.” Zimet, Strange Sisters,
17.
8 In the novel, the inscription “Feld-hure” is not a tattoo but “branded into the
skin with a stamp” (Ka-Tzetnik, Dolls, 133). This discrepancy suggests that
the illustrator may have had some general sense of the novel’s content but had
not actually read the text. While the stamp seems unusual, before the Nazis
began to tattoo Auschwitz inmates on their lower left arm with a single
needle, they did experiment with a metal stamp made up of needles with
which they could punch any set of numbers onto the prisoner’s left upper
chest (after which ink would be rubbed into the needle wounds). See “Tattoos
and Numbers: The System of Identifying Prisoners at Auschwitz,” US
Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed September 9, 2016,
www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007056. Note, however,
that such tattoos were only used in Auschwitz and that Daniella supposedly
received this tattoo at another camp. There is furthermore no historical
evidence that the Nazis ever used a “Feld-Hure” branding or tattoo.
9 The image also reappeared in languages other than English. The 1955
Yiddish hardcover edition (k. Cetnik 135633, Dos Hoiz Fun Di Lialkes,
Bikher-Serie Dos Poilishe Yidntum 115 [Buenos Aires: Union Central
Israelita Polaca en la Argentina, 1955]) first featured this illustration in black
and white, with the title and author name set in white and yellow type. The
1960 GOPA German-language edition, which was published in Paris under
the title “Freuden-Abteilung!” exclusively for the German readers in Israel (it
explicitly forbade the sale of this book in Germany), uses the same image but
here a photo is used, framed by an orange background and the title is in white.
The photo is identical to the image of the Yiddish edition, and all illustrated
covers with this image, even those that were published before this edition,
seem to be based on this photograph. There are also later editions that have
new and stylistically updated versions of this image on the cover, such as the
1965 Serbian Epoha edition (the woman on the photo looks out of the frame
sideways), the 1980 American Mayflower/Granada edition (with an updated
version of the photo), and a 1987 Spanish edition by Ediciones
Internacionales Futuro (this cover contains a new but similar illustration and
adds a Nazi figure standing right behind the shoulder of the woman, with
watchtowers in the background).
10 Meyer Levin, “Out of the Depths of Nazi Bestiality,” New York Times, May
1, 1955.
11 This version is #G326 in the Pyramid Books series and was published in
1958. The cover painting is by Gerald Powell, who was a popular illustrator
of pulp paperback and magazine covers in the 1970s. As a fascinating aside,
this exact same cover illustration, minus the tattoo, was used by a competing
paperback publisher (Digit/Brown, Watson) in the same year for an entirely
different Holocaust memoir, Ravensbrück (translation of Un camp très
ordinaire from 1957) by the French political prisoner Micheline Maurel. It
even carries the same byline borrowed from the Meyer Levin review of
House of Dolls: “As Real as The Diary of Anne Frank.” This suggests that the
mass marketing of such texts in the United States was aimed at selling the
greatest number of copies possible and that such marketing was formulaic and
even came at the cost of truthful advertising.
12 The women-in-prison genre emerged first in the cheap 1930s’ pulp novel in
the United States. Usually it offers a melodramatic story of a young woman
who finds her way back to a righteous life after a temporary transgression, but
not until the reader has gotten a voyeuristic view at a female universe where
men only appear as jailors. By the 1950s, this genre had been readapted to the
more upscaled paperback market, after the immense success of Tereska
Torrès’s Women’s Barracks (published in the United States in 1950 as a
paperback original). The Jewish Torrès had fled her native France to join the
Free French forces in London, and her book was meant to be a fictionalized
but serious account of this experience. As the novel contained lesbian
relationships and was published with a salacious cover, it inadvertently
became a scandalous bestseller (selling over two million copies between 1950
and 1955) and was singled out as an example of moral corruption by the
House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in their 1952
hearings. This only gave the book more notoriety and led to a revamping of
the genre in both paperback and film.
13 See the covers of the Pyramid paperback editions, illustrated by Larry Lurin
and published in 1968 and 1969.
14 While serious consideration of Dinur’s work has increased in Israel since the
author’s death in 2001, up until this point, major works of international
Holocaust scholarship have not included this novel. See Bartov, Mirrors, 280.
Bartov’s 1997 essay was one of the first scholarly discussions of House of
Dolls in English.
15 I quite like Bartov’s description of Dinur’s writing as a “bizarre and startling
mixture of kitsch, sadism, and what initially appears as outright pornography,
with remarkable and at times quite devastating insights into the reality of
Auschwitz.” Bartov, Mirrors, 188.
16 Ben-Ari detects in translations a tendency to avoid “the spoken vernacular”
and instead a choice of “a register that is overall high in stylistic and
linguistic markers” (Ben-Ari “Suppression,” 524). Whereas House of Dolls is
technically speaking not a translation, there are strong indicators that it was
thought up as, and perhaps even written as, a Yiddish-language text initially,
and that the difficulty in translating the graphic descriptions of the “Joy
Division” scenes to Hebrew led to its awkwardness, which subsequently can
be found as well in the English translation from the Hebrew.
17 See, for instance, Regina Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen: sexuelle Gewalttaten
und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1945
(Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 2010), and Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen,
“Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during
World War II” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2004). On incidents of
Jewish barter sex as well as coercion and rape in the Warsaw ghetto, see
Dalia Ofer, “Gender Issues in Diaries and Testimonies of the Ghetto: The
Case of Warsaw,” in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J.
Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 143–68; and
Katarzyna Person, “Sexual Violence during the Holocaust: The Case of
Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Shofar 33, no. 2 (Winter 2015):
103–21, 156.
18 For a thorough historical examination (and rejection) of the claim that Jewish
women were sexually enslaved by the Nazis for use in military or
concentrationcamp brothels, see, for instance, Christa Paul and Robert
Sommer, “SS-Bordelle und Oral History: Problematische Quellen und die
Existenz von Bordellen für die SS in Konzentrationslagern,” BIOS 19, no. 1
(2006): 124–42; Robert Sommer, “Camp Brothels: Forced Sex Labour in
Nazi Concentration Camps,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in
Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2009), 168–96; and RobertSommer, “Sexual Exploitation of
Women in Nazi Concentration Camp Brothels,” in Sexual Violence against
Jewish Women during the Holocaust, eds. Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle
Saidel (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010): 46–60. For more
on the Nazi practice of forced prostitution generally, see Christa Schikorra,
“Forced Prostitution in the Nazi Concentration Camps,” Lessons and
Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar
Herzog (Chicago: Northwestern Press, 2006), 169–78; Helga Amesberger,
Katrin Auer, and Brigitte Halbmayr, Sexualisierte Gewalt: Weibliche
Erfahrungen in NS-Konzentrationslagern (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2004); and
Brigitte Halbmayr, “Sexualized Violence against Women during the Nazi
‘Racial’ Persecution,” in Hedgepeth and Saidel, Sexual Violence, 29–44.
19 Despite evidence on the contrary, the argument that there indeed was
organized sexual enslavement of Jewish women is made by scholars such as
Helene Sinnreich, who claims that “Jewish women were forced to serve in
German brothels” (9). Helene Sinnreich, “‘And It Was Something We Didn’t
Talk About’: Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust,” Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 14, no. 2 (2008): 9–13. However, if
one looks closely at the sources Sinnreich cites, they all reflect cases of Nazi
soldiers or even officers going into ghettos and even barracks of
concentration camps, hand-picking one or more Jewish women, taking them
away to private quarters or another location outside of the ghetto or camp,
and raping them (and often subsequently murdering them). However heinous
such crimes of sexual violence are, and however common they may have
been in certain locations and at certain points in time, these cases should not
be misconstrued as a form of organized recruitment of Jewish women into
German military brothels with the intent to make them work as prostitutes for
Nazi soldiers. There is no evidence to support the latter claim.
20 Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz, German Holocaust Literature (New York: Peter
Lang, 1985), 62.
21 Most English editions of the novel contain statements on the front or back
covers that suggest that the work is autobiographical, based as it is on the
author’s experiences and on the author’s sister’s “authentic diary.” For
instance, Meyer Levin’s review of the novel in New York Times called it “As
real as The Diary of Anne Frank.” Levin, “Out of the Depths,” BR4. See also
the advertising for this book: “Just published: The story of a young Jewish
girl forced into prostitution by the Nazis ... A novel based on an authentic
diary.” Display ad in New York Times, May 1, 1955, BR23, and “This novel
has been acclaimed for its dramatic impact and, above all, its truth ... Why
should such accounts as these be written? The answer is simple: the truth, no
matter how shameless, must be known.” Display ad in New York Times, June
5, 1955, BR32.
22 Besides the artistic license Dinur took in writing about a kind of Jewish
sexual slavery that never existed, the question of what is autobiographical in
his work is difficult to assess, since, as Dina Porat explains in her contribution
to this volume, many details of his personal life cannot be verified.
23 Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
24 Hanna Yablonka, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel:
The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials,” Israel Studies 8, no.
3 (2003), 6. It is the general consensus of Israeli historians that this particular
view of survivors would not substantially change until after the 1961
Eichmann trial. See also Idit Gil, “The Shoah in Israeli Collective Memory:
Changes in Meanings and Protagonists,” Modern Judaism 32, no. 1 (2012),
84–5; Yechiam Weitz, “Political Dimensions of Shoah Memory in Israel
during the 1950s,” Israel Affairs 1, no. 3 (1995), 129–45; Julia Resnik, “Sites
of Memory’ of the Holocaust: Shaping National Memory in the Education
System in Israel,” Nations and Nationalism 9, no. 2 (2003), 293–313; and
Roni Stauber, “The Jewish Response during the Holocaust: The Educational
Debate in Israel in the 1950s,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish
Studies 22, no. 4 (2004), 57–66.
25 “93 Choose Suicide before Nazi Shame,” New York Times, January 8, 1943,
8.
26 Hillel Bavli, “The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens,” Hadoar 22, no.
12 (January 22, 1943), 186. English translation in High Holiday Prayer Book
for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: A Contemporary Service. Compiled by
Marlboro Jewish Center, Congregation Ohev Shalom (Marlboro, NJ: 2011),
135.
27 See Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust
(London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), 118–38.
28 See Baumel, Double, 122.
29 Sara R. Horowitz, “Martyrdom and Gender in Jewish-American Holocaust
Memory,” Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures,
eds. Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick (New York: Routledge, 2006),
180.
30 It is not known who wrote the letter. The back story is that the letter
supposedly came to the United States by way of Switzerland and was sent on
to the secretary of World Beth Jacob Movement in New York at the
beginning of 1943. Subsequently, a rabbi wrote an accompanying
explanation, and the Chair of the American Beth Jacob Committee sent a
translated and abridged version on to New York Times. See Baumel, Double,
118, 121. Whether any of these men created the forgery, were in on it, or
were deceived themselves, is unknown.
31 George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual
Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 6.
While Mosse refers to Nazi ideas about sexual deviancy, as Laura Frost
points out, such standards of sexual normality and deviance were just as
central in the construction of respectability and national identity in modern
Britain, France, and the United States as they were in Germany. Laura Frost
Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell
Universiy Press, 2002), 6.
32 Germans were already depicted as rapists during World War I in British and
French literature: “Germany’s sexual practices are imagined to be as
aggressive and undemocratic as her politics: Germany is a nation of rapists
and sadomasochists.” Frost, Sex Drives, 20.
33 Gullace argues that during World War I this strategy was effectively used in
British anti-German propaganda directed at Americans, which marketed “an
evocative, sentimental, and deeply gendered version of the conflict to the
wider American public” by way of a “highly sexualized image of German
monstrosity.” Nicoletta F. Gullace, “War Crimes or Atrocity Stories? Anglo-
American Narratives of Truth and Deception in the Aftermath of World War
I,” in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era
of Human Rights, ed. Elizabeth Heineman (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 107. Gullace does not mean to argue that the
Germans did not commit acts of sexual violence during this war, but merely
that many of the British reports had no bearing on these actual crimes and
need to be understood as atrocity propaganda.
34 Jacob Apenszlak, Jakób Kenner, Isaac Lewin, and Moses Polakiewicz, eds.,
The Black Book of Polish Jewry: An Account of the Martyrdom of Polish
Jewry under the Nazi Occupation (New York: American Federation of Polish
Jews in cooperation with the Association of Jewish Refugees and Immigrants
from Poland; Roy Publishers, 1943), xvi. A small subsection of Chapter 2
deals with the charge of Nazi sexual slavery under the heading “Brothels for
the Conquerors.” It describes two separate statements claiming that in either
November of 1939 or early 1940, or both (it is unclear whether the statements
refer to the same purported incident), the Nazis sought to establish a brothel
in Warsaw for their soldiers and that they were seeking local women to work
there, including “fifty Jewish girls.” The Jewish Council members were
outraged at the request and refused. The Black Book concludes in the next
paragraph that the Germans did not pursue this plan but did commit many
other acts of sexual violence against Jewish women in Warsaw, and it sums
up a set of other incidents in the following paragraphs, which proves that the
“racist principles of the Nuremberg Laws were not always strictly applied to
the Germans to the Jews of Poland” (25).
35 As Horowitz has argued, by interpreting their deaths by suicide as an act of
martyrdom, the story provides “religious comfort and theological meaning.”
Sara R. Horowitz, “The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust
Memory,” in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and
Its Aftermath, eds. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York:
Berghahn 2005), 168.
36 For a critical analysis of Talmudic thought about martyrdom in the face of
sexual violation, see Horowitz, “Martyrdom and Gender,” 180–86.
37 Sara R. Horowitz, “Mengele, the Gynecologist, and Other Stories of
Women’s Survival,” in Judaism since Gender, eds. Miriam Peskowitz, and
Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997), 210.
38 See Dalia Ofer, “Gender Issues in Diaries and Testimonies of the Ghetto: The
Case of Warsaw,” in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Leonore J.
Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 143–68; Joan
Ringelheim, “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust,” in Women in the
Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Leonore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998), 340–50; and Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times
of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 3 (2013): 503–33.
39 See also Pascale Bos, “Her Flesh Is Branded: ‘For Officers Only’
Imagining/Imagined Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the
Holocaust,” in Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the
Holocaust in a Changing World, eds. Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014): 59–85.
40 Baumel, Double Jeopardy, 123–4.
41 The Zionist leadership’s ambivalence toward the European Jewish
community during and right after World War II has been the source of much
scholarly debate in Israel for the past twenty-five years. For good overviews
of this discussion, see Gulie Ne’eman Arad, “Israel and the Shoah: A Tale of
Multifarious Taboos,” New German Critique 90 (2003), 5–26; Hanna
Yablonka, “The Formation of Shoah Consciousness in the State of Israel: The
Early Days,” in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, ed.
Efraim Sicher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 119–36; Hanna
Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel after the War (New York: New
York University Press, 1999); Hanna Yablonka, “Development”; Segev,
Seventh, 1993; Weitz, “Political Dimensions,” 1995; Stauber, “The Jewish
Response”; Gil, “The Shoah in Israel,” 76–101; Idith Zertal, From
Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Idith Zertal, Israel’s
Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, 2nd ed., trans. Chaya Galai
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Zertal offers the most
critical assessment of Ben Gurion’s and Mapai’s political leadership.
42 “The rise of the Nazis was seen as confirming the historical prognosis of
Zionist ideology.” Segev, Seventh, 18.
43 “The story of the [Y]ishuv leaders during the Holocaust was essentially one
of helplessness,” Segev argues. “They rescued a few thousand Jews from
Europe. They could, perhaps, have saved more, but they could not have saved
millions.” Segev, Seventh, 82. About 50,000 Jews arrived in Palestine during
the war, of which 16,000 were smuggled in illegally.
44 See Segev, Seventh, 84–5.
45 By the spring of 1947, the number of Jewish Displaced Persons neared
250,000.
46 See Segev, Seventh, 154.
47 Yablonka suggests that even though Holocaust survivors made up only one-
third of all the troops during the 1948 war (as many were unable to learn
Hebrew well enough to function in administrative roles), survivors were
disproportionally assigned to fight at the front. Hanna Yablonka, “Holocaust
Survivors in the Israeli Army during the 1948 War: Documents and
Memory,” Israel Affairs 12, no. 3 (2006): 465. One-third of the survivor
troops died during this war. See Segev, Seventh, 177.
48 See Segev, Seventh, 154.
49 See Judith Tydor Baumel, “Bridging Myth and Reality: The Absorption of
She’erit Hepletah in Eretz Yisrael, 1945–48,” Middle Eastern Studies 33, no.
2 (1997): 362–82.
50 Arad, “Israel,” 7.
51 In Ari Libsker’s (otherwise problematic) documentary film Stalags, Uri
Avnery—Israeli journalist, author, and former politician, who himself arrived
with his parents from Nazi Germany in Palestine in 1933—states that “During
the war we all ignored what was happening to the Jews. There were rumors,
some information, but the general tendency was to simply ignore them.”
Many Israelis argued that the European Jews should have saved themselves:
“why didn’t they come here?” This is their own fault—they could have
emigrated in time, as we did. There was absolute alienation. Also, there were
always questions asked: “what did you do in order to stay alive? How come
you survived?” Ari Libsker, Stalags [Stalagim] (Heymann Brothers Films,
Yes Docu, New Israeli Foundation for Cinema & TV, Cinephil, 2007).
52 As Segev points out, “the bluntest expression” of this contemptuous view of
survivors can be found in a Hebrew slang word that was used at the time to
refer to survivors: “sabon” or soap, which was based on the erroneous notion
that the Nazis turned Jewish corpses into soap. Segev, Seventh, 183.
53 Whereas this group of resistance fighters had been very small and only some
of them had been Zionists, they were claimed as “men of the land of Israel in
the Diaspora.” Many had in fact been Bundists (secular Eastern European
Jewish socialists who were for the most part anti-Zionist), socialists, or
communists rather than Zionists. Stauber, Response, 62. See also Mooli Brog,
“Victims and Victors: Holocaust and Military Commemoration in Israel
Collective Memory,” Israel Studies 8, no. 3 (2003), 65–99; Daniel Gutwein,
“The Privatization of the Holocaust Memory, Historiography, and Politics,”
Israel Studies 14, no. 1 (2009): 36–64; Weitz, Political, 1995; and Yablonka,
“Formation.”
54 Arad, “Israel,” 8.
55 Yablonka offers an interesting, dissenting view from the common narrative
by suggesting that it was actually the small group of Zionist Jewish resistance
fighters who came to Palestine between 1945 and 1947 who set the tone for
this narrative of “contrary possibilities: The Judenrat ... that played by the
German rules ... and, the armed underground that fought the Nazis, redeemed
Jewish honor” (“The Development of Holocaust Consciousness,” 5). Even in
the early 1950s, she argues, “Holocaust discourse in Israel took place ... as an
internal discourse among the survivors that radiated outward to general Israeli
society” (Ibid., 10). Myers Feinstein argues similarly that for survivors the
identification with the resistance fighters and Partisans already took place in
the DP camps of Europe and that they brought this narrative to Palestine,
rather than that Zionist ideology imposed it. Margarete Myers Feinstein, “Re-
imagining the Unimaginable: Theater, Memory, and Rehabilitation in the
Displaced Persons Camps,” in After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of
Silence, eds. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (London: Routledge,
2012), 52.
56 This is a biblical term first used in this context by famed survivor-poet and
former resistance fighter Abba Kovner in 1941 (Segev, Seventh, 120).
57 Segev, Seventh, 118–19. One survivor recounts that “In almost every
[encounter] ... the question would come up of how we had remained alive. I
was asked again and again and not always in the most delicate way. I had a
feeling that I was being blamed for having stayed alive.” Segev, Seventh, 160.
58 Rachel Feldhay Brenner, “‘Ideologically Incorrect’ Responses to the
Holocaust by Three Israeli Women Writers,” CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture 11, no. 1, accessed September 7, 2016.
59 Yitzhak Sadeh, “My Sister on the Beach” in Zertal, Catastrophe, 262–3. First
published under the pen name Y. Noded as “Ahoti al hahof,” in Alon
Hapalmach in 1945, republished in Sefer Hapalmach (The Palmach Book),
ed. Zerubavel Gilead (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchdad, 1953), 725.
60 In actuality, only a very small number of survivors made it to Palestine in this
fashion, but much was made of these illegal attempts to land on the shores of
Palestine despite British blockades and strict immigration quotas. “[E]ven
though it was the Jewish refugees who made the clandestine immigration
campaign possible, and bore it ‘on their shoulders’ much more than they were
borne by the sons and daughters of the Land of Israel, it was these Zionist
natives who were immortalized in poem and mythic tale.” Zertal,
Catastrophe, 221.
61 These historians rewrote the history of the formative years of the state (1947–
1952) from a critical perspective rather than from a Zionist standpoint, to
show the lack of successful rescue attempts of European Jewry by leaders in
the Yishuv, the effects of the Zionist ideology of “negation of the Diaspora,”
and the Yishuv’s post-war focus on settlement, development, and defense,
rather than on survivors. The work of Segev and Zertal is most well known in
the United States. For overviews, see Anita Shapira and Ora Wiskind-Elper,
“Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the ‘New Historians’ in
Israel,” History and Memory 7, no. 1 (1995), 9–40; and Ilan Pappé, “The
Vicissitude in the 1948 Historiography of Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies
39, no. 1 (2009), 6–23.
62 “In belligerent disputes the abuse of women is an element of male
communication” that intends to humiliate men. Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape:
A Preliminary Analysis,” in Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 59.
63 Both Idith Zertal and Ronit Lentin focus on this gendered aspect of the poem.
Ronit Lentin, Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the
Territories of Silence (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 206–9. While Lentin’s
reading is insightful, she does not comment specifically on the depiction of
the woman as victim of sexual violence. Zertal reads “My Sister on the
Beach” as an “internal ... mobilizing speech” in which nevertheless a trace of
the “repressed, the silenced, the erased” within the Zionist myth of Jewish
redemption is apparent. Rather than “encounters of love and compassion ...
acceptance, of homecoming” that it professes on the surface, the poem reveals
“terror and horror ... about the immanent threat” these survivors embodied
“for the sons of the land” (Zertal, Catastrophe, 264, 266).
64 Segev, Seventh, 179–80.
65 Zertal, Catastrophe, 269. “Her very survival, her being alive after the
Holocaust is shameful testimony to her double betrayal—her betrayal of
herself, her femininity, and her betrayal of her people—by surrendering her
body to [Nazi] officers.” Zertal, Catastrophe, 268.
66 Yablonka, “Formation,” 121.
67 Na’ama Shik suggests that it was deemed “common knowledge” in Israel
“that Jewish women ‘served’ as whores for the SS and for German soldiers in
some camps and on the Eastern front.” Na’ama Shik, “Sexual Abuse of
Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Brutality and Desire: War and
Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 242. Halbmayr argues similarly: “Jewish women
who as concentration camp survivors arrived in Israel or pre-Israel Palestine
... were falsely condemned as having been prostitutes off the SS.” Halbmayr,
“Sexualized Violence,” 39. Nili Keren has also argued that “In the first years
after the end of the war, following initial encounters with relatively young
women who survived even the death camps, many in Israel, and perhaps
elsewhere, believed that these women had paid for their survival with their
bodies, with their sexual purity. There was much talk of German brothels and
of the medical experiments conducted on women’s bodies.” Nili Keren, “A
Voice Grown Strong,” Haaretz, May 25, 1997. See also the discussion in
Libsker, Stalagim (Stalags): survivor author Ruth Bondy and Shik both
recount how Israelis assumed in the 1940s (and some continue to believe to
this day) that one needed to have been ruthless in order to survive, and that it
was a process of a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” rather than “mere
chance.” Whereas male survivors were accused of having been kapos, female
survivors were thought to have been prostitutes—especially if the women
were beautiful, young, and childless. Whereas Bondy links these assumptions
as stemming directly from House of Dolls, my analysis shows that such
presumptions predate Ka-Tzetnik’s work by at least a decade.
68 Yablonkla, “Formation,” 9.
69 He seems to have written his first two novels (and possibly three) in Yiddish
first and subsequently to have translated them to Hebrew.
70 What makes the work difficult to classify as either memoir or fiction is “Ka-
Tzetnik’s avowed purpose to give a comprehensive account of the experience
of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime: for that purpose he wrote
episodes dealing with situations that he had not personally witnessed, in
particular, several sections of The House of Dolls.” Yechiel Szeintuch, “The
Myth of the Salamander in the Work of Ka-Tzetnik,” trans. Daniella
Tourgeman and Maayan Zigdon, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and
the History of Ideas 3, no. 1 (2005): 120. The desire to speak not only of his
own experiences but that of all victims of the Holocaust is also visible in his
choice of an impersonal pseudonym—going by Ka-Tzetnik rather than
Yechiel Dinur—which suggests that he is merely one inmate among millions.
71 Segev claims that Dinur mentioned that the woman in Sadeh’s poem was a
relative of his and that the poem served as the inspiration for House of Dolls.
Whereas Dinur thus reaffirms what he claims is the historical basis of his
story, I read it as a confirmation that he knew of this influential poem. Tom
Segev, “Dreaming with Shimon: If Shimon Peres’ Dreams Had Become
Reality, They Would Have Changed the Face of History,” Haaretz, July 19,
2007.
72 Technically speaking, the novel has an auctorial narrator—an omniscient
narrator who is not a participant within the story—yet the emphasis within the
story on Dinur’s alter ego Harry receiving Daniella’s writing after she dies
suggests otherwise. As Popkin points out, “At the time when [Dinur] wrote
Salamandra, autobiographical literature that was written in the form ‘of
novels [narrated] in the third person’ was quite common.” Popkin, “Ka-
Tzetnik 135633,” 345.
73 House of Dolls is typical for what David Roskies calls khurbn-literatur:
“True tales of the ghettos and camps that employed modes of enhanced
authenticity, such as confessions, autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries, lest
... they be read as ‘mere’ fiction.” David G. Roskies, “Dividing the Ruins:
Communal Memory in Yiddish and Hebrew,” in Cesarani and Sundquist,
After the Holocaust 91. The diary functions as a device that allows Ka-
Tzetnik to be a legitimate narrator in a story about Jewish women inmates
that he would otherwise by definition not have been privy to as a male. The
presence of the diary fabricates this part of the novel’s authenticity. As James
Young points out, the words of Holocaust diaries can be read “as material
fragments of experiences ... the current existence of [the] narrative is causal
proof that its objects also existed in historical time.” Moreover, “diaries can
be far more convincing of their factual veracity than more retrospective
accounts ... the diary accrues the weight and authority of reality itself.” James
E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1988), 23, 25.
74 The terms used in the book in German are “Arbeit durch Freude” and
“Freudenabteilung” (“Joy Division”). These are probably bastardizations of
the German term “Freudenhäuser,” popular parlance for brothels, and can be
read as a conflation of the notorious slogan “Arbeit macht frei” on the gate of
Auschwitz and “Kraft durch Freude” (strength through joy), a popular Nazi
program of leisure and travel that ran through 1939.
75 It is important to note that all of these details are fictitious: while sterilization
was part of the medical experimentation conducted at a number of
concentration camps, the (non-Jewish) women who worked in camp brothels
were not sterilized. The branding or tattoo on the chest was never used in
brothels, either. The term Feldhure was a generic German term for prostitutes
who served soldiers on the front.
76 His wife Nina Dinur claims that “In order to cauterize the subject matter of
any trace of pornography and get at the quintessence of this unprecedented
grief, Ka-Tzetnik rewrote the book five times. House of Dolls is the fifth and
final version.” “Ka-Tzetnik 135633,” Contemporary Authors Online,
accessed September 6, 2016, http://infotrac.galegroup.com/default.
77 See Anna Przyrembel, “Transfixed by an Image: Ilse Koch, the
‘Kommandeuse of Buchenwald,’” German History 19, no. 3 (2001): 369–99.
It is important to note that “The sadistic female Nazi is an almost exclusively
postwar image ... created by the press after the war.” Frost, Sex Drives, 154.
Frost argues that this phenomenon should be understood “as a gendered
extension of the earlier trope of fascist male sadism, since female violence
and sexual violence are even more culturally aberrant than male sadism.”
Frost, Sex Drives, 154.
78 Significantly, this has been incorrectly translated in the English edition. “Bais
Ya’acov” or “Beit David” is misread as Bas Ya’acov or “Bat David” and thus
(mis)translated as “Daughters of Jacob” rather than “House of Jacob,”
obscuring the link between this novel and the story of “the 93” and the Bavli
poem. The correct translation opens up a reading of House of Dolls as a
deliberate reworking of this now-almost-archetypical Holocaust narrative.
79 Ka-Tzetnik, Dolls, 36.
80 Ibid., 152.
81 Ibid., 200.
82 Ibid., 42–4.
83 Ibid., 185.
84 Iris Milner, “The ‘Gray Zone’ Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in
Ka. Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008),
118.
85 Iris Milner, “The Evil Spirits of the Shoah: Ka-Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony
to Death and Survival in the Concentrationary Universe,” lecture at
conference Ka-Tzetnik: The Impact of the First Holocaust Novelist in Israel
and Beyond, University of Calgary, March 2013, 4.
86 Milner, Spirits, 5.
87 Ka-Tzetnik, Dolls, 137.
88 What complicates matters is the emergence in the early 1960s in Israel of a
genre of pulp porn novels set in German POW (Stammlager) camps, named
Stalagim. These stories imagined a Nazi universe in which Allied soldiers—
never Jews—were tortured and sexually assaulted by female SS orderlies
(who did not exist in real life). Although this bore no relation to actual
historical events, so little information on the Holocaust was available at the
time, and the novels were so popular and notorious, teenagers read these texts
next to the work of Ka-Tzetnik and came to associate the two. In Libsker’s
2007 film Stalags, both Omer Bartov and Libsker suggest that the readers get
the two confused and thus think that they remember that the Stalagim “depict
sex forced by Nazis on Jewish women,” which they do not. Conversely, I
suspect that the confusion also works the other way around: stylistically, Beit
ha Bubot’s depictions of Nazi sexual violence are not pornographic or even
erotic, but those in Stalagim were, and this association makes Dinur’s work
now retroactively appear in this light as well. As to the argument that Beit ha
Bubot inspired the Stalag genre as renowned literary scholar Dan Miron
argues in this film, I strongly dispute this as there is, in fact, a very different
progenitor to these novels, in terms of their cover illustrations, content, and
basic plot, namely American Men’s Adventure Magazines. I say more on this
in a forthcoming article.
89 Young, Writing, 5.
6
The Eroticization of Witnessing: The Twofold
Legacy of Ka-Tzetnik
Guido Vitiello
The two main themes at the center of each plot are captivity and
transgression. The camp is portrayed as an isolated and enclosed
microcosm. Moreover, each story makes clear that the Stalag is
unlike any other Nazi camp. Although operating under Nazi rule, it
is somehow an anomaly to that rule. Hence the camp is portrayed as
both an exception to and a realization of Nazism—or better, the
place where the aberration and the radicalization of Nazism meet.
Under its auspices are eccentricities such as a Nazi project for
immortalizing Aryans, horrendous medical experiments on
prisoners, or the prostitution of female prisoners by criminals turned
guards. Yet the fundamental aberration of the Stalag is the unlikely
presence of men and women on opposite sides of the command line.
Captivity is therefore portrayed as a laboratory of extreme brutality
and at the same time as an orgy waiting to happen.8
Not only the timing, coming shortly after the Eichmann trial, but the very
language reveals how the Stalag as a genre constituted an early response to
the trauma of the Holocaust and to the emotional impact of the Eichmann
trial. As Pinchevski and Brand have argued, the books supplemented the
legal procedure with fantasies of sex and violence, producing a revealing
mix that highlights the fact that “for young Israelis of that time, coming to
know about the Holocaust was intimately linked with the coming of
puberty and the initiation into national identity.”10
That a quest for knowledge about the Holocaust and a thirst for reading
material with sexual themes could be intertwined was also apparent in the
way that Ka-Tzetnik’s novels were read. Although, as Bartov argues, the
novels were presented to Israeli students as “legitimate” accounts of the
Holocaust, they were often read in “illegitimate” ways:
For young Israelis of the early 1960s, the question of the Holocaust was
the question of their own origins—personal, familial, and national at once.
In other words, the Holocaust functioned as a sort of shared “primal
scene”—the traumatizing scene (actually seen or phantasized) in Freudian
theory, where a child witnesses sexual intercourse between the parents.
And just as the original Urszene (primal scene), it was the target of intense
curiosity. In an illuminating psychoanalytic analysis, Nanette Auerhahn
and Dori Laub describe how the parents’ bedroom and the gas chamber
were often superimposed or conflated in the dreams and fantasies of
second-generation patients: “In the primal scene, children typically
misinterpret the parents’ sexual activity as an act of violence, disguising
the life force by aggression. In contrast, we have found that children
confronted with the scene of atrocity defend against their knowledge by
misinterpreting the scene as a sexual one.”12 It could be argued that the
novels of Ka-Tzetnik, as well as the Stalags, provided young Israelis with
fictional access to this Urszene of death through the vehicle of sexual
curiosity. History was thus displaced by sex, and in offering a way to
approach a scene of atrocity as a scene of desire, the Stalags ultimately
conflated vicarious witnessing and voyeurism.
We must be careful not to generalize either the very unique situation of
Israeli society at the time of the Eichmann trial or the experience of being
the child of a Holocaust victim. Nonetheless, what we might call the
“eroticization of witnessing”—the resort to sexual curiosity and voyeurism
as a means of approaching the “other planet” of the Holocaust—and what
Alvin Rosenfeld has called the “erotics of Auschwitz,”13 has been one of
the registers of Holocaust literature since the 1970s and has affected both
high culture and pop culture, film and literature, historiography and public
debate.14
It would be going too far to consider the Holocaust the “primal scene”
of our culture, but it could be argued that the Holocaust has increasingly
become, as Gavriel Motzkin and Avishai Margalit persuasively suggest, “a
negative myth of origin for the post-war world”:
A myth of origin is a story that people tell about where they came
from and how the situation in which they live was created; it serves
as a general framework for the interpretation of the world. . . . When
we call the Holocaust a myth, we do not mean that it did not take
place or that the actual event was somehow different from the one
we know. Calling the function of the Holocaust in the postwar world
a myth of origin means that we view the Holocaust as both a caesura
that separates us from the pre-Holocaust past and as the point in time
and place at which the world of our values has originated. It requires
little acuity to ascertain that the Holocaust has become a universal
symbol in our culture, that many other events are constantly being
compared to it.
Notes
1 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth
Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 48–9.
2 Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975). Ka-Tzetnik has no place
also in Lawrence L. Langer, ed., Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
3 A comprehensive account of this subgenre can be found in Daniel H.
Magilow, Elizabeth Bridges, and Kristin T. Vander Lugt, eds.,
Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture (New
York: Continuum, 2011). In a book for exploitation fans, Sex, Death,
Swastikas: Nazi Sexploitation SSinema, by Jack Hunter (London: Creation
Books, 2010), House of Dolls is included in the appendix, “Kamp Kulture:
Nazi Exploitation and Sexploitation in Literature,” and introduced with these
words: “Despite its age ... House of Dolls is undoubtedly Nazi sexploitation,
and by the 1970s and 1980s it was being marketed explicitly as such: ‘Based
on an authentic diary, House of Dolls with its hideous revelations and
characters such as Daniella’s blonde Aryan torturess, here called Elsa, is the
most appalling and famous confession on record of the terror that finally
broke the millions of men and women who were savaged by Europe’s great
catastrophe’ [Internal blurb of the 1986 Granada paperback]. The cover...
shows a dark-haired woman unbottoning a striped concentration-camp
uniform to reveal the words and numbers ‘Feld-Hure 135633’ sitting above
her cleavage.”
4 Several scholars have explored the fact that Ka-Tzetnik intended his writing
to be an authentic witness and memorial to Holocaust. See, for example,
William D. Brierley, “Memory in the Work of Yehiel Dinur (Ka-Tzetnik
135633),” in L. I. Yudkin, ed., Hebrew Literature in the Wake of the
Holocaust (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 52–74;
Galia Glasner-Heled, “Reader, Writer, and Holocaust Literature: The Case of
Ka-Tzetnik,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 109–33; Jeremy D. Popkin,
“Ka-Tzetnik 135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History 33,
no. 2 (2002): 343–55; and Miryam Sivan, “‘Stoning the Messenger’: Yehiel
Dinur’s House of Dolls and Piepel,” in Sonya M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G.
Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust
(Lebanon: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 200–16.
5 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, House of Dolls (London: Granada, 1973 [1955]), 198.
6 Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 130.
7 On this episode, see Hanno Loewy, “Zwischen Judgment und Twilight:
Schulddiskurse, Holocaust und das Courtroom Drama,” in Sven Kramer, ed.,
Die Shoah im Bild (Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 2003), 133–69.
8 Amit Pinchevski and Roy Brand, “Holocaust Perversions: The Stalags Pulp
Fiction and the Eichmann Trial,” in Critical Studies in Media Communication
24, no. 5 (2007): 394.
9 Quoted in Pinchevski and Brand, “Holocaust Perversions,” 398.
10 Ibid., 388.
11 Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism,” 59.
12 Nanette C. Auerhahn and Dori Laub, “The Primal Scene of Atrocity: The
Dynamic Interplay Between Knowledge and Fantasy of the Holocaust in
Children of Survivors,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 15, no. 3 (1998): 372.
13 The formulation comes from Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Imagining Hitler
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 53.
14 Saul Friedlander, Réflets du nazisme (Paris: Seuil, 1982).
15 Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin, “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 25, no. 1 (1996): 65–83.
16 Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the
Holocaust (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 4.
17 Terrence Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed.
Berel Lang (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 216–33.
18 James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in
Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2000), 55.
19 For analyses of this genre, see Marcus Stiglegger, Sadiconazista. Faschismus
und Sexualität im Film (Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag, 1999); Mikel J. Koven,
“‘The Film You Are about to See Is Based on Documented Fact’: Italian Nazi
Sexploitation Cinema,” in Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation
Cinema since 1945, eds. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (London and
New York: Wallflower Press, 2004); Lynn Rapaport, “Holocaust
Pornography: Profaning the Sacred in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS,” in Monsters
in the Mirror: Representations of Nazism in Post-War Popular Culture, eds.
Sara Buttsworth and Maartje Abbenhuis (Westport: Praeger, 2010), 101–30;
and Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust(New York: Continuum, 2011). On
the eroticization of Nazism more broadly, see also Laura Frost, Sex Drives:
Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2002); Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Silke Wenk,
“Rhetoriken der Pornografisierung: Rahmungen des Blicks auf die NS-
Verbrechen,” in Gedächtnis und Geschlecht: Deutungsmuster in
Darstellungen des Nationalsozialistischen Genozids, eds. Insa Eschebach,
Sigrid Jacobeit, and Silke Wenk (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2002),
269–96.
20 Robert S. C. Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2012), 59.
21 Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); on pop music and the Holocaust, see
also Jon Stratton, “Jews, Punk and the Holocaust: From the Velvet
Underground to the Ramones: The Jewish-American Story,” Popular Music
24, no. 1 (2005): 79–105.
22 Omer Bartov, “Spielberg’s Oskar: Hollywood Tries Evil,” in Spielberg’s
Holocaust. Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 49. See also Omer Bartov,
Murder in Our Midst. The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 170.
23 Lawrence L. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006), 51.
24 Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing.
25 Mark Browning, Stephen King on the Big Screen (London: Intellect Books,
2009).
26 David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers, 2nd ed.
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
27 Stephen King, Different Seasons (London: Futura, 1982), 127.
28 Claudia Eppert, “Entertaining History: (Un)heroic Identifications, Apt Pupils,
and an Ethical Imagination,” New German Critique 86 (Spring–Summer
2002): 71–101. See also Caroline Joan Picart and David A. Frank, Frames of
Evil: the Holocaust as Horror in American Film (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2006).
29 Eddie Cockrell, “Apt Pupil. One Good Hard Step Beyond Innocence,” Nitrate
Online, October 30, 1998, www.nitrateonline.com/faptpupil.html, accessed
August 2, 2016.
7
Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, and the Muslims
Uri S. Cohen
Miron is making two claims: One is that Levi writes about Auschwitz as
existing on a continuum of human behavior, while Ka-Tzetnik writes of
“another planet.” Miron’s second claim is that Levi’s writing renders the
horror of his account more accessible to the reader. Both claims are cause
and effect of the difference between Levi’s metonymic Auschwitz and Ka-
Tzetnik’s metaphoric Auschwitz. These are serious charges and they
pertain to the very essence of how we understand and think about literature
and its capacity to represent, comprehend, and simply talk about
Auschwitz. The argument also reveals a core truth of Israeli politics and
the edifying place of Auschwitz in it—what the writer Gershom Shofman
has called Ka-Tzetnik’s ability to “make you feel, as if you were there,
really there, and you are but one of those saved by a miracle.”4 Shofman’s
praise of Ka-Tzetnik is indicative of the place of Holocaust education in
Israel, which is designed to make everyone feel like a survivor. In other
words, it would appear that as a state Israel privileges a metaphoric link to
Auschwitz and not a metonymic one, though what that could mean
remains to be seen.
As Joel Fineman has so eloquently demonstrated, the difference
between metaphor and metonym is elusive, and it is this nature of allegory
that constitutes the act of interpretation.5 In “Metatphors We Live By,”
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain that metaphor and metonym are
different kinds of processes. Metaphor is principally a way of conceiving
of one thing in terms of another, and its primary function is understanding.
Metonym, on the other hand, has primarily a referential function; that is, it
allows us to use one entity to stand for another.6 The distinction between
metaphor and metonym would be that metaphor is based on a leap—a non-
linear gap between ground and figure—while metonym never fully
detaches itself from a continuum of reference. Metaphor floats, metonym
is grounded. Ka-Tzetnik’s Salamandra and Levi’s Se questo è un Uomo
(first translated into English as If This Is a Man and later as Survival in
Auschwitz) appeared within a short interval between 1946 and 1947.7
Levi’s book was hardly noticed at the time it was published in Italy, while
Salamandra received a warmer welcome in Palestine.8 Though it is
perhaps farfetched to claim that Zionist culture immediately recognized
itself in Ka-Tzetnik’s narrative, it certainly found in it a proper
representation of the catastrophe, while Levi and other non-Zionist writers
remained largely unknown to Hebrew culture until the 1980s. Examining
the core figure of the Muselmann in these seminal works will help
elucidate the meaning and political implications as well as the changing
trajectories of insight both authors offer into this figure and to notions of
survival.
Levi’s description of his experience of internment at Buna, an
Arbeitslager (labor camp) at Auschwitz that serviced I. G. Farben’s Buna
Werke,9 is indeed metonymic of the camps. Levi is but one survivor,
whose story is part of what both Iris Milner and David Rousset have called
the concentrationary universe.10 Buna, though different from Birkenau, is
Auschwitz, and its description allows us to induce and deduce the contours
of other stories, even those untold. There are by now many stories of
experience in the camp, but Levi’s work stands out in its operation of the
poetic upon the historical, its ability to capture and linguistically design the
figures and to shape the story to offer a deep and true essence of the Camp.
In this sense, Levi’s first book, Se questo è un uomo, is truly more
philosophical in Aristotelian terms than Ka-Tzetnik’s Salamandra,
precisely because it is more historical. Levi poetically captures the general
sense of his experience in a story of great suffering and chilling insight
into the banality of that suffering. He never resorts to hyperbole, the tone
is composed, and not without irony, the narrative is straightforward even
though figurative language creates other, darker, possibilities of reading.
As Levi writes, it becomes clear that his suffering, even suffering itself, is
not the novelty of Auschwitz. What Levi seems to say is that the reasons,
or lack of reasons, for internment are new, but the mode of producing
death is the main novelty, and it is captured in the figure of the
Muselmann:
All the Muselmänner who go to the gas chambers have the same
story, or more exactly, have no story; they have followed the slope
down to the bottom, naturally, like streams that run down to the sea.
Once they entered the camp, they were overwhelmed, either through
basic incapacity, or through misfortune, or through some banal
incident, before they can adapt; ... their body is already breaking
down, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by
exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they the
Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an
anonymous mass, continually renewed and always the same, of non-
men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within
them, already too empty to truly suffer. One hesitates to call them
living; one hesitates to call their death death—in the face of it they
have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.11
Here Levi makes an acute observation about the nature of narrative and the
form of narrative that is testimony. The drowned do not have a story, or
rather, their story, which is the true story of Auschwitz, cannot be told,
because narrative is the work of the survivor. This is the reason the
Muselmann can have no voice, and Levi’s own voice, though observing
them, fails to represent those who he constantly ignored in the camp. Levi
may not have been a “Prominent,” one who has a position in the camp that
allows him to rise above the dying mass, but he was lucky in many ways;
he was helped by an Italian civil worker (Lorenzo Perrone) and worked
indoors.12 The survivor is certainly a victim, but what does this make the
Muselmann? When he faces the Muselmann, Levi himself drowns in the
image:
Both Levi and Ka-Tzetnik, and perhaps all survivors feel obliged
toward the endless stream of Muselmänner sliding toward their death.
Already in these early writings, it is evident that the Muselmann is the core
image of Levi’s account and that the analysis is brilliant, terrifying because
of its tone. Levi describes the tone of his study as pacato (calm, placid),
and this word also described the tone employed by the SS guards as the
inmates are processed and await the dreaded showers.14 In his first
description of the Muselmann in Survival in Auschwitz, we can already see
the kind of lines Levi is drawing between the drowned and the saved, the
Muselmann and the survivor. Though the idea is present already in this
early passage written immediately after the war, it seems Levi only much
later realizes the true significance and weight of this recognition that at the
core of the survivor’s testimony there is a blind spot, a lacuna, the
Muselmann, the (symbolic) core without language. In his last book, The
Drowned and the Saved, Levi reflects on the complex relationship between
the survivor and the Muselmann:
Let me repeat that we, the survivors are not the true witnesses ... we
survivors are an anomalous and negligible minority. We are the ones
who, because of our transgressions, ability, or luck did not touch
bottom. The ones who did, who saw the Gorgon, did not come back
to tell about it or have returned mute. But it is they the
“Muselmänner,” the drowned, the complete witnesses—they are the
ones whose testimony would have had a comprehensive meaning.
They are the rule, we are the exception ... We speak in their place,
by proxy.15
Is the flower of the twentieth century, the sum of its creation. And
this is his nature ... humans whose weight is their weight in bones,
no more, and their innards have become as thin as cobwebs. The
musselman cannot eat anymore and does not feel hunger and his
sign is this: when a man carrying two portions of bread was seen, it
was clear that this rich man has become a musselman. That is, that
he had not inherited some fortune, rather: he is about to leave it to
others ... When a musselman ate he would immediately have
diarrhea and therefore they were always in the latrine their pants
constantly stained with watery excrement.19
Levi’s early work displays insight about the nature of the Muselmann that
flashes and disappears only to reappear more clearly in the eighties. On the
surface, his story is one of survival. I would say that calling it optimistic is
exaggerated, but Levi himself claims that he was optimistic. In his own
words about the translation of Kafka’s Trial he declares that he declares
that he was for a time illogically lending his story of survival to all forms
of suffering, “even stupidly so.25 It is an incredibly lucid observation and
displays the realization that testimonies of the camp including his own are
the stories of survival and are thus truly unrepresentative. Jean Améry’s
suicide in 1978 and his book At the Mind’s Limits, together with Levi’s
translation of Kafka’s Trial, greatly influenced Levi’s later thinking and
writing.26 I would like to briefly examine Levi’s engagement with Améry,
a fellow Auschwitz survivor, because it explains the form of his last work,
The Drowned and the Saved, and because it prompted his reconsideration
of the Muselmann.
In form, The Drowned and the Saved is completely different from
Levi’s other books, and there is no other explanation for this fact than the
direct influence of Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits. Levi dedicated a chapter
in the book to Améry: “The Intellectual at Auschwitz.”27 The chapter is
partly an introduction to Améry and partly a desperate argument with him
against suicide. The details of the argument are fascinating and carefully
lead the reader toward a distancing from Améry’s bleak conclusion. The
crucial part seems to me when Levi finally defines the difference between
himself and Améry:
The trial of the diligent, petty bank clerk Josef K. ends in fact with a
death sentence; never pronounced, never written, and the execution
takes place in the most sordid, unadorned surroundings, without
apparatus or outrage, at the hand of two puppet executioners who,
with bureaucratic meticulousness, fulfill their duty mechanically,
hardly uttering a word, exchanging foolish courtesies. It’s a page
that takes your breath away. I, a survivor of Auschwitz, would never
have written it, or never like that: because of an incapable and
deficient imagination, of course, but also because of shame in the
face of the death that Kafka did not know, or if he did, denied; or
perhaps for lack of courage.30
These are very powerful words in such a context, and they belong with
those of Améry, because both signify an end to the truce Levi had
managed to create after Auschwitz. In May 1983, Levi gave an interview
that was later published under the title “An Attack Called Kafka.” The
concept refers with precision to Levi’s own choice of “The Truce” for the
title of his second book, which had been published in 1963. The truce Levi
defined is the unclear time frame between two inevitable and perennial
states of war: the first in the camp, and the second in a world that had
allowed the camps to exist and persist. Both imply death, and surviving the
first makes the second inevitable. But a truce is possible, Levi implies;
even if it is temporary, it allows survivors to bear witness. If Kafka writes
the ultimate metaphor of Auschwitz, Améry wrote its inevitable
metonymic conclusion (suicide), and both imply the end of the truce. Levi
desperately tries to refute Améry and arrives at the conclusion that his
story is different because his gaze was guided toward the Muselmann. As
the chapter about Améry in the Drowned and the Saved concludes, the
realization of the aporia is stark; if Levi had seen the Muselmann, if his
gaze had really been directed there, he would not have survived. In fact, in
order to survive, one constantly looks away:
But it’s not worth speaking to the musselmänner, the men who are
disintegrating, because you know already that they will complain
and will tell you about what they used to eat at home. It’s even less
worthwhile to make friends with them, because they have no
important connections in the camp, they do not gain any extra
rations, they do not work in profitable Kommandos, and they do not
know any secret method of organizing. And in any case, it’s clear
they’re only passing through here, that in a few weeks nothing will
remain of them but a handful of ashes in some nearby field and a
checked-off number in a register.31
Here is an insight shared by Ka-Tzetnik and Levi: one looked away, one
had to look away, and one never got over the guilt of having done so, even
if constrained to do so by the will of the true perpetrator. In Auschwitz,
Ka-Tzetnik writes, “in order to survive you must kill another.”32
Levi tried valiantly to ward of the realization that one’s own survival
was predicated on the death of others, and the terror of it seems to invade
every aspect of what he wrote in the eighties. In the harrowing poem The
Survivor, for example, Levi pleads his innocence in front of the multitude
of victims haunting him. Though he repeats that he has not taken anyone’s
place, that he never stole another’s bread, he still realizes that he was part
of the machine that produced the Muselmann, a machine that was created
by the Nazis but driven by the survivors. Dinur reached a very similar
conclusion in the process of analyzing the meaning of his LSD-induced
visions. As Iris Roebling Grau explores in her contribution to this volume,
late in his life Ka-Tzetnik underwent experimental LSD treatment and
experienced a vison that he had himself become an SS officer.33 This led
him to the realization that Auschwitz was not another planet but our very
own and he himself not only the victim but also its very other.
In the end, it seems that Ka-Tzetnik and Levi followed almost opposite
though converging trajectories and that they covered similar ground. Levi
begins as a returned subject or at least a metonym of an erased subject,
telling a carefully crafted tale of his experience of survival as
representative of the camps. Eventually he comes to see his own
experience as exiguous and the Muselmann as the true core of Auschwitz.
His own experience becomes a metaphor that undoes his own possibility
of subjectivity. Ka-Tzetnik began with a metaphoric-symbolic story, told
through the metaphor of a non-subject, the erasure of Yehiel Feiner—the
Man he was—is decisive and consciously formulated: “My name went up
in the flames of the crematorium,” he told all who would listen. Ka-
Tzetnik achieved something special in the form of literature that erases its
own literariness, and he finally arrived closer to the erased metonymic
subject—Feiner—through the Eichmann trial and the public’s interest in it.
Both come to realize that they cannot avoid the Muselmann, the memory
of constant pleading for help, or the fact that they could do nothing to
change the circumstance—that survival itself involved a form of
collaboration with the machine that produces death by survival. To truly
come close to the Muselmann is to realize that one was oneself an
instrument of death. Ka-Tzetnik seems to have slowly inched away from
such a perception, perhaps because he was part of an Israeli culture that by
the 1980s had become obsessed with erasing the difference between
survivors and victims. Perhaps, as Shoshana Felman argues, Ka-Tzetnik
did manage to embody the absence of the Muselmann; by fainting at the
Eichmann trial while speaking of Muselmänner, Ka-Tzetnik allowed
himself to undo his disembodiment to some extent. His talks with Yechiel
Szeintuch, which slowly uncovered the biographical subject, also allowed
him to gradually draw out the metonymic Feiner.34
Unlike Ka-Tzetnik and perhaps because he was part of an Italian
culture bent on denying collaboration, Levi grew steadily more aware that
the mechanism of annihilation, production of death by work, depended on
the will to survive of the few who were able to work, whether simply by
some lucky circumstance or because they possessed a special skill or
characteristic. He also realized that the valorization of the anomalous
minority of survivors could make it seem as if they were living proof that
all had ended well. He could not escape realizing that the survivor was
awarded the same prize offered by Polyphemos the Cyclopes to Nobody in
the story of Odysseus: to be the last of his companions to be eaten.
Suicide, then is to deny society the comfort offered by the presence of the
survivor, because it is a rebuttal of the prize—a denial of the very will that
made one a survivor, the will to live.
Notes
1 Dan Miron, “Bein sefer le’efer,” Alpayim 10 (1994): 200–1.
2 Note that the spelling of Muselman varies, often within the same work. In one
English version of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir, for instance, he uses all
of the following spellings: Muselmann, musselman, muselmann, and the
plural forms mussulmans and Muselmänner. (See Primo Levi, If This Is a
Man [New York: Orion Press, 1959].) I have chosen the follow the usage of
the recent publication of Primo Levi’s work in English: Primo Levi, The
Complete Works of Primo Levi (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,
2015).
3 Miron, “Bein sefer le’efer,” 200–1.
4 Gershom Shofman, “Slamandra,” in Madrih la’moreh (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz
Hameuchad, 1993), 101.
5 Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literature: Essays toward
the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 8.
6 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 36.
7 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Salamandrah (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1946); Primo Levi, Se
questo è un’uomo (Torino: De Silva, 1947). The precise history of both texts
are complicated and evolved through multiple editions. On Levi, see Marco
Belpoliti, Primo Levi (Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 1998), 144–55.
8 See Yechiel Szeintuch, Salamandrah: Mitos Ṿe-Hisṭoryah Be-Khitve K.
Tseṭniḳ (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009), 177–85.
9 For a descriptions of the camp system, see the website of the Memorial and
Museum, Auschwitz Birkenau at http://en.auschwitz.org/h/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=5j accessed March 23, 2017;
and Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz
Death Camp (Bloomington: Published by Indiana University Press in
association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC,
1994).
10 See Milner’s chapter in this volume; and David Rousset, L’univers
concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946).
11 Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi (New York: Liveright
Publishing, 2015), If This Is A Man, vol. 1, 75.
12 See Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography (London:
Viking, 2002), 319–24.
13 Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 1, 75.
14 Ibid., 36.
15 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 1508.
16 Gil Anidjar, The Jew the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford
University Press 2003), 145; and Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz:
The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 80–86.
17 On the history of the poem Salamandra and its performance in Europe by the
Jewish Brigade’s entertainment unit, see Szeintuch, Salamandra, 191–259.
18 Levi begins his account with the phrase “Per mia fortuna,” and my use of the
word is intended in this sense—with attention to the way that Levi echoes its
use by authors such as Machiavelli. For more on the concept of “fortune” in
the Holocaust, see Robert S. C. Gordon, “Sfacciata fortuna.” La Shoah e il
caso-“Sfacciata fortuna.” Luck and the Holocaust, trans. C. Stangalino
(Torino: Einaudi, 2010).
19 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1946), 235–6; and Ka-Tzetnik
135633, Sunrise over Hell (London: Corgi, 1977).
20 This is Giorgio Agmaben’s claim in Remnants of Auschwitz, 132–5.
21 On this matter, see Levi’s beautiful essay: Primo Levi, “Beyond Survival,”
Prooftexts 4, no. 1 (1984): 9–21.
22 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Levi himself uses the term
“biological and social experiment” in Survival in Auschwitz. See Primo Levi,
The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 1, 74.
23 On the question of survivor’s justice, see Mahmood Mamdani,
“Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?” Journal of Intervention and
Statebuilding 4, no. 1 (2010): 53–67.
24 A version of this view as historical narrative can be found in Benny Morris,
Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (New
York: Knopf, 1999).
25 Primo Levi, “Un Aggresione chiamato Kafaka,” in Primo Levi:
Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987, ed. Marco Belpoliti (Torino: Einaudi,
1997), 191–2.
26 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on
Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980);
and Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999). See also W. G. Sebald, On the Natural
History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003), 143–68.
27 Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 1528–38.
28 Ibid., 1534.
29 Franz Kafka, Il Processo di Franz Kafka nella traduzione di Primo Levi
(Torino: Enaudi, 1983).
30 Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 1434–5.
31 Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 1, 81.
32 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 219.
33 Yehiel Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiaḥ Lefi Tumo: Śiḥot ʻim Yeḥiʾel Di-Nur (Jerusalem:
Bet loḥame ha-geṭaʾot, 2003), 71–2.
34 Shoshana Felman, “Reading Legal Events: A Ghost in the House of Justice:
Death and the Language of the Law,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
13, no. 1 (2001): 241–8; and Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiaḥ Lefi Tumo, 168–71.
8
How to Understand Shivitti?
Iris Roebling-Grau
As others in this volume have already discussed, the true identity of the
Israeli author Ka-Tzetnik became known to a worldwide audience when he
testified under his real name, Yehiel Dinur, at the Eichmann trail in
Jerusalem in 1961. This was where he first clearly articulated the metaphor
of the “other planet” of Auschwitz that later became central to his legacy.
While Hannah Arendt abrasively dismissed Dinur’s speech in her report of
the trial, Shoshana Felman later defended him and explained his choice of
words as a metaphorical way of speaking that should testify to the “utter
foreignness of Auschwitz.”1 Neither Dinur the citizen nor Ka-Tzetnik the
author provided any reflection on his use of the “other planet” metaphor
until the publication of his last book. In Shivitti: A Vision, first published
in Hebrew in 1987, Ka-Tzetnik picks up on this metaphor when he reflects
on the impossibility of talking about Auschwitz to the psychiatrist Jan
Bastiaans:
Prof. Bastiaans was never in Auschwitz. And even those who were
there don’t know Auschwitz. Not even someone who was there two
long years, as I was. Auschwitz is another planet, while we
humankind, occupants of planet Earth, have no key to decipher the
code name of Auschwitz. How dare I commit sacrilege by trifling
with those eyes on their way to the crematorium?2
While the women and children were beginning to catch fire the S.S.
man walked over behind our row and kicked the Dutchman in the
buttocks. The latter’s skeleton-body, like a piece of driftwood,
toppled into the flames. “Kan niet lopen.” When we were marched
off to the work site, the Dutchman, his step unsure, had limped by
my side. “Kan niet lopen” he had mumbled, and it was then I had
my first experience with Dutch. Looking at him, I understood the
foreign words. Since his “No” to the S.S. man and his flight into the
fire, I have not been able to get “Kan niet lopen,” syllable for
syllable, out of the mind.
Can you appreciate the simple humanity, the sheer ordinariness
of those three words uttered while being marched in Auschwitz
accompanied by S.S. hounds?11
The number on top of this page of manuscript has jumped out at me.
I can’t believe my eyes: I’ve filled dozens of folio pages with tiny
letters without even realizing the newness of what I’m doing: I am
writing in the first person! Until now, all of my books have used the
third person, even though I’ve had to go through contortions doing
so ... Without the shadow of a doubt I can at last acknowledge my
two identities, co-existing in my body.14
I am not sure if this description can be taken as proof of the fact that Ka-
Tzetnik had conquered what we might call an almost schizophrenic state
of mind.15 On the other hand, I do think that the fact that Ka-Tzetnik
writes in the first person in Shivitti constitutes an important difference
between this book and his previous writing. I nevertheless question
whether he really brings the two sides of his personality together by doing
so. One might even argue that he does the very opposite. He shows us that
two sides of his personality exist but are not joined: they “co-exist,” as he
himself writes, within the “I” he uses. Nonetheless the fact that he uses the
“I” adds something by turning his text into a self-portrait. It forces us to
read Shivitti as a text in which someone is reflecting about himself. Of
course, this does not necessarily mean that this self-portrait is the realistic
or “true” image of De-Nur/Dinur/Ka-Tzetnik. He himself questions the “I”
he creates in his own text.16 I am not interested in finding out whether the
self-portrait in Shivitti is somehow “true” or not. For my reading it is only
important that we are confronted with a self-portrait, written in the first
person singular. How is this self-portrait designed?
In Shivitti, Ka-Tzetnik understands himself in relation to others. Two
people stand out as most important and are presented as the “others” who
reveal something fundamental about Ka-Tzetnik’s own self-reflection. The
first is the SS man mentioned in the first vision—a commander in
Auschwitz who is charged with supervising the transport that is to bring
Ka-Tzetnik to the crematorium. In Ka-Tzetnik’s narration of the scene, this
perpetrator becomes a mirror image for Ka-tzentik himself. Looking at
him, he gradually begins to identify with and see himself in the
commander:
Ka-Tzetnik obviously did not have this information when he wrote Shivitti,
because he interprets the photograph differently. And yet, his
misinterpretation is telling. He imagines that the bodies lying on the
ground are corpses and that the Jew on the photograph is about to be
killed. He is thus deeply impressed by the Jew’s calm and almost confident
attitude, describing the figure as being illuminated by a godly light. The
image is central to the vision in gate four, where Ka-Tzetnik evokes the
Hasidic figure of the zaddik and turns the Jew in the photograph into an
image of Jesus Christ by describing the “crown of thorns that German
soldiers have placed on the head of a Jew.”30 This scene, too, ends up in
self-identification, as Ka-Tzetnik sees himself as being the Jew on the
photograph. In the process, the author of Shivitti, astonishingly, imitates
Jesus Christ:
These last words are taken from the Bible, they appear in Psalm 31:6 and
are quoted by Lucas verse 23:46 as the last words of Jesus Christ. In
quoting them, Ka-Tzetnik turns the scene in the photograph into a
crucifixion in which Ka-Tzetnik becomes Rabbi Hagermann and is
crucified. The vision turns the scene in the photograph into a Jewish
imitatio Christi.
This reading makes the link between Ka-Tzetnik’s reading of the
photograph and his identification with the SS man clear, since in that
fantasy Ka-Tzetnik changes sides with the enemy because he believes that
“we are both created in the image of God.” As the boundary between
victims and perpetrators is also a boundary between Jews and Christians,
the transgression is repeated when Ka-Tzetnik turns the Jew in the
photograph into the figure of Jesus Christ (who, of course, was a Jew) and
then identifies with this Jewish Christian image.32
While Ka-Tzetnik’s imagining of himself as a perpetrator arises out of
fear, his identification with Rabbi Hagermann (who he believes to have
been killed by German soldiers) might well arise out of a wish—the wish
to have been among those who did not return. Ka-Tzetnik says this clearly
by quoting the first book of Samuel: “Would God I had died for thee!”33
This quotation is all the more terrible as it is part of the vision in which
Ka-Tzenik sees himself digging the grave for the Jew in the photograph,
thus making it clear that the wish to have died in Auschwitz arose out of
feelings of guilt.34 Feelings of guilt therefore seem to be at the center of
Ka-Tzetnik’s fascination with the photograph that hung over his desk for
many years, and it separates him, as it does for every survivor, from all
those who have been killed. The dead are also “others,” in other words,
and Ka-Tzetnik would like to see himself as one of them.
Notes
This essay is part of the project “Imitatio und Identifikation” funded by the
Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
1 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht über die Banalität des
Bösen (Munich: Piper, 2004), 335. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical
Unconscious. Trials and Traumas in the Tweentieth Century (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 131–66, quotation from p. 160.
2 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision, trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa
Herman (San Francisco: Harper & Row), xvi.
3 Bezalel Narkiss, “Shivviti,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 18: San-Sol
(Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007), 492.
4 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, xvi.
5 Bastiaans wrote about his theory in German, using the term “psychische
Aufschließung.” See Jan Bastiaans, “Vom Menschen im KZ und vom KZ im
Menschen. Ein Beitrag zur Behandlung des KZ-Syndroms und dessen
Spätfolgen,” in Essays über Naziverbrechen: Simon Wiesenthal gewidmet, ed.
Wiesenthalfonds Amsterdam and the Bund Jüdischer Verfolgter Wien
(Amsterdam: Wiesenthal Fonds, 1973), 187.
6 Bastiaans, “Vom Menschen im KZ und vom KZ im Menschen,” 181.
7 Tom Segev, Die Siebte Million, trans. Jürgen Peter Krause and Maja Ueberle-
Pfaff (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, Reinbek, 1995), 20–21.
8 Iris Milner has argued just the opposite, insisting that Ka-Tzetnik’s
description of his use of drugs creates a hallucinatory atmosphere in Shivitti:
“Shivitti thus transgresses into the realm of the fantastic.” Iris Milner, “The
‘Gray Zone’ Revisited. The Concentrationary Universe in Ka-Tzetnik’s
Literary Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 148.
9 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 63.
10 Ibid., 53.
11 Ibid., 50.
12 Ibid., 53.
13 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet. Israeli Youth
Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 59–62; and
Tom Segev, Die Siebte Million, 20.
14 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 72–3.
15 Jeremy D. Popkin also seems to be skeptical about an optimistic reading of
this passage and stresses that all of Ka-Tzetnik’s writings, including Shivitti,
are published under the same pseudonym. Jeremy D. Popkin, “Ka-Tzetnik
135633. The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History 33, no. 2 (2002):
354.
16 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 17.
17 Ibid., 12–13.
18 Ibid., 15.
19 Yoel Cohen, Whistleblowers and the Bomb, new ed. (London: Pluto Press,
2005), 28–9.
20 Ibid., 75–98.
21 Ka-Tzetnik does not really explain this concept. “Asmodeus (Ashmedai)” is
an “evil spirit” or “evil demon.” In the talmudic aggadah, Asmodeus is
described as “king of the demons” (Per. 110a). N. N., “Asmodeus
(Ashmedai),” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 2: Alr-Az (Detroit: Thomson
Gale, 2007), 592.
22 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 43.
23 Ibid., 111.
24 Ibid., 44.
25 Bezalel Naor, Kabbalah and the Holocaust (Spring Valley: Orot, 2001), 7.
26 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 13.
27 Ibid., xviif.
28 “German Police Activity in Olkusz,” July 31, 1940, Through the Lens of
History—Mini Exhibits from the Yad Vashem Collections, accessed August 4,
2016, www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/through-the-lens/olkusz.asp.
29 Ibid.
30 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 85.
31 Ibid., 86.
32 The Hasidic culture does not know the concept of imitation, which is quite
common in Christianity. Zaddikim is not imitated as Jesus Christ is imitated
by Christian believers. Susanne Galley, Der Gerechte ist das Fundament der
Welt. Jüdische Heiligenlegenden aus dem Umfeld des Chassidismus
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003), 396–7. Thus, in his vision, Ka-
Tzetnik really creates an intermixture of Judaism and Christianity.
33 Ka-Tzentik, Shivitti, 86.
34 Ibid., 78.
35 Ibid., xi.
36 Ibid., xiv.
37 Ibid., 119.
38 Bastiaans, “Vom Menschen im KZ und vom KZ im Menschen,” 201.
39 Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet,” 67.
40 Ibid., 68.
41 Ibid., 48.
42 Ibid.
43 Oskar N. Sahlberg, Reisen zu Gott und Rückkehr ins Leben:
Tiefenpsychologie der religiösen Erfahrung (Gießen: Imago Psychosozial-
Verlag, 2004), 316–17.
44 Ibid., 26.
45 Ibid., 27.
46 Ibid., 28.
47 I am very grateful to David Patterson for explaining the term that “our
period” translates from the Hebrew original. In his words, “The Hebrew word
here is ( תקופתיtekufti), from ( תקופהtekufah), which means ‘epoch,’
‘period,’ ‘age’; it can also mean cycle. תקופתיliterally indicates ‘my period,
epoch, age.’ So, strictly speaking, it is neither ‘our’ nor ‘this.’ So he is saying
it is an age that he personally lived through.” David Patterson, email
communication with the author, April 26, 2016.
48 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti. Eine Vision (Löhrbach: Der Grüne Zweig,
2005), 250.
9
Beyond Boundaries: History, the Holocaust, and
Literature
Dirk Rupnow
Translated by Christopher Geissler and Annette F. Timm
Notes
This essay is part of the project “Transforming the Holocaust: European and
Global Politics of Memory after 1989,” funded by the Zukunftsfonds of the
Republic of Austria (P08-0434). Earlier versions have been published as
“Jenseits der Grenzen. Zeitgeschichte, Holocaust und Literatur,” in akten-
kundig? Literatur, Zeitgeschichte und Archiv (Sichtungen. Archiv—
Bibliothek—Literaturwissenschaft, 10./11. Jahrgang 2007/08), eds. Marcel
Atze, Thomas Degener, Michael Hansel, and Volker Kaukoreit (Vienna:
praesens, 2009), 67–97; “Jenseits der Grenzen: Die Geschichtswissenschaft,
der Holocaust und die Literatur,” in “Holocaust”-Fiktion: Kunst jenseits der
Authentizität (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), 85–99; and “Fakten und
Fiktionen: Der Holocaust zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft und Literatur |
lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de,” Lernen aus der Geschichte 04/2015: Kunst
und Geschichte. Künstlerische Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Holocaust,
accessed September 8, 2016, http://lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de/Lernen-und-
Lehren/content/12378.
1 Michel de Certeau, Theoretische Fiktionen: Geschichte und Psychoanalyse
(Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1997), 59.
2 Dirk Rupnow, “Transformationen des Holocaust: Anmerkungen nach dem
Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts,” Transit—Europäische Revue 35 (2008): 68–88.
I also provide a discussion of the extensive literature on the subject here. See
also Dirk Rupnow, “Zeitgeschichte oder Holocaust-Studien? Zum Ort der
Erforschung der nazistischen Massenverbrechen,” in Politische Gewalt und
Machtausübung im 20. Jahrhundert: Zeitgeschichte, Zeitgeschehen und
Kontroversen. Festschrift für Gerhard Botz, eds. Heinz Berger, Melanie
Dejnega, Regina Fritz, and Alexander Prenninger (Vienna, Cologne and
Weimar: Böhlau, 2011), 575–83.
3 See the chapter “From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European
Memory,” in Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New
York: Vintage, 2005), 803–31. For a critical view of the possibilities and
potentials of European memory politics, see Jan-Werner Müller,
“Europäische Erinnerungspolitik Revisited,” Transit 33 (2007): 166–75.
4 Moshe Zimmermann, “Die transnationale Holocaust-Erinnerung,” in
Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, eds. Gunilla
Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2006), 202–16. For a different view, see Jens Kroh, Transnationale
Erinnerung: Der Holocaust im Fokus geschichtspolitischer Initiativen
(Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus Verlag, 2008). Kroh focuses
particularly on the Stockholm conference of 2000.
5 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der
Holocaust (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2001). Levy and Sznaider call the
process of hybridization and mixing in global culture “Glokalisierung”
(glocalization).
6 On the importance of the national level for transnational processes and the
complex interplay between the global and the local, see Saskia Sassen, A
Sociology of Globalization (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
7 Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Post-War
Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence
of the Past, ed. Jan-Werner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 157–83.
8 See Viola B. Georgi, Entliehene Erinnerung: Geschichtsbilder junger
Migranten in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003); Nora
Sternfeld, Kontaktzonen der Geschichtsvermittlung: Transnationales Lernen
über den Holocaust in der postnazistischen Migrationsgesellschaft (Vienna:
Zaglossus, 2013); and Büro trafo.K, “‘Und was hat das mit mir zu tun?’
Perspektiven einer transnationalen Geschichtsvermittlung zu Nazismus und
Holocaust in der Migrationsgesellschaft,” Zeitgeschichte 40 (2013) 1: 49–68.
9 Particularly useful examples from the rich literature include Cornelia Brink,
Ikonen der Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus
nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: De Gruyter,
1998); Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in der
deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001); Jeffrey
Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999); Peter Reichel, Erfundene Erinnerung:
Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater (Munich and Vienna: Carl
Hanser Verlag, 2004); and Waltraud Wende, ed., Der Holocaust im Film:
Mediale Inszenierung und kulturelles Gedächtnis (Heidelberg: Synchron,
2008).
10 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zachor: Erinnere Dich! Jüdische Geschichte und
jüdisches Gedächtnis (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988), 104.
11 See Dirk Rupnow, “Unser Umgang mit den Bildern der Täter. Die Spuren
Nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik—Ein Kommentar zu Yael
Hersonskis Film ‘Geheimsache Ghettofilm,’” Dossier Geheimsache
Ghettofilm, ed. Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, accessed September 8,
2016, www.bpb.de/geschichte/nationalsozialismus/geheimsache-ghettofilm/;
and Dirk Rupnow, “Die Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik und
unser Umgang mit den Bildern der Täter. Ein Beitrag zu Yael Hersonskis ‘A
Film Unfinished’/‘Geheimsache Ghettofilm,’” zeitgeschichte-online, October
2010, www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/md=AFilmUnfinished.
12 See Bertrand Perz, Die KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen: 1945 bis zur
Gegenwart (Innsbruck, Vienna and Bozen: Studien Verlag, 2006), 235–58;
and Bertrand Perz, “Die Ausstellungen in den KZ-Gedenkstätten
Mauthausen, Gusen und Melk,” in Zeitgeschichte ausstellen in Österreich:
Museen—Gedenkstätten—Ausstellungen, ed. Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie
Uhl (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau, 2011), 87–116; and Heidemarie
Uhl and Bertrand Perz, “Gedächtnis-Orte im ‘Kampf um die Erinnerung’.
Gedenkstätten für die Gefallenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges und für die Opfer
der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft,” in Memoria Austriae I:
Menschen—Mythen—Zeiten, eds. Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller and Hannes
Stekl (Vienna: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004), 545–79.
13 See Wolf Gruner, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden
durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, vol. 1: Deutsches
Reich 1933–1937 (Munich: de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2008), 8; and Dieter
Pohl, “Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das
nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945: Ein neues Editionsprojekt,”
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 53 (2005): 4, 651–9.
14 A general discussion of this debate can be found in Manuele Grüttner,
“Shoah-Geschichte(n): Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden im
Spannungsfeld von Historiographie und Literatur,” in Literatur und
Geschichte: Ein Kompendium zu ihrem Verhältnis von der Aufklärung bis zur
Gegenwart, eds. Daniel Fulda and Silvia Serena Tschopp (Berlin and New
York: de Gruyter, 2002), 173–94.
15 Ruth Klüger, Dichter und Historiker: Fakten und Fiktionen (Vienna: Picus
Verlag, 2000), 50f. See also Ruth Klüger, weiter leben: Eine Jugend
(Göttingen: dtv Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992).
16 Imre Kertész, Galeerentagebuch (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1997), 253.
17 Sarah Kofman, Erstickte Worte, trans. Birgit Wagner (Vienna: Passagen,
1988), 53.
18 Jonathan Littell and Pierre Nora, “Gespräch über die Geschichte und den
Roman,” in Jonathan Littell, Die Wohlgesinnten: Marginalienband, trans.
Doris Heinemann et al. (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2008), 22–64, esp. 37 and 45.
See also Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones: A Novel, trans. Charlotte Mandell
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2010). The French original appeared under the
title Les Bienveillantes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2006).
19 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Literarische Erzählung oder kritische Analyse? Ein
Duell in der gegenwärtigen Geschichtswissenschaft (Vienna: Picus Verlag,
2007), 43.
20 Claude Lanzmann and Jürg Altwegg, “Littell hat die Sprache der Henker
erfunden,” in Littell, Die Wohlgesinnten: Marginalienband, 15–21, esp. 18.
See also Claude Lanzmann, “Ihr sollt nicht weinen: Einspruch gegen
‘Schindlers Liste,’” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 5, 1994; and
Claude Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of Understanding. An Evening with
Claude Lanzmann,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 200–20.
21 Laurent Binet, HHhH. Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich, trans. Mayela Gerhardt
(Reinbek: Rowoht, 2011).
22 See Heimrad Bäcker, nachschrift (Graz and Vienna: Droschl, 1993) and
Heimrad Bäcker, nachschrift 2 (Graz and Vienna: Droschl, 1997). I have
written on the subject in detail in Dirk Rupnow, “Die Unbeschreibbarkeit des
Beschreibbaren: Anmerkungen zu Heimrad Bäckers ‘nachschriften,’” Modern
Austrian Literature 36 (2003): 1–2 and 17–31.
23 On the problem of Holocaust denial, see Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the
Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Plume,
1994); Deborah Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David
Irving (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005); Richard J. Evans, Lying about
Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New York: Basic
Books, 2002); Michael Shermer and AlexGrobman, Denying History: Who
Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 2002); and Robert Jan van Pelt, The
Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indian University Press, 2002). On the question of the authentic,
see Achim Saupe, “Authentizität,” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte: Begriffe,
Methoden und Debatten der zeithistorischen Forschung, accessed August 8,
2012,
http://docupedia.de/zg/Authentizit%C3%A4t_Version_3.0_Achim_Saupe;
and Achim Saupe, “Authentisch/Authentizität,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe:
Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al., vol. 7
(Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2005), 40–65, esp. 63.
24 Saul Friedländer, “Introduction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation:
Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–21, esp. 5.
25 Saul Friedländer, Kitsch und Tod: Der Widerschein des Nazismus (Munich:
dtv Deutsche Taschenbuchverlag, 1984). The English version was published
in the same year: Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch
and Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
26 See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews. 2 volumes (London:
HarperCollins, 1997 and 2006). Saul Friedländer, Den Holocaust
beschreiben: Auf dem Weg zu einer integrierten Geschichte (Göttingen:
Wallstein Verlag, 2007). For a discussion of Friedländer’s work, see the
contributions from Alon Confino, Christopher Browning and Amos Goldberg
in “Forum: On Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination,” History and
Theory 48, no. 3 (2009).
27 For Saul Friedländer’s earlier arguments, see Saul Friedländer, “The ‘Final
Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” in Lessons and
Legacies: The Memory of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter
Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 23–35; and Saul
Friedländer, “Trauma, Memory, and Transference,” in Holocaust
Remembrance: The Shape of Memory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Oxford and
Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994), 252–63.
28 See “Collections Highlight: Auschwitz through the Lens of the SS,” US
Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?
ModuleId=10007435, accessed August 9, 2016. The album was put together
by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker (1911–2000), a defendant in the first
Frankfurt Auschwitz trial who received a sentence of seven years of
imprisonment for complicity in the mass murder of at least 3,000 people.
29 Ulrike Jureit, “Vom Zwang zu erinnern,” Merkur 61 (2007): 2, 158–63.
30 In this context, see also Peter Schünemann, “Vergessensschuld: Vortrag bei
der Gedenkveranstaltung für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus am 27. Januar
2000 in Darmstadt,” Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung:
Jahrbuch 2000 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 9–15.
31 See Dan Diner, “Vorwort des Herausgebers,” in Zivilisationsbruch: Denken
nach Auschwitz, ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1988),
7–13; Dan Diner “Den ‘Zivilisationsbruch’ erinnern: Über Entstehung und
Geltung eines Begriffs,” in Zivilisationsbruch und Gedächtniskultur: Das 20.
Jahrhundert in der Erinnerung des beginnenden 21. Jahrhunderts, ed.
Heidemarie Uhl (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003), 17–34; and Dan Diner,
Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse: Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).
32 Imre Kertész, Eine Gedankenlänge Stille, während das
Erschießungskommando neu lädt, trans. György Buda and Christian Polzin
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 21.
33 Friedländer, “The “Final Solution,’” 23.
34 Alain Finkielkraut, Die vergebliche Erinnerung: Vom Verbrechen gegen die
Menschheit (Berlin: Klaus Bittermann, 1989).
35 Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft: Antisemitismus,
Imperialismus, totale Herrschaft (Munich: Piper, 2000 [first English edition,
1951]), 912. See also Harald Welzer, Verweilen beim Grauen: Essays zum
wissenschaftlichen Umgang mit dem Holocaust (Tübingen: ed. discord,
1997).
36 Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, “Dichtet Clio wirklich?,” in Sprache der
Geschichte, ed. Jürgen Trabant (Munich: de Gruyter, 2005), 77–85.
37 See, for example, Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance:
Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006); and Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History,
Language, and Practices (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1997). For a concrete historical investigation of the problem of
objectivity in the discipline of history, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream:
The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). A more positivistic view of
the topic can be found in Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York
and London: W. W. Norton, 2000). In this context, see also Chris Lorenz,
Konstruktion der Vergangenheit: Eine Einführung in die Geschichtstheorie
(Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1997); and Ludolf Herbst,
Komplexität und Chaos: Grundzüge einer Theorie der Geschichte (Munich:
C. H. Beck Verlag, 2004).
38 Hayden White, The Content and the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987), 82.
Conclusion
Annette F. Timm
This was an absolute departure from the voice he had adopted in his
writings up to this time, a voice that identified directly with the
hopelessness and death of the Muselmann, the “figure,” as Uri Cohen
writes, “that re-inscribes the ancient tale of victimhood and frees the
author from most self-doubt.”7 The splitting was necessary for Dinur to
cope with his gaze upon the Muselmann; it made it possible for him to
frame his Eichmann testimony as a description of “the two years when I
was a Muselmann” despite the fact that, unlike the true Muselmann, he had
lived through the fires of annihilation.8 From his first post-Holocaust
poem, his central metaphor was the mythic creature of Salamandra, a
monster who could live through fire yet marched the earth seeking revenge
to “extinguish the fire in its intestines.”9 Having relied on mythic
associations and identifications with age-old Jewish suffering, Dinur
himself suffered until he realized that all humans were capable of such
crimes—that the Salamandra is in all of us.10 In the earliest phase of his
writing, as he began the journey through Italy to Eretz Israel that Dina
Porat describes in her chapter, he had seen himself as the embodiment of
this figure of annihilation (Vernichtung); he viewed his fiction, Cohen
argues, as writing “that is made into documentary through the erasure of
the metonymic subject.”11
On some level, Dinur must have been conscious that his status as a
survivor conflicted with this erasure of his personal voice. In Piepel, Moni,
who had outlived the other sex slaves and whose instincts had always
helped him get “away from the Block Chiefs in the nick of time,” ponders
his own mortality. He asks himself when it is that “you turn Musselmann”
and he reassures himself that this only happens when one has felt the last
hunger.12 Hunger is a sign of life, without it one is already resigned to
death. But we know from Porat’s biography that Ka-Tzetnik spent his last
months of imprisonment at the Auschwitz sub-camp Günthergrube, where
conditions were more tolerable. It is therefore unlikely that he personally
experienced this “last hunger”—that he ever thought of himself as a
Muselmann while a Häftling. His insistence on this label in his Eichmann
testimony thus reveals his early belief that he was, as Milner puts it, a
“mythic figure destined by the deities to remain alive and relate the story
of the apocalypse through his very being.”13 While his collapse on the
witness-stand could not have been planned, what Milner calls the
“theatrical gesture” of presenting himself as the “protagonist of a
prodigious drama” seems to have been a conscious attempt to sustain the
split between Ka-Tzetnik the artist and Dinur the eyewitness even in the
presence of an audience that wished to hear only from the latter. The
specific event of the Eichmann trial forcibly placed Dinur in history,
challenging his desire to speak in the language of myth.
This was not the only time that the specific chronology of Dinur’s life
forced him to reevaluate his perspective, and his biography is essential for
understanding how and why he created the voice of Ka-Tzetnik. This is, of
course, a perspective that he resisted; he purposely tried to erase his
biography by destroying his early writing, by long refusing to reveal the
identity behind his pen name, and by never providing details about his
Polish family or his early life. Even after beginning a new life with a wife
and children in Israel, he would periodically don the Auschwitz prisoner’s
uniform and physically retreat backward in time into the tiny space of a
forlorn hut. And yet, we cannot understand how he developed what Or
Rogovin calls his particular “readerly effect” without placing him
precisely where he resisted going: into a very specific time and place.
The day had unfurled over Auschwitz. A new Auschwitz day, but
familiar in every scent and hue. One just like it was here yesterday,
and one just like it will be here tomorrow—after you. Besides it,
there is nothing here. Everywhere-Auschwitz. As far as the eye can
see—an Auschwitz-latticed sky.14
As Or Rogovin writes, in this passage, “time and space fuse into an
indistinguishable, inescapable, and infinite sequence that language can
capture only from within: an ‘Auschwitz day’, an ‘Auschwitz sky.’”15
That Ka-Tzetnik was trying to establish the otherworldliness of Auschwitz
—its status as the “other planet”—is necessary to grasp how he intended to
convey the experience of the Muselmänner. Unlike Dinur’s unconscious
choice to adopt the third person, the image of “the planet of Auschwitz”—
with its chronotope of “interchangeable space” and its different
relationship to time (where “every fraction of a minute ... passes on a
different scale of time”)—was carefully crafted.16 It was an effort to
convey the enormity of the crimes committed during the Holocaust and the
helplessness of its victims. But having investigated how important this
destabilization of time and space is to the “the underlying system of his
writing,” we must locate the writer himself in time and space in order to
take his readings seriously as an eyewitness account. Both Dinur and the
readers of his works are influenced by their particular location in time and
space: the specific historical context from which we view the experience
of the Holocaust.
Ka-Tzetnik began writing in a time when the communication between
survivors and those seeking historical understanding was possible but
incredibly fraught. As I argued in Chapter 2, before the Eichmann trial,
both the attitudes of professional historians and the political atmosphere in
Israel during the period of nation building militated against the
valorization of the voices of individual survivors. Of course, Dinur—or,
more accurately for this time, Feiner/Zitinsky—had chosen to speak in
fiction and in the third person before he had any exposure to this particular
atmosphere. His recourse to the mythic symbol of Salamandra and his
assumption of the voice of the omniscient narrator took place in Bucharest
and Italy, while he was part of the Ha’Bricha and when he was still writing
in Yiddish. He received various encouragements and material rewards
from this refugee group and swore an “Auschwitz Oath” to represent their
experiences in writing. In other words, the choice to write in the third
person is only understandable in the context of this particular biographical
experience of having been designated the representative of a group of
survivors. It is not surprising that the author maintained this more
distanced third-person approach to the stories he told once he had
succeeded in making a life for himself in an Israel that was not yet open to
hearing about the suffering of individual survivors.
In other words, we cannot understand the poetic choices that Ka-
Tzetnik’s made in his early novels without tracking the specific
geopolitical context in which they were written. As Bartov has argued,
before the 1960s, survivors could not easily assume the role of
representatives of the nation since in the context of a militarized state
under threat from surrounding enemies it seemed more powerful to “be
just like one’s enemies so as to avoid the fate of one’s ancestors.”17 This
fact influenced both scholarly and literary investigations of the Holocaust,
and it was only after the forced resignation of Ben-Zion Dinur from Yad
Vashem in 1959 that research into the experiences of survivors could
begin.18 If we once again take Yechiel Dinur’s testimony at the Eichmann
trial as the turning point, it is fairly understandable how his fame
transitioned from one based on distance—in the sense that his family saga
was written in the third person—to one based on identification. Before the
1960s Israeli survivors, particularly those with Eastern European heritage,
could not be easily integrated into the national narrative of the creation of
an independent state, despite the fact that the Holocaust more generally
had been a central argument for the creation of the state of Israel.19 “The
trial of Adolf Eichmann,” Tom Segev argues, “served as therapy for the
nation, starting a process of identification with the tragedy of the victims
and survivors, a process that continues to this day.”20 This transition also
created a new standpoint from which Ka-Tzetnik’s novels were read, both
in Israel and abroad.
Aside from shining a spotlight on the author that connected his work to
the trial’s detailing of graphic violence, the shift in attention toward
survivors also enabled a new reading of Ka-Tzetnik’s identification with
the Muselmann. A connection that Ka-Tzetnik had framed in mythic and
theological terms was henceforth read more politically: the Muselmann
now appeared as a symbol of the “entire Jewish world.” As Uri Cohen
argues, a deeper reading of Ka-Tzetnik’s novels reveals a primarily
Eastern European understanding of the fate of the Jews, an understanding
that was quite alien to Western Jews. Even Jews of German-speaking
origin who had emigrated to Israel (and who were known, often
disparagingly, as yekkes) were unlikely to frame their experiences in
spiritual terms and often refused to identify with their more spiritual
counterparts from Eastern Europe, to whom they still often applied the
extremely derogatory label: Ostjuden (Eastern Jews).21 Ka-Tzetnik’s
particular mode of identifying with the Muselmann, particularly his
insistence that he was one, contrasts with the perspective of the Italian
survivor Primo Levi, who self-consciously framed his memoir, Se questo è
un Uomo (If This Is a Man but later translated as Survival in Auschwitz), in
the terms of the Enlightenment. “Levi,” Cohen argues, “is writing of
Man’s Auschwitz, of the destruction of the West’s crowning
achievement,” while “Ka-Tzetnik is writing the Jewish Holocaust.”22
The question of point of view, of identification with the victims of the
Holocaust as Jews or as fellow human beings, is quite obvious in the
context of the young Israeli state. But it has not in any way lost its
significance for our understanding of the survivors’ writings. This volume
has presented considerable evidence that Ka-Tzetnik’s works have been
read and marketed very differently in Israel than they have been in the rest
of the world, and we must be aware of how they will enter a fundamentally
reconfigured global memory culture as we move into what, following
Rupnow, we might call the post-communicative phase of Holocaust
research, memorialization, and remembrance. Rather than contributing to
the flattening of discourse surrounding the Holocaust (produced by
endlessly circulating media images that “can be inappropriately and easily
operationalized and interchanged for other purposes”23) scholarly
explorations of Ka-Tzetnik’s work must stay attuned to how the different
translations, marketing methods, and receptions reveal specific national
memory cultures along with the influence of what has become a global
culture of Holocaust remembrance. Segev notes that “Over the years, there
were those who distorted the heritage of the Holocaust, making it a bizarre
cult of memory, death, and kitsch. Others too have used it, toyed with it,
traded on it, popularized it, and politicized it. As the Holocaust recedes in
time—and into the realm of history—its lessons have moved to the center
of a fierce struggle over the politics, ideology, and morals of the
present.”24 The temptations to read Ka-Tzetnik’s work as kitsch have been
particularly strong outside of Israel, where taboos against its sexual themes
held sway in the academy while simultaneously nursing the titillating
instrumentalization of his storylines and metaphors in popular culture.
Notes
1 Dirk Rupnow, “Beyond Boundaries: History, the Holocaust and Literature,”
this volume.
2 Iris Roebling-Grau’s chapter in this volume, cited from Ka-Tzetnik 135633,
Shivitti: A Vision, trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa Herman (San
Francisco: Harper & Row), 72–3.
3 This quotation was translated from the original Hebrew by Omer Bartov and
differs somewhat from the published English version that Roebling-Grau has
relied on. See Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other
Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2
(1997): 61. Quotation from Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Ha-tsofen: Masa ha-garin
shel Auschwitz (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994), 77–8.
4 Iris Milner, “The Evil Spirits of the Shoah: Ka-Tzentik’s Literary Testimony
to Death and Survival in the Concentrationary Universe,” this volume.
5 Quoted from Ka-Tzetnik, Ha-tsofen, 133 in Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism,” 62.
6 This clip is included in Ari Libsker, Stalags [Stalagim], Documentary
(Heymann Brothers Films, Yes Docu, New Israeli Foundation for Cinema &
TV, Cinephil, 2007).
7 Uri Cohen, “Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi and the Muslims,” this volume.
8 Quoted in Or Rogovin, “The Poetics of the Other Planet: Testimony and
Chronotope in Ka-Tzetnik’s Piepel,” this volume.
9 The poem is provided in Yiddish and Hebrew in Yechiel Szeintuch,
Salamandrah: Mitos Ṿe-Hisṭoryah Be-Khitve K. Tseṭniḳ (Jerusalem: Carmel,
2009), 235–7, and it is quoted in Porat,
10 Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism,” 62.
11 Cohen, “Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi and the Muslims,” this volume.
12 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Piepel, trans. Moshe M. Kohn (London: Anthony Blond,
1961). This passage is also cited in Rogovin, this volume. I retained the
alternate spelling of Musselmann used in this edition.
13 Milner, “The Evil Spirits of the Shoah,” this volume.
14 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 102; Moni, 119.
15 Or Rogovin, “The Poetics of the Other Planet: Testimony and Chronotope in
Ka-Tzetnik’s Piepel,” this volume.
16 Ibid. Rogovin takes the phrase “interchangeable space” from M. M. Bakhtin,
“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson,
revised ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 100.
17 Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism,” 48.
18 Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in
Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 197–8.
See my longer discussion of these developments in Chapter 2.
19 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim
Watzman (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991), 18.
20 Ibid., 11.
21 For an extended discussion of the difficulties that German-speaking Jews had
in integrating into Israeli culture in the 1930s and beyond, see Segev, The
Seventh Million, 15–66, esp. 51–2; and Rakefet Sela-Heffy, “‘Europeans in
the Levant’ Revisited—German Jewish Immigrants in 1930s Palestine and
the Question of Culture Retention,” in Deutsche(s) in Palästina und Israel:
Alltag, Kultur, Politik, ed. José Brunner, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche
Geschichte/Tel Aviv Yearbook for German History 41 (Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag, 2013), 40–59, esp. 48.
22 Cohen, “Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi and the Muslims,” this volume.
23 Rupnow, “Beyond Boundaries.”
24 Segev, The Seventh Million, 11.
25 Pascale Bos, “Sexual Violence in Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls,” this volume.
26 Sara R. Horowitz, “Mengele, the Gynecologist, and Other Stories of
Women’s Survival,” in Judaism since Gender, ed. Miriam Peskowitz and
Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997), 210.
27
28 Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
Final Solution (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992).
29 Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits
of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),
12.
30 Hayden White, The Content and the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987), 75.
31 Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance, 13.
32 On the Betriebsunfall thesis and its origins, see Nicolas Berg, The Holocaust
and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretation and
Autobiographical Memory, trans. Joel Golb (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2003), 48–50.
33 Rupnow, “Beyond Boundaries,” this volume.
34 Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical
Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5.
35 Rupnow, “Beyond Boundaries,” this volume.
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Index
Feiner, Yechiel here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
childhood and education here
as Holocaust victim here
see also Dinur, Yehiel; Ka–Tzetnik 135633
Felman, Shoshana here
Fortunoff Video Archive here
Fragments (Wilkomirski) here
Frank, Anne here, here
Friedländer, Saul here, here, here, here
Funktion here, here, here, here, here
Piepel (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here
pornography here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. See also
sexploitation
Preleshnik, Daniella (character in Salamandra series) here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. See also House of Dolls
Preleshnik, Harry (character in Salamandra series) here, here, here, here,
here, here, here
Preleshnik, Moni (character in Salamandra series) here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here. See also Piepel
prostitution (forced). See sex slavery
Rassenschande here
Red Army here
Ringelblum, Emanuel here
www.bloomsbury.com
Annette F. Timm has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work.
Cover image: Survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp during his testimony
at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Alias: K. Zetnik. (Photo by Popper Ltd./ullstein
bild/Getty Images)
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