Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik 9781350012097, 9781350012127, 9781350012103

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations and Note on Terminology and Spelling
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Dilemmas of Ka-Tzetnik’s International Fame
1. An Author as His Own Biographer—Ka-Tzetnik: A Man and a Tattooed Number
2. Testimony in Holocaust Historiography
3. The Evil Spirits of the Shoah : Ka-Tzentik’s Literary Testimony to Death and Survival in the Concentrationary Universe
4. The Poetics of the Other Planet: Testimony and Chronotope in Ka- Tzetnik’s
5. Sexual Violence in Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls
6. The Eroticization of Witnessing: The Twofold Legacy of Ka-Tzetnik
7. Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, and the Muslims
8. How to Understand Shivitti?
9. Beyond Boundaries: History, the Holocaust, and Literature
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik

Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik Edited by Annette F. Timm

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2018 Paperback Edition first published 2019 Copyright © Annette F. Timm and Contributors, 2018 Annette F.Timm has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. 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) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Timm, Annette F., editor. Title: Holocaust history and the readings of Ka- tzetnik / edited by Annette F. Timm. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, [2018] Identifiers: LCCN 2017021639 | ISBN 9781350012097 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350012110 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Ka- tzetnik 135633, 1917– 2001– Criticism and interpretation. | BISAC: HISTORY / Holocaust. | HISTORY / Middle East / Israel. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Jewish. Classification: LCC PJ5054.K343 Z69 2017 | DDC 892.43/ 6– dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/ 2017021639 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-1209-7 PB: 978-1-3501-2308-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-1210-3 eBook: 978-1-3500-1211-0 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations and Note on Terminology and Spelling List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: The Dilemmas of Ka-Tzetnik’s International Fame Annette F. Timm 1

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An Author as His Own Biographer—Ka-Tzetnik: A Man and a Tattooed Number Dina Porat

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2

Testimony in Holocaust Historiography Annette F. Timm

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3

The Evil Spirits of the Shoah: Ka-Tzentik’s Literary Testimony to Death and Survival in the Concentrationary Universe Iris Milner

67

The Poetics of the Other Planet: Testimony and Chronotope in Ka-Tzetnik’s Piepel Or Rogovin

79

5

Sexual Violence in Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls Pascale Bos

105

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The Eroticization of Witnessing: The Twofold Legacy of Ka-Tzetnik Guido Vitiello

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7

Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, and the Muslims Uri S. Cohen

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8

How to Understand Shivitti? Iris Roebling-Grau

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Beyond Boundaries: History, the Holocaust, and Literature Dirk Rupnow

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Conclusion Annette F. Timm

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Bibliography Index

217 239

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Illustrations 0.1 1.1

Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls. New York: Pyramid Books, 1960. Aron Dotan, Elie Wiesel, and Dina Porat. Courtesy Adv. Itshak Japhet Halevy.

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Note on Terminology and Spelling Readers should note that there is no definitive consensus about how to spell the name of the author investigated in this book. We have chosen the most common English spelling of the pen name Ka-Tzetnik 135633, but we have kept alternative spellings used by other authors when quoting their work. Variations include: K. Tzetnik, Ka-Tsetnik, and K-Zetnik. For the most part, the authors in this volume use the name Yehiel Dinur when referring to the person and Ka-Tzetnik when referring to the author of a given piece of writing. To add to the confusion, Dinur was born as Yehiel Feiner, but he later used the following names and spellings: Yechiel Fajner, Karl Tzetninski, Yehiel De-Nur, and Yehiel Denoor. The spelling variations are explained in part by variations in transliterations from Hebrew into other languages. This is also evident in the spelling of slang terms created within the multi-lingual yet mostly non-textual conditions forced upon the inmates of the concentration camps. For instance, the term that camp inmates used for those who were in the final stages of starvation and exhaustion and were soon to die—Muselmann, derived from the German word for Muslim—is spelled variously in Ka-Tzetnik’s work and in the works of other Holocaust survivors, such as Primo Levi. (A definition on Yad Vashem’s website argues that the term originates from the fact that these individuals could no longer stand up and thus looked like they were continually prostrating themselves in prayer. See http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/ Microsoft%20Word%20-%206474.pdf.) We have settled on “Muselmann” and the German plural “Muselmänner,” but Ka-Tzetnik was not entirely consistent himself, and his and other works quoted in this book also contain the following spellings: musselman, muselmann, Mussulman, Mussulmen, and mussulmans. Our choice is consistent with the usage in the recently published English translation of Primo Levi’s work. See Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015).

Contributors Pascale Bos received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Minnesota in 1998. She is associate professor in the Departments of Germanic Studies and European Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and she is affiliated with the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, the program for women’s and gender studies, and the European studies programs. Her research interests include twentieth-century comparative Western European and US literature; gender and women’s studies; and the history, culture, and literature of the Holocaust. She is author of German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger, and the Politics of Address (2005) and numerous scholarly articles on the literary representations of the experience of rape in World War II. She teaches twentieth-century comparative Western European and US literature, along with courses in cultural studies, gender and memory, autobiography, the Holocaust, and sexual violence in armed conflict. 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. Iris Milner is a associate professor in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University. She specializes in the study of modern Hebrew literature and its impact on Israeli society, culture, and politics. She has written extensively on the role of literature in mediating changes in collective memory, particularly with regard to the trauma of the Holocaust. Her book Past Present: Biography, Identity and Memory in Second Generation Literature (2003, Hebrew) is a study of the representation in Hebrew prose of second-generation family members of Holocaust survivors, while Narratives of Holocaust Literature (2008, Hebrew) investigates major themes and modes of representation in a multilingual corpus of Holocaust literature. 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

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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). Iris Roebling-Grau is currently a fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center of the Freie Universität Berlin. She is working in the field of comparative literature with a focus on romance philology. Her research project is financed by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. It deals with different literary texts by Teresa of Ávila, JeanJacques Rousseau, and Jonathan Littell. They are interpreted and located within the long theological tradition of texts as a mirror for their readers. Iris RoeblingGrau received her PhD in comparative literature with a focus on French literature. Her publications include various articles in Poetica and the monograph “Acte gratuit”: Variationen einer Denkfigur von André Gide (2009). She is also the coeditor of the volume “Holocaust”-Fiktion. Kunst jenseits der Authentizität (2015). Or Rogovin received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2012. He is assistant professor and Silbermann Family Professor in Modern Hebrew Language and Literature in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at Bucknell University. His areas of research and teaching include Modern Hebrew and Jewish literature, Holocaust studies, and narrative theory. His recent articles appeared in journals such as Prooftexts, Partial Answers, and Iyunim Be-Tekumat Israel. Dirk Rupnow received his PhD from the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2002. He is currently professor of History at the University of Innsbruck and the head of the Institute for Contemporary History there. In 2009 he completed his habilitation at the University of Vienna. He has also been a research associate for the Historians’ Commission of the Republic of Austria (1999/2000) and a visiting fellow or lecturer at various historical institutes in Vienna, at Dartmouth College, the University of Bielefeld, Duke University, Leipzig University, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust

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Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In 2016 and 2017, Rupnow was the Distinguished Visiting Chair of Austrian History at Stanford University. He has received numerous international awards for his writing, including the 2009 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History of the Wiener Library, London. His most important publications include Judenforschung im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft zwischen Politik, Propaganda und Ideologie (Research on Jews in the Third Reich: Science Between Politics, Propaganda, and Ideology, 2011); Aporien des Gedenkens. Reflexionen über “Holocaust” und Erinnerung (Aporia of Memorialization: Reflections on “Holocaust” and Memory, 2006), and Vernichten und Erinnern. Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik (Destruction and Memory. Traces of National Socialist Memory Politics, 2005). Annette F. Timm received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1999. She is associate professor of History at the University of Calgary and editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Her scholarly publications include The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (2010), and Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day, 2nd ed. (coauthor with Joshua Sanborn, 2016). Her current projects include a monograph (in the writing stage), titled Lebensborn: Myth, Memory and the Sexualization of the German Past, and a collaborative research and curation project that explores the resonance of German sexology in public discourses about sex and sexuality in Germany and North America. Not Straight from Germany: Sexual Publics and Sexual Citizenship Since Magnus Hirschfeld, an edited volume and exhibition catalog (documenting a scholarly conference and historical and art exhibition in Calgary in 2011 called PopSex!), is in press. Guido Vitiello is assistant professor in the Faculty of Political Sciences, Sociology, and Communication of the University of Rome, La Sapienza. His recent research focuses on such topics as the Holocaust in film and popular culture, and the memory of the Third Reich in German films. His latest book, Il testimone immaginario. Auschwitz, il cinema e la cultura pop (Imaginary Witness. Auschwitz, Film and Pop Culture, 2011), explores the representation of the Holocaust in science fiction, horror, and erotic film. He is the creator of the Holocaust Visual Archive (holocaustvisualarchive.wordpress.com), a blog that collects images of the Holocaust in pop culture, cinema, memorial culture, and modern art. His most recent English-language publication is the chapter “Portrait of the Chimpanzee as a Metaphysician: Parody and Dehumanization in Echoes from a Somber Empire,” in B. Prager (ed.), A Companion to Werner Herzog.

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Acknowledgments 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 outof-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

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Figure 0.1 Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls. New York: Pyramid Books, 1960.

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

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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

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Annette F. Timm 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

So even while we might question the historical veracity of some of the narrative elements of Ka-Tzetnik’s writings, we cannot question his burning desire to deploy literature as a means of conveying the experience of the victims of the Holocaust to those who had many reasons to avoid imagining it. By the time of the trial, Ka-Tzetnik’s goal of enlightening a broad audience about the crimes of the Nazis had been achieved, and his family chronicle had helped to quench a thirst for knowledge, especially among youth, that had otherwise met with taboos and relative silence in the popular, scholarly, and literary publishing scenes of the early decades of the state of Israel.10 Virtually all Israelis who were of reading age in the second half of the twentieth century are aware of Ka-Tzetnik’s writing, and for many in the older generation his books provided their first exposure to the violent experiences of the victims of the Holocaust. As Bartov, Amit Pinchevski, Roy Brand, Jeremy Popkin, Jeffrey Wallen, and others have noted, this fame cannot be understood without reference to the graphic portrayals of violence and sexual slavery that books like House of Dolls and its sequel Piepel (about the sexual slavery of a young boy in Auschwitz) contained.11 This fact does not, however, cancel out Ka-Tzetnik’s role as testifier and witness to the crimes he sought to chronicle. By bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, with different perspectives and approaches to Dinur’s work and life, this volume seeks to address both the uncomfortable effects of KaTzetnik’s fiction (including his unintentional fictions) and the power of his testimonial and literary legacies. How do we approach an author who has prompted one of the most prominent Holocaust historians in Israel, Dan Miron, to argue that his work should be removed from the “Reference Guide” for Israeli teachers and students but whose penname also graces Yad-Vashem’s “Ka-Tzetnik Prize for Holocaust Consciousness”?12 How do we integrate the knowledge that more

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than seven decades of intense scholarly research on the Holocaust has taught us while still remaining sensitive to the fact that the writing that made Ka-Tzetnik famous took place mostly in the immediate aftermath of the war and without access to secondary accounts that might have reframed and contextualized his memories? What do we make of the intertwined but still quite different receptions to his work in Israel and in other parts of the world? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we remain respectful of the emotional truths about the survivor experience that Dinur wanted to convey to us while avoiding the traps of righteous demythologization? The authors in this volume take up these challenges from a diverse set of backgrounds and with varying disciplinary perspectives. We begin with a biographical essay by Holocaust historian Dina Porat, who has uncovered a wealth of new detail about the life of the man who was so adamant about maintaining the distinction between himself and his authorial persona that he stole and burned copies of his 1931 collection of poems (Tsveiuntsvantsig: Lider) from the Library of Congress in Washington and from libraries in Jerusalem, claiming that they “belonged to a world that no longer existed.”13 Porat tracks Feiner’s early life and his precise movements during the period of persecution—through various labor camps and ghettos and finally to Auschwitz in August 1943. Most interestingly and originally, Porat tracks Feiner’s movements after his escape from a death march in January 1945 and describes his months in Rumania, where he began writing and organizing his escape from Europe. His first book was translated from Yiddish to Hebrew and was published soon after he arrived in Tel Aviv in 1946. This specifically biographical chapter is followed by my own, which takes a broader historiographical approach to the memoir literature and oral testimony of the early post-war years. I  argue that Ka-Tzetnik’s uneven integration into the canon of Holocaust testimony can be explained as a function of historians’ distrust of oral history as a methodology and their discomfort with the most graphic descriptions of violence—and particularly sexual violence—that survivors gave when first liberated. While recent historical work has revealed that the early silence of survivors on these themes is a myth, it is nonetheless true that various political, social, and linguistic forces combined to ensure that these graphic descriptions were temporarily marginalized in the scholarly literature. These historical chapters are followed by literary analyses of Ka-Tzetnik’s writing. Iris Milner investigates the seeming contradictions in Ka-Tzetnik’s style between the starkly naturalistic modes of representation and historical narratives suffused with literary manipulations (metaphors, analogies, and recurrent

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leitmotifs). Or Rogovin then turns our view to Ka-Tzetnik’s famous metaphor— “the planet of Auschwitz”—and investigates its complexity. The conceptualization of Auschwitz as “another planet” serves as the central memetic construction of the world of the camps in Ka-Tzetnik’s writing. While Rogovin focuses on poetics and Milner trains her lens on the impact of testimony, both insist that the power of Ka-Tzetnik’s writing rests in the jarring and disruptive way that he manipulates literary conventions in order to highlight the dehumanization of the camps. This, Milner insists, wrests the story of the camps away from the simplistic narratives of heroism that were dominant in Israel in the 1940s and 1950s and underlines the importance of interpersonal norms in the creation of testimony. Together these two chapters make a case that what past critics have described as unevenness or a lack of sophistication in Ka-Tzetnik’s writing in fact represents an understandable inability to tame the beastly forces of the Holocaust and to organize the multitude of narrative dimensions that explaining the experience of survivors entails. The chapters by Pascale Bos and Guido Vitiello directly address the ethical dilemmas produced by the theme of sexual violence in Ka-Tzetnik’s writing. Bos argues against those who have called Ka-Tzetnik’s description of sexual violence pornographic, and she insists that the novel House of Dolls must be understood in the context of a wartime and post-war discourse about Nazi sexual violence that was far more prevalent than later scholars appreciated. Her chapter traces the rumors and stories that likely served as Dinur’s source material for House of Dolls and demonstrates that the novel is best treated as an attempt to correct deeply demeaning narratives about Jewish compromise and collaboration rather than as an exploitative and titillating piece of pulp fiction. Taking up where Bos leaves off, Vitiello then explores some of the titillating pulp fiction that Ka-Tzetnik’s novels (and perhaps particularly their book covers) inspired. From TV series like the The Twilight Zone to the Israeli sadomasochistic and pornographic novels known as the Stalags, the image of the “other planet” has contributed to a disturbing eroticization of the Nazi past.14 Exploring this “eroticization of witnessing”—the resort to sexual curiosity and voyeurism as a means to approach the horrors of Auschwitz—Vitiello ranges widely over examples from both high and low culture: B. Wilkomirski’s pseudo-memoir Fragments, Jonathan Littell’s historical novel The Kindly Ones, Stephen King’s horror novella Apt Pupil, and Liliana Cavani’s Nazisploitation film The Night Porter. Turning from popular culture back to analyzing Ka-Tzetnik as the author of high literature, Uri Cohen emphasizes the role of Dinur’s writing as memoir and compares Ka-Tzetnik’s Salamandra sextet to Primo Levi’s much more critically

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acclaimed autobiography Se questo è un Uomo (If This is a Man, but more often published in English as Survival in Auschwitz). Cohen seeks to determine how each author frames the experience of the camps in terms of Jewish politics and the wider significance of this experience for humanity as a whole. The chapter focuses on the image of the Muselmann—the name (spelled differently in various survivor accounts) that inmates gave to fellow sufferers who they felt had no hope of survival. While Levi’s Muselmann teaches that survival itself was a form of collaboration, Ka-Tzetnik, at least in his early works, insists that the Muselmann is a figure of extreme victimhood who represents the latest phase of an ancient story of persecution. In Levi, there is self-doubt, while Ka-Tzetnik’s Muselmann acts as a metaphor for the author’s own experience of a loss of subjectivity. In both cases, however, investigating how the authors depict the most doomed victims of the Holocaust reveals the debates within Jewish communities about the difference and tension between victims and survivors. This victim/survivor tension tormented Dinur and led to a breakdown that convinced him to seek treatment from the Dutch psychiatrist Jan C. Bastiaans in the last years of his life. In his last book, Shivitt: A Vision (1987), Ka-Tzetnik provided a report of the visions that he experienced under Bastianns’s LSD-aided psychological treatment. Visions of god intermix with emotional reflections upon Dinur’s experience in Auschwitz, and Dinur insisted that this combination of spirituality and drug-aided reverie was essential to his path of emotional healing. Roebling-Grau argues that in this last phase of his life, Dinur had begun to conceptually and spiritually dismantle what he had previously viewed as a strict boundary between the identity of victim and perpetrator. In the spiritual state that LSD enabled for him, he saw not only God, but also himself in an SS uniform. In Shivitti, Roebling-Grau argues, Ka-Tzetnik drew on Cold War themes to strengthen the metaphorical power of his words, demonstrating how the end of the Cold War has produced noticeable shifts in the available rhetoric and its historical contextualization. It is instructive that the American publishers of Shivitti felt compelled to include an explanation for Dinur’s penname on a page opposite the title page: “K.Z. (German pronunciation ka-tzet) are the initials of Konzentration Zenter [sic] (Concentration Camp). Every K.Z. inmate was known as ‘KaTzetnik Number . . .,’ the number itself being branded into the flesh of the left arm. The author of Shivitti was Ka-Tzetnik 135633.”15 There are obvious errors in this explanation: concentration camps were never called “Zenter,” so KZ— still a common way of designating concentration camps in German today—is less an acronym than a phonetic abbreviation, derived in ways similar to how “Nazi” became a short form for National Sozialist; and concentration camp

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inmates were not “branded” but tattooed—and not all of them, but only those in Auschwitz. Nevertheless, highlighting that “ka-tzetnik” was a word used in the camps made it clear that the American publishers were presenting Ka-Tzetnik as a representative of Holocaust victims and his writing as legitimate testimony. As Dinur’s work moved away from fiction and became more explicitly autobiographical and self-reflective, it found a new home in the canon of English-language Holocaust writing. Yet the contributions to this volume demonstrate that no clear line can be drawn between Dinur’s fiction and his testimony. The concluding chapter of this book provides context for our reflections about the tension between Ka-Tzetnik’s storytelling and his testimony by exploring the complex interrelationship between historical scholarship and literature in  the process of transmitting information about the Holocaust to a global audience. Although Dirk Rupnow does not refer directly to Ka-Tzetnik’s works, his arguments are critical for our understanding of how this complex author will be read differently in an era—soon upon us—devoid of the living voices of survivors. Rupnow argues that public knowledge about the Holocaust is today far more likely to be conveyed through museums, films, and novels than through discussions with eyewitnesses or court cases. While we might question whether the ubiquity of these literary representations is a good thing—some fear that it can easily degenerate into kitsch—its central role in setting the boundaries of knowledge and in defining categories of authenticity and objectivity is undeniable. Ultimately, novels like Ka-Tzetnik’s demonstrate that the telling of stories about the Holocaust is a necessary process of cultural coping with this past without which we would be declaring the perpetrators victorious in their effort to transform human life. Given that only a very small percentage of those who survived the Holocaust are still alive, and given what Rupnow describes as a flood of new forms of representation of the Holocaust in film, literature, and popular culture, we have now moved into a world that Ka-Tzetnik could not have anticipated—a world in which the features of the “other planet” have become so familiar as to be risking cliché. Rupnow’s exploration of the tension between scholarly explorations of the Holocaust and their occasional co-optation for popular, government, or even corporate purposes, makes it clear that Ka-Tzetnik’s own transformations and the internal tensions in his work can serve as a valuable test case for developing correctives to clichéd depictions of Holocaust violence. The rejection of all conciliation in his early works, but also his later recognition that the Holocaust needs to be understood as part of the history of humanity, can provide us with material to combat formalized rhetorics about the Holocaust that now dominate its depiction in popular culture.

Introduction

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In the end, the complexities and discomforts of Ka-Tzetnik’s writing—the fact that reading his books requires us to face the taboos and simplified narratives that heroic tales of resistance or martyrdom create—are reason enough to bring the work of this controversial author to the broader attention of scholars of the Holocaust. Collectively, the chapters in this book tackle each of his many faces and the emotions they provoked. We move from Yechiel Feiner (also spelled Yechiel Fajner) to Karl Tzetninski, to Ka-Tzetnik (or K. Tzetnik, or Ka-Tsetnik) and finally to Yehiel Dinur (also spelled De-Nur or Denoor). The difficulties of translation from Yiddish to Hebrew and English, not to mention other European languages, stands as a metaphor for the complexities of this author’s writing and its reception. It follows then, that this book can carry no one central thesis. Ka-Tzetnik’s novels do not allow us the comfort of easy explanations or identifications. Even his vacillations—the fact that he at one time called Auschwitz the “other planet” only to insist on the common humanity of victim and perpetrator at the end of his life—underlines his devotion to the imperative of explanation and highlights the rewards of examining his work in its historical context. For Jews of the Yishuv (Jewish residents of Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel) and for Israelis, the effect of the ethical discomforts that reading Ka-Tzentik produced was both educational and traumatizing. As Galia Glasner-Heled has argued, his writings created a kind of “ ‘educational bypass’ by transmitting what could not be openly transmitted about the Holocaust from one generation to the next, not via child-parent or teacher-student communication, but through an intimate, harrowing reading experience.”16 But this jarring effect can also be historicized, and we can better understand Dinur’s message if we take KaTzetnik’s literary techniques seriously. To rest in the comfort of dismissal—to refuse to understand the insights because the details of the violence do not match a record that had not yet been uncovered when the author wrote—is to refuse to acknowledge the power that his books undeniably had.

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,

10

3 4

5

6

7 8

9

10 11

Annette F. Timm K. Tzetnik, and Ka-Tsetnik. I have chosen the spelling that has become most common in English writings. 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. 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). 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 NSVerbrechen,” in Gedächtnis und Geschlecht: Deutungsmuster in Darstellungen des Nationalsozialistischen Genozids (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2002), 269–96. 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). Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 54. 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. 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. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 189–90. 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 Communication

Introduction

12

13

14

15 16

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24, 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. 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. 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. 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. Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision, trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa Herman (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), cover page. Galia Glasner-Heled, “Reader, Writer, and Holocaust Literature: The Case of KaTzetnik,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 120.

1

An Author as His Own Biographer—Ka-Tzetnik: A Man and a Tattooed Number Dina Porat

Readers of Ka-Tzetnik’s writings have most probably noticed that the Auschwitz prisoner number that he often mentions is 135633. Many of these readers must have taken a look at the cover of his best known novel, The House of Dolls, and discovered that the photo of the chest of an unfortunate young woman— tattooed with the words “FELD-HURE,” meaning a field or front whore—carries the number 135833, just one digit different. Did the author identify himself with the young woman up to a point of merging? Did he feel he was hurt in a similar manner? What is the connection between him and the photo? Was he trying to say that the number is not his but rather belongs to the dead? Let us try and unearth who Ka-Tzetnik was and unfold the story of his life. But first, two introductory remarks. Quite surprisingly, there is no written biography of Ka-Tzetnik, a well-known author whose literary output has been read by three generations, first in Hebrew in Israel and then in a large number of languages worldwide; and second, Ka-Tzetnik’s demeanor did not encourage this fame:  Not only did he lead the life of a monk in a closed home or in a secluded hut, cut off from the rest of the world with rare moments of communication with the outside world, but many of the details included in the family saga, which may seem at first glance to be authentically autobiographic, are in fact imaginary literary details, and do not help construct his real-life story or that of his family.1 This is important to note, because the man and his rather mysterious persona became a symbol of the Holocaust. Through the six main novels that together present the saga of a Jewish family, he was the first to transmit the Holocaust experience to the public in Israel with full force. Salamandra, the first in the

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series, which describes the ghetto and the labor camps, was published in 1946; the House of Dolls, which describes the fate of a Jewish young women, supposedly his sister, who was sexually enslaved by German officers, was published in 1953; They Called Him Piepel (also published under the title Moni: A Novel of Auschwitz), which tracks the story of Moni (supposedly Ka-Tzetnik’s brother) and describes the sexual abuse of boys in Auschwitz, came out in 1962 as the trial of Adolf Eichmann was ending; the Star of Ashes (published also under the title The Clock above the Head), which is a collection of poems, was issued in 1966; Like Sand out of the Ashes, later titled The Confrontation (Ha’Imut, 1987), describes Ka-Tzetnik’s first years in Israel and the meeting with his second wife, Nina; and, finally, Tsofen: E.D.M.A (Code: EDMA, published in 1987 and translated into English as Shivitti: a Vision in 1989), a book of mystical Kabbalistic images written following an LSD treatment. It should be noted that these six main books were often reprinted, either in full new editions, sometimes under different titles, or as chapters in the form of small booklets. They were also translated into many languages, again under different titles or forms, and it is, therefore, quite difficult to establish a fully accurate bibliographic list of all these editions and reprints. As if to say that the books were not his but rather belonged to the dead, much as his tattooed number, Ka-Tzetnik never allowed his photo to be included in any of his various publications. When the first parts of the Salamandra saga were published in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most of the about 360,000 Holocaust survivors who had come to Israel were still absorbed in their pain and unable to express it. Most other descriptions of the war years that were being published in Israel at that time were memoirs and anthologies of partisans and ghetto fighters, whose stories were a national asset for the young state still fighting for its survival. His books were a first outburst of realistic, blunt, and merciless description of the suffering of victims in the Holocaust, and they gave the readers, especially the younger generation, a feeling of peeping into a forbidden world—the world of the Nazi ghettos and camps. For better or worse, they provided many Israelis with their first introduction to that period and were a source of nightmares for the first generation growing up in the new state. They were sold and read everywhere, to the extent that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) included six excerpts from KaTzetnik’s books in their “Yalkut Library,” a series of small-format classic books meant to fit into soldiers’ backpacks (yalkut), which were published and distributed in large numbers. The Ministry of Defense, which ran a prolific publication house for many decades, continuously kept Ka-Tzetnik’s books in print between the 1960s and the 1980s.

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The nature and style of Holocaust literature has changed considerably since Ka-Tzetnik’s time, and we are now more familiar with works like those of Aharon Appelfeld and Primo Levi, who wrote with considerable restraint and shied away from expressions of intense emotion. However, while we, their readership, understand the change in tone and style of Holocaust literature over time, we still remain puzzled by the dramatic and enigmatic figure of Ka-Tzetnik, the man best remembered for fainting on the witness stand during the Eichmann trial in June 1961, a scene that was immediately burnt into the Israeli collective memory at that very moment. We have no full-length scholarly biographical research that might illuminate the source of the enigma, placing Ka-Tzetnik’s writing into the context of his time and the literary milieu in which he was writing. Even Yechiel Szeintuch, who delved deeply into the story of Ka-Tzetnik’s life and writings, chose to do it by recording in writing a series of telephone dialogs held with Ka-Tzetnik over seven years (they met in person few times) and by composing a non-chronological literary analysis of Salamandra.2 Despite these challenges, this chapter, which will be based on some new sources, will provide an initial—and necessarily incomplete and perhaps not fully accurate—biographical outline of Ka-Tzetnik’s life story. Ka-Tzetnik was born in 1909, in Sosnowiec, southwestern Poland, and he passed away at the age of ninety-two on July 17, 2001, in Tel Aviv. The details of his death only became known to the public much later, since he had warned his family against publicly disclosing the date and place of his burial. His original name was Yechiel Feiner, and in Israel, he later changed it into the Hebraic name Di-Nur, or Dinur—“Nur” meaning fire in Aramaic and thus signifying one who came out of the fire, or belongs to it. Di-Nur is also the name of a river mentioned in the Book of Daniel (7; 9–10) and later in a variety of other sources, such as the Sages Midrashim, the old occult (Sod) literature, and dozens of times in the Zohar, the main text of Kabbalah. The authors of the Zohar described it as a river of fire that streams high above, wherein the souls of the righteous immerse and come out repurified, while the souls of the wicked are sentenced to be burnt, like straw on fire, fire that eats fire.3 Ka-Tzetnik is a term common for camp survivors and based on the abbreviation of Konzentrationlager, signifying a prisoner of a concentration camp. Yet unlike most of the other survivors, who cast this name aside after the war and returned to their original names, Dinur kept it, as if to signify that he actually had never left the camp and continued to live his life under the shadow of Auschwitz. He frequently reiterated that in the camp he actually had no name—his name was his number, and the number became the essence of his camp identity. At

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the same time, he repeatedly claimed not to have remembered the number that was actually tattooed in his left arm and most probably also in his soul.4 His real name, Yechiel Di-Nur, which he assumed following his marriage in Israel, became publicly known only when he testified at the Eichmann trial in 1961. Here we will use his names Feiner, Ka-Tzetnik, Dinur, and others—in accordance with the the names he assumed during the different periods in his life Feiner was the son of Avraham Feiner, and he was born into a Hassidic family. He was educated in a Talmudic high school, the highly acclaimed The Sages of Lublin Yeshiva. According to his own testimony, he was considered an “Illuy”—a student of extraordinary intellectual talents—and he was among the very few who studied Kabbalah under the guidance of the Yeshiva Rabbi. His mother passed away when he was still young, and he was taken care of by his uncle and an elder sister, who is perhaps the counterpart of Daniella, his sister in House of Dolls. He wrote a moving eulogy to his mother, which was published in 1928 in a Yiddish newspaper.5 Having started to write in his youth, Feiner published his first collection of Yiddish poetry in 1931 with the Kultur Lige (the League of Culture), a wellknown Bundist (Jewish Workers Yiddishist party) publication house in Warsaw. This collection helps us establish the date of his birth, since it opens with the phrase “twenty two poems, twenty two years,” indicating that he was twenty-two years old in 1931.6 This modest collection drew public attention in December 1993, when Ka-Tzetnik took, or actually stole, two of the few copies of the book to have survived the war, one from the National Library in Jerusalem and the other from the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where he had traveled with the express purpose of retrieving and burning his book. He later explained that this act was motivated by the overwhelming experience of having watched the burning of his pre-war world.7 Before the war, he had married his beloved girlfriend, Sanya Goldblum. We now know that they had no children and that his mother passed away before 1928, meaning that his later description of the agony and grief he felt while witnessing the deaths of his mother and children in the gas chambers was a literary metaphor. He had a younger sister, Malkale, and a brother, Yitzhak. During the war, he lived in the Jewish quarter of Sosnowiec (more on which later) in a room with his wife Sanya and her half-sister, Halinka. The sisters’ parents, the Goldblums, had already left for Eretz Israel (Palestine) before the war, where they had investments. They joined their son, Nathan, who was studying at the Technion in Haifa, and hoped to find a way to obtain visas to bring over the two sisters as well. Yechiel’s father, Avraham, lived in another

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room in the crowded Jewish quarter with his two younger children, Malkale and Yitzhak.8 Feiner’s political views went through a number of radical transformations in these years. Before the war, he was an activist of Agudat Israel Youth, an ultra-orthodox extremist faction within the Hassidic party that propagated a harsh anti-Zionist ideology, but he also had contacts with right-wing Zionist Revisionist circles in Poland. After the war and after his arrival in Israel, he became a fervent Zionist and formed opinions compatible with those of the local Revisionist party. By the 1980s, his views regarding Jewish–Arab relations in Israel had become moderate, and he believed that an understanding between the two peoples could be achieved. Thus, he once strongly reprimanded the IDF soldiers who allegedly treated Palestinians unjustly, as the literary critic Dan Miron has argued. After abandoning his former opinions, he became extremely upset—close to using violent words—when reminded of them.9 After the war, Dinur also confronted challenges to his faith, and his efforts to solve the problem of how a Jewish god could have allowed the Holocaust to happen forced him to revisit his relationship with god. His experiences at Auschwitz made him face the contradictions and conflicts of the question of god’s presence vis-à-vis the suffering of the Jewish people, and he found a solution in what he considered a twofold providence: the godly one and an anti-godly and autonomous evil one that sometimes replaces the godly, as it had at Auschwitz. This seems to have been his deeply held belief, although he continued grappling with questions of faith throughout his life. Feiner-Dinur’s personal journey and that of the people close to him can be tracked, more or less, through his and their writings and testimonies, and it can be summarized as follows: 

 



From Sosnowiec, he was sent to two hard-labor camps, Zakrau and Niederwalden, which were run by Organization Schmelt, an SS organization headquartered in Annaberg and created by Heinrich Himmler to organize the slave labor of Jews in Silesia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.10 After a short time in these camps, he was sent back to Sosnowiec. In the spring of 1943, he was rounded up with the rest of the surviving Jews of Sosnowiec and Bedzin and sent to a newly established ghetto near Kamionka. When the ghetto was liquidated in early August 1943, he was sent to Auschwitz, where he and a group of friends from the ghetto were imprisoned for about six months.

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In early 1944, he and this group of friends were moved to a sub-camp of Auschwitz, Günthergrube, in Lędzin (then called Lendzin and part of Germany), not far from Auschwitz. When in January 1945 the Germans realized that the Red Army was approaching, the camp was liquidated, and the prisoners were taken on a death march. Feiner managed to escape at the last minute when the Germans started shooting the survivors. He returned to Sosnowiec, together with some of his friends, and then moved with them to Bedzin and southwards to Bucharest. From Rumania, the group followed the routes of “Ha’Bricha” (“the Escape,” the underground movement helping Jewish survivors and displaced persons to illegally travel to Palestine) to Tarvisio in the north of Italy, where the Jewish Brigade was stationed. Then he stayed for a time in Naples, where he finally embarked on a ship sailing to Tel Aviv.

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.

The Jewish quarter in Sosnowiec and the ghetto Feiner was thirty years old when World War II broke out, and thirty-one years old in 1940 when Jewish councils were established in Upper Silesia. The Jews in Sosnowiec, a major city in the Zaglebie region in which about 28,000 Jews formed a fifth of the city’s population before the war, suffered deprivations much as all Jews in occupied Poland: daily police commands limited their every step and every aspect of their lives; their property was confiscated; they were forced to carry out hard labor in both nearby and in faraway camps; they were also put to hard labor in the small enterprises inside the ghetto; and, from May 1942, more than 10,000—or about a third of them—were deported to nearby Auschwitz. However, this area had a number of unique characteristics. First of all, the region had been annexed directly to the German Reich, and it was close to the border with Slovakia, making it possible to maintain contact with representatives of Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and with delegates from Palestine who were stationed in Switzerland and who helped Jews to obtain documents, especially Latin American ones, that opened up escape routes to Hungary, Rumania, and from there to Turkey and to Eretz Israel. This

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solution was much debated by the youth movement members, some of whom advocated an uprising as a last resort in order to save their own and their people’s honor. Second, the Zaglebie and Upper Silesian area was rich with iron and coal, and the Nazis relied upon the estimated 100,000 Jews who were scattered across about forty-five communities to mine these resources. This provided a reprieve from being herded immediately into ghettos or behind closed fences and walls. The region was temporarily spared from mass hunger, and no beggars crowded the streets. It was only in the spring of 1943 that a ghetto was established for the Jews from Sosnowiec and Bedzin, and it existed only a few months before its inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz. Despite these facts, Ka-Tzetnik refers in his writings to the Jewish quarter in Sosnowiec as a ghetto that had existed since the beginning of the German occupation. In Salamandra, he tells the story of how he and his beloved wife, Sanya, suffered together and how she saved his life many times. In unearthly terms, he emphasizes the special bond they forged and her electrifying personality. The book tells the story of how, when Ka-Tzetnik was taken to Auschwitz, Sanya found her way to the Warsaw ghetto, where she fought in the uprising, was caught, and was then sent to Auschwitz, where she perished.11 None of these biographical details can be verified, and a line should be drawn between his literary treatment of his own and his family’s experiences and his descriptions of Jewish life in the Jewish quarter and later in the ghetto, especially those in Salamandra. For instance, historian Avihu Ronen, who meticulously researched the fate of his mother, Chajka Klinger, a Bedzin ghetto fighter, and the history of the Zaglebie area, accepts Ka-Tzetnik’s descriptions of nearby Sosnowiec as authentic, yet does not refer to the personal and family saga Ka-Tzetnik presented.12 In February 1943, barely half a year before the ghetto near Kamionka was liquidated in early August, an exchange of citizens between Germany and the British mandate in Eretz Israel allowed eleven Jews to leave Poland. Helena Haya (Halinka) Goldblum, Feiner’s sister-in-law, was among them, and benefiting from the fact that her parents were already property owners in Eretz Israel, she obtained British mandate citizenship. She had not wanted to leave her youth movement comrades—the other members of the Zionist Youth, Hano’ar Ha’Zioni—but she had been persuaded to accept the role of Nidona LaHaim, one “sentenced to life.” This was the mission local youth movements in several ghettos imposed upon one of their members after they realized that there was very little hope for survival. This person was designated to go to Eretz Israel and convey the agony of the Holocaust, lest no one would be left to do it. The farewell words of Juzek (Israel) Kozuch, leader of Halinka’s youth movement, reflect the

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national mission she undertook: The eighteen-year-old girl was asked to tell the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Eretz Israel) “about our life and struggle, how we did not surrender and will try to die as proud Jews . . . Tell them about the deportations, the murdered and the strangled, children killed in cold blood . . . the packed wagons. The extermination will be swift and total. But please convey to the Yishuv our testament, to build the country at a speed swifter than our annihilation. And if our sacrifice will contribute just one brick to the construction, this will be our reward.”13 She was equipped with a detailed report of the scope of the killings, the names of the extermination camps and ghettos in the area, the activities of her youth movement and of the Jewish fighting organizations in Warsaw and in the Zaglebie area. She also carried a description of the preparations for the impending uprisings and a letter emphatically demanding that the Yishuv send urgent help. The head of the Jewish councils in the area, Moshe (Monik) Merin, met her personally, despite the ongoing confrontations between him and the youth movements and his strong opposition to the practice of obtaining Latin American documents. He gave her a treasure—a loaf of bread for the way; he asked her to let the leadership of the Yishuv know that “the fate of the Jews is sealed,” and he briefed her on his point of view in the hope that she would help those in Eretz Israel to understand him and his policy of gaining time through work. Halinka did her best, and she became one of the central messengers of European Jewry, conveying its tragedy with empathy and without condemnation.14 It was as if two members of the Feiner-Goldblum family had undertaken the heavy task of transmitting the horrors of the Holocaust to the Yishuv and to Israeli society. Feiner took the pen name Ka-Tzetnik with an oath to write the story of Auschwitz, and Goldblum was burdened with the story of the ghettos and their Zionist youth movements and underground activities. There is no evidence that Feiner was instrumental in obtaining the documents that enabled her to leave Poland, as he later claimed;15 yet it is plausible to assume that the two discussed the situation in Sosnowiec and the surrounding area at length before she left. In his first book Salamandra, Ka-Tzetnik tells his readers that he was interrogated twice in Katowice, first in the Gestapo area headquarters, where he first saw Adolf Eichmann. He was brought to the District Gestapo commander, Alfred Draier, after he was caught holding a Honduran passport. While Draier was hesitating about what to do in such a rare case, Eichmann entered, read the papers, tore them to pieces, and slowly dropped them into the waste basket. Only later did Feiner learn that this man was Eichmann. The feeling of helplessness, of

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facing an arbitrary force of inexplicably cold evil that determines one’s fate in a fraction of a second never left him and eventually led to his quest for the meaning of Jewish fate, which could be so easily determined. His second encounter with the Katowice Gestapo headquarters came when he was caught and tortured in connection with the discovery of a secret cache of weapons in the ghetto, though he was not even a member of the youth movement underground. It should be noted that the very few people who were released after being tortured were treated with grave suspicion by fellow Jews locked up in the ghettos. Being in the lion’s den and coming out without having to denounce other people—that was a rare miracle. Naturally, there is no other evidence regarding the torn document and the interrogations, but Ka-Tzetnik’s description indicates that he had the strength to initiate steps toward rescue; he had managed to obtain the kind of document that only a few hundred Jews in the area had tried to acquire, and he must have been in contact with some of them. Through Halinka, he must also have had contact with the youth movements underground, even though he was not a member. In early August 1943, when Feiner was thirty-four years old and most probably still in good physical condition, he was sent from the liquidated ghetto to Auschwitz, together with the rest of the Jews of Sosnowiec and Bedzin. Together with several friends from Bedzin, he was imprisoned for about six months, and toward the end of the year, this group was sent to Günthergrube, a new sub-camp of Auschwitz. The group included the two Londner brothers, Moshe (Manek) and Ze’ev (later Liron), Dov Yudkowski, and a few others. In this small camp, they stayed for a year, enjoying, if one can use this term, better conditions than known to be the norm in other camps: “When we got off the trucks [which brought them from Auschwitz] we immediately realized that this is another world,” Liron later said. “They spoke differently there.”16 The Lagerelteste (camp senior supervisor), Ludwig Woerl—who had been imprisoned for anti-Nazi activities in 1933 in Dachau and who had been sent to Günthergrube on punishment for saving Jewish lives in Auschwitz before it became known that conditions at Günthergrube would become more tolerable—continued helping and defending the Jewish prisoners in Günthergrube. When Yad Vashem was established in the early 1950s, Ka-Tzetnik, Yudkowski, and Ze’ev Londner filed a request to have Woerl awarded the title “Righteous of the Nations.” His file was number one in line, and he was one of the first to be awarded the title. The camp commander, Aloise Wendlin Frei, never raised a hand on a prisoner, and Manek testified to that effect in his trial after the war. Frei was sentenced in Poland

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to only five years in jail, since there was no prisoner who would counter these sympathetic accounts. “We were not hungry there, and saw no one dying of hunger,” and there were no selections, said the Londner brothers later. The work in the nearby coal mines was too important for the I.G. Farben plant, and food was distributed accordingly.17 It was indeed another world. These conditions explain how Ka-Tzetnik could tell Elie Wiesel (in a letter discussed below) that he came out of Auschwitz (actually out of Günthergrube) physically well (Shalem Begufi). There is, then, a striking contradiction between the image Ka-Tzetnik created of himself—as a symbol of the Muselmann, a person who was imprisoned in Auschwitz for an unbearable year-and-a-half, during which time he deteriorated to a pile of skin and bones, lost his mental capacities, becoming a barely alive skeleton all covered with wounds and lice18—and the testimonies of his friends about the year in Günthergrube, where the humane treatment they received enabled them to regain their strength after the months spent in Auschwitz to stage a last-minute escape. It seems that Ka-Tzetnik’s Auschwitz experience overshadowed everything else, especially his sense of time and place, and he chose to give a strong literary expression only to these sentiments. On January 18, 1945, on the eve of the final evacuation of Günthergrube and before the Red Army liberated the place, the remaining prisoners were sent on a two-day march to Gleiwitz, where they were herded on a train heading for Germany. The Londner brothers and a third friend of theirs jumped off the train. Feiner and the rest of the group managed to escape when the Germans stopped the train to unload their human cargo and started shooting everyone still alive. Each ran his own way, yet they met again, and made their way back to Sosnowiec and Bedzin, trying to find survivors from their families and recover the remnants of their homes.19 Most of them gave up after a short while, especially after having faced fierce antisemitic remarks and even outright violence from their former neighbors. After hearing that many Jewish survivors were fleeing to Bucharest to find a way to Eretz Israel, they began the difficult journey to Romania, feeling that this was their only remaining option.

The Bricha—escape from Europe Ka-Tzetnik did not include the period between 1945 and 1947 in the saga he later wrote, although this was a crucial stage in his life, forming a sort of bridge

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between the war and the Holocaust and life in the Land of Israel. It was then that his first works were written, hence the importance of these years when one takes a closer look at his life. At the beginning of 1945, Bucharest, the capital of Romania, became a gathering place for survivors who flocked in from every direction, coming down the roads of the Bricha—the escape from a Europe that had turned into a cemetery. They came from all directions:  from hiding places in Poland, forests in Lithuania, camps in Germany, and as repatriations from the Soviet Union. As author Yonat Sened described: “there gathered there a large crowd, hustling and bustling, from youth movement idealists to black marketeers trading currencies.”20 Among the many and varied faces, Yechiel Feiner stood out and attracted attention. During the Bricha, he changed and exchanged names and documents, and in Bucharest he mostly went by the name of Kalman (Karl) Zitinsky, which has initials matching his later pen name of Ka-Tzetnik. He was a member of a group of five Auschwitz and Günthergrube survivors, whom the Bricha organizers indeed called “the Auschwitz Group.” The Auschwitz group happened to arrive in Romania with another group of six of the Warsaw ghetto fighters, and they clung to these fighters, insisting on living in the same room with them and expressing their admiration in often exaggerated and embarrassing ways.21 Accommodating the many survivors who were arriving in Bucharest was not an easy matter, and many shared the same room, sleeping on wooden multistoried bunks that were reminiscent of conditions in the camps. The group of ghetto fighters included Zivia Lubetkin, the famous leader of the Warsaw uprising, whom Ka-Tzetnik later described as “a person—an angel, who understood us.”22 To the amazement of their roommates, the Auschwitz group turned their common room into a mini-Auschwitz, holding Appels—early morning roll calls—wearing the striped uniforms they kept since their days in the camp, and singing camp prisoner songs. Sometimes they went wild on the streets of the city, screaming and singing and walking in the same lines as they did in the camp, embarrassing the other survivors, who were grateful for being allowed to stay in Bucharest. Feiner, or rather Zitinsky, who led many of these activities, kept repeating that in any case he was not a living human being anymore, hence his unavoidable and unrestrained conduct. It should be noted that the Red Army soldiers were deeply moved at the sight of the striped camp uniforms and of the numbers tattooed into the exprisoners forearms. Bricha activists therefore borrowed the uniforms from time to time, particularly when they had to cut a tough deal with the soldiers, and some of them even tattooed numbers on one another.23

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On the eve of Passover, in the spring of April 1945, a few dozens of the leaders of the Bricha movement gathered in one of the dining halls to discuss their situation. There were already some 1,300 Jewish refugees in Bucharest at that time. When members of the Auschwitz group were given the floor, Feiner/Zitinsky apparently represented the group. With reference to “an oath we took,” he said: 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.

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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

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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-oftime.”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

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“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

First years in Israel Ka-Tzetnik devoted some forty years, from the 1950s to the 1980s, to writing down the fate of his murdered family and to the attempt to build a new

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family. But throughout this period he kept being absorbed in the memory of the Holocaust and particularly with the memory of Auschwitz. When he arrived in Tel Aviv in 1946, at the age of thirty-seven, he slept on a bench in the Rothschild Boulevard in the heart of the city. He was eventually given a room in a cellar, which he describes fondly in Ha’Imut, because once again he had a place of his own, a rare commodity in a city then flooded with refugees and newcomers. Yet even when he had the room, he continued occasionally sleeping on the wooden bench, which perhaps reminded him of the barracks in the camps. It was during these first weeks that he met his second wife to be; Nina Asherman was the daughter of the famous Tel Aviv gynecologist, Prof. Yoseph (Gustav) Asherman and Malka nèe Vilner—a well-known couple who played a central role in the social life of Tel Aviv. In early 1946, Nina read the newly published Salamandra, was deeply impressed, and decided to find the writer hiding under the pen name. She succeeded, and they met and fell in love, married, and had a son, Lior, and a daughter, Daniella, named after the literary name he had given his sister. He did not speak with his children about the Holocaust, wishing to protect them from the horror.33 It should be emphasized that in his later literary writings he never referred to his first wife Sanya or children; the couple never had any. Instead, he primarily wrote about his sister Daniella and his brother Moni, both literary names. Nina (nicknamed Nike) Asherman was a Sabra, and he refers to her in his writings as Galilea (meaning coming from the Galilee), a very Zionist first name directly tied to a major region in the north of the land. Yet he was not swept up by her world or its atmosphere—the enterprise of building a new country and culture—but instead remained immersed in his grief. He lived ensconced in his home in Tel Aviv (on Pineles Street at the heart of the old and quite aristocratic northern part of the city). Yet from time to time, especially when he was overtaken by a wave of writing, he would seclude himself for months on end in a hut in an orchard in Herzliya, and as if he were returning to Auschwitz, he would wear the striped prisoner’s uniform he kept all along, starving himself almost to death, not washing or sleeping, and seeing no one. Even when he came out of seclusion, he always wore long sleeves, even during the hot Israeli summer, so that no one would see the Auschwitz number tattooed on his left arm. Once, when the family came to the hut to break the sad news that his mother-in-law had died, he collapsed when he saw them through the window, and his fatherin-law, Prof. Asherman, had to resuscitate him.34 In January 2010, nine years after Dinur’s death, his son Lior initiated the establishment of a house for Holocaust survivors in Herzliya named after

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Ka-Tzetnik, “The Ka-Tzetnik House for the Awareness of the Holocaust and the Resurrection of Israel,” which was symbolically erected on the grounds where the hut he had used to imprison himself stood.35 He was still alive when the corner stone was laid, and almost ten years elapsed from the stone laying to the completion of the building. After years of facing the challenges of an intense life with such a survivor, Nina fell physically ill, and at times she felt even mentally weak. In the last decade of her life she changed her name to Eli-yah, which means God is my god. She used to say that he was not easy to live with:  “it was crowded:  whenever he entered home, the six million joined him.” In a warm personal letter to Elie Wiesel—both Auschwitz former prisoners, both authors, looking for a way to settle their relationship with God—Ka-Tzetnik writes about his wife’s agony and pain; she had been hospitalized for three quarters of a year, and he was constantly at her bedside.36 A poet and intellectual in her own right, she published a collection of poems in 1987, which were written in excellent, rich Hebrew, were imbued with Jewish sources, and most of which were addressed to the man she loved, expressing unusually all-consuming love and intimacy. In one of the poems, she directly addresses him and refers to his many names, complaining that despite her complete commitment “you still did not want to let me know your name.” The collection bears a title that one might translate as Leftovers, though the original Hebrew is closer to “what is left of me.” The year of publication is no less significant—1987—when she was hospitalized for many months.37 Wiesel and Ka-Tzetnik corresponded for some thirty years, since the beginning of the 1960s, and Ka-Tzetnik’s letters are warm and personal. In a letter written immediately after having fainted in the Jerusalem court during the Eichmann trial, he complains about a kind of paralysis that befell him out of the blue. From Auschwitz, he wrote, he came out in one piece (Shalem Begufi), and he is puzzled and distressed at the fact that so many years after he should have to suffer such an unexpected disaster. He was taken from his desk to testify in Jerusalem, in the midst of a fruitful flow of writing, and it was cut off as if with a knife.38 Wiesel and Ka-Tzetnik corresponded about their books and the problems of translation, publication, contents, and readership. Ka-Tzetnik writes with great admiration: he calls Wiesel a brother, considers him more Israeli than the Israelis, fully relies on his judgment, and highly praises his books. “In my opinion, you are a miracle created by the Divine Presence,” he writes, and he rejoiced about every letter that arrived from New York.39 How come a person suffering the kind of mental agony that Ka-Tzetnik endured received no treatment when he arrived in Eretz Israel? It seems that he

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was highly sensitive and given to extremes even before the war. As a youth in Sosnowiec, he had a thin skin over his soul, as philosopher Martin Buber used to define people with exposed nerves. The answer is that when the wave of immigrants came, in the late 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, the survivors were not registered as such, as there was neither a category to single out survivors in the immigrants’ forms nor a definition of who a survivor was. The survivors, who in the beginning of the 1950s constituted a quarter of the Jewish population, never formed a political party or an umbrella organization that could have represented all of them, instead establishing many separate organizations representing their cities or countries of origin, and sometimes the camps or forests where they had spent the war years. During those decades, the country, which was flooded with refugees, both survivors and newcomers from Muslim countries, and which constantly faced enemies at its borders, lacked the financial means to pay for social workers or psychiatrists, professions which hardly existed then. It was only in the 1960s that this professional support became available. Having said this, although Ka-Tzetnik’s writings radiate a sense of loneliness, as does his secluded way of life, he was never physically alone. Other survivors shared the same problems, and authors appreciated his work and tried to be in contact with him. Indeed, in his Ha’Imut (the confrontation), in which he tells the story of his first years in Tel Aviv, his description of the attitudes of people he met is warm and appreciative, demonstrating that he had found at least a physical home, if not more.40 Finally, as Iris Roebling-Grau describes in more detail in her contribution to this volume, in the middle of the 1970s, Dinur was treated with LSD in Leiden by the Dutch professor Jan Bastiaans, an expert in the radical treatment of what he called the Concentration Camp Syndrome. This was a highly controversial treatment; the patients would enter a trance, return to their past, and hallucinate imaginary scenes. This treatment changed Ka-Tzetnik in a number of ways: first, he realized that Auschwitz was not another planet; it was part of the human planet, created by human beings. He understood, with dismay, that being a human being, he too bears part of the guilt and could have been, had the circumstances been different, an SS man himself. Secondly, he was finally able to merge his two personalities, his two names, Ka-Tzetnik and Di-Nur, into one by putting an end to the division between them; and thirdly, he overcame decades of having nightmares and learned to sleep without waking up his family with his screams. Finally, his political opinions tempered, he observed the Middle Eastern situation through more compassionate eyes.

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Ten years passed until he wrote down, again as if in a trance, his sixth book, whose Hebrew title translates as The Code: E.D.M.A (the initials probably stand for a magic rescue prayer that asked Rabbi Meir Ba’al Hanes—he who performs miracles—for help). The book is also titled Shivitti—a word taken from Psalms (16/8) that is part of a phrase often inscribed over synagogue arcs: “I have set the Lord always before me.” It tells the story of his treatment in Kabbalistic mystic terms.41 Not only the Ministry of Defense but also the Ministry of Education published and distributed Ka-Tzetnik’s books, with the support of a wealthy American admirer who claimed that the reading of these books saved his son from drugs and alcohol. Enough money was left to hire teachers who supervised high school final papers, which were written as a substitute for matriculation examinations, as well as for a biennial literary prize, named after Ka-Tzetnik and awarded at the residence of the President of the State. These measures, taken during the 1970s and 1980s, were unheard of and contrasted with the treatment of books of the other great Hebrew writers and poets.42 And yet, throughout the years, when he was already an established Holocaust symbol, and the second and third generations of Israeli were reading his family saga, Ka-Tzetnik continued to refuse to come out in the open; he communicated with almost no one outside his closest family and a few friends, not even with his readership, and he never attended the presidential award ceremonies that bore his name. It seems he did not enjoy the status he had acquired. His impact on Israeli perceptions, even without any interaction with his readership, was crucial in shaping a number of themes and mistaken beliefs: The other planet: He was already fifty-two years old during the Eichmann trial, and it was as if he were trying to sum up and convey to the audience in the court the entirety of his Holocaust experience. Coming out of the mouth of a well-known author who had been imprisoned on that planet, the expression “the Other Planet” caught on and became a popular and widely used expression. But it was at the same time an obstacle on the way to understanding that the Holocaust was perpetrated by humans to humans. By the time his treatment had caused him to change his mind, research, education and public opinion in Israel had matured, and the expression lost some, though not all, of its appeal. The house of dolls: As Pascal Bos’s article in this volume makes clear, there were no Jewish women in these houses, because of the racial laws that prohibited physical intercourse between Germans and Jews. The women sexually enslaved in the camp were professional German prostitutes or Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian

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prisoners. Only a few were Jewish women who had assumed a non-Jewish identity before being brought to Auschwitz.43 The question is whether Ka-Tzetnik knew that and deliberately distorted this reality. Generations of Israelis and others believed what they had read or heard, and the notion of Jewish women having been turned into sex slaves became deeply entrenched, until it became, unfortunately, a “fact” that no one questioned. Women survivors sometimes had to endure being questioned about whether they had survived because they had served in a brothel or had otherwise used their body as a means of survival. These questions began in response to the encounter between the Yishuv and the survivors; Ka-Tzetnik’s books contributed to the phenomenon. The cruel Jewish Kapo:  In his novel Piepel, Ka-Tzetnik described Fruchtenbeum, an exceptionally cruel, murderous and pompous Jewish Kapo, and he again managed to instill this image into the heads of his Israeli readership and public. After having read Piepel everyone knew that a Jewish Kapo was synonymous with despicable cruelty. This Fruchtenbeum is actually an allusion to Eliezer (Atshe) Gruenbeum (the middle son of Yitzhak Greunbeum, an admired Zionist leader in Poland between the two World Wars and a member of the executive of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem after making Aliyah), who was indeed a deputy Blockelteste in Auschwitz and in Buchenwald. He was brought to trial after the war in Paris, after having been recognized by survivors, and he was acquitted because Paris was not the place to judge him and because evidence showed that he had been cruel in some cases and merciful in others. But KaTzetnik’s terrible description is just black, dipped in red blood, with no room for white or even gray shadows.44 The treatment Dinur received in Holland perhaps offered some consolation and relief to this tormented man late in his life, when he was already in his early sixties and he had come to terms with his identity. But he still carried the burden of Auschwitz and could not be fully cured. Was the change, even though not complete, noticed by the public in Israel, and especially by his readership? It seems that the clear-cut images carved into public awareness had sunk in too deeply. He is still remembered as the witness who fainted while saying that Auschwitz was on another planet, the survivor who fanatically concealed his identity, the penniless refugee who married a well-established native young lady, and the fervent right-wing Zionist whose opinions came as an answer to the national tragedy. The Other Planet is still here at least as an expression; the House with Jewish Dolls cannot be erased; the identity of the young woman with the tattooed number on her chest remains an unresolved issue, and the Jewish Kapo remains a synonym for cruelty.

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Figure 1.1 Aron Dotan, Elie Wiesel, and Dina Porat. Courtesy Adv. Itshak Japhet Halevy.

Yechiel Feiner/135633/Karl Zitinsky/Ka-Tzetnik/Dinur’s life story is a sad one. Perhaps he cannot be addressed in the same terms as most other survivors, who managed to rebuild their lives in a different, quite normal so to say, manner. His hypersensitivity was coupled with his talents, with the undefined spark that attracted people to him and made them give him a hand or a room, or fall in love with him. What we know for sure is that his writings put the Holocaust in blunt, naked, merciless terms in Israel’s and the world’s front yard. Dina Porat would like to dedicate this chapter to the memory of Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel.

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

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3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16

Dina Porat and names in his books are fictional and can indicate no biographic details of any member of the family. 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 ṾeHisṭoryah Be-Khitve K. Tseṭniḳ (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009). I would like to thank Dr. Isaac Hershkowitz for the information on the river in Jewish sources. Conversation with Dorit Sharir. The poem is reprinted in Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiach Lefi Tumo, 113. 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. On the burning of the booklet, see Dan Miron, “Bein Sefer Le’Efer,” Alpayim 10 (1994): 196–224. See an interview with Halinka in Iris Milner’s chapter in this volume. Described in a letter from Dan Miron to me, January 11, 2014. 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. About Sanya: in Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 9–138. For example, Avihu Ronen, Nidona La’Chaim (Haifa: Sifrei Hemed, 2011), 65, 166, 253, 318, 322, 339, and 530. Fredka Mazia, Re’im Basa’ar (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1964), 114–15. 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. Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 81–5. 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.

An Author as His Own Biographer—Ka-Tzetnik

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

35

The group included two more brothers, Kalman and Eizik Belachash, Alther Brukner, Reuven (family name not remembered), and a few others. Ibid. 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. In an earlier conversation of the author with Manek Londner on July 10, 2010. Yonat Sened, Kazik (Tel Aviv : Hakibbutz Hame’uchad, 2008), 76. 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. In an interview with Zvika Dror, in Hem hayu Sham—Bimhitzat She’erit Hapleita (Tel Aviv : Hakibbutz Hame’uchad, 1992), 76–7. See Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 207 and 213. 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. Ka-Tzetnik, Nakam (Tel Aviv : Ketsin hinukh rashi, Anaf hasbarah, Misrad habitahon, 1981), 35. Conversations with Manek Londner, 2010 and 2014. See the poem, in Yiddish and Hebrew, in Szeintuch, Salamandrah, 235–7. 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. Ka-Tzetnik, Nakam, 38. For Goldenberg’s testimony, see Szeintuch, Salamandrah, 126–36. 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. Ka-Tzetnik, Nakam, 15, 80, 84, and 92. Szeintuch, Salamandrah, 258–9. For details about this meeting and relations with Nina, see Ka-Tzetnik, Haimut (Tel Aviv : Hakibutz Hameuchad, 1975). Lior Di-Nur, “Hishlamti et Hashlihuto shel Abba,” Yediot Hasharon, January 15, 2010. Ibid.

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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

On June 7, 1961, Yehiel Dinur, a survivor of Auschwitz who had been called to testify against Adolf Eichmann, created what Tom Segev has called “one of the most dramatic moments in [Israel’s] history.”1 The presiding judge had asked Dinur why he had taken on the pen name Ka-Tzetnik to write his autobiographical novels about Auschwitz. His answer has since become an iconic representation of the incommunicability of the experience of Holocaust survivors: It is not a pen name. I do not regard myself as a writer who writes literature. This is a chronicle from the planet of Auschwitz. I was there for about two years. Time there was different from what it is here on earth. Every split second ran on a different cycle of time. And the inhabitants of that planet had no names. They had neither parents nor children. They did not dress as we dress here. They were not born there nor did anyone give birth. Even their breathing was regulated by the laws of another nature. They did not live, nor did they die, in accordance with the laws of this world. Their names were the numbers “K-zetnik so and so” . . . They left me, they kept leaving me, left . . . for close to two years they left me and always left me behind . . . I see them, they are watching me, I see them—2

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

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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

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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

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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 khurbnforshung (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

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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

42

Annette F. Timm 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

This view meshed with historians’ assumptions that Jews in post-World War II America had done their best to assimilate and that it was only the 1967 Arab/Israeli war that had prompted a reappraisal of the role of the Holocaust. Generational perceptions—the perception on the part of the younger generation that their parents had refused to speak to them about their experiences— influenced both popular and scholarly approaches; historians took “communal memory and inscrib[ed] it into their scholarship.”29 In Israel, the mythic portrayal of Jewish resistance combined with the very traditional approach taken to historical argument on the part of the most prominent historians in the early years to obscure the voices of the survivors. For instance, Ben-Zion Dinur, an historian at Hebrew University and the first director of Yad Vashem in 1953, sought to professionalize the study of the Holocaust partially through the exclusion of the participation of witnesses, whose emotional connections to the material made them unsuited to the pursuit of the distantly objective, German-style historical methodology in which he and his fellow directors had been trained. The shift toward a more survivor-centered approach, however, came before the Eichmann trial, as agitation from survivors both within and outside of Yad Vashem forced Dinur’s resignation in 1959 and opened the way for what Dan Michman has called the “Israeli school” of Holocaust research, which focuses upon the reactions of Jewish communities to Nazi persecution through a combination of both survivor testimony and perpetrator documents.30 A final reason for the neglect of these early accounts from survivors, is the fact that many of them were phrased without reference to the specificity of Jewish persecution.31 Even accounts written by Jews tended to emphasize national identity and patriotism over racial persecution. As Peter Lagrou has argued, this was an understandable tendency given the overwhelming dominance of anti-fascist discourse and the benefits, both material and symbolic, that accrued to survivors who stressed their political resistance. “Specific recognition of Jewishness,” Lagrou argues, “even through the recognition of a tragically distinctive persecution, was not what many survivors, whose survival had depended on the opposite, asked for at the time.”32 Early memoirs

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tended to efface the Jewishness of the authors, while the accounts of relief workers, doctors, and even the emissaries of Jewish organizations tended to be focused on the pressing task of dealing with the health catastrophe of the DP camps.33 Although preparations for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg produced a massive documentation effort (it is estimated that over 100,000 documents were collected, later supplemented by thirty million Nazi Party files housed at the Berlin Document Center),34 interest in collecting testimonies waned by the end of the 1940s. David Cesarani suggests that the rising tensions of the Cold War, along with the eventual emptying of the DP camps and the survivors’ own struggles with their new lives in other countries explains this transition. A  new phase in international politics meant that it became “morally impossible to treat an ally [the Germans] as the incarnation of evil,” as the early, raw, and unrestrained memoirs had done. Cesarani notes that the early accounts were composed at a time when hatred of the Nazis and Germany was unrestrained and brutal images of the war filled the media. There were few inhibitions about what could be said:  sexual abuse, depravity, prisoner-on-prisoner violence, cannibalism, graphic descriptions of fifth, squalor and human degradation, as well as explicit accounts of revenge are common. Reading these memoirs and testimonies it is easy to understand why, by the end of the 1940s, the public turned away.35

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.

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The role of testimony in historicizing the Holocaust We have established that the silence of survivors in the period between the end of the war and the Eichmann trial has been exaggerated. But viewed from the broad angle of Holocaust historiography, Yehiel Dinur’s collapse in the courtroom at the trial of Adolf Eichmann stands as a symbolic representation of the transition from the relative impotence of individual testimony in establishing the story of the Holocaust to a central meaning-creating role. As Shoshana Felman has persuasively argued, Dinur’s collapse has become iconic because it so succinctly symbolized the disjuncture between the juridical goal of the trial—to establish the facts of Eichmann’s involvement in the Holocaust—and the impossibility of ever achieving either individual or collective closure for a trauma of this magnitude. It was a moment, she insists, “in which history as injury dramatically, traumatically spoke,” transforming “an incoherent mass of private traumas (the secret, hidden, silenced, individual traumas of survivors) into one collective, national, and public trauma.”39 Felman argues against Hannah Arendt’s assessment of this incident. In her famous reportage of the Eichmann trial, Arendt had condemned the focus on survivors, arguing that the “case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done.”40 She dismissed Dinur as an example of the prosecution’s reliance on publically recognizable figures, on volunteers rather than chosen witnesses, and upon theatrical and emotionalized stagings at the expense of a focus upon the specific deeds of the accused. Arendt read Dinur’s testimony, particularly his reference to “the planet of Auschwitz,” as the ramblings of a madman, whose “little excursion into astrology” served simply to detract from the serious goals of the trial.41 Felman counters that even Arendt had previously admitted that knowledge of the Holocaust had opened an “abyss” of understanding and that her post-war writings were a desperate struggle to come to terms with the need to communicate in the face of this abyss.42 While acknowledging that Dinur’s inability to conceive of a post-Holocaust existence was responsible for the failure of his testimony (“[h]e is still a captive of the planet of ashes”), Felman reads the event of his fainting not as a failure but as a concise representation of the “infinite traumatic repetition of a past that is not past.”43 The truth that Dinur had wanted to convey may not have been juridical truth— the kind of truth that consigns an event to the past and chooses a punishment that will provide closure for both the victims and society at large. Instead, Felman insists, “K-Zetnik’s court appearance marks . . . an invasion of the trial and of the legal temporality by the endless, timeless temporality of art.”44 To

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return to my reflections in the introduction to this chapter, it was an attempt to expand the archive of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, even while expressed as actual witnessing, Dinur’s was a form of testimony with which courts of law are and remain ill-equipped to cope. Dinur’s traumatic confrontation with the demands of a forum that insisted upon a distanced, objective report and eschewed the art of story-telling and its emotional truths provides a precise metaphor for the discomfort that both lawyers and later historians felt when confronted with survivor testimony. As Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch argued in 1995, the historians concerned with explaining the Holocaust from the 1950s to 1980s were part of a rather “insular tribe” that had set itself the task of tracking the metanarrative of Germany’s political failures and catastrophes through meticulous and “objective” historical research in archives. Their “disciplinary power rested to a large degree upon the stability of the Cold War,” and they eschewed interdisciplinary perspectives, particularly the threat posed by postmodernism.45 Explanations for Nazism centered upon overarching theories of fascism, and totalitarianism—they looked to the ideologies of decision-makers and key figures in the regime, leaving cultural and social structures largely unexplored. This emphasis on politics to the exclusion of culture and a Rankian dependence upon documentary, archival evidence influenced the first efforts to present the full scope of Nazi crimes against the Jews. In Harvest of Hate, Leon Poliakov reassured his readers that “wherever possible, to forestall objections, we have quoted the executioners rather than the victims.”46 Looking back upon his role in the development of Holocaust historiography in 2008, Raul Hilberg, whose 1961 book The Destruction of the European Jews was one of the few comprehensive scholarly books on the Holocaust written before the 1970s and has since become a classic, admitted that he had taken an entirely “top-down” approach. His aim, he said, had been to establish what happened, but the refusal to acknowledge the importance of survivor testimony had produced a skewed view. Historians of the 1960s and 1970s insisted upon maintaining objective distance, Hilberg explained. This meant that “we had an incomplete picture of what was happening, and . . . the victims were not properly described at all. In fact, they were not really listened to, even though they did speak in courts or publish memoirs.”47 Up until the Eichmann trial and beyond, historians viewed individual testimony with suspicion; they relegated it to the realm of art. Several developments converged to bring about a revolution in historical methodology. The growth of oral history and more advanced techniques of cultural history are certainly part of this story, but space constraints force me to

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leave them aside here.48 I will concentrate instead on debates among historians about the representation of the Holocaust. With specific reference to Holocaust history, Saul Friedländer began in the 1990s to question “the limits of representation” in historical understanding and writing. In his edited volume Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” and in related publications,49 Friedländer assembled his and others’ concerns about whether the Holocaust presents a limit-case or a testcase of historical objectivity and distance.50 Friedländer’s skepticism was a direct response to other calls (particularly from the German historian Martin Broszat) to rigorously historicize the Holocaust—to write “morality-free,” political histories.51 Friedländer asked whether “an event such as the ‘Final Solution’ allow[ed] for any kind of narrative . . . Does it perhaps escape the grasp of a plausible narrative altogether?”52 In the end, Friedländer’s more careful approach, if not the more theoretical arguments of some of his authors in Probing the Limits (such as Hayden White) set a new tone. The book became foundational for the discussion of Holocaust representation; it was regularly assigned in graduate seminars and contributed to the tendency of future researchers to begin their accounts with the assertion that truly explaining the Holocaust was an impossible task. But as Confino insists, this distancing from moral evaluation did not stop the avalanche of books that implicitly did just that. The 1980s through the early 2000s saw an explosion of detailed studies of the Holocaust, with historians like Christopher Browning, Ian Kershaw, and Richard Evans, relying on the British school of sound empirical research that attempted to ask the question of “how it came about” (Kershaw) and to “show how one thing led to another” (Evans).53 These historians, and Evans most explicitly, have tried to fend off the influence of “theory,” particularly postmodern challenges to Rankian methodologies, with the argument that any softening of traditional historical methods would threaten the solid foundation of knowledge about the Holocaust—would, in other words, open the doors to Holocaust denial.54 Meanwhile, theorists of the Holocaust, such as Dominick LaCapra, Hayden White, and James E. Young, had begun to refine their challenge to fact-based history and question historians’ independence from the culture of memory and other narrative forms. Hayden White had already argued in the mid-1970s that the practice of bringing coherence to historical material was itself an art—that historians could not so easily distinguish their work from literature.55 By the late 1980s he pushed even harder, insisting in The Content and the Form that historians did not in fact refrain from making moral judgments even as they insisted upon their empiricism and objectivity. “The demand for closure in the historical

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story is a demand . . . for moral meaning,” he wrote, “a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama.”56 Similarly, LaCapra insisted that the relationship between memory and history was permanently “vexed,” and he asked:  “Can—or should—historiography define itself in a purely scholarly and professional way that distances it from public memory and its ethical implications? Should it, on the contrary, ground itself in memory as its matrix and muse?”57 While admitting that memory could be put to dubious, nostalgic, and sentimental uses, LaCapra argued that it also “poses questions to history in that it points to problems that are still alive or invested with emotions and value.” The silencing of survivors in an Israel more focused on redemption and heroism, and the lack of mourning in a Germany obsessed with the economic miracle had only resulted in a situation where memory returned as art in compulsive and uncontrollable bursts.58 Those who insist most stridently upon the “demythologized form of secular enlightenment” at the heart of “commonsense notions of causality and accuracy,” LaCapra proclaimed, were actually the most likely to “conflate memory with myth or ideology.”59 James E. Young also reinforced White’s point about the poetic quality of historical understanding. He argued that If we recognize this “poetizing” activity also as one of the bases of worldly praxis, then the issue here becomes not just “the facts” of the Holocaust, but also their “poetic”—i.e. narrative—configuration, and how particular representations may have guided writers in both their interpretations of events and their worldly responses to them. As becomes painfully clear, it was not “the facts” in and of themselves that determined actions taken by the victims of the Holocaust—or by the killers themselves; but it was the structural, mythological, and figurative apprehension of these facts that led to action taken on their behalf.60

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

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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 HansGünther 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 (longterm 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

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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

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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, by dint of its humanness and freedom, an individual voice suddenly arising in the course of an ordinary historical narrative of events such as those presented here can tear through seamless interpretation and pierce the (mostly involuntary) smugness of scholarly detachment and “objectivity.”78

Confino takes Friedländer’s book as marking a decisive shift in Holocaust historiography—an indication that overarching narratives of the Holocaust are no longer imaginable without testimony. Confino makes a plea for historians to go even further—to abandon an overemphasis on Nazi ideology and to investigate the more emotional, less rational, less cerebral motivations that drove not only the leaders but everyday German citizens to act. Friedländer, Confino insists, has shown the way. Integrating testimony allows historians to

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explore aspects of the regime that a focus on military and political developments elides: “the historical sensations of the period dominated by sentiments of incredulity in the face of mass murder, of ideas of redemption and existential anxiety, of fears and exhilaration evoked by the unspeakable breaking of taboo.”79 Contrary to the arguments of historians like Martin Brozsat, who famously insisted on the need for sober historicization,80 Confino insists that the “strangeness” of the culture that produced the Holocaust cannot be explained away but is precisely what requires description and analysis. The integration of testimony, he argues acts not to “domesticate disbelief,” to explain it away, but rather to use it to convey sensations that were “the defining characteristic of the period and an element the historian has to integrate into his or her narrative.”81 And contrary to the assumptions of the 1980s and 1990s that the Holocaust was somehow unique and required specific methodological approaches, it actually just reveals the limits of all historical representation. If the emotions generated in and after the Holocaust are particularly intense, Confino argues, they cannot be considered entirely unique. In Holocaust research as in all other historical analysis, we must understand motivations, even those that are irrational, unpredictable, unplanned, and supported by a variety of psychological mechanisms. It is in this realm that memoirs and their literary equivalents have the most to offer. We can go beyond Browning’s approach and use them to uncover the realm of emotion—fears, concerns, seductions, joys, hatreds, and pleasures— that motivated human action in the most difficult of circumstances. With easier reference to historical agency, this approach has indeed had an impact on the scholarly literature exploring the motivations of Nazi perpetrators.82 But emotions are no less central to the experience of survivors, and Yehiel Dinur’s writings are both particularly troubling and valuable because they are so unguarded and raw.83 They also raise themes—varieties of persecution—that more traditional memory cultures had avoided. Turning now to Ka-Tzetnik himself, I will explore the theme of sexual violence and its role in the reception of testimony.

Sexual violence and testimony: The case of Ka-Tzetnik Two of the volumes of Ka-Tzetnik’s sextet focus on the theme of sexual violence in concentration camps. It should be noted precisely how unusual this choice of subject matter was. In the early accounts, written in the phase of raw hatreds and a search for immediate retribution, memoirs, and testimonies did make reference to various forms of sexual abuse. But the references were veiled and the

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details sparse. Sexual violence was more common in the unpublished testimonies and interviews of the early years, but as we have established, historians did not integrate this testimony into their accounts of the Holocaust until much later. The early historians, focused as they were on the archival evidence, found few references to sexual violence, particularly against Jews, in German documents,84 and the mere mention of this topic can still prompt denials that it occurred from experts in all other aspects of the Holocaust. When Rochelle Saidel raised the issue of rape at a workshop at Yad Vashem in 2006, for instance, Lawrence Langer interrupted her with the demand that she provide evidence.85 But since historians have begun looking for it in more creative places, the evidence that sexual violence was common, particularly in the killing fields of Eastern Europe, has begun to surface. For example, there were frequent references to sexual violence in the secretly recorded conversations between German POWs in British and American detention, but their Allied captors did nothing with this information, and it remained hidden from historians until 2001.86 That historians failed to go searching for evidence of sexual violence committed against Jews is explained by two somewhat contradictory assumptions: that sexual violence accompanies war as a matter of course; and that the laws against sexual intercourse between Jews and “Aryans”—the prohibitions against Rassenschande (race defilement)— were actually obeyed.87 But the combination of historians’ disinterest in testimony and an unwillingness to take sexuality seriously as a subject of historical research has left a large gap in our knowledge about this aspect of the experience of Holocaust victims. While a few feminists, like Andrea Dworkin, insisted upon integrating sexual violence and evidence of rape into our understanding of the Holocaust, we are only now beginning to see this subject being taken up by historians.88 The fact that many historians continue to believe that Germans never raped Jews demonstrates the strength of the historical paradigm under which they were operating—the assumption that all actions in the Third Reich were governed by strict racial ideology.89 Ka-Tzetnik’s discussion of sexual themes was thus unique and shocking in the context of his time. House of Dolls, first published in Hebrew in 1953, is the ostensible story of Dinur’s sister, Daniella, who is forced into prostitution as a socalled Feldhure—a prostitute for German soldiers. Piepel, first published in 1958, is the story of Dinur’s brother, who acted as a sexual slave for a series of barrack commanders.90 It was exceedingly unusual for survivors to discuss prostitution and childhood sexual abuse in published memoirs.91 But as Omer Bartov has argued, the reception of Ka-Tztetnik’s books must be viewed in the context of 1950s and 1960s Israeli society. In the atmosphere of a culturally traditional

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society that had not yet begun to come to terms with the Holocaust or the experiences of its survivors, Bartov argues, 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, pornography is an infinitely plastic, dizzying term: a term whose concentration of rhetorical force and explanatory power is such that its meaning is not really held to account. Pornography allegorizes the causes and effects of our numbness and thereby of threats to empathic identification in a wide variety of Holocaust discussions. Unlike the term “trauma,” which performs a similar though seemingly more weighty analytic purpose in this and related contexts, pornography does not encourage but freezes discussion, and this function is arguably its most significant accomplishment.94

To call Ka-Tzetnik’s books pornography, in other words, is tantamount to completely discrediting them as testimony. Having made this argument, the impression that the brothel in House of Dolls creates was certainly somewhat misleading. It is never actually entirely clear which concentration camp the novel describes; it is only ever called “Camp Labor via Joy,” and one could make the case that it was meant to stand for Auschwitz, for one of its subsidiary camps, or for one of the hundreds of

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other labor camps in Nazi-occupied Poland with which, as Dina Porat’s autobiographical essay in this volume makes clear, Ka-Tzetnik had more experience.95 However, the fact that Daniella is tattooed—a practice only implemented at Auschwitz—certainly creates the impression that Ka-Tzetnik meant us to be thinking of that place. And yet although there is growing evidence of the extent of the sexual abuse of Jewish women (and men) in the Holocaust, there is no evidence that anything as organized as the camp that Ka-Tzetnik described existed. Robert Sommer has demonstrated that none of the ten Sonderbauten (special buildings) where women were forced into sexual slavery in concentration camps housed Jewish women. Relying on the files of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, which only recently became available to historians, Sommer has found records for 180 brothel inmates, most of whom served prisoners in the concentration camps and a few of whom served Ukrainian SS guards.96 None of these women were Jewish. It is therefore impossible to match the brothel depicted in House of Dolls with an historically authentic equivalent. Our inability to establish that Dinur even had a sister or which camp she might have been imprisoned in exacerbates the conflict between the literary and the documentary. And yet, there is no evidence in Dinur’s biography (so carefully described in Dina Porat’s opening chapter in this book) that he was purposely inventing in order to titillate. We must therefore read this testimony less as a description of specific camp conditions and more as a reflection of Dinur’s vicarious experience of the sexual violence that threatened all female Jews in this period.97 Whether or not Ka-Tzetnik’s description of “Camp Labor via Joy” stands up to historical scrutiny, his description serves as a testament to the pervasiveness of sexual violence against Jewish women in the Holocaust, from desperate sexual barter in ghettos to rape and forms of sexual slavery in the camps.98 Indeed, the fact that a very religious man would imagine the existence of organized sexual enslavement of Jewish women simply underlines the ubiquity of the fear of sexual violence and exploitation. Despite the factual inaccuracies in Ka-Tzetnik’s writing, then, I  would argue that we must understand Holocaust testimony as inevitably blending factual information with survivor emotion and interpretation and that the sexual themes in Ka-Tzetnik’s writings are uniquely significant.99 For one thing, they provide yet another explanation for historians’ early failures to take testimony seriously. The absolute brutality of personal experience, and perhaps particularly the scenes of sexual degradation that concentration camp victims experienced, had no place in historians’ established narratives or methodological techniques. Even as Ka-Tzetnik’s books seized the public imagination in Israel,100 they were not taken seriously by historians

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of the Holocaust, not least because of the focus on sexual violence. Before the 1980s, historians had no methodology for even understanding the history of sex. It took the writings of Michel Foucault and other thinkers of the late twentieth century for historians to begin historicizing sexuality, and efforts to understand the role of sex in the Third Reich have only just begun.101 Although there have been too few studies on the role of sexual violence in the Holocaust, I would argue that the centrality of sexual slavery and degradation in Ka-Tzetnik’s writings reveals something essentially true about the experience of the victims of the Holocaust. Rather than understanding this aspect of his writing as pornography or simply factually mistaken, we should think of the fictional accounts of his siblings’ experiences as what Lawrence Langer has called “humiliated memory[: a memory that] recalls an utter distress that shatters all molds designed to contain a unified and irreproachable image of the self.”102 Although Langer has insisted that “the historical significance [of rape] is very small in the context of the Holocaust experience,”103 his concept of humiliated memory nicely explains why such subjects have remained taboo in general accounts of the Holocaust despite being regularly revealed in Holocaust testimony.104 We can certainly use such testimony as Browning has:  comparing as many versions as possible to reach the “objective” truth. But we can also seek a deeper, more subjective understanding through an appreciation of art, acknowledging the importance of individual narrations (not just factual recountings) to our understanding of the Holocaust. The insistence of mid-twentieth-century historians on using only the most rigorous and rational methodological techniques to uncover the facts of the Holocaust was both laudable and politically necessary. But while stories of the silencing of survivors have perhaps been exaggerated, it is clear that this strategy produced a disciplinary separation between history and literary/cultural studies that has done more to obscure than to uncover certain truths about the Holocaust. Had we listened sooner, not to mention more attentively and less judgmentally, to the voices of survivors like Yehiel Dinur, we would have been forced to acknowledge that the particular stories we were telling about the Holocaust were incomplete.

Notes 1 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 4.

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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

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10

11

12

13

14

15

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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 postwar 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. The term is from Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 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. 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). 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. 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). 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. 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.

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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).

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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

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Annette F. Timm 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). Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Revised ed. (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1963), 6. 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. 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. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 151. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. See, for example, Saul Friedländer, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” History & Memory 1, no. 2 (1991): 61–76. Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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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.

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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 longrunning 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

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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. Confino, Foundational Pasts, 53–4. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945: The Years of Extermination (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xxv–xxvi. Confino, Foundational Pasts, 53. 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). Ibid., 52 and 54. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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.

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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?

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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

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Annette F. Timm to preserve the historical narrative from the ruptures of the Holocaust. Silke Wenk, “Rhetoriken der Pornografisierung: Rahmungen des Blicks auf die NSVerbrechen,” 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. 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. 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. Galia Glasner-Heled, “Reader, Writer, and Holocaust Literature: The Case of KaTzetnik,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 114. 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). Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 77. 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. 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

The critical discourse regarding the representation of the Holocaust has raised profound questions regarding the very possibility and the legitimacy of textualizing the trauma, primarily owing to what the title of Saul Friedländer’s seminal volume on the subject refers to as the inherent “limits of representation.”1 The extremity of the traumatic events render them ineffable, outside of speech, voiceless. Articulating them in any form, media, or genre is, therefore, susceptible to dangers such as mitigation, trivialization, and relativization. These reservations concern all forms of representation, including testimonies, memoirs, documentations, and historiographical writings. Factors such as the intricate interplay and mutual influence of public and private memory and the fact that narration—even of extreme situations—is necessarily subjective and dependent on the circumstances under which it is produced, all attest to the inevitable gap between the signifier and the signified—in this case, the gap between the numerous historiographical and literary texts about the Holocaust and the actual atrocities they attempt to convey. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, “not only do we lack anything close to a complete understanding, even the sense and reasons for the behavior of the executioners and the victims, indeed their very words, still seem profoundly enigmatic . . . we can enumerate and describe each of these events, but they remain singularly opaque when we truly seek to understand them.”2 There is, nevertheless, an assumed hierarchy among the various modes of representation: greater credibility is generally correlated with lesser degrees of mediation and intervention. Berel Lang notes “the numerous ‘introductions’

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to works of Holocaust fiction that emphasize its verisimilitude . . . the embedding in such fiction of historical documentation” and argues that “such devices suggest that historical discourse is viewed even by writers of the imaginative literature of the Holocaust as a condition to which they aspire.”3 Within this context, the attempt to “voice the void” (to use Sara Horowitz’s terminology) through art in general and through literary texts in particular is regarded as particularly remote and thus unreliable.4 Artistic representation is also seen as running the moral risk of estheticizing and of obscuring the inexplicable, incomprehensible, and irrational nature of the historical events. The fictive aspect of literary texts further complicates the issue of adequacy and legitimacy.5 Less distant forms of textualization, such as oral or written testimonies, are thus considered more authentic and trustworthy. Authors of literary works that relate to the Holocaust, therefore, often prefer to define them as “docu-novels” or “faction” (a term comprised of the words fact and fiction) and make extensive use of what James Young defines as “a rhetoric of anti-rhetoric,” by refraining from obvious literary manipulations in order to endow their narrative with the impression of an unmediated testimony.6 Yehiel Dinur commenced his testimonial project a short time after his release from the concentration camp, in a DP camp where he was surrounded by fellow survivors, many of whom were similarly devoted to writing about their Holocaust traumas. Roteh Pops, an editor of a Holocaust Yiddish poetry collection, testified in later years to this tendency of survivors to record their memories, commenting that “Geshriben haben ale”—everyone wrote.7 Dinur had no reservations regarding a literary strategy of representation. On the contrary, his first work, Salamandra, and his entire oeuvre (with the exception of his last work, Shivitti)8 take the form of novels, narrated in the third person by an omniscient voice, and they employ an abundance of literary devices, fictive figures, and fictive constellations. Rather than producing a direct testimony of his own experiences in the Shoah, Dinur presents in the center of the trilogy that constitutes the bulk of his oeuvre (Salamandra, House of Dolls, and Piepel) a generalized “chronicle” of a Jewish family—any family—in the twentieth century.9 The three novels are thus presented as a three-part literary work designed to create an all-encompassing tale of the Jewish fate in the “Concentrationary Universe.”10 Within this framework, and in obvious contradiction to its minutely ordered literariness, the trilogy relays harsh descriptions, verging on pornography in some critics’ eyes,11 of death and survival in the Lager. In light of the dispute regarding the possibility and legitimacy of representation, it is not surprising then that

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considerable objections have been raised to Dinur’s literature in terms of its historical accuracy, ethical adequacy, and literary quality.12 Similarly complex was the image of Dinur himself: the author and his oeuvre in fact mirrored each other in an uncanny mise-en-abyme—and what may be termed “the Ka-Tzetnik phenomenon” was in itself bizarre and self-contradictory. On the one hand, Dinur was, like his works, a haunting remnant of “the other planet,” an uncannily foreign, anonymous, permanent Häftling (inmate), deprived of his name and identity, who conducted a peculiar, chaotic life, existing outside of normal social order and ultimately outside of speech, as his collapse on the witness stand at the Eichmann trial demonstrated.13 Yet, with his life after the Holocaust composed of numerous planned and unplanned, conscious and unconscious theatrical gestures, and with his obvious identification with his fictional character, Harry Preleshnik, he constructed himself both as the protagonist of a prodigious drama and as a mythic figure destined by the deities to remain alive and relate the story of the apocalypse through his very being.14 In my comments here I would like to refer to this split, specifically as it is performed in Dinur’s literature, and to reconsider its implications regarding an ethics of memory and remembrance. My argument is that as an efficient psychological defense mechanism not only in psychic life but also in the literary realm, splitting allows for the exposure in Salamandra, Piepel, and House of Dolls of contents that in the works of many other writers of the Holocaust remain permanently unspeakable. Splitting, though responsible for some of the idiosyncrasies of Dinur’s works, is, then, a literary mechanism that enables Dinur to testify to the most profound aspects of the murder of the Jews in the Shoah. Moreover, and somewhat in contradiction to the author’s self-imposed image as an eternal inmate of the Lager—a permanent “kazetnik”—splitting constitutes a paradigm of memorialization that encourages an acknowledgment on the part of survivors of their mission and responsibility to rejoin the living through a resumption of their right and capability to tell a story, their story. It allows the testifying survivor to express a feeling of being forever imprisoned within the fences of the concentrationary universe and at the same time to assume an auctorial voice that is devoted to the mission of telling about this experience. The split in Dinur’s literature is between the ultimate chaos the works relate and the unified and meticulously designed structure through which they relate it. An accurate and comprehensible order on the one hand, and a completely uncontrolled chaos on the other, constitute the two poles in his works. In terms of form and styling, order is achieved through the use of traditional literary organizing formulas and narrative tools, such as analogies and leitmotifs, that

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endow a literary text with cohesiveness and allow for a centralized reading of it. Thematically, it relies on an extensive use of the unifying and stabilizing concept of the family. The thematic and stylistic factors work in synchrony; they are relevant to the trilogy in its entirety and to each of the novels themselves. It is the concept of the family that determines the master plot of the three novels and defines them as an integrated whole. Salamandra, Piepel, and House of Dolls are each devoted to one of three siblings of the imagined Preleshnik family, whose chronology the trilogy relates.15 Although cruelly torn apart, the family does not cease to exist in the protagonists’ minds; memories of and longings for the family compromise an obvious connecting thread of the three separate plots and constitute their fixed, though forlorn, background. The genesis of the tragic “chronology of a Jewish family in the twentieth century,” as Dinur choses to narrate it, is then the apocalyptic event of a family’s destruction, which threw each of its members into a lonely existence and forced them all to surrender to a deadly, brutal universe. Many of the texts’ literary devices support this reading. The trilogy is in fact a dense network of (rather banal) metaphors and leitmotifs, which reinforce the interconnectedness of its three parts, control the flow of events in each of them, and structure their various elements. The recurrent motifs of “bewitching” eyes and of exceptional physical beauty are obvious examples of such integrative dynamics: the three Preleshnik siblings as well as Harry’s wife, Sanya, are blessed with attractive features that in various ways determine their fate, even in the frenzied, irrational circumstances of the Ghetto and the camp. The color red is another example of a similarly organizing element. In Piepel it constructs a set of coordinates that map the Lager, marking the sites of its terror and introducing the memory of the family and the longings for it. Red is the color of the projectors lighting the camp’s barbed wire fences, of the “romantic” light in the Block Chiefs’ cabins, of the sunrises and sunsets that the lonely twelve-year-old child protagonist stares at, of the camp’s many streams of blood, and of a sweater knitted by the child’s mother, pieces of which he wraps around his feet as stockings and never takes off until his death. Red is of course also connected to fire—an element that appears in the trilogy time and again, in various contexts and with different meanings, all of which converge in the flames of the crematorium, the ultimate site of annihilation. Splitting is also maintained and emphasized through an extensive use of analogies. Recurrent direct analogies between the fate of any inmate and that of his/ her fellow victims convey the uncannily similar short, tortured, and hopeless life-courses of the death camp’s prisoners; they testify to the anonymity of these

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prisoners and the arbitrariness of their deaths. At the same time, it is through the use of reverse analogies that the concept of the family emerges in its role as the contrasting pole to everything that takes place in the concentrationary universe in terms of the ties among the inmates. The family does not exist anymore in the death camp. Nevertheless, in the minds of the trilogy’s heroes, it remains the ultimate signifier of an ethical world of human solidarity and care that keeps its strength in face of a Satanic scheme planned to erase any signs of humanness among the victims. The strong emphasis on the family thus fulfills a key function of presenting the atrocities of the Holocaust from an angle that the majority of Holocaust writers attempt to avoid: the “divide and rule” strategy that was systematically employed by the Nazis, and the consequent loneliness of the victims, who were thrown into a world where human solidarity often vanished and where they were deprived even of the sense of having the right to belong to the human race. The Holocaust’s colossally explosive forces destroyed the family’s centripetal dynamics and brought about its annihilation; this is one of the core clashes to which the trilogy testifies. Beyond the domain of the family, on the other side of everything that the family stands for in human culture, outside the reach of empathy, loyalty, devotion, and compassion, lies the chaotic brutal space of the Lager, were humanism ceases to exist. The “other planet”—as Dinur referred to Auschwitz in his short monologue on the Eichmann trial’s witness-stand—is presented as an extreme opposite of a universe in which human ethics, symbolized by the family, prevail. In Shivitti, Dinur withdrew from the assertion that Auschwitz had been “another planet,” stating that over the years he had come to realize that it had been on this planet that the Holocaust had taken place, which meant that ordinary people had committed the atrocities. Nevertheless this concept, echoing David Rousset’s term “concentrationary universe,” remains relevant to the descriptions of a space where the essence of the human being and the core of human relations ceased to exist.16 Indeed, numerous outrageously wild descriptions of life and death in the concentration camp defy, both in content and form, any traces of the ordered world where the family had predominated. They demonstrate a bare existence based on biophysical terror that disperses its subjects into separate entities and thus sentences them to the lowest possible level of disgrace and degradation. According to the reading I  propose here, what Dinur conceives of as the ultimate state of victimhood, “the bottom,” in Primo Levi’s terminology,17 is not only, and not primarily, the murder of Jews in itself, but rather the dehumanization to which the victims were subjected in the process of their extermination. Leaning on a naturalistic approach that allows him a close look at the physical

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details of the torture and death in Auschwitz, Dinur gazes in his works more deeply than many other Holocaust writers into the most minute, and often concealed, details of what this dehumanization actually entailed. This, for example, is the fundamental role of the descriptions of sexual abuse in Piepel and in House of Dolls; whether or not Jewish women were systemically used in the camps’ brothels (and it is by now agreed that this was definitely not the case18), Naama Schick has convincingly argued that the objectification of the victims and their treatment as usable commodities did indeed include the exploitation of both female and male bodies for sadistic sexual pleasures.19 Dinur dares to describe not only the vicious performance of this exploitation, which appears among the many other forms of torture he does not hesitate to delineate, but also, and most importantly, the victims’ tragic internalization of their subjectification. An example of this internalization can be seen in Piepel, when the twelve-year-old child desperately struggles to overcome his profound sickness and disgust and to eat the relatively abundant quantities of food he can lay his hands on, in order to gain weight and make his body fat enough, and thus sexually attractive enough, for the Block Chief. Dinur is making an exceptionally unique and courageous statement on the terms of existence in the concentration camp, as they were dictated by Nazi strategies of control. In the same manner, Dinur gazes closely at all variations of the living dead—“die Stücke” or “Pupe” (in “Nazi Deutsch”), the Automatons, the Muselmänner (in the language of the inmates)—daring to look at and to portray the sight of both their physical and mental rot and decay. I have written elsewhere about the manner in which Dinur’s works present what is called, in Primo Levi’s terminology, the “gray zone”—that zone where the borders between the perpetrators and their victims became somewhat blurred due to various forms of inmates’ collaboration.20 I argued that what was probably most unique to Dinur’s Holocaust literature was its deep understanding of the Nazis’ management of the camp as a means of turning it, in its entirety, into a “gray zone.” Nazi methods of ruling camps dehumanized the inmates not only by eliminating their names, personal identities, and biographies, denying them food and drink and using their bodies as perishable physical resources in the German industries of war and destruction. These strategies also achieved dehumanization through the inducement of cruel competition among individual inmates over extremely scarce basic resources and equally scarce privileged positions, which gave their holders the illusion of having better chances of survival. In unsparing detail and without judgment, Dinur dares to describe the resultant battle over meager supplies, battles often fought at the price of other inmates’ lives. As one example among many, we are told of Moni Preleshnik’s yearning

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for the death of another “Piepel” (another twelve-year-old victim)—a death that would allow him to regain the job of the Block Chief ’s sex servant. Similarly, in House of Dolls, Dinur emphasizes the hatred Daniella Preleshnik and her fellow female victims in the camp’s brothel feel toward the newcomers who are about to replace them. Indeed, one of Dinur’s most shocking acknowledgments is that veterans of the Lager regarded newcomers as their “death angels,” whose arrival announced their approaching deportation to the crematorium. Dinur is well aware of the fact that not all victims actually fell to this most degrading “bottom,” where all traces of human solidarity vanished, and that many managed to remain committed to human empathy and loyalty. This is indeed what the reverse analogies between various inmates in his writings often exemplify: Unlike most of the inmates, some—particularly mothers and fathers—manage not to betray basic human values and remain loyal to others even at the price of their own lives. Nevertheless, Dinur often does not spare even his precious heroes the fate of ultimate dehumanization, thus demonstrating his deep understanding that dehumanization was not a form of vicious collaboration, an identification with the aggressors or a case of becoming infected and contaminated by the evil spirits of the perpetrators, but a form of victimhood; it was indeed the most tragic fate awaiting the inmates at the lowest level of degradation that was planned for them by their annihilators. Dinur’s description of the Lager as a battlefield where captives are desperately fighting each other over a “function” (funczia, in the camp’s jargon) and where the death of one Häftling (prisoner) provides some chance, usually illusionary, for the survival of the other, is indeed, in my reading, the most significant aspect of his representation and conceptualization of the evil spirits of the Holocaust. His ability to textualize this horror of dehumanization, sincerely presenting it as an uncanny manifestation of victimhood, is outstanding. Splitting is the psychological defense mechanism, applied to the literary arena, which enables this to take place; it allows the nucleus of the family in Dinur’s Auschwitz trilogy to be preserved in the minds of the protagonists (namely the three siblings of the Preleshnik family) as an ultimate haven of loyalty, solidarity, and love for which Harry, Daniella, and Moni never cease to yearn. It is this preservation of the concept of the family in the context of its actual collapse in the concentrationary universe that makes it possible for Dinur to nonjudgmentally portray the horrific site where one Muselmann is forced to live on the physical remains of the other. Remaining deeply faithful to the memory of the family—a family torn apart and destroyed by the Nazis—Dinur’s precious protagonists, and with them the crowds of their fellow inmates, are spared any form of moral verdict. As part

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of this splitting strategy, blame in Dinur’s descriptions of the victims’ conduct is directed only toward a limited minority of top “functionaries,” who sadistically performed their duties as representatives of the Nazi authorities: Jewish policemen in the Ghetto, and Kapos in the concentration camp. Regardless of the degree to which they manipulated the economy of scarcity created by the Nazis, and even as they gained their temporary survival by exploiting the weaknesses and disadvantages of others, the rest of the camp’s population is portrayed as the morally innocent victims of a vicious scheme. The concept of the family is, then, a moral anchor to which Dinur returns time and again in his writings. His memorialization of the Holocaust, through a life-long literary project of textualizing its catastrophes, may accordingly be conceived of as his attempt at straightforwardly presenting the degradation to which the Nazi perpetrators subjected their victims while still saving the victims from the moral judgment of the sort that prevailed, to some extent, in the Israeli social and cultural arena of the first decades after the Holocaust. In those years, vocal members of Israeli society often accused Holocaust survivors of going to the gas chambers “like sheep to slaughter,” thus manifesting an alleged loss of human and national dignity.21 Survivors themselves treated fellow survivors of the camps who were known to have served as functionaries with open contempt. The contempt with which Dinur treated certain characters in his works and his depiction of them as collaborators may have encouraged such attitudes. At the same time, his empathic portrayal of various phenomena of degradation as forms of victimhood might have planted the seeds for a later understanding of the Israeli public of the profound meaning of victimhood under the Nazi regime.22 Thus in refuting any accusation of the victims’ alleged moral deterioration, not by presenting active resistance on their part, but rather by testifying to their profound weakness, Dinur’s literary representation possibly contributed to the debate over the question of victimhood as opposed to heroism. Furthermore, by telling the stories of the victims—those who perished as well as those, like himself, who survived—with the aid of unifying literary strategies that employ traditional literary genres and devices, Dinur makes claims for their right to belong to the human race not only in terms of their morality and ethics but also in terms of their place in elevated human spheres, such as art and literature. In so doing, Dinur in fact adheres to the call for an “ethics of survival” put forward by Cathy Caruth, following Lacan, in the chapter “Traumatic Awakening” of her book Unclaimed Experience.23 Referring to Lacan’s remarks about Freud’s analysis of dreams about accidental deaths, Caruth asserts that “in thus implicitly exploring consciousness as

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figured by the survivor whose life is inextricably linked to the death he witnesses, Lacan resituates the psyche’s relations to the real not as a simple matter of seeing or of knowing the nature of empirical event . . . but as the story of an urgent responsibility, or what Lacan defines in this conjunction as an ethical relation to the real.”24 Throughout his career Dinur indeed expressed an urgent responsibility to testify to what he conceived as “the real,” which he had been forced to experience and witness. He believed that these experiences implied a consistent obligation on his part to straightforwardly delineate the bare terms of life and death in the concentrationary universe, the planned and consistently applied degradation they entailed, and the “choiceless choices” (as Lawrence Langer defines them25) enforced on the victims under these conditions. Thus, against his own declared intentions, Dinur refuses, in his literature, to surrender to his perpetrators by remaining an eternal “kazetnik,” forever enclosed in their deadly trap, but instead acknowledges the fact of his survival by assuming the authority of an auctorial voice that stands on the side of the victims and guards their memory.

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

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6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Iris Milner in Post-Holocaust Poetry,” in Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation, 259–76. 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. 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). 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 Hatzofen: E.D.M.A (Code: E.D.M.A.). 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). I borrow the term “concentrationary universe” from title of French survivor David Rousset’s book L’Univers Concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1965 [1946]). 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. 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. 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).

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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 halfsister 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).

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20 Iris Milner, “The ‘Gray Zone’ Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in KaTzetnik’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

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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: I do not regard myself as a writer of literary material. This is a chronicle of the planet of Auschwitz. I was there for about two years. Time there is not like it is here on earth. Every fraction of a minute there passes on a different scale of time. And the inhabitants of this planet had no names, they had no parents nor did they have children. They did not dress in the way we dress here; they were not born there and they did not give birth; they breathed according to different laws of nature; they did not live—nor did they die—according to the laws of this world. Their name was the number “Ka-Tzetnik.” . . . This oath was the armour with which I acquired the supernatural power, so that I should be able, after time—the time of Auschwitz—the two years when I was a Musselman, to overcome it. For they left me, they always left me, they were parted from me, and this oath always appeared in the look of their 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.6

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

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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 planet of Auschwitz” Various widely circulated maps of the locations of Nazi concentration camps reveal their proximity to towns, roads, borders, or rivers. Aerial photographs or detailed charts of the camps themselves present a strict organization of space, where the camp is internally divided into separate areas by walls and fences, which also separate it from the external world. The overall impression is that of meticulously arranged spatial order and discretely separated functions for specific places in the compound. Keeping this sense of spatial order in mind, let us examine the following passages from Ka-Tzetnik. The first describes Daniella Preleshnik’s arrival in the “Labor through Joy” section of Auschwitz in House of Dolls (Beit habubot, 1953). The other two passages from Piepel render Auschwitz through the eyes of Hayim-Idl and Moni, two of the camp’s old-timers. “Fall in! Snap to! Snap to!” They are being pushed, prodded along with bludgeons. Daniella runs with the others. A labyrinth of blocks. A queer new world. A world all blocks. Alleys and blocks . . . “Run! Run! On the double!” . . . The camp suddenly stood forth enormously vast and terrifying. Alleys and blocks. Blocks and Alleys.10 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

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Or Rogovin 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

The experience conveyed most strongly in these passages—as in so many others in Ka-Tzetnik’s writing—is that of the beholder’s disorientation, diminution, and powerlessness before an endless and elusive space. While camp maps and other factual representations of the camp’s space—including tourists’ visits—create the impression of spatial omniscience, in Ka-Tzetnik’s representation, camp space duplicates itself in an interminable, deceptive, and overwhelming labyrinth of blocks and passages, watchtowers, and fences. His descriptions reflect the sensual and conceptual perspective of those trapped within the camp, newcomers and old-timers alike, for whom these topographical facts posed not only the physical threats with which we have become so familiar, but also the threats to the mind, which slowly but surely created an equally deadly despair. The principles underlying Ka-Tzetnik’s construction of camp space correspond to what M. M. Bakhtin, in his discussion of the chronotope, calls “interchangeable space,” a space which is unspecific and abstract.13 The events could have taken place not only in any one of the blocks of the camp, but also in any of the Nazi camps, and Moni, Daniella, and Hayim-Idl could have been any of the Jews who populated these camps. The space of the camp in Ka-Tzetnik’s novels is presented, in Bakhtin’s terms, as an “alien world.” Although both the author and the protagonist know it well, this space is deprived of the small and particular details that differentiate one block or corner of the camp from another. It is indefinite, undifferentiated, abstract, alien. “All the blocks are alike. As alike as the camplings in them.”14 When little Moni finds a temporary hideout on a bunk in one of the blocks, he looks around: 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

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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: When the third attempt to kill Anshel Wasserman came to naught, the Germans sent him running to camp headquarters with a very young officer named Hoppfler at his heels yelling, “Schnell.” I  can see them now, as they leave the grounds of the lower camp, where the gas chambers are, and approach the two barbed-wire fences concealed by hedges between which new arrivals are forced to run naked past a double file of Ukrainians, who set up dogs on them and pound them with clubs. The inmates call this route the Schlauch, or tube, and the Germans with their peculiar humor call it Himmelstrasse—the Heavenly Way . . . Now they pass the parade grounds and stop in from of the commander’s barracks. Wasserman is panting. The barracks are a grim-looking wooden structure, two stories high, with curtained windows. A small brass sign on the door says CAMP COMMANDER, and another, on the outer wall, CONSTRUCTION– SCHOENBRUN INC., LEIPZIG, AND SCHMIDT INC., MÜNSTERMAN.17

The sense of space evoked in this passage is fundamentally different than what we find in Ka-Tzetnik. This is not only because Grossman’s choice of genre is closer to fantastic-realism or due to any lack of knowledge about the camps; Grossman has obviously studied the relevant scholarship in detail.18 It is precisely this thorough, even scholarly, familiarity with the facts of the camps that Grossman—or, more accurately, Momik, his internal second-generation narrator—demonstrates throughout his narrative that conveys an experience so different than the one we find in Ka-Tzetnik’s writing. Even if the details Grossman provides were known to Jews in the camp, describing these details is less likely to evoke a sense of the inmates’ perspective exactly because they are so organized and lucid. The continuous and uninterrupted movement within space, as in a long stroke of a brush, reflects Grossman’s look from the outside inwards, as if one were closely studying a map or a photograph or as if one were taking or,

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indeed, leading a tour of one’s own home, naming and explaining the most marginal and intriguing details of the landscape. Grossman’s rendition of the camp depends upon a geographical stability and tranquil focus that we do not find in descriptions of the camp given directly by Ka-Tzetnik’s narrator or through the consciousness of his Jewish characters. Grossman narrates the most minute details with the pleasure and craft of a storyteller, slowly and eloquently unfolding an imaginative world to the audience of his tale. In contrast, it is sometimes painful to read Ka-Tzetnik’s description of the camp exactly because he writes without pleasure, without an attempt to produce a vivid illusion of reality. In the Salamandra novels, the camp is not rendered as a sequence of places or objects, well-defined, ordered, and observed. Rather, in accordance with the prisoner’s experience, it is portrayed as an overwhelming, endless, duplicable, and agonizing space. There is no pleasure in it or in the art of its narration. The camps in which Ka-Tzetnik’s characters are trapped evoke not the sense of a cage, through the metal bars of which one can see the inside and outside, but rather the sense of an endless maze of mirrors, in which some objects and people are permanent and well discerned, and the masses of bodies, blocks, and fences duplicate themselves infinitely and painfully in time and space. The specificity and concreteness demonstrated in Grossman’s description of camp space typify, in Bakhtin’s terms, a depiction of “one’s own native world.”19 Such a world opposes the abstractness of the alien world emerging in KaTzetnik’s text, and this contrast in portrayals of space is a symptom of a fundamental contrast between narrations of the camp that look “from within” and those that look “from without”: through the eyes of the Ka-Tzet, struggling to survive in the camp’s time and space, or through the eyes of an external observer, whose detailed demonstration of facts only sets a barrier between readers and life as it was actually lived in the conditions of the Lager. If applied to additional camp locations, Grossman’s mode of narrating space would have eventually provided a fairly clear, detailed, and comprehensive picture of the camp as a whole. This cannot happen in the abstract and alien world constructed in Piepel, where the numerous descriptions of the camp’s landscape only duplicate each other, never allowing an integrative, definite, and comprehensible picture of space, which therefore remains undefeatable for body and mind. The despairing effect evoked by such spatial imagery is accessible to both readers and dwellers of the camp, thereby creating a higher level of narrative integration as audience and characters share one experience. From the perspective of his characters, Ka-Tzetnik’s poetics illustrates well how “temporal and spatial determinations are inseparable from one another, and always colored by

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emotions and values.”20 Confined in Auschwitz for over a year, with no hope of rescue, Moni’s conceptualization of space is shaped by his surroundings and situation. The barbed wire, the blocks, guards, and watchtowers—all visible to the eye of the visitor or scholar—are visible, of course, to Moni as well. But in the understanding of the one who is trapped within, the camp gains a different meaning—one that exceeds its manmade boundaries: 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 insideGermans. 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

In the experience of the Ka-Tzet, the camp is not an isolated, well-defined location or object within the world, restricted in time and space, as it would appear looking from the outside in, then or today. Rather, it is everything and everywhere. It fills the world and consumes it.

“Time there is not like it is here on earth” Historians have already determined when the Nazi camps were constructed and liberated. We know when trains arrived at the camps from the different ghettos, and we can even describe in detail the daily routine of the inmates in various camps.22 Testifying during the Eichmann trial, Dinur himself mentioned twice that he had spent about two years in Auschwitz.23 But how was time experienced by the Ka-Tzets, who had no access to clocks and calendars and for whom every living second incorporated a tormented struggle to survive? “Time there is not like it is here on earth,” Dinur testified. “Every fraction of a minute there passes on a different scale of time.” How is this inner sense of time articulated in the poetics of Piepel? Ka-Tzetnik’s representation of the camp operates to diffuse the conventional sense of time for readers and characters alike, while creating an alternative and gripping temporal experience. In Piepel, Moni Preleshnik survives as a servant and sex slave (“Piepel” in camp jargon) for the block-masters. He manages to keep transferring from one block to another, just in time to avoid being murdered by a master who wants to replace him with a new Piepel. At some point,

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Moni entirely loses his invaluable Funktion (a position that provides him with extra food and protection) and is immediately thrown back into the general population of prisoners, where he risks not only death at the hands of an abusive block-master, but also, his greatest fear, becoming a Muselmann.24 “There’s just six hours between a full belly and a hungry one in camp,” Rostek, the blockmaster’s cook, reminds Moni. “And once you lose your Funktion, inside of six hours you’re just as hungry as the rest of them. And you know where the hungry go in Auschwitz, Piepel. Six hours is all you need to tell you.”25 This is the window of opportunity during which Moni must find food or, better, a Funktion, if he is to survive. On the Other Planet, Ka-Tzetnik tells us, time is not measured by days or months, but by hours—a simple matter of physiology. And if the interval between meals is longer than six hours, the risk is that by the time some food is miraculously procured, it may be too late to recover one’s previous strength. “When do you become a Muselmann?” Moni wonders. “Do you feel the moment? He isn’t a Muselmann yet! Why, he still realizes with everything in him that he must save himself immediately. It’s after the last hunger that you become a Muselmann.”26 Further down this terrifying path, then, the sand in the hourglass gains the form of purely physiological symptoms of the hunger’s type and its place in the sequence. As long as one is still capable of being hungry, there may still be a chance of rescue, and Moni is happy to feel that “he’s going to be hungry again!”27 In another manifestation of the unprecedented otherness of the Auschwitz planet, hunger is a positive symptom of a mind and body that are still capable of responsiveness and thought. Mediating these sensations and insights through Moni’s consciousness allows Ka-Tzetnik to animate the substitution of objective chronometry with biological pace and its intrinsic meaning as inseparable from the experience and perspective of the planet’s inhabitants. The accelerated and biologized passing of hours is complemented and made more compelling through the story’s suspension of larger time units. While the date of September 1, 1939—the day that the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and began setting up ghettos for Jews—is explicitly indicated early in the first volume of the Salamandra series, Ka-Tzetnik leaves the counting of days, weeks and months, or any reference to the conventional temporal sequence or historical events, at the camp’s gates.28 Even the change of seasons is obscured: “In Auschwitz you never know whether it’s winter or summer. Your frame is consumed by the fire of hunger. So, what’s the season of the year to you? Here it is the never-ending season of hunger.”29 This suspension of conventional chronometrics mirrors Bakhtin’s observation that in the “literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete

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whole.”30 Just as camp space is alien and interchangeable, without concrete markings, so the passing of time in the camp seems to be suspended, making units of time that are longer than hours similar and indistinguishable. Ka-Tzetnik’s narrator aptly expresses the unique spatiotemporal nature of Auschwitz in one pensive observation: 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. EverywhereAuschwitz. 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

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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

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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.

“The inhabitants of this planet” The human domain in Ka-Tzetnik’s textual construction of Auschwitz is rich and diverse, encompassing a multitude of communities. It is populated by Zionist leaders and Orthodox Rabbis, tradesmen and businessmen, children and adults, family members and complete strangers, men and women, Jews, Poles, and Germans, the camp’s Funktion holders and the rankless, the good and the evil. In this regard, Ka-Tzetnik’s portrayal of the camp’s population is efficient, comprehensive, and factually compelling, but except for the historical circumstances it contains, it is not unique among the panoramic explorations of a place and its people that are typical of conventional novels of social realism. Yet, when these individuals constitute a mass of people—a crowd—a mimetic challenge that is unique to representations of the camps arises. In our ordinary experience, it is an observer’s sensual or cultural perspective that groups a large number of individuals into a mass of people, and this mass is formed by a coincidence of circumstance or a momentary act soon to dissolve. The “inhabitants” of the “planet of Auschwitz,” on the other hand, comprise a mass of people not as product of a perceptual process in the eyes of the beholder, but rather through a metamorphosis imposed upon them as the object of perception itself. They “had no names, they had no parents nor did they have children,” Dinur testified on the witness stand. “They did not dress in the way we dress here . . . Their name was the number ‘Ka-Tzetnik.’ ” A systematic erasure of all distinctive features—name, familial status, clothing, normal physical appearance—forces the camp inmates into anonymity, not only as a mass of people but as individuals. As such, how can they be captured with senses and text? The eye has no grip on this amorphous mass, and if the exception is found, the individual cannot stand for the rule, who is, again, defined by anonymity as a visual feature (for both a member and a spectator). This anonymity constitutes both cause and effect: it is a

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result of the first stage of violence in a Nazi system in which victims who cannot escape anonymity quickly in the form of a Funktion will soon become victims once more on their way to annihilation. It is perhaps the conceptual, visual, and mimetic impasse that the masses create that accounts for the nature of their presence in Ka-Tzetnik’s texts. What Ka-Tzetnik’s narration lacks in its ability to individualize the masses it makes up for in the attention it pays them. Reading Piepel, one develops the sense that although Moni and Hayim-Idl are the heroes, and many other characters gain considerable narratorial attention—be it favorable or disparaging—the focus of the novel is in fact on the masses of anonymous Ka-Tzets. They are constantly mentioned and integrated into the narrator’s descriptions of the landscape on the one hand and into the consciousness of the main characters on the other. They are ceaselessly positioned before the eyes of the readers, who cannot evade them, and before the main characters as part of their world. This spatial and visual deployment can, of course, be grounded in the factual image of the camps, but it is also be a projection of Dinur’s own mindset and nightmares, which he reveals in the testimony he gave in the Eichmann trial: 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.

In her analysis of this testimony, Shoshana Felman notes that “what K-Zetnik keeps reliving of the death camp is the moment of departure, the last gaze of the departed, the exchange of looks between the dying and the living at the very moment in which life and death are separating but are still tied up together and can for the last time see each other eye to eye.”36 Felman is drawing here on Dinur’s testimony and his later memoir Shivitti, but her understanding of Dinur’s consciousness can also provide us with insight into the way that he depicts the camp’s anonymous masses in the Salamandra narratives. He is haunted by the masses, by their presence, by the grip they take of his mind and soul. He is mesmerized by their image, by the look in their eyes, which connects with his and forms a bond that haunts him long after his liberation. He has internalized them and constantly feels that they are looking at him with the expectation that he tell their story; he constantly sees them in his mind’s eye, in the eye of Ka-Tzetnik, who broadcasts from within the Other Planet with its spaces, nightmares, and anguished inhabitants.

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The actualization of Dinur’s consciousness in poetics is also evident in the violent erasure of all markers of individuality, as this passage from Piepel demonstrates well: He [Moni] opened the door of block 4. Everything looked the same as before. Nothing had changed . . . All hutches looked identical. All of them crammed with the identical tangle of bodies. The identical heads. All one color. No young, and no old. A monotonous stream of murk reaching from the platform to the crematorium. A thousand camplings, brought from diverse lands; diverse languages. All identical now. All drops in the same stream. He went among them. He lay among them, side by side with them, body to bodies. He had no way of telling whether the one lying beside him was his age or his father’s. He did not know who they were, just as he did not know who the other thousand in the block were; as he did not know who were all the hundreds of thousands who had previously streamed through these very hutches. They were all one thing to him: camplings.37

Deprived of their individualizing features, the “inhabitants of this planet” are integrated into the chronotope; interchangeable and alien as blocks and hutches, undifferentiated like days and seasons, one inmate can be substituted for another—a whole that has no visible boundaries and that threatens, like an ocean, to drown its beholder. By repeatedly referring to this mass of anonymous inmates, by investigating their uniformity and the differences it erases, Ka-Tzetnik maintains narratorial eye contact with the nameless masses mentioned in his testimony. Coloring the “spatial determinations,” to use Bakhtin’s terminology, through the hero’s “emotions and values,” KaTzetnik’s narrator is able to convey the enormous sense of loneliness Moni feels among this mass of people of similar situation and destiny. Even to this lonely child, who has been observing them closely, they are just “camplings”; their individuality has been abolished. Exploring the inner world of one person enables Ka-Tzetnik to “bring it [the Holocaust] down,” as Aharon Appelfeld puts it, “to make events speak through the individual and in his language, to rescue the suffering from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity, and to restore the person’s given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him.”38 When the explored mind is that of an individual within the mass and when that mind is occupied with perception and conceptualization of that mass, this process becomes especially tangible.

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The challenge of representing the anonymous masses is further complicated when the Muselmann is the object. If the Muselmänner are what Boaz Neumann calls “live object[s]” and “human merchandise,” should a novelist consider them objects or characters?39 How should a person who had lost his character be characterized? How can the mind be presented if it shows no signs of activity or operates in modes unknown to both narrator and reader? Retaining a solid factual grounding and a perspective that is interior to life in the camp—where the Muselmann was beyond the realm of human communication—Ka-Tzetnik does not attempt to explore the mind of those who “crossed the invisible border between existence and nonexistence.”40 But he also does not betray his oath to tell their story. In Piepel, the Muselmänner are omnipresent and inescapable, not only in order to provide factual accuracy in the historical sense or realistic fullness in the a literary. Ka-Tzetnik integrates them into the poetics of his narrative, presenting the encounter with the Muselmänner as experienced from within the Other Planet. Primo Levi writes that the Muselmänner crowd his memory “with their faceless presence.” “Their life is short, but their number is endless; they . . . form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence.”41 Ka-Tzetnik animates a similar experience through his characters and plots: 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

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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: Out of the dark along the walls, shadows—Mussulmen—began to emerge one by one. Silently they came from the rear gate on bare, muffled skeleton-feet. Along

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There is no interaction among the Muselmänner or between them and Moni, and any communication would have of course been impossible because the Muselmänner had crossed the threshold that marks the world of the living. They are confined to a physical presence forming an essential detail of the camp’s landscape, just like the blocks and the watchtowers. Yet, the latrine seems “emptier and more ominous than before” due to these shadows’ psychological impact on Moni, for whom they serve as a physical and mental reminder of his most probable fate. In the convoluted logic of Auschwitz, Moni is less terrified by the constant rapes that he endures at the hands the block-masters or even by the impending murder that awaits Piepels who do not escape their masters in time, than he is seized by the horror of “oncoming Muselmanity.”46 This special type of death was invented in the Nazi camps, the mental phase of which, the “irreversible withdrawal from life; the phase of acquiescent capitulation to despair,” precedes turning into a “Muselmann in body.”47 “Oh God!” this child begs silently, “let him at least keep on realizing that he must save himself.”48 While the Muselmänner themselves are only shadows unable to participate actively in the narrative’s plot, let alone propel it, the paralyzing horror, panic even, of becoming a Muselmann serves as a powerful motivation for KaTzetnik’s central characters. It was the desperate struggle to “save his mind from degeneration,” leading into the initial mental phase of Muselmanity, that saved the life of Harry Preleshnik, Moni’s older brother and the protagonist of several of the Salamandra volumes, although “his body was ravaged and fleshless.”49 It is the fear of becoming a Muselmann that generates many of Moni’s agonized inner monologues as well as his persistent struggle to secure another portion of food, if not a Funktion. This set of priorities and motivations reveals the terrifying psychological drama of life and death on the Other Planet. Within the concentrationary chronotope, the Muselmann fulfills the function of what Bakhtin calls the “chronotopic motif,” where the “intersection of spatial and temporal sequences” materializes most visibly and echoes the chronotope of the novel as whole.50 The Muselmann, however, is not an event—meeting, discovery, recognition—or a place—castle, road, salon—like in the examples of chronotopic motifs that Bakhtin discusses.51 The Muselmann is a stage that

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combines place and event; it is a transformation that occurs in the camp as a result of the set of conditions that it imposes on the concentrationees. On the Other Planet, where movement in space is limited by barbwires, where events are duplicated by camp routine, and time has frozen, the prisoner’s body becomes the site of development from one stage to another, demonstrating the intersection of time and space in the most visual and terrifying manner. A Muselmann is a person who, within a period of time (weeks or months) and in a specific place (the Nazi camp) has lost his personhood. Discussing the great realist writers of the nineteenth century, Bakhtin observes that Balzac’s depictions of houses are “materialized history” demonstrating the French novelist’s extraordinary “ability to ‘see’ time in space.”52 Looking at a Muselmann, one can “see time in space” in a horrifying manner that Balzac or Bakhtin never imagined and that may serve as a marker of the Holocaust as a modern invention. In the camp’s very particular type of space, time leaves its traces on the living bodies in the form of an industrially inflicted accelerated decay. But the chronotopicity of the Muselmann exceeds the function of a motif. As a “formally constitutive category,” Bakhtin observes, the chronotope “determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature . . . The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.”53 In the Greek romance, where characters are not changed by the tests they pass, their immutability affirms “their identity, their durability and continuity.”54 The various categories of the modern novel, in contrast, present a process of human “becoming” and “emergence,” where life and events “reveal themselves as the hero’s experience, as the school or environment that first forms and formulates the hero’s character and world view.”55 In the realistic novel, which Ka-Tzetnik’s writing more closely resembles in period and conventions, human emergence is not a “private affair.”56 Rather, in it the human “emerges along with the world,” reflecting “the historical emergence of the world itself,” and is forced to “become a new, unprecedented type of human being.”57 In its combination of the abstract, interchangeable, and alien space (characteristic of the Greek romance) with the impact of time on characters (typical of the realistic novel), the chronotope of the Other Planet determines the image of the individual not to a “significant degree,” as Bakhtin observes in the corpus he analyses, but absolutely. The item manufactured at the end of the concentrationary production line is the Muselmann, an unprecedented type of human being, who reflects in the most tangible manner the unprecedented historical developments of the Holocaust. Under the horrifying circumstances of the concentrationary chronotope, the process of “becoming” or “emergence” is not that of character growth or ideological development forged through the experience of interaction

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with history. Becoming a Muselmann is a process of descent during which an individual is drained of all mental and physical capacities in a procedure that embodies, in the most literal sense of the word, the historical conditions of the Nazi camp and reifies the image of the human as a chronotopic motif. Unlike conventional characters, a Muselmann is not a fictional individual who participates in events against the background of the chronotope. The Muselmann has lost the most basic psychological and physical agency, to the point of becoming a camp object, perceived by other inhabitants of the Other Planet—Ka-Tzets, SS, Kapos—not as an individual but as another duplicable element of the concentrationary chronotope. Finally, Muselmanity is consequential for Ka-Tzetnik’s act of narration. The tension between Moni’s gushing, idiosyncratic stream of thought and the looming erasure of individuality imposed by the Muselmann condition motivates the text in the domain of telling as much as in the domain of the told. If the novel’s focal character degenerates to the point in which his mind is no longer able to comprehend his surroundings or even reflect them passively, this is the end of the story in the most literal sense.58 This drama of narration is encapsulated in the recurring motif of the eye. As a skinny Piepel who had lost his appetite, Moni is no longer attractive to the block-masters through conventional sexual qualities. These are his enchanting “virgin” and “velvet” eyes that captivate the appetite of the masters and secure his Funktion, his life.59 Nearby, endless, identical, their individuality erased and awaiting with everlasting patience are the Muselmänner, on whose faces and in whose eyes, as Levi observes, “not a trace of a thought is to be seen.”60 The transition from Moni’s “virgin” eye to the Muselman’s “blank stare” is a movement from the world of the living to the world of the dead, constituting the eye as a metaphor for life.61 Such transition would also terminate the psycho-literary function of Moni’s gaze as a channel through which Dinur maintains eye contact with the camp’s masses and explores the Other Planet from within—a channel “colored by [the] emotions and values” of a participants in the event—character and author. Indeed, in the final lines of Piepel, when Moni lays on the ground after his failed attempt to escape, the “Auschwitz sky leaned over his eyelashes,” and the “earth gathered him in like a mother cradling her little one to sleep.”62 The child’s shut eyes can no longer observe the sky or resist, through an alert consciousness and a stubborn will to live, the camp’s fatal grip. Although not as a Muselmann lingering on the threshold between the living and the dead but through a frail act of defiance; although he continued to struggle until the very last heart beat; Moni is eventually integrated, not in mind but in body,

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into the concentrationary chronotope. This is where Ka-Tzetnik’s narration concludes.

“Chronicle” or “literary material”? Understanding the Other Planet as a chronotope may illuminate a problematic tension that arises in Dinur’s testimony at the Eichmann trial. “What was the reason that you hid behind the pseudonym ‘Ka-Tzetnik,’ Mr. Dinur?” the judge asked. “It is not a pseudonym,” Dinur replied. “I do not regard myself as a writer of literary material. This is a chronicle of the planet of Auschwitz.”63 Salamandra, House of Dolls, and Piepel cannot be considered chronicles in the strictly formal sense—they are not records of events given in a chronologically arranged list of entries. Nor do these books qualify in terms of the chronicle’s substance: instead of a dry factual account that minimizes authorial intervention, they illustrate a comprehensive and very particular poetics that places them well within the domain of “literary material,” to use Dinur’s own terms.64 How, then, can this incongruity between Dinur’s statement of intention and his published output be explained? One way to resolve this tension is to suggest that in the context of the trial, Dinur wished to emphasize the factual value of his work at the expense of the poetic qualities that he would not otherwise deny. But when read closely, the testimony reveals a more comprehensive explanation, which rests on the intimate relationship between Dinur and Ka-Tzetnik, the survivor and the texts. Dinur, it should be noted, did not state that he had written a “chronicle of Auschwitz”—a type of work standing in opposition to literary accounts of the camps. Instead, he testified that his books are a chronicle of the “planet” of Auschwitz. This is a fundamental distinction.65 Even if he does not regard himself as a “writer of literary material,” but aspires to maximum objectivity and minimum authorial intervention in textualizing historical facts, Dinur narrates through his conceptualization of the camp as a “planet,” which in his novels he further qualifies as an Other Planet, “distanced from the land of man as it is distanced from the sun.”66 This qualification proves especially important when the concentrationary universe that Ka-Tzetnik describes is viewed through the lens of the chronotope. Bakhtin observes that the “chronotope in a work always contains within it an evaluating aspect.”67 In Ka-Tzetnik’s portrayal of the actual Auschwitz this “evaluating aspect” is realized as he conceptualizes the camp as an Other Planet, a conceptualization that materializes Dinur’s personal experience and insights as

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a Ka-Tzet and mediates between the factual Auschwitz and its novelistic articulation in the Salamandra volumes. The form of a chronicle—a chronologically arranged list of events—cannot apply to this chronicle of the Other planet. Time itself, like space, is perceived differently in this universe of unprecedented otherness, and it produces radically different meanings and implications for humanity. Dinur’s use of “chronicle” may be understood in reference to the genre’s other major quality, its factual substance, which gains special relevance in a trial testimony. The Auschwitz we encounter in Piepel is indeed immersed through and through in the details and sights of the actual camp; but allusions to discrete historical facts constitute only the surface of the text’s intrinsic relationship with history. Bakhtin observes that a “literary work’s artistic unity in relationship to actual reality is defined by its chronotope,” and art reflects “forms of an actual chronotope.”68 The process of “assimilating an actual historical chronotope in literature,” as Bakhtin calls it, sustains, according to Bernhard Scholz, the ties between the literary chronotope and the actual world in the context of which the text was created.69 Once reflected in art, the plot-generating potential of the actual chronotope is harnessed to produce fictional narratives, which recreate the relationship between time, space, and the events of historical plots.70 By reflecting the concentrationary universe as a chronotope, Ka-Tzetnik utilizes the literary dimension of his work to recover and document the physical and psychological conditions endured by the concentrationees in history. It is exactly this intersection of striving for a chronicle’s maximum factuality while narrating the Other Planet as Ka-Tzetnik that enables Dinur to compellingly convey an interior perspective—a perspective that is indispensable for understanding the facts of the Holocaust but is suppressed by any blind adherence to the facts alone. By conceptualizing the actual camp as an Other Planet and giving it a body in the form of the concentrationary chronotope, Ka-Tzetnik testifies to the experience of survival in Auschwitz through the force of his poetics.

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’s

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2

3 4

5

6

7

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first 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. 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. For more about the event, see Miron, “Beyn sefer le’efer.” 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. 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. 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. 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).

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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

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19 20 21 22

23

24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

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Fiction of the Holocaust,” in The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction, ed. Alan Mintz (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1997), 143–83. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 100–101. Ibid., 243. Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 225; Moni, 252. 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. 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. 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. Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 32; Moni, 41. Italics in Moni. Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 205; Moni, 231. Ibid. 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. Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 211; Moni, 237–8. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 84. Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 102; Moni, 119. Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 70. “Concentrationee” is David Rousset’s term for the inhabitants of the concentrationary universe, the Ka-Tzets. Rousset, Kingdom, 102. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 106. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, 392–3.

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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 . . .

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61 62 63

64

65

66

67 68 69

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seemed to be already dead, did not reflect the will to live, but blind and vacuous hunger.” Cited in Ryn, Life and Death, 12. Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 43; Moni, 53 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 256; Moni, 286. 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. 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. 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. 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). Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 243. Ibid., 243, 85. Ibid., 85. Bernhard Scholz, “Bakhtin’s Concept of ‘Chronotope’: The Kantian Connection,” The Contexts of Bakhtin, ed. David Shepherd (London: Routledge, 1998), 161. 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

The work of Ka-Tzetnik 135633 is well known in Israel, read by important segments of the population, and well respected. A biannual literary prize is named after the author, his work is studied by soldiers in the Israeli Defense Force, and his novel House of Dolls was adopted by the Israeli Ministry of Education in the 1990s as part of the standard high school curriculum so that younger generations could reacquaint themselves with what is considered a central text of Israeli Holocaust literature.1 Outside of Israel, however, Dinur’s oeuvre is not as widely known with the exception of this second work, House of Dolls (Beit Ha-Bubot, published in Hebrew in 1953 and from 1955 on in translation).2 For several decades, this novel was Dinur’s only work to achieve international commercial success. It was a bestseller: by 1980, well over ten million copies of House of Dolls had been sold in at least ten separate US editions, eighteen UK editions, multiple editions in European languages, as well as Japanese and Sinhalese translations.3 This success can be attributed to the unusual and controversial content of the second half of the work, and to how this content has been marketed. The first half of the novel recounts a somewhat conventional Holocaust narrative of a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, Daniella Preleshnik, and her brother, Harry (Dinur’s alter ego).4 It recounts the gradual destruction of their family and community under the German occupation of Poland, their deportation to a ghetto, and their eventual incarceration in separate concentration camps. The second half of the novel, however, is a rather unusual story of the sexual enslavement of Jewish women. Daniella is forced to work as a prostitute for Nazi soldiers in a women’s concentration camp that is specifically created for this purpose. This part of the novel contains elaborate scenes with graphic depictions of physical and sexual torture that Daniella and other young Jewish inmates are subjected

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to at the hands of Nazi doctors, officers, soldiers, and female camp wardens. The novel ends with Daniella’s death. The explicit descriptions of female nudity in this part of the novel, and the sexual acts and torture that the women are subjected to were risqué when the book was first published in Hebrew in 1953. Puritanical norms ruled Israeli culture in the 1950s and 1960s: “the new principles of ‘sabra purity’ . . . were all-encompassing: purity of thought, word, and deed.”5 This made such scenes particularly fascinating to a younger Israeli audience, which, as Omer Bartov claims, came to read it as a form of erotica.6 Different publishers subsequently capitalized upon this curiosity through their packaging. While the initial Hebrew hardcover edition of the book contains a sober graphic, typical of the cover designs of the period, bearing just the author’s name and the book’s title, later foreign editions feature ever more explicitly erotic covers, especially the paperback editions. This is in part a result of this particular medium. The new production of paperback novels in the United States after World War II aimed at an emerging market of upwardly mobile working- and middle-class consumers, many of whom were men and GIs, leading to a marketing strategy in which reprinted novels—even those of a rather serious nature—were repackaged with splashy colorful covers meant to seduce male readers into making a quick impulse buy.7 Authors were rarely consulted on cover art or taglines of paperback editions as these were decided on by the publishers, and it is unlikely that Dinur was consulted about these. Whereas the first hardcover editions of House of Dolls in English (Simon and Schuster 1955 and Frederick Muller 1956) still feature illustrations that are relatively sober in style and do not contain strong sexual overtones, this disappears in subsequent paperback editions. The cover of the US (1955) edition has a small stylized black-and-white pen illustration by Sam Fischer of a young girl who is grabbed and lifted up by what appears to be two Nazi Storm troopers, her belongings splayed out over the ground. The cover is in all black with white lettering, the illustration offset in a small yellow square, which faintly resembles a German Iron Cross. The 1956 UK edition features a full cover size expressionist illustration of a young dark-haired woman with a terror-stricken face who stands among a crowd of emaciated and beaten girls in a barren landscape, a female Nazi overseer with a stick in her hand nearby. The cover depicts a scene from the book during which one of Daniella’s friends is beaten to death. Here too the colors are black, yellow, and white. While Daniella’s dress is torn and her chest is partly visible, her facial expression conveys horror rather than anything erotic.

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After 1956, the covers become much more explicit. A recurring motif features an illustration (and in one case a photograph) of the upper torso of a slender female with an ample bosom whose face is partially obscured above the mouth (blurred in the illustration, cropped in the photo)—head cocked backward— and whose hands part her striped camp uniform dress at the neck to reveal a large tattoo with the inscription “Feld-Hure” (field whore) and a camp inmate number just above her breasts.8 This pose provokes an ambiguous reading: it can be seen as a gesture of shame on the part of the woman (she does not want to show her face), or possibly as an indication of sexual ecstasy. Such ambiguity was likely intentional and certainly not undesirable, as it resulted in phenomenal sales. This particular cover design would be used in a few different variations in countless editions over the next thirty years.9 The 1957–1965 US Lion and Pyramid mass-market paperback editions feature a full-color, painted and slightly dramatized version of this same illustration (the tattoo is now marked in red, as are the woman’s lips) with the title of the book in red on a yellow banner, or in white on a red banner and with a quote taken from the New York Times review of the book: “As real as The Diary of Anne Frank . . . Far more relentless than The Wall . . . The most important story yet to appear out of these ultimate depths . . . written in eternal fire.”10 Another late-1950s edition features a beautiful woman (who resembles Elizabeth Taylor); dressed in a fitted prison dress in the foreground, a similar tattoo visible on her chest, she looks straight out at the viewer through a barbed wire fence against the backdrop of a concentration camp watch tower and barracks.11 While her gaze is somewhat downturned and suggestive of the peril she is in, the image is strongly reminiscent of other such images in the popular “women in prison” paperback genre of the time that promised an arousing as well as a suspenseful read to the buyer.12 A third set of paperback covers from the late 1960s leaves no more doubt about the intent behind the marketing of House of Dolls: in the foreground is the image of a reclining female, face invisible, whose knees and buttocks are lifted up in the direction of the viewer’s gaze in a suggestive sexual pose. Just behind her stands a Nazi officer, dressed in iconic black, with leather boots and riding crops.13 Despite its bestselling commercial status—or perhaps also because of it—major scholarly works on Holocaust literature ignored House of Dolls, dismissing the novel as pulp or rejecting it outright as catering to a prurient voyeurism.14 At times, Dinur’s awkward prose is mentioned as a reason for its exclusion from serious Holocaust literature: it is quite frenzied, obsessive, repetitive, and over-the-top.15 Some of the clumsiness in the language may

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be explained by the fact that, as Ben-Ari points out, “Hebrew language revivalists had avoided erotic terminology,”16 and it was difficult to write in Hebrew of sex acts and sexual organs without sounding either too biblical or, conversely, unintentionally tacky. And certainly, the novel’s international pulp-style marketing certainly did not help the book’s reputation. However, the central scholarly objection to the work is a reaction to its depiction of the Nazis’ sexual enslavement of Jewish women. It is not merely considered lewd, but more significantly, deemed to be historically incorrect. No evidence exists that any of the brothels that the Nazis maintained for use by Nazi soldiers were “staffed” with Jewish women, as the novel describes. Indeed, despite a pervasive presence of sexual coercion and sexual violence during World War II,17 Jewish women were not subject to the organized perpetration of forced prostitution by Nazi soldiers, officers, or Nazi camp guards in the concentration camps.18 A large number of field brothels were set up near the eastern front for the use of Nazi soldiers, but no Jewish women worked there. Brothels were also set up within ten major concentration camps, but these were for the use of so-called “privileged” non-Jewish inmates. Non-Jewish female inmates (mostly from Ravensbrück) performed the forced labor of prostitution.19 Since this aspect of the Ka-Tzetnik’s novel is not actually autobiographical or historical, one may need to ask what purpose it serves. What does the story of imagined sexual violence represent? How does one address the scathing accusation that the novel “abounds in falsifications that gratify the prurient taste for sadism and sexual perversions”?20 This chapter does not intend to resolve the discrepancy between what has been represented as an autobiographical text21 and its description of events that never took place.22 Instead I propose to transcend the existing dichotomy of House of Dolls as memoir vs. pornography and move beyond a debate on “lies and truth in Holocaust fiction.”23 Dinur’s case is more complicated than this phrase—provocatively used in the title of Ruth Franklin’s book about Holocaust memoir and second-generation literature—suggests. Neither intending to write fabrications, nor capable of telling the story of what he believed to have happened to young women during the Holocaust without resorting to his imagination, Ka-Tzetnik’s novel is best understood as a fictional reconstruction of what he assumed were historical facts. In other words, I suggest an analysis of the work within its cultural-historical context that illustrates its intertextuality, which will make it clear that Dinur’s portrayal of Nazi sexual violence is not as unique or as isolated as is often thought. Similar depictions of Nazi rape and forced prostitution of Jewish women and girls can be found in a range of media in the United States, Palestine, and Israel and in literary texts that were well known

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when Dinur composed his novel. These stories were believed to be historically accurate at the time, and they played an important role in how the victimization of Jews during the Holocaust was initially understood in Jewish communities that were removed from the battle fields of Europe and were not directly affected by the violence of the Holocaust. As this essay will show, during an era when only limited information on the Holocaust was available, texts that imagined the Holocaust through the lens of sexual enslavement aided in the precarious task of trying to envision and make sense of unprecedented horrors. However, after the war ended, such stories would come to be read differently whereby the sexually violated Jewess now became an important—while often implicit—figure in contentious discussions over Jewish collusion and complicity with the Nazis, particularly in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. The accusation that survivors had been implicated by the oppression and violence of the Nazi concentration camp system and were thus tainted by and in part to blame for their own victimization was widespread until the mid-1960s,24 and it is something to which the work of Dinur can be seen to respond. This essay explores how such depictions of Nazi sexual violence first came into public circulation, how their respective audiences reacted to them, and why Dinur may have felt compelled to include them in his family saga. Read from within this specific cultural-historical context, I  trace the rumors and stories from which the inspiration for House of Dolls is likely derived and argue for a reconsideration of this novel from this perspective. I contend that the novel is neither a work that is pure fiction, or worse, a falsification with the goal of titillation, but an autobiographical narrative that intends to show a core truth about Nazi violence and its goal to dehumanize and humiliate its victims. Moreover, the novel can be read as an attempt at rehabilitating the reputation of Holocaust victims and restoring their dignity during a time and place when their integrity was being questioned. Literary works that imagine the Holocaust through a prism of sexual violence are not unproblematic, however, and this essay also touches upon some of these implications.

Martyrdom in the face of Nazi rape: “The Ninety-Three Maidens” Rumors about Nazi sexual violence against Jews began to circulate among the Polish Jewish refugee community in the United States in 1943 and first entered the broader public sphere via a brief New York Times article published in January

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of that year. Under the headline, “93 Choose Suicide Before Nazi Shame,” the news story describes an alleged incident in which ninety-three young female students and a teacher from the Beth Jacob Orthodox Jewish girls’ school in Warsaw chose to commit suicide by poison rather than be “forced into prostitution by German soldiers.”25 This article was based on a Yiddish letter purportedly written by one of the girls immediately before she committed suicide, and it was subsequently smuggled out of Europe. A few weeks after the Times article publication, “The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens” appeared in an American Hebrew language paper: a Hebrew poem based on this story composed by Hillel Bavli. This poem transformed the letter—from this moment on usually referred to as the “Letter of the Ninety-Three Bais Yaakov Girls of Krakow”— already infused with religious overtones, into an explicitly religious lament: 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

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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

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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

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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 Holocaust within early Zionist discourse in the Yishuv and Israel The “Letter of the Ninety-Three Bais Yaakov Girls of Krakow” and Bavli’s “The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens” both reached Palestine in 1943, and, as in the United States, both were once again depicted as being based upon historical events. The episode was widely reported in Hebrew-language newspapers, as the Jewish community was anxiously awaiting news about the fate of their relatives in Europe. It inspired Jewish organizations in Palestine to stage commemorative gatherings, to form a “Committee to Defend the Honor of the Daughters of Israel,” and to name streets after “the 93” in several cities.40 As in the United States, many observant Jews embraced the story as a reaffirmation of Jewish spiritual resistance: they used it as a rallying cry to support European Jews and to generate outrage about the barbarity of the Nazi regime. Yet, after the war ended, the story went through a significant transformation that was particular to a certain kind of Zionist worldview and ethos of the period and that revealed the ambivalent way the political leadership and the community as a whole in Palestine approached the Holocaust and its survivors after 1945.41 During the first years of Hitler’s regime, the political leadership of the Yishuv had feared the worst for the Jews of Germany but also hoped that the situation would bring increased support for Zionism.42 As the persecution escalated during the war, they found themselves powerless to do much to help the Jews of Europe.43 There were displays of solidarity in the Yishuv, and there were popular rallies and protests against the war, but in practical terms little changed. Having been threatened by British authorities that any increase in illegal immigration would lead to a ban on legal immigration, and with their own preference for healthy Zionist immigrants as opposed to “unsuitable refugees,” the Jewish leadership displayed little inclination to attempt a mass evacuation of Europe’s Jews.44 Even after it was all over, and the unprecedented extent of the destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities had become clear, this ambivalent political and communal response toward Jewish refugees remained.

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In terms of international politics, the destruction of the European Jewish communities, while feared and mourned, turned out to be politically advantageous for the Zionist cause. The historically unprecedented extent of the Nazis’ murderous antisemitism had seemingly confirmed the prescience of the Zionist national project to establish a Jewish national state with its own independent government and army. After 1945, there would be broad international support to establish such a state in Palestine (in part because it served as a solution for the now growing Jewish refugee problem in Europe).45 This “remnant” of European Jewish communities was also needed in practical terms in Palestine, both as an affirmation of the legitimacy of creating a homeland for stateless European Jews and as the means of creating a Jewish majority in Palestine. In the second half of 1945, about 90,000 European survivors arrived in Palestine, over the next three years another 60,000 would come.46 These immigrants were needed both to help build up the land and to fight for the nation’s independence.47 After independence in 1948 another 200,000 arrived. By late 1949 close to 350,000 survivors lived in Israel, forming almost one-third of the entire population.48 In every other respect, however, the survivor immigrants from Europe presented a challenge.49 Whereas ideologically the Holocaust could be seen as a confirmation of the failure of a Diaspora model of Jewish assimilation and as evidence “to prove the absolute validity of the Zionist prognosis that Israel was the only solution to the ‘Jewish Problem,’ ”50 these new immigrants served as an uncomfortable reminder of Jewish vulnerability and fallibility. They generated uncomfortable feelings of guilt among Jews in Palestine, feelings that were promptly projected back onto the survivors, who were often thought to have only themselves to blame for their persecution.51 The survivors were seen to embody the antithesis of the Zionist ideal of pride, self-reliance, and military strength, possessing instead the kind of diaspora traits that the Yishuv explicitly rejected: weakness, dependence, and collusion with those in power.52 Survivors’ stories of victimization and suffering that did not fit within the Zionist narrative were silenced, while exceptional accounts of heroism and resistance were put center-stage. This process took place by foregrounding (in schoolbooks, national monuments, and memorial services) the deeds of Jewish ghetto fighters and Partisans who had taken up arms to fight the Nazis.53 Only they were upheld as heroes worthy of appreciation and commemoration. By exclusively stressing these experiences as models “to be emulated by young Israelis who were expected to sacrifice their lives in the struggle for Israel’s independence,”54 a hierarchy was put in place.55 The Holocaust victims were on the whole indicted as apolitical, naïve, and passive—as having gone “like sheep to slaughter.”56

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Those who had been in Palestine throughout the war assumed that survivors were alive because they had compromised themselves by working with the Nazis (as kapos, police, orderlies, or as part of the Jewish Councils).57 Such a black-and-white view of survivors would eventually change decades later, but it is reflected in the Hebrew literature of the period. Written by (mostly male) native-born sabras and those who had emigrated to Palestine before 1939, their work reveals an undertone of suspicion, pity, and even disdain toward survivors.58 It is also present in one of the most famous texts of the immediate post-war era, “My Sister on the Beach” a poem by Yitzhak Sadeh, famed General of the Palmach (the combat forces of pre-state Israel), which imagines the Holocaust and its survivors through the figure of a young Jewish woman who has served as a prostitute for Nazi officers.59 Published in 1945 and frequently reprinted throughout the 1950s, the poem envisions the mythical encounter between a young Jewish soldier representing the new Zionist state and a female Holocaust survivor on the beach in Palestine where she has just disembarked from an illegal immigrant ship coming from Europe.60 The poem alternates between the viewpoint and the voice of the narrator, the Jewish soldier who describes his observations and thoughts about this encounter, and that of a female survivor whose words the narrator either quotes or paraphrases: Darkness. On wet sand, my sister stands before me: filthy, tattered, wild-haired, her feet are bare and her head bowed. She stands and weeps/I know. Her flesh is branded: “For Officers Only.” /My sister weeps and says:/Friend, why am I here? Why did they bring me here? Am I worthy that young healthy boys risk their lives for me? No, there is no place for me in the world. I should not live.

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: I embrace my sister, embrace her shoulders and tell her:/You have a place in the world, my sister, a very special place. Here, in/our land. And you should live, my sister. Your feet have trodden the road/of suffering, and tonight you have

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come home, and here with us is your place . . . /For these sisters—I am strong./ For these sisters—I am brave./For these sisters—I will also be cruel./For you everything—everything.

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.

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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

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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.

Restoring honor to the victim, Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls As Dina Porat’s biographical essay in this volume details, Dinur survived a total of eighteen months at Birkenau and the Auschwitz satellite camp Günthergrube before coming to Palestine in 1945 with the first wave of postwar immigrants, as part of an illegal immigration operation of the Jewish Brigade and the Haganah. His first work Salamandra (1946), written while recovering in Italy right after his liberation, became one of the first works of Holocaust literature published in Palestine and revealed the urgency present in so many survivor narratives to tell the world what he had witnessed in the Nazi ghetto and camps. House of Dolls was written after Diner had been living in Palestine for several years, and it goes beyond Dinur’s personal perspective to recount the story of his sister Daniella.69 Unable to know what his sister may have experienced once they became separated, yet compelled to tell her story, Dinur produced a work that has to rely more heavily on imagination and on the stories he encountered after his liberation.70 Dinur was familiar with both Bavli’s poem and Sadeh’s narrative, and these texts as well as other similar stories that circulated at the time clearly form the inspiration for the depiction of Daniella’s experiences in House of Dolls.71 The transition from the autobiographical to the fictional is apparent in both the composition and the content of the novel. Although it ostensibly recounts Daniella’s story, Daniella’s brother Harry (Dinur’s alter ego) plays an important

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role in the novel’s narrative structure. Of the nineteen chapters, thirteen chapters recount Daniella’s experiences, three recount Harry’s (chapters 5, 8, and 11), and in two chapters Daniella and Harry meet (chapters 4 and 18). The inclusion of the chapters with Harry’s perspective opens up the possibility that it is he, and not Daniella, who is the actual narrator of her story. The end of the novel confirms this suspicion.72 Daniella has kept a diary while in the ghetto and she kept a notebook while working in the “Joy Division,” and just before she commits suicide, she entrusts a fellow inmate with delivering this notebook to Harry. This makes it possible for Harry to recount Daniella’s and his own parallel stories after her death and even quote from one of her diary entries directly.73 The transition from the autobiographical to the fictional is also apparent in the content of the novel. The first six chapters that recount what happens to Daniella over a span of about two and a half years (ages fourteen to seventeen) are relatively conventional. The novel opens with Daniella living in the Cracow ghetto, after she has become separated from her family during a class trip that was interrupted by the start of the war in Poland. This overall chronology is regularly interrupted by flashbacks, dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations that reveal the profound sense of displacement and chaos that both Daniella and Harry experience. Through the flashbacks we learn of her harrowing journey up to that point: caught up in the Nazi round-up of local Jews in the small town where her class trip ends up, she narrowly survives the town’s liquidation. Betrayed by local Poles, she ends up imprisoned in the ghetto. The rest of the story of life in the ghetto, Daniella’s subsequent transfer to the Durchgangslager and then on to the women’s camp, and of Harry’s work as a medic in another camp, is told chronologically and in great detail. What dominates are descriptions of profound deprivation: cold, hunger, filth, pain, and constant, mortal, fear—increasingly inhumane circumstances through which everyone around her slowly descends into a state of living death and becomes “Mussulmänner”—the walking skeletons who have lost the will to fight for life. The second half of the novel, which recounts Daniella’s experiences in the “Doll House,” is more frenzied in its pace and contains elaborate descriptions of a system of exploitation that is imagined as perverse in every detail. The brothel for Nazi soldiers in a subsection of the camp where Daniella is forced to work is named “Labor Via Joy.” This is an invented term that echoes similar Nazi euphemisms.74 Clearly, the joy is not that of the inmates but rather that of the soldiers. Upon selection for this “Enjoyment Duty” the girls are brutally sterilized and tattooed with an inmate number and branded with a sign between their breasts

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that reads “Feld-Hure.” The sterilization scene is one of great horror that also depicts grotesque Nazi medical experimentation.75 Another obscene aspect of the girl’s forced daily service to the German soldiers is that they have to pretend to enjoy their experience lest they get reported by the soldiers, and three reports will lead to death. The fear of these reports drives the girls close to madness and overrides even the disgust for the work they are made to do. What sustains Daniella’s will to live is her longing to find her brother Harry. Once she discovers that he works in a neighboring camp, she agrees to serve the German officers there in order to see him once more. It is in this compromising position that Harry accidentally finds her, and this leads to Daniella’s subsequent suicide with which the novel ends. On the face of it, it may seem that House of Dolls supports rather than contests the early Zionist discourse on the female survivor as defiled. Indeed, the graphic depiction of this Nazi brothel with Jewish women can easily be read as gratuitous if not understood within its context. (Even Dinur seems to have been concerned about this possibility, as he rewrote this novel five times in order to get it right.76) Viewing Dinur’s narrative of sexual slavery instead as in line with earlier depictions of Nazi sexual violence such as those by Bavli and Sadeh (which Dinur and his contemporaries took to be historical), the text reveals something different, however. In reading the second half of House of Dolls closely, it is not the pornographic nature of the descriptions of the sexual violations of the women that stands out, but the depiction of the depravity of their overseers and the Nazis. Male Nazis are inevitably cruel and sadistic, but especially noteworthy are Dinur’s depictions of female overseers (such as Elsa) and Nazi women (such as the “blonde Magdalen” and Yaga, known as “the Blonde Beast”). They are grotesque caricatures of sexually frustrated women, particularly sadistic and sexually perverse, and they are likely based upon the historical characters of Ilse Koch (“the beast of Buchenwald”), who was tried in 1947 and retried in 1949, and Irma Grese (“the beast of Belsen/Auschwitz”) who had served in Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen and who was sentenced to death in 1945 for unusually sadistic methods of killing from which some said she derived pleasure. Both of these women’s court cases had received much sensationalized news coverage.77 These depictions of Nazis stand in sharp contrast to the continual affirmation of the Jewish girls’ physical and spiritual purity and innocence in spite of the work that they are forced to do. Each of the major Jewish female characters in this part of the story can in fact be seen to represent a different but fundamentally dignified coping strategy. The sisters Hanna and Tzivia are described as “devout former members of ‘House

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of Jacob’ ” (the same Orthodox Jewish girls’ school movement mentioned in the story of the ninety-three maidens).78 They support each other and continue to faithfully say their prayers three times a day. They are described as “gentle, undefiled souls.”79 They are least prepared for the brutality that faces them after the deportation to the camp, and once they are separated have only their faith to rely on. Too frail to do the physical labor that is commanded of her, Hanna is mercilessly beaten by a German overseer in the labor camp. In her anguish, she screams out for God to take her. In death, she is described as pure, as “God vanquished [the overseer] in the battle for Hanna’s soul.”80 Hanna’s sister Tzivia does have to serve in the brothel but fails at it and quickly receives three negative reports. As she is brought to the Execution Square to be publicly punished before being killed, the narrator describes her as still being the devout girl from the Daughters of Jacob school: “her innocence hadn’t been diminished one bit . . . Her . . . body radiated chasteness and purity—not touched.”81 Then there is Fella. Beautiful, in her early twenties, and more experienced and pragmatic than the other girls, she realizes early on that the male attention she receives can be turned from something unwanted into an advantage, and she uses it to help herself and others in the ghetto and the camp.82 While it is clear that she trades sexual favors for goods and protection, she is described as a survivor, as someone who knows how to work the system and who cannot be destroyed by it. Ironically, it is she who manages to charm her way out of the brothel and into the Commandant’s home to work as a cleaning lady rather than as a prostitute, suggesting that she is in control of her sexuality rather than that she is the victim of Nazi men. Finally, there is Daniella who is not able to protect herself from having to serve as a prostitute, but who is described as an innocent. From the moment she is touched by the soldiers, she imagines purifying herself by submerging herself in a nearby lake. The lake will cleanse her body “inside and out. She’ll be pure, light, free.”83 After Harry has seen her with the Germans, Daniella walks to the gate of the camp to get to the lake, undeterred by the guardsman who will shoot her. In Dinur’s attempt to describe a Nazi brothel, a world of compromise and complicity that the Nazis forced camp inmates to live in, House of Dolls is perhaps best understood, as Iris Milner has suggested, as an attempt to explore what Primo Levi has called “the gray zone.”84 Dinur’s work shows “his deep understanding that the Nazis’ management of the camp’s resources and their distribution of ‘functions’ dehumanized their captives . . . by depriving them of a sense of human solidarity even toward their fellow prisoners, thus turning the entire concentrationary universe into one big ‘gray zone.’ ”85 Dinur describes this process

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without judgment, “thus demonstrating his deep understanding that dehumanization was not a form of vicious collaboration but a function of victimhood.”86 All the inmates are shown to live in a “gray zone” in House of Dolls. Not only in the sense that Primo Levi defined it, as a world in which every inmate is made to fight for their own survival at the cost of other inmates, making them feel implicated in deaths of others—but in the sense of having to forgo normal life, norms, and values. Sexual exploitation is used to denote the ultimate loss of self. “We’re property of the German Government,” one inmate explains to Daniella when asked what the “For Officers Only” branding means.87 They are reduced to their bodies, which can be used, abused, and discarded at will by the Nazis. The need to mentally and spiritually adjust to this reality, without which one could not survive and would be reduced to the state of the Musselmann, would be judged harshly after the war by those who were not there. Yet in presenting a much more complex depiction of what Lawrence Langer has called the inmates’ “choiceless choices,” House of Dolls complicates the facile assessment of survivor complicity and guilt that was so prevalent in Israel. By reframing women’s response to sexual violence in this more idealized fashion—by highlighting both its religious overtones and the women’s experience with Nazi depravity and brutality—House of Dolls has more in common with Bavli’s “The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens” than with the Zionist discourse of judgment by Sadeh. It fills in the background story of sexual violence that Sadeh’s poem merely presumes, making the sexual exploitation of Jewish women explicit from their own perspective and making their suffering central to the story. Here, rape is read not primarily as a communication between men, but as a dehumanizing act of Nazi men against Jewish women. In recounting this suffering and the women’s idealized and dignified response, Dinur’s work rehabilitates rather than judges the female victims for what they faced. However ill-conceived the novel thus may be in terms of its portrayal of Jewish sexual slavery in the camps as historical and as based on a supposedly authentic diary, the work presents a correction to a demeaning discourse of Jewish compromise and collaboration and women’s impropriety which was so common at that time and in that context. The novel’s broader impact, however, proved more problematic. As House of Dolls quickly gained popularity and notoriety in Israel and beyond, in great part because of how the text was packaged and marketed, its graphic story of sexual violence against Jewish women was assumed to constitute evidence of such events actually having occurred. Because House of Dolls was so widely read, it

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has the dubious distinction of becoming the central source for the dissemination of such stories.88

Narratives of sexual violence and the consequences of interpretation In his ground-breaking 1988 study of Holocaust literature and monuments, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust with the telling subtitle: “Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation,” James E. Young makes the at once seemingly self-evident and radical argument that the Holocaust is knowable only by way of the narratives that victims and survivors created to make sense of what was happening to them, both at the time the events took place, and afterwards, and that it behoves us to carefully examine their particular frameworks of interpretation. Indeed, interpretation not only plays a role after the fact, he argues, but shaped how one acted in the world while events were unfolding: “the events of the Holocaust are not only shaped post factum in their narration, but . . . they were initially determined as they unfolded by the schematic ways in which they were apprehended, expressed, and then acted upon . . . Thus perceived, history never unfolds independently of the ways we have understood it.”89 I have argued that we should reconsider Dinur’s depiction of Nazi sexual brutality (which has always been at the center of House of Dolls’ reception, whether as the key to its popular success or as the cause for its rejection by the critics) as neither historical nor as wholly invented, but rather as inspired by other narratives that already imagined the Holocaust by way of this story and which Dinur and his contemporaries assumed to be historical. Rumors and reports about and fears of Nazi sexual violence were part of a framework of interpretation of both European Jews and Jews in the United States and in Palestine during the Holocaust and shaped the understanding of these events after the fact. At a time when the Holocaust was still poorly understood, stories about Nazi sexual violence against Jewish women thus played a prominent role in a framework of understanding the Holocaust for Jewish bystanders in the United States and the Yishuv. These narratives aided in making sense of the unparalleled brutality and scale of the Holocaust as they reframed it and its cultural, political, and spiritual implications for these different communities. For an American and Israeli audience, outrageous stories of Nazi sexual violence confirmed the Nazis to be debased and barbaric. They offered a simplified image of the Nazi enemy

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and their crimes while these in reality were far more systematic and sinister, and the Jewish community in both the United States and Palestine proved powerless in the face of this onslaught. At the same time, the inconceivable Nazi crimes of mass enslavement and genocide were in some way also made more manageable by imagining Nazi violence as sexual in nature; since rape was a familiar wartime crime, the violence could be comprehended from within a tradition and structure that it would otherwise transgress. (Sexual violence was not unprecedented and therefore not unmanageable, whereas genocidal violence on the scale of the Nazi Holocaust was.) For religious Jews, the narrative of Jewish resistance (by suicide and martyrdom) in the face of impending sexual violation could serve as a confirmation of traditional Jewish values in the face of Nazi brutality. Yet several of these stories also came to play an important role in a postwar political discourse on Jewish guilt and collaboration in the United States and Palestine/Israel which implied that survivors had been complicit in the violence of the Nazi concentration camp system and were to blame for their own victimization. I have shown such rhetoric to have been common in the Yishuv and the early state of Israel where it helped to distract from both the impotence of the Zionist leadership during the war and a communal sense of guilt afterwards. While the female rape victim came to symbolize the failure of the Jewish Diaspora to defend itself, this shameful Diaspora culture of accommodation now came to justify an ideology of Zionist nationalist militancy. While influenced by these earlier narratives, Dinur’s House of Dolls in my view represents an important point of departure from this framework of interpretation and serves as a correction. It brings the reader inside the story of the girls’ suffering, shows their struggle to be dignified, and describes their deaths and survival in ways that rejects the thesis of moral compromise. Yet all of the works I mentioned, including Dinur’s novel, in which the Nazi genocide against the Jews is not only symbolically understood to be “like a rape,” but also becomes transformed into the story of actual Nazi rape or sexual enslavement of Jewish women, have certain problematic consequences. Within a traditional interpretation of wartime rape that sees women’s bodies and their honor as belonging to the Jewish community and to Jewish males (husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons), rather than truly to the women themselves, sexual violence is still understood as a story of conquest by Nazi males that humiliates Jewish males (who are unable to protect their women). The Nazi rape of Jewish women is thus primarily understood to be about Jewish women’s humiliation and loss of honor as Jews, a humiliation that is necessarily a degradation of Jewish men and the Jewish community as a whole. Understood as such, it is

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a story whose resolution can only be either resistance or submission. Resistance is imagined in the form of suicide and martyrdom, even in Dinur’s work; by remaining “pure,” such women saved the Jewish people’s honor and autonomy. Conversely, the women’s imagined submission leads to the community’s humiliation and (figurative) infection, infertility, or occupation by the enemy—a dishonor to be avenged. In such an interpretation of wartime rape, the morality and fate of the Jewish community as a whole is ultimately imagined to hinge on the Jewish female’s submission or resistance to Nazi sexual advances. The resulting emotional, physical, and spiritual cost of sexual violence for its female victims is not considered at all, or as in Dinur’s work, not imagined fully: we do not know what the aftermath of this experience would have been like for Daniella—she, too succumbs. Moreover, as such imagined stories of Nazi prostitution took hold, it unfortunately sensationalized and scandalized the subject. The sexual violence is not analyzed as a phenomenon in its own right, but as part of the overall barbarity, brutality, and depravity of the enemy soldier force. It is scandalized for the sake of publicity and to generate moral outrage and activism but it comes to overshadow the actual events of sexual violence during the Holocaust.

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).

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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

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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

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Pascale Bos 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. See the covers of the Pyramid paperback editions, illustrated by Larry Lurin and published in 1968 and 1969. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 Robert

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Sommer, “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.

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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

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States as they were in Germany. Laura Frost, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell Universiy Press, 2002), 6. 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. 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. 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). 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. For a critical analysis of Talmudic thought about martyrdom in the face of sexual violation, see Horowitz, “Martyrdom and Gender,” 180–86.

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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.

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See Segev, Seventh, 84–5. By the spring of 1947, the number of Jewish Displaced Persons neared 250,000. See Segev, Seventh, 154. 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. See Segev, Seventh, 154. 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. Arad, “Israel,” 7. 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). 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. 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.” Arad, “Israel,” 8.

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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

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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. “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. 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). Segev, Seventh, 179–80. 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. Yablonka, “Formation,” 121. 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

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Pascale Bos 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. Yablonkla, “Formation,” 9. He seems to have written his first two novels (and possibly three) in Yiddish first and subsequently to have translated them to Hebrew. What makes the work difficult to classify as either memoir or fiction is “KaTzetnik’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 KaTzetnik rather than Yechiel Dinur—which suggests that he is merely one inmate among millions. 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. 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. 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.

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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. 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. 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. 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, KaTzetnik 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. 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. 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

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Pascale Bos translation opens up a reading of House of Dolls as a deliberate reworking of this now-almost-archetypical Holocaust narrative. Ka-Tzetnik, Dolls, 36. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 42–4. Ibid., 185. Iris Milner, “The ‘Gray Zone’ Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in Ka. Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008), 118. Iris Milner, “The Evil Spirits of the Shoah: Ka-Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony to Death and Survival in the Concentrationary Universe,” lecture at conference KaTzetnik: The Impact of the First Holocaust Novelist in Israel and Beyond, University of Calgary, March 2013, 4. Milner, Spirits, 5. Ka-Tzetnik, Dolls, 137. 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. Young, Writing, 5.

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The Eroticization of Witnessing: The Twofold Legacy of Ka-Tzetnik Guido Vitiello

The legacy of Ka-Tzetnik is a twofold one. As Omer Bartov pointed out in his essay on kitsch and sadism, Yehiel Dinur was during his time—the 1950s and early 1960s in Israel—one of the few writers and survivors, perhaps the only one, to waver between writing “legitimate” and “illegitimate” Holocaust literature, a demarcation that Bartov traced as follows: In pre-1967 Israel, two types of literature about the Holocaust were available to young Israelis. The first could be called “legitimate” literature. Strongly didactic, imbued with Zionist ideological biases, and often employed as teaching material in the appropriate grades, much of this literature consisted of quasi-fictionalized accounts of resistance to the Nazis . . . Hence the focus of these stories was on action, sacrifice, and meaningful death . . . The second type of “literature,” which might be called “illegitimate,” was passed secretly from one youth to another, [and was] a source of illicit excitement and shameful pleasure. These were the so-called “Stalags,” a type of pornographic literature that circulated in Israel of the time, . . . replete with perverse sex and sadistic violence . . . Nothing could be a greater taboo than deriving sexual pleasure from pornography in the context of the Holocaust; hence nothing could be as exciting.1

The coexistence, in the work of Ka-Tzetnik, of the highest moral and metaphysical insights into the Holocaust with the most disturbing depictions of sex, sadism, and atrocity, occasionally bordering on pornography, prevents its definite collocation in the hierarchical canon of memorialization sketched by Bartov. Hence the dual nature of this author’s legacy:  often neglected or approached with a palpable embarrassment in the “legitimate” Holocaust discourse (Lawrence L. Langer, for instance, does not even mention Dinur in his

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comprehensive account of Holocaust literature2), the novels of Ka-Tzetnik have been ambiguously fetishized and made the object of a weird cult in the “illegitimate” underworld of pornography, exploitation, and “sexploitation.”3 Needless to say, the intertwining of “high” and “low” motifs in Dinur’s work did not arise as a conscious plan on his part to create the kind of morbid, history-inspired plots that would produce best-sellers; it was rather the mirror of a disconcerting biographical experience and of a complex psyche.4 But misreadings and misappropriations can sometimes be as instructive as the most meticulous readings; therefore, my considerations will be focused, so to speak, on Dinur’s legacy notwithstanding Dinur, in order to underline the paradigmatic value of his work for contemporary Holocaust culture. The indefinable position Ka-Tzetnik occupies in the Holocaust canon is well exemplified by the vicissitudes of the famous “other planet” metaphor, around which Dinur built his brief and shocking testimony at the Eichmann trial on June 7, 1961, which notoriously culminated in his collapse on the witness stand. Ka-Tzetnik had already resorted to that metaphor on other occassions. In House of Dolls, for example, he described a load of corpses that “had been brought from the outside, from beyond the barbed wire, from a mysterious somewhere which you cannot plumb, though you know it exists, just as the inhabitants of one planet know of the existence of another planet, yet cannot visualize what it’s like there.”5 But the metaphor of the “other planet” only received global attention after his collapse on the witness stand in Jerusalem, an event that came to epitomize the whole trial and that Jeffrey Shandler has described as “one of the most often shown moments from the trial footage” on American television.6 This publicized event made it possible for Ka-Tzetnik’s powerful evocation of the “other planet,” an image that seemed to combine astrology, science fiction, and mysticism, to become part of the “legitimate” canon of Holocaust discourse, and it was widely adopted as a metaphor for the radical unknowability and unspeakability of Auschwitz—quite literally, for its otherworldliness. Elie Wiesel, among countless others, referred to it on various occasions. Dinur’s trial speech was also used as a voice-over for the conclusion of the official Israeli documentary film The Eighty-First Blow (Haim Goury, 1974), a film that Prime Minister Golda Meir endorsed by appearing before the opening credits with a message to the audience. But aside from its consecration and adoption in the “legitimate” canon, the “other planet” image (quite like its creator) lived a second and shadowy life in the “illegitimate” context of popular culture, inside and outside Israel.

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The dark side of the other planet On November 10, 1961, five months after the trial session in which Dinur used the “other planet” metaphor, the American network CBS aired an episode of the sci-fi television series The Twilight Zone, titled “Death’s Head Revisited” and written by series creator Rod Serling. Set in a fictive Dachau-like concentration camp and openly inspired by the Eichmann trial, the story featured a former SS commander, Captain Lutze, who returned to the camp as a nostalgic tourist many years after the end of the war and was judged by a ghostly court composed of his victims. In the opening narration, Rod Serling presents the concentration camp as an extraterrestrial landscape and uses language that was reminiscent of KaTzetnik’s allegory: “A place like Dachau cannot exist only in Bavaria. By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas of the twilight zone.”7 But the most uncanny reappearance of the “other planet” metaphor occurred in Israel in the weeks following Ka-Tzetnik’s testimony. It was in one of the so-called “Stalags”—the cheap pocketbooks of sadomasochistic pornography that Bartov describes as the quintessential “illegitimate” Holocaust literature. Amit Pinchevski and Roy Brand argue that the Stalags all followed a predictable formula: 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

Stalag 217, written by Victor Boulder (one of the recurring pseudonyms of Stalag writers), was published shortly after Ka-Tzetnik’s trial testimony and sold out in less than one week. The author describes the camp in terms clearly reminiscent of Dinur’s “planet of the ashes”: Stalag 217 deviated from the framework of World War II and became an isolated planet in the center of Holland. Totally removed from the rest of the world . . .

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the camp sank in the mire of debauchery. Packages and letters arriving from the outside were like ambassadors from another world, and people would retreat from their planet for a few seconds to read a letter or open a package and then return with a stroke of a hand to their share of sin.9

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: In the 1950s and 1960s Israeli youngsters often read Ka-Tzetnik because he was the only legitimate source of sexually titillating and sadistic literature in a still puritanical and closed society, with the result that the Holocaust somehow became enmeshed in their minds with both repelling and fascinating pornographic images.11

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

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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.

A negative myth of origin, in contrast to a positive one, means a myth that takes the moment of creation as a moment of chaos and destruction, and it contrasts our order or disorder to that originary moment of chaos and destruction rather than to any well-ordered process of creation or stabilizing harmony. The Holocaust has become such a foundational moment.15 This cultural construction of the Holocaust as a negative myth of origin, and also as a sacred and mysterious event surrounded with representational taboos, is arguably at the root of the retrospective voyeurism shared by many people, especially young people, who have no family connection with the Jewish extermination. Of course, it is an eroticization cleansed of the painful biographical connections that the Israeli readers of Ka-Tzetnik and the Stalags or the patients of Laub and Auerhahn suffered. Those of the second or third generation, who did not personally experience the Holocaust, are freer to actively desire and seek out various ways of achieving a

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deeper connection to the Holocaust, while for the survivors themselves the process represents a tortuous exploration of a past that is felt primarily as a burden. Voyeurism pervades many of the fictional approaches to the Holocaust that Gary Weissman has labeled “fantasies of witnessing,” which express the unspoken desire of many people who have no direct experience of the Holocaust but are deeply interested in studying, remembering, and memorializing it. It is a desire to know what it was like to be there, in Nazi Europe; in hiding; at the sites of mass shootings; in the ghettos; in the cattle cars; in the concentration camps; in the death camps; in the gas chambers and crematoria. This desire can be satisfied only in fantasy, in fantasies of witnessing the Holocaust for oneself.16

My point is that the growing conflation of memory and desire, of vicarious witnessing and retrospective voyeurism, is the deepest and most important legacy of Ka-Tzetnik, or better that it has Ka-Tzetnik as its precursor. Under the effect of this conflation, the area of “legitimacy” in Holocaust culture is being rapidly reconfigured. Needless to say, the question of what is “legitimate” and “illegitimate” is a complex one, depending as it does on social/historical contexts and power relations, and it would require a much deeper discussion than we have space for here. Most debates on Holocaust representation are indeed “legitimacy wars,” unleashed every time an unusual genre or approach is introduced or obtains greater visibility (Is comedy acceptable? Is the graphic novel a proper form of remembrance?). The answers to these questions change over time. There is, for instance, no doubt that the third principle of “Holocaust etiquette” described by Terrence Des Pres in 1987 (“The Holocaust shall be approached as a solemn or even a sacred event, with a seriousness admitting no response that might obscure its enormity or dishonor its dead”) has a weaker authority today,17 and many comedic approaches to the Holocaust are considered legitimate, though controversial. Nonetheless, sexualization remains the most controversial form of representation. As James Young explains, “to this day, many people insist that some scenes from the Holocaust cannot ethically be represented. Because no one survived the gas chambers to describe the terror there, its darkness has remained absolute. Other areas in which artists are practically forbidden to tread include the sexuality of victims and the possible sadosexuality of the killers.”18 The novels of Ka-Tzetnik trod exactly in this forbidden area, combining solemnity and sadosexuality, seriousness and pornography. This particular aspect of Ka-Tzetnik’s legacy is directly traceable if we explore the fact that House of Dolls was a key inspiration for the Italian sub-genre of

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“Nazi-Sexploitation” films, which staged sadomasochistic pornography in concentration camps, such as SS Experiment Camp (S. Garrone, 1976).19 Translated by Italian best-selling publisher Mondadori in 1959, House of Dolls thereafter went through seven printings in nine months. As Robert Gordon put it, the book was “one of the first major works to establish a trend that would peak in the 1970s, for the ‘sexualization’ of the Holocaust,”20 leading—among other films, books, and even comic books—to Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter (1974). Other direct influences include, for example, the exploitation B-movie Love Camp 7 (Lee Frost, 1969), which was partly inspired by House of Dolls, and the popular post-punk band Joy Division, which took its very name from the camp brothels described by Ka-Tzetnik.21 Instead of reconstructing the subterranean story of the “illegitimate” afterlives of Dinur’s writing, though, I would like to consider his legacy and significance from a wider perspective. To put it formulaically: Ka-Tzetnik’s twofold legacy is no longer so unique. That indefinable and solitary space, that “twilight zone” that his novels have long occupied, hovering over the border between the “legitimate” and “illegitimate” forms of Holocaust remembrance, is becoming more and more crowded. Again, strange fictional creatures are emerging in which solemnity and pornography, the trivial and the sublime coexist in unsettling ways, and the guilty pleasures of Holocaust voyeurism increasingly creep into the most respected styles and registers.

Soft-porn showers and Holocaust gothic The quintessential expression of this conflation of registers is the infamous “shower scene” in Auschwitz from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). This “illegitimate” sequence enters like a Trojan horse in the culminating moment of the most “legitimate” Holocaust film—a film employed as teaching material, shown to young students worldwide, and even officially promoted by President Bill Clinton upon its release (“Go see it!”). Although many of the critiques of Spielberg’s scene were based on subtle misunderstandings, those who objected to it were right to point out that the definition of what can be considered “legitimate” representations of these events had shifted. For example, in his review of the film, Omer Bartov, called the shower scene the “most troubling of all”: since that mass of attractive, frightened, naked women, finally relieved from their anxiety by jets of water rather than gas, would be more appropriate to a

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soft-porn sadomasochistic film than to its context (and here Spielberg comes dangerously close to such films as Cavani’s The Night Porter and Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties). The fact that this “actually” happened is, of course, wholly beside the point, since in most cases it did not, and even when it did, the only eyes which might have derived any sexual pleasure from watching such scenes belonged to the SS. Hence, by including this scene, Spielberg makes the viewers complicit with the SS, both in sharing their voyeurism and in blocking out the reality of the gas chambers.22

Taking a closer look, however, it is easy to demonstrate that Spielberg conveys the voyeuristic desire of the spectator only to frustrate it, and the coda of the same sequence, seen through the eyes of one of Schindler’s surviving women, depicts a group of prisoners directed to the real gas chambers and is followed by the detail of the smoke ascending from the crematorium. What happens in between is kept in darkness. The eroticized gaze of the SS guards at the peephole and the sad expressions of the woman watching prisoners as they walk to certain death belong to two conflicting visual and symbolic worlds: no conflation is possible, only a “friction” that questions the spectatorial voyeurism, associating it with the perspective of the perpetrator. And yet, even though Spielberg’s sequence can be considered a lectio magistralis on the limits of representation and the ethics of spectatorship, the fact that he resorts to suspense mechanisms borrowed from thriller/horror films and to B-movie stereotypes such as the group of naked women screaming, indicates how indefinite the borders between legitimate and illegitimate are becoming. Another revealing example is offered by the well-known Wilkomirski affair. In 1995, German publisher Suhrkamp published the memoir Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit, 1939–1948 (later published in English as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood), in which Binjamin Wilkomirski described what he claimed were his experiences as a child in Majdanek and Auschwitz. But three years later a Swiss journalist discovered that Wilkomirski’s account was entirely fictional, that the author—a Swiss musician named Bruno Dössekker— had become familiar with the concentration camps only as a tourist and as a reader/viewer of fiction, and that his identity as a Holocaust survivor was fabricated. This was, in other words, a pathological case of a “fantasy of witnessing.” Lawrence Langer has argued that Wilkomirski’s version of the Holocaust was a disturbing mixture of utter violence and sexualization, bordering on exploitation pornography, and containing episodes “designed to rouse in the reader a combination of horror and disgust that simultaneously attracts and repels, what we might call the fascination of revulsion, a kind of fantasy-dread

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that one could tentatively identify as Holocaust gothic.”23 And yet, before its revelation as a fake, Wilkomirski’s memoir was adopted in the “legitimate” canon at the highest level:  the book was awarded the National Jewish Book Award, Wilkomirski was compared to Primo Levi and Anne Frank, and he was invited to speak at the Shoah Visual History Foundation and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.24 Many examples could be given for this redefinition of the “legitimate” area in contemporary Holocaust culture: novels such as The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell or The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis, films such as The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008) or The German Doctor (Lucía Puenzo, 2013). In the following and final section, I will limit myself to some considerations on a single case that is especially illuminating: Bryan Singer’s horror film Apt Pupil (1998), which was adapted from a novella by Stephen King.25 If Wilkomirski’s Fragments was an example of a (fake) “legitimate” narrative using “illegitimate” styles, Apt Pupil went the other way round, leading to the legitimation of the lower canon of horror, soft-porn, and B-movies.

Wet dreams and fantasies of witnessing Bryan Singer is an American Jewish filmmaker heavily inspired by Spielberg (he even named his production company, Bad Hat Harry Productions, after a minor character from Jaws), and Apt Pupil could be considered as the first chapter of his daring reinterpretation of Holocaust-related topics through minor film genres such as horror and science fiction, the most famous of which is the superhero film X-Men (2000).26 Set in different decades, the plots of Singer’s film adaptation and King’s 1975 novella are quite different, but the basic idea is the same and can be summarized as follows:  Todd Bowden, an American youngster with a morbid curiosity for the Holocaust, discovers that a former SS guard is living under false pretenses in his neighborhood, but instead of denouncing him to the local police, he chooses to blackmail him. Young Todd is not interested in money; what he craves most are the old man’s memories— his first-hand historical knowledge—and above all to find ways of intensifying his deep personal connection with the Holocaust. In other words, Todd needs the help of the reluctant Nazi in order to enact his own “fantasy of witnessing” and to satisfy his retrospective voyeurism: “I want to hear about it. That’s all,” Todd tells his neighbor. “The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves and then stand on the ends so they’d fall

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into them.” His tongue came out and wetted his lips. “The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff.”27 Just as was the case with the readers of the Stalags, Todd’s fascination for the Holocaust combines with his initiation to puberty and has a strong sexual connotation. In King’s novella, the boy becomes curious about the Holocaust after finding a bunch of old pulp magazines like Man’s Action and True War in the garage of a friend’s father. (Replete with scenes of sex and torture, the cover images for these magazines were the model for the Israeli Stalags.) The Holocaust populates the boy’s wet dreams, which resembled the typical Stalag fantasies of torture, medical experiments, and forced prostitution. Revealingly, in the film adaptation a similar curiosity arises from “legitimate” origins—from history classes at school rather than from porn magazines.28 Intended for a wider audience, Singer’s film did not emulate the graphic pornography of King’s novella. In place of Todd’s extreme “sexploitation” dreams, Singer shot two short sequences: a nightmare and a hallucination. The first follows a peephole motif similar to the shower scene in Schindler’s List, while the second relies on the confusion between the shower and the gas chamber. In the hallucination sequence, the camera follows Todd into a high school shower room; his eyes are closed under the water, but when he reopens them, concentration camp inmates appear around him like ghosts, whispers and shouts in German are heard, and the warm pleasant steam of the locker-room evokes the gas-filled chambers that the Nazis disguised as showers. This sequence also deliberately evokes the shower scene in Schindler’s List, but this time the conflation of eroticism and horror is not avoided in any way, and what we have is the ultimate fantasy of witnessing that Spielberg did not dare to stage: the impossible fantasy of the gas chamber experience. Even more revealing is the different reception the two versions received. At the time Stephen King was about to publish his novella, his agent and some representatives of the Jewish community were dubious about the enterprise of basing a horror story on the Holocaust, and they tried to discourage publication. Aware of those warnings, Singer decided to arrange a pre-screening of his film at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles in August 1998. As he told an interviewer, the film was acclaimed: “I screened the film at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and it went beautifully,” Singer said. “It was quite wonderful, I got a fantastic congratulatory letter about the importance of the picture and any support that the center could offer the movie, a premiere or something like that.”29 The most “illegitimate” Holocaust fiction—inspired by Israeli Stalags, American pulp magazines, and Italian “Sexploitation”—had

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found its place, at least for one day, in the most “legitimate” place of memorial culture, a Holocaust museum. Eroticization of witnessing, retrospective voyeurism, the Holocaust as a dark “primal scene” of sex and violence, conflation of registers, solemnity and pornography intertwined. The same traits that once made Ka-Tzetnik an “Unidentified Fictional Object” landed from another planet, are now at the core of many accepted forms of Holocaust remembrance. And this is one of the many reasons why it is necessary, nowadays, to return to his work and to his figure.

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,

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8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Guido Vitiello 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. Ka-Tzetnik 135633, House of Dolls (London: Granada, 1973 [1955]), 198. Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 130. 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. 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. Quoted in Pinchevski and Brand, “Holocaust Perversions,” 398. Ibid., 388. Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism,” 59. 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. The formulation comes from Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Imagining Hitler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 53. Saul Friedlander, Réflets du nazisme (Paris: Seuil, 1982). Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin, “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25, no. 1 (1996): 65–83. Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 4. Terrence Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 216–33. 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. 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

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22

23 24 25 26 27 28

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(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 NSVerbrechen,” 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. Robert S. C. Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 59. 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. 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. Lawrence L. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 51. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing. Mark Browning, Stephen King on the Big Screen (London: Intellect Books, 2009). David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Stephen King, Different Seasons (London: Futura, 1982), 127. 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). Eddie Cockrell, “Apt Pupil. One Good Hard Step Beyond Innocence,” Nitrate Online, October 30, 1998, www.nitrateonline.com/faptpupil.html, accessed August 2, 2016.

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Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, and the Muslims Uri S. Cohen

In an essay discussing Ka-Tzetnik’s attempt to destroy the last existing copies of Yehiel Feiner’s—his own—book of puerile poetry, Dan Miron has drawn a clear distinction between two, antipodal modes of writing about Auschwitz and their ability to instruct us on the subject: the metaphoric-hyperbolic, and Levi’s Auschwitz, which is mainly metonymic.1 In this chapter, I will attempt to follow this distinction to its core by tracking how Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik represent the Muselmann: that figure in Auschwitz who was seen as beyond survival and destined for the crematorium—the fiber of the camp, beyond life but not dead yet.2 Although both Levi and Ka-Tzetnik describe the same figure and both authors recognize that the Muselmann is the muted core of Auschwitz, the consequences of their two accounts to thought and even politics are entirely different. The Muselmann teaches Levi that survival itself is a form of collaboration in the production of the Muselmann; in a direct sense, the Muselmann is the victim of the survivor. For Ka-Tzetnik, the Muselmann is a figure that reinscribes the ancient tale of victimhood and frees the author from most of his self-doubt. Writing after Ka-Tzetnik’s books had been introduced into Israeli high schools as compulsory reading by the ministry of education, Miron argues that Primo Levi’s trilogy offers a completely different picture of Auschwitz and its detainees than the one offered in Ka-Tzetnik’s books—a picture . . . perhaps even more horrifying than the one offered by Salamandra and its sequels—even though or perhaps because, Levi did not for one moment experience Auschwitz as if it was taking place on “another planet” but rather maintained . . . consciousness of the fact that all that took place before his eyes was of our world . . . and was nothing but the continuation or the essence of human behaviour considered “normal” . . . Unlike Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, did not write Auschwitz literature that is coarse, metaphysical, apocalyptic or without nuance. He wrote human

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literature that is historical, psychological . . . Ka-Tzetnik’s Auschwitz is mainly metaphoric-hyperbolic, and Levi’s Auschwitz is mainly metonymic.3

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

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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

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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: They crowd my memory with their faceless presence, and if I could encompass all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head bowed and shoulders bent, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought can be seen. If the drowned have no story, and there is only a single, broad path to perdition, the paths to salvation are many, rugged and unimaginable.13

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

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The question seems to be whether the Muselmann is a metaphor or a metonym. It appears that near the end of his life, Levi realized that at the core of his metonymic account stands a metaphor and a very political one at that. Though proximity, speaking by proxy, is metonymic speech because it represents continuity the gulf between the drowned and the saved, the Muselmann and the survivor is such that metonym collapses into metaphor. One should notice that in this case the Jew borrows the figure of the Muslim to signify the impossible being beyond being, and it is not at all clear if describing the already-non-human Jew as the “Muslim” is metaphor or metonym. As Gil Anidjar, building on Giorgio Agamben, argues: “The Muslims testify to the theological in that they are lacking in divinity, in that they mark the death of a divine (non)humanity. They are non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them.”16 The absence of the divine spark, or rather its presence, is apparent in those who have not reached bottom, and this difference is a form of metaphor. In Salamandra, his first book, Ka-Tzetnik takes a different path. Beginning like Levi with a poem, also called “Salamandra,” Ka-Tzetnik proceeded to write a prose account that can only be called fiction.17 In literary terms, it matters little that his account is based on experience and seeks to tell a symbolic story that in Aristotelian terms is poetic to such a degree as to capture the essence of Jewish suffering and the novelty of this horror. In the novel, history is embodied in novelistic characters bound in a romantic relationship typical of the genre that are then overrun by the Holocaust. The symbolic nature of such a story, its overreaching ambition, is in the end an indication of the metaphoric nature of Ka-Tzetnik’s writing as Miron described it. The novel’s protagonists, Harry Preleshnik and Sania Schmitt, are characters, figures whose (hi)story is symbolic of Jewish fate and suffering. While Levi writes a documentary whose poetry is based on the crafty selection and artistic composition of experience, Ka-Tzetnik, writes fiction that is made into documentary through the erasure of the metonymic subject: Yehiel Feiner. “I have invented nothing,” Levi tells us in the preface to If This Is a Man. Ka-Tzetnik cannot say the same, at least not in a strict sense. One cannot help but notice the intuitive poetic interpretations of Auschwitz embodied in these choices. Following his choice to embody the Vernichtung—the annihilation of the subject—Ka-Tzetnik must erase Yehiel Feiner. In contrast, Levi, at least initially, chooses a poetic mode that is a constant reiteration of the subject’s metonymic presence; the Muselmann is the abyss that separates the deported Levi from the Levi returning to his home in Torino.

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These differences are also expressed in the very different nature of the two protagonists, Harry Preleshnik and Primo Levi. Harry is hyperbole personified; the toast of Warsaw, he moves from the peaks of emancipation to the depth of the crematorium. Levi’s story is unexceptional, though not without good fortune;18 Levi the survivor is metonymic to Levi before the war, and his true artistic achievement is in understanding the veracity and particularity of his own experience, point of view, and fate. It is in approaching the Muselmann that the differences and similarities between the two authors become clearer. For Ka-Tzetnik, the Muselmann 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

The imagery employed by Ka-Tzetnik is powerful; the production of the nonhuman human as the “flower” of modernity, its sum of creation, is a modernistic image to the bone and underlines the inadequacy of metaphor for the novelty of Auschwitz. Where Levi inscribes a form of silence, Ka-Tzetnik uses explosive, hyperbolic metaphor. The Muselmann captures some essence of this new horror, yet in the end all the descriptions are familiar: powerful in creating a sense of nausea and repugnance, yet capturing little that is new other than the extremity of the situation. Levi’s description is more open. He truly ponders the sight, while recognizing that the Muselmann (life beyond death) is the primary novelty and product of Auschwitz. The important difference here is that Ka-Tzetnik, the narrator, becomes a Muselmann himself and is saved from the crematorium only by a miracle. The question of the historical veracity of Dinur’s experience is not as important as the idea that language can redeem, that Muselmänner can possess language, that Ka-Tzetnik is their voice, and that Yiddish, albeit translated into Hebrew, is their proper language. This is possible and even coherent in Ka-Tzetnik’s account because his conception of the camp and perhaps the Holocaust itself is radically different from Levi’s. The symbolism of Ka-Tzetnik’s narrative positions Judaism itself, particularly East European Judaism, and the entire Jewish world as the Muselmann, or perhaps, farfetched as it may sound, it positions God himself as a Muslim.

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Levi writes of a different camp and a different Muselmann. To some extent, Levi’s Muselmann is Man—humankind—and there is no bottom to the abyss opened by the conditional “If this is a man . . .” “This is not man,” Levi writes, “and this is what man has made of man: the non-man.”20 Auschwitz is the end of humanity, of humanism if you will, of the entire edifice that Man has erected since the renaissance, long before the Enlightenment. Levi is writing of Man’s Auschwitz, of the destruction of the West’s crowning achievement, and in this sense he is writing the Holocaust of the West and of the Jews only in so far as they are part of the West. In contrast, Ka-Tzetnik is writing the Jewish Holocaust, the same catastrophe from a particular Jewish East European point of view that was wholly alien to Levi.21 Both meet in the figure of the Muselmann, who is for Ka-Tzetnik a theologically coherent figure, since without God, Jews and Judaism (or God) become Muslims. For Levi (who is without God or Judaism in any sense that is not external, coming from the outside, or the law to begin with), the Muslim is the theological trace emerging from the discourse of secularism and modernity as the specter within the biopolitical experiment in extermination that is the camp.22 The difference between secular and religious interpretations is reflected in the distinction between a Jewish view of the camp and one that is essentially “Western.” A Jewish view, such as Ka-Tzetnik’s, sees the camp and its figures as a reiteration of a well-known and oft-repeated historical condition: the suffering of the Jews. Levi, the secular Italian Jew, views with dismay the presence of the theological within a rationalized production of death, recognizing that all along Man was actually Christian and that the theological others—Jews and Muslims—are destined to death by slavery. A Man becomes a Jew and through work becomes a Muslim; he is then sent to the crematorium and returned to a silent sky. This brings us back to the political. What is the relation between the survivor and the Muselmann; is it metonym or metaphor? In the camp, does the Muselmann stand for the survivor beyond the threshold? Does this figure produce understanding or is it a metaphor allowing for an intuitive grasp of the camp through otherness? On the outside, that is, in the Jewish state, is the Muslim what we will become when we do not survive? Does he stand for us because we survive, or is he the key to the understanding of the deep and dark truth about the survivor state. In other words, is there a survivor state where there should have been a victim’s state? It is a question that pertains to issues of survivor’s justice and the possibility of a Jewish state that is heir to suffering and has a meaningful relationship with suffering.23 Israel was founded through war with

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a largely Muslim local population. From such a point of view, it is a state of the survivors who in the act of surviving have—again—become an instrument of destruction—victims who inevitably create other victims.24 A survivor state as a metonym of the camp is a state of the strong, the prominent, those with friends and profitable posts, and those who collaborated with the mighty and are indifferent to the inevitable fate of the helpless Muselmann. *** 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: My vision of the world was different and complementary to that of my comrade and antagonist Améry. Different interests conveyed by his writings: the political combatant’s interest in the disease that plagued Europe and threatened the world (and still does); the philosopher’s interest in the Spirit, which in Auschwitz was empty; the interest of the demeaned scholar, stripped of his homeland and his identity by the forces of history. His gaze is directed upward in fact, and rarely lingers on the commoners of the Lager, or on its typical character, the Muselmann, the exhausted man, whose intellect is dying or dead.28

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Levi is struggling at this point to define his difference, to explain if only to himself, the terms of his own survival and its possible meaning. His struggle with Améry is uncannily similar to his struggle with Kafka. In the early 1980s, Levi’s publishing house, Enaudi, asked him to translate The Trial by Kafka as part of a larger project of writers translating writers. The task was incredibly demanding, and it became almost impossible for Levi to complete as he came to realize the true nature of The Trial.29 Kafka, Levi started to understand, did more than imagine the absurd travails of Josef K., the bank employee who was accused of a crime he did not commit and who was prosecuted in a manner he could not understand: 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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

Shivitti is a documentation of Ka-Tzetnik’s experience with LSD, which he took to help him cope with the effects of living as a survivor of the Holocaust. The title refers to the opening words of Psalm 16:8:  “I have set the Lord always before me.” “As a part of the daily prayer, the word became a cliché for Jewish devotion and common language. During the 18th and 19th centuries, and up to the present a votive tablet called ‘Shivviti,’ principally containing the above verse, was put up in front of those praying in the synagogue.”3 With the encouragement of his wife, Nike (Nina Dinur, also known as Eliyah Nike De-Nur),

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Ka-Tzetnik agreed to become a patient of Jan Bastiaans, a psychiatrist in Leiden who was attempting to ease the psychological struggles of survivors of the Holocaust “with a new method of treatment incorporating LSD.”4 Bastiaans aimed to achieve “a psychic opening” to allow the patient to get in touch with his own traumatic experiences.5 He developed a theory of something he called the concentration camp (KZ) syndrome, which he argued was a psychological condition that developed when prisoners seek to protect themselves by building up an inner KZ—“an irreversible psychic or psychosomatic barrier”—in order to defend themselves against their environment.6 But when left only with this imperfect defense mechanism, Bastiaans hypothesized, individuals suffering from KZ syndrome would never be able to free themselves, even after their liberation. Perhaps reflecting the idea of passing different gates while approaching God, the five chapters of Shivitti are entitled “gate one,” “gate two,” and so on. Within these chapters, there are short passages of realistic writing, where Ka-Tzetnik talks about his stay at the clinic, his doubts, and his conversations with Bastiaans. These passages provide the framework for the “visions,” the scenes that KaTzetnik remembers from Auschwitz after taking LSD under Bastiaans’s supervision. Ka-Tzetnik wrote Shivitti in the space of only two weeks, ten years after his LSD treatment at Leiden.7 The book can, therefore, be called both spontaneous in one sense, contrived in another. I see it as an artistic production of authenticity and truth. Ka-Tzetnik gives us the impression of really seeing what happened in Auschwitz, and he presents the idea of truth in two ways: First, the drug seems to put Ka-Tzetnik in touch with his own inner, hidden truth.8 Second, Ka-Tzetnik uses highly religious speech to present his visions, which are arranged as pathways through “gates” that lead us toward a “secret.”9 This rhetorical device evokes the Jewish prophets of the Ancient Testament; the text assumes the aura and the weight of a prophecy. Because the visions are presented within the framework of the context of the therapy in Leiden, we see more than the visions themselves. We see the transgression of the boundary from one world to the other, and we follow Ka-Tzetnik trying to cross the boundary between Auschwitz and Leiden, trying to go back and forth. This transgression adds an important dimension to the text by making it a testimony about the effort of talking and writing about “the other planet,” not only about “the other planet” itself. Ka-Tzetnik illustrates his intention in very few words. In a break from his therapy, as he was “strolling down the alleyways of Noordwijk” in 1976, KaTzetnik was struck by the memory of a Dutch prisoner who had stammered “Kan niet lopen” (cannot walk) after refusing to kill other inmates.10 He had been

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ordered to empty a container of kerosene over living women and children but said “No!” Describing this scene, Ka-Tzetnik writes: 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

In this pivotal passage the reader is addressed directly: “Can you imagine?” The question remains open in the text, but on another walk through the streets of Noordwijk, Ka-Tzetnik gives a pessimistic answer to the question of whether anyone who had not been in Auschwitz could imagine the impact of these three words in Dutch. Feeling an urge to talk to other people, he writes that he “couldn’t hold it back any longer. I said to the woman walking toward me, ‘Kan niet lopen’ and she stopped, looked at me, and said something in Dutch that I did not understand. Then she stopped a man passing by and said something to him. I made out the word ambulance.”12 In this passage Ka-Tzetnik composes a portrait of himself as someone who tries to transmit his experiences from Auschwitz through the language (Dutch) of those he addresses. He is telling them something about one of their countrymen rather than a story about a foreigner, but the message from the anonymous Dutch prisoner who burned to death is not understood. To the people in Holland in 1976 “Kan niet lopen” remained a foreign transmission, just as in the English translation of KaTzetnik’s book, the three words in Dutch remain a foreign intervention. The fact that the Dutch people do not understand a Holocaust testimony communicated in their own language makes the episode almost tragic. They have no access to “the other planet.” This episode makes it apparent that in Shivitti, Ka-Tzetnik was attempting to make “the other planet” accessible, even as he knew that this attempt would be mostly destined to fail. Shivitti is thus also a text about its own author. The decision to write not only about Auschwitz itself but also about the effort to write about Auschwitz was a conscious decision to include the narrator as the one who tries to make the communication possible.

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The SS man as mirror image Tom Segev and Omer Bartov have both maintained the singularity of Shivitti. They argue that Shivitti is the symptom not of an illness but of a recovery in which Ka-Tzetnik somehow manages to reconcile the two sides of his personality.13 This analysis is supported by Ka-Tzetnik’s own sudden realization about the voice he has chosen to write his book: 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:

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And I am in the rolling truck, one naked skeleton, amid a mass of naked skeletons, carted off to the crematorium under the watchful eye of a yawning German. Staring at him and his yawn I suddenly ask myself: Does he hate me? He doesn’t even know me. He doesn’t even know my name. Still staring at him I ask myself: Do I hate him? I don’t even know his name, just as I don’t know the names of the rest of us now being delivered to the crematorium. All I know about this German is that on a cold morning like this he’d certainly prefer snuggling under the covers of his warm bed without having to get up this early because of some load that has to leave for the crematorium. All at once an additional horror seizes me, one I’ve not yet known:  if this is so, then he could have been standing here in my place, a naked skeleton in this truck, while I, I  could have been standing there instead of him, on just such a cold morning doing my job delivering him and millions like him to the crematorium—and like him I, too, would yawn, because like him I’d certainly prefer snuggling under the covers of my warm bed on a cold morning like this.17

This passage is an astonishing portrait of a perpetrator written by a survivor. The German enemy is presented as tired, weak, and almost humane. At the end of the passage he will even save Ka-Tzetnik’s life. The boundaries between victims and perpetrators seem to melt, and Ka-Tzetnik somehow integrates the perpetrator’s own position when he imagines himself being in his place. It is doubtful that this wise and detached interpretation of the scene emerged while Dinur was in Auschwitz. Ka-Tzetnik himself clarifies that it was only during his therapy that he was able to reconsider the events: “That other time I did see the S.S. man’s face and I saw his yawn; but then I may not have had the time to think about him and his yawn.”18 As one reads Shivitti, it becomes evident that Ka-Tzetnik’s almost benevolent view of the SS man is part of a new and larger self-reflection; he tries to understand the proximity of good and evil, and he supports this idea through theological reflections. On October 5, 1986, one year before Shivitti appeared in Hebrew, the British broadsheet Sunday Times published an article entitled “Revealed: the Secrets of Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal,” which relied on reports from Israeli scientist Mordechai Vanunu, a former employee of the nuclear reactor at Dimona. He had left Israel in January 1986, had converted to Christianity, and obviously felt an inner need to tell the world about his secret work at the reactor.19 Right after the publication of this article, he was kidnapped by Mossad and convicted of treason, causing a huge debate in the international and Israeli press.20 The resonance of this event, at least on a semantic level, is evident in Shivitti, where we find cryptic references to a global nuclear threat in Ka-tztenik’s second vision. Ashmadai represented as

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a kind of counterpart to God,21 is described as “mushroom-like”—like a “specter [that] looms in the sky: Shamhazai and Azael are about to anoint Ashmadai as the new King of Kings, lord of the universe. With blaring trumpets they declare to the four corners of the earth that the new name of this sovereign of the universe will no longer be Ashmadai, but Nucleus!”22 This “Nucleus” seems to be a shifting figure. On the one hand he is presented as the antagonist of God, while on the other it appears that “we” have constructed him. In the afterword and foreword of Shivitti, Ka-tzenik writes: “But nowadays Auschwitz has lumbered its way to everyone’s doorstep. Wherever there is humankind, there is Auschwitz. It wasn’t Satan who created the Nucleus, but you and I.  We did!”23 These few words seem to be comparing a possible nuclear war to Auschwitz. The evil that had previously been most visible in the largest Nazi concentration camp is now being updated with the looming threat of the explosion of nuclear weapons. Ka-Tzetnik then complicates the concept of Nucleus by placing him close to God: “Opposite the mushroom of Nucleus the letters of the name of God catch fire; but as the Hebrew letters change into the tangle of vipers with my face in the S.S. cap superimposed on it, then shivitti goes into hiding, and Nucleus the King wins the upper hand.”24 This leads to further theological speculation about the essence of God, which Ka-Tzetnik does not really develop. One might associate his brief remarks with the cabbalistic conviction that “God is to be found in the heart of evil.”25 But in Shivitti the essence of Nucleus/Ashmadai remains vague. Is Ashmadai responsible for the Evil or are we responsible for the existence of Nucleus? Is he God’s opposite or part of God? These questions call for further interpretation. For my argument it is only important to note that Ka-Tzetnik’s belated identification with the SS man in Shivitti can be understood as arising out of the particular historical moment of the late eighties. Because Ka-Tzetnik imagines his country as being able to use nuclear weapons, he suddenly identifies with the German perpetrator; Ka-Tzetnik is surprised to be confronted with his own mirror image. Without saying so explicitly, Ka-Tzetnik’s theoretical acceptance of the brotherhood between the SS man and the KZ inmate could well be rooted in the public debate on Israeli defense policy. His explanation for the comparison is, however, theological: “Oh Lord, Lord of Auschwitz heavens, illumine my ignorance of your handiwork, so that I might know who is the being within me now delivered to the crematorium—and why? And who is the being within him delivering me to the crematorium—and why? For you know that at this moment the two of us, dispatcher and dispatched, are equal sons of man, both created by you, in your image.”26 Against this background, the “I” that KaTzetnik sketches transgresses the boundary between victims and perpetrators

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while describing the effort that this understanding of the other side entails, an understanding, I argue, that arose out of Ka-Tzetnik’s fear of one day possibly becoming a perpetrator himself. The fear is based on a kind of similarity, as imaginary as this similarity might be.

The Jew on the photograph as mirror image In the foreword of Shivitti, we see a photograph of a Jew who is surrounded by young German soldiers in uniform and who is standing near the feet of other people lying on the ground.

www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/our_collections/olkusz/index.asp

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Ka-Tzetnik writes that this photograph, which he had found in a magazine, hung on the wall over his desk for many years: “I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it, away from the face of the Jew in his tallith and tefillin who had been posed against a background of guffawing German soldiers as a souvenir of the event . . . Any moment now a bullet would dispatch him to join the row of corpses lined at the feet of the rollicking German fraternity of warriors.”27 Today this photograph is part of the Yad Vashem Collection and carries the caption: “German policemen humiliating Rabbi Moshe Yitzhak Hagermann, on ‘Bloody Wednesday’ in Olkusz, Poland, 31/07/1940.”28 In order to further humiliate the Jews, Rabbi Moshe Yitzhak Hagermann was made to don his tallith (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries), and to stand barefoot and pray next to some prostrate Jews. Hence the scene in the famous photograph. The Jews and the other men were permitted to return home that day, and the Germans left. Due to the beatings suffered by the Jews, the event was subsequently referred to as “Bloody Wednesday.”29

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: I get to my feet. And I am he [the Jew on the photograph]. I am wearing the prayer shawl; to my left arm is strapped the leather tefillin wound seven times. Branded on my arm is my Auschwitz serial number, 135633. . . I cast my eyes down to the patch of earth to which, any moment now, my body will surrender its dying breath, and I hear my soul whisper, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”31

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

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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 KaTzetnik 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 KaTzetnik would like to see himself as one of them.

How might we understand Shivitti victims Exploring these two episodes of identification leads us to an understanding of the highly complex image behind what we might call Ka-Tzetnik’s “I” in this book. How might we, the readers, understand this “I” and what it tries to communicate? Following what Ka-Tzetnik himself describes as the processes of identification and the difficulties of explaining Auschwitz to the world, I  will focus on two possible answers. The English translation of Shivitti is prefaced with two different readings of the work. The first is provided by Claudio Naranjo, an American psychiatrist, born in Chile, who used LSD in his clinical practice. Naranjo stresses how singular and outstanding Shivitti is as a document of the “experience of the Holocaust.”35 He then goes on to briefly describe his own treatment practices,

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concluding with a condemnation of increasingly common prohibitions on the use of LSD in controlled medical therapies: I consider this prohibition part of a truly evil aspect of our society, and I do not see great difference between the mind-set of those who persecuted the Jews at the time of World War II and that of those who invoke morality to wage today’s “war on drugs.” Today, as ever, the foremost characteristic of the Adversary is that of pointing away from himself to say “There is the Devil!”36

In this statement, Naranjo underscores his commitment to Ka-Tzetnik and to all the Jews persecuted during the war and illustrates his identification with them. Like them, he feels persecuted by the law and the government—a victim of discrimination. Bastiaans provides the second forward and appears to read Shivitti in a similar way. In “The doctor’s word,” he praises Ka-Tzentik for his courage in agreeing to take LSD and being willing to confront his traumatic experience. This act, Bastiaans argues, has allowed all of us “to become conscious of the dimensions and the core of our very existence . . . for all of us are victims of war.”37 Bastiaans implicitly congratulates himself for curing Ka-Tzetnik while explaining why his LSD treatment is of such global importance: since we are all victims of World War II, we should all undergo a therapy like Ka-Tzetnik’s. In contrast with Naranjo, Bastiaans does not feel persecuted, but he nonetheless identifies with Ka-Tzetnik; he can put himself into the shoes of the Holocaust survivor, because he feels himself to be a victim of the war. He later made this case in a scientific article about the KZ syndrome, predicting that psychological research would bring about “the real liberation of humanity from each person’s own personal KZ.”38 This equation between all of humanity and Holocaust survivors is astonishing. It is based on vague feelings of being victimized, and it overlooks two important themes in Ka-Tzetnik’s book. First, Ka-Tzetnik himself describes how being a survivor produced overwhelming feelings of guilt and failure. In their slightly different but equally self-justifying identifications with Ka-Tzetnik, neither Bastiaans nor Naranjo take this most tragic dimension of surviving into consideration. Second, failing to acknowledge the uniqueness of the experience of survivors ignores Ka-Tzentik’s own narration of experience— his desire to tell the world something about Auschwitz. Among the very few words that Ka-Tzetnik quotes from prisoners who did not survived is the Dutch sentence “Kan niet lopen,” the words of the man who refused to pour kerosene over living women and children. When Ka-Tzetnik tries to communicate this sentence to someone outside of Auschwitz nobody understands him. We should

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understand this sentence as a metaphor for every failed effort to communicate the meaning of Auschwitz and especially as an attempt to convey the words of those who did not survive. The destiny of the victims, Ka-Tzetnik seems to say, can never be totally grasped. This insight might be the truest way of understanding what is at stake. To equate other feelings of being victimized with this experience is to miss what Ka-Tzetnik was trying to communicate about the “other planet.”

How might we understand Shivitti? Possible perpetrators In his influential article about Ka-Tzetnik, Omer Bartov presents a very different reading of Shivitti than that proposed by Naranjo or Bastiaans. Nevertheless, Bartov too stresses the fact that Shivitti is a text that pulls us into a reading characterized by identification. In the last paragraph of his article he claims that in Shivitti, Ka-Tzetnik has “transcended his own vision of another planet and applied it to our own.”39 The moment when the Holocaust survivor imagines himself as the perpetrator is highly relevant to Bartov, and he concludes that “when we imagine the Holocaust, we must first and foremost imagine ourselves,”40 an excise that clearly includes the self-image of being the perpetrator. Taking up Ka-Tzetnik’s central theme in Shivitti, Bartov links the insight that anyone is capable of creating something like Auschwitz to the fascination that Ka-Tzetnik’s writings held for Israeli young people in the late sixties and seventies—an era of heightened nationalistic sentiment and assertions of military power. Bartov describes the uncomfortable truth that as representatives of those who had lost the battle, the survivors of the Holocaust were less attractive role models for Israeli youth than the perpetrators of the crimes. “If from one perspective the Nazi perpetrators were the epitome of evil and the Jewish victims the fundamental legitimation of Israeli statehood,” Bartov writes, “then at the same time the notion arose that one had to be just like one’s enemies so as to avoid the fate of one’s ancestors.”41 Without further elaboration or support, Bartov’s analysis here presents an interpretation of Ka-Tzetnik’s perpetrator vision that goes beyond the expression of anxiety about becoming a perpetrator. Through the various detours of nation building, Bartov seems to suggest that being a perpetrator had become a Jewish wish, a self-ideal. This is of course a provocative thought that would require significant sociological data to support. I only have the space here to argue that Bartov’s idea of imagining the Holocaust as an imagining of ourselves is compatible with an important theme in Shivitti.

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The anthropological insight into the proximity of good and evil fits well with Ka-Tzetnik’s theological reflection of that he is like the SS man because both of them had been created in the image of God. While Bartov speaks from the Israeli point of view and Ka-Tzetnik’s perspective is clearly Jewish, the two arguments have much in common. Nevertheless, the forms of identification are, of course, different. Bartov describes the attractiveness of the Nazi perpetrators as arising from their superior physical strength and their aggressiveness.42 Providing a psychoanalytical interpretation of Shivitti, Oskar Sahlberg has argued that Ka-Tzetnik himself describes an identification of this type—one that can be seen as an “identification with the aggressor”—when he writes about the very cruel actions of Siegfried in gate five.43 But in the more central scene of the first vision, when Ka-Tzetnik clearly identifies with a German SS man, he describes the perpetrator as complex and almost humane. This is a different perspective than Bartov’s argument, where it is neither the aggression nor the power that triggers the identification that Ka-Tzetnik describes when he writes explicitly about himself. Since Bartov is interested in exploring the identification of Ka-Tzetnik’s readers, he does not mention this specific moment in Shivitti. It seems nonetheless meaningful that both Bartov and Ka-Tzetnik talk about the idea of identifying with the perpetrator but that they focus on two different images of the perpetrator. I, of course, must read Ka-Tzetnik from the perspective of being German, a position from which being connected somehow to the perpetrator is not a fantasy but a reality. How might one read Shivitti with this reality in mind? The question is all the more important since Ka-Tzetnik asks it himself. Ka-Tzetnik’s examination of what it means to communicate the experience of the Holocaust is not limited to his repetition of the Dutch survivor’s words but also includes an important encounter with young Germans in Leiden. Their “chests and arms [were] bizarrely tattooed,” he writes. “In amused fascination they stared at the ordinary, no-frills number they discovered on my forearm.”44 When one of them approaches Ka-Tzetnik, he feels the desire to plunge his “fangs into the throat of this being standing over me.”45 But then he runs away. The passage ends on a meditative note: “My eyes are still imprinted with the smiling face of that young German who found the tattoo on my arm to be so plain and therefore unique; and I ask myself if our period in Germany history [sic] will impress future generations as a plain, therefore unique tattoo.”46 This passages presents the most striking example of how Ka-Tzetnik tried to imagine a German point of view. He wonders if Germans of future generations will be able to understand the tattoos of Holocaust survivors or if they will just be impressed by them. In other

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words, will they be able to recognize and to read the tattoos that their fathers and grandfathers have burned into the skin of Jews in concentration camps? Furthermore, will they understand “our period” (the Holocaust) in German history?47 This question seems remarkable to me because Ka-Tzetnik neither separates the Jewish from the German, nor does he simply mingle the two together. The Holocaust becomes a German and also Jewish part of history, and Germans are asked to try to understand the Jewish part as a part of their own history or risk it being as incomprehensible as a strange and unique tattoo. Ka-Tzetnik never provides an answer to the question of whether Germans will be able to merge their own perspective on history with the experience of the Jews—maybe because this answer must be given by German readers themselves. But if one reads Shivitti in German, one will inevitably miss the question entirely, because the passage that references “our period” in history does not appear in the German editions of the text. For some reason, whether by accident or design, the last paragraph of the first chapter (gate one) is missing. Readers of the German translation will not find out that Ka-Tzetnik wondered if they would be able to understand what he had to tell them. The question how German readers might understand Shivitti is nonetheless opened up in a general way in the rest of the book. Can a German reader conclude his/her reading of Shivitti just as Bartov does, by saying: When we imagine the Holocaust, we must first and foremost imagine ourselves (as perpetrators)? Or will the German version of imagining ourselves (as perpetrators) be different from the Israeli point of view? The question is made even more poignant if we describe how Shivitti was marketed in Germany. Although all three German editions of the book use the same translation, their covers differ dramatically. The cover of the first edition, published in 1991 by the Antje Kunstman Verlag, is graced with an interesting yet cryptic and abstract drawing of a cross, a red rectangle, and some black lines. The title is a direct translation from the English: Shivitti: Eine Vision. But in 1994, Piper Verlag issued a second edition under a new title: Ich bin der SS-Mann: Eine Vision (I am the SS man: A Vision). This is most surprising, because the phrase: “Ich bin der SS-Mann” is never used in the text. Ka-Tzetnik says only that he could have been in the place of the SS man. This dramatic change to the title gives the book an almost exculpating dimension, as if the Jews were now being put into the role of the SS perpetrator in Auschwitz, an argument that Ka-Tzetnik never made. The most recent edition from 2005 returned to the more discreet title Shivitti: Eine Vision and was published by a press known for its books on drug consumption and policy.48

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On the cover we see a barbed wire fence, maybe part of a concentration camp, and an LSD injection. It looks strange and crazed, further complicating the story of whether Germans are capable of the kind of identification with the story of the Holocaust that Ka-Tzetnik demands of them in the English version of Shivitti. I would like to suggest that Ka-Tzetnik himself did give a very tentative answer to this question. By presenting the photograph of Moshe Yitzhak Hagermann as a mirror image of himself—by describing his sense of guilt when he looked at a holy Jew who he thought had been martyred—Ka-Tzetnik seems to suggest that others, even Germans, could also find themselves mirrored there. What might they see? Future generations in Germany might look at this photograph and direct their gaze not only at the Jew in the foreground but also at one of the young policemen in the background, who stares directly into the camera, crossing the gaze of the beholder of the photograph. This encounter is uncanny in two ways: The policeman looks at the beholder just as a mirror image might. But even if the beholders might want to avoid being reflected in the policeman’s gaze, they are inevitably put into the shoes of the person who took the picture, into the shoes of the photographer. As soon as they cross the gaze of the young policeman, they are at the perpetrator’s side. This German reading of Shivitti takes up Ka-Tzetnik’s understanding of the photograph as a mirror image and it wholly agrees with Bartov’s insight that “we” are all able to become perpetrators. But it might also come from a different direction, because the possibility of being the perpetrator emerges directly within the gaze of the young policeman in the background.

Notes

1

2 3 4

This essay is part of the project “Imitatio und Identifikation” funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. 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. Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision, trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa Herman (San Francisco: Harper & Row), xvi. Bezalel Narkiss, “Shivviti,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 18: San-Sol (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007), 492. Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, xvi.

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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.

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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 ‫יתפוקת‬ (tekufti), from ‫( הפוקת‬tekufah), which means ‘epoch,’ ‘period,’ ‘age’; it can also mean cycle. ‫ יתפוקת‬literally 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

Editor’s note: This is a translated and edited version of a work previously published elsewhere. Although Rupnow does not directly address Ka-Tzetnik’s work, his reflections on the intricate ways that historical and literary representations of the Holocaust have interacted and are intertwined help us to place Ka-Tzetnik’s oeuvre within the globalized circulation of memory cultures. Despite still raging debates between scholars and in the public sphere, Rupnow implies that it makes little sense to pit the supposedly objective view of the historian against the fictional lens of the novelist or the film maker. As the passage of time increasingly removes the possibility of directly communicating with survivors, the difficulties of representing the unimaginable crimes of Judeocide has led to a blurring of genres: literary and filmic representations are held to increasingly high standards of facticity, while historians have become self-conscious of the narrativity of their accounts and their ethical responsibility to explain not only the actions of the perpetrators but the emotional responses of the victims. Rupnow argues that we have moved well beyond the arguments about the impossibility of narrating the Holocaust as historians’ claims to a monopoly on explanation have been overtaken by institutionalized forms of memorialization, perhaps best symbolized by the establishment of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. As we struggle with the apparent contradictions between the emotional power of Ka-Tzetnik’s fiction and its occasionally troubling historical inaccuracies, Rupnow’s discourse on the current state of Holocaust memory cultures—both scholarly and popular, in writing and film, in imagery and public memorialization—provides important signposts to the issues at stake, to which we will return in the conclusion to this book.

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The Holocaust, in addition to assuming a central place in debates on history and memory, is today the key historical reference in reflections on the relationship between history and literature, at least in Europe and North America. The European-wide genocide of the Jews systematically perpetrated by the Germans, the Austrians, and their accomplices produced shockwaves that destabilized this relationship, leading to both an overemphasis and a blurring of distinctions, making parallels and similarities seem obvious yet  also dubious, and evoking both processes of identification and distancing mechanisms. Debates about history and literature, on the one hand, and history and memory, on the other, both of which are intimately connected and imbricated with one another, are cases of what Michel de Certeau, describing the problematic relationship between history and stories, between science and fiction, called an “internal war” and a “family dispute.”1 These obviously do not take place in a vacuum, but unfold in a context characterized by profound change. Most significantly, we are losing the connection to direct experience of the Holocaust in the form of eyewitnesses, an impending transformation that has been a topic of discussion since the beginning of the 1980s. This does not necessarily mean that our ability to pass on historical knowledge will change to any significant degree. Stories told by family members, interviews with eyewitnesses, and even criminal court cases have long since been supplanted as the primary means for conveying knowledge about the systematic genocide perpetrated against Europe’s Jews. This knowledge is instead imparted through media, through museums and exhibitions, films and books, whether scholarly, autobiographical, or literary. Even if this means that the shift from communicative to cultural memory and the retreat of the Holocaust into a history that we can no longer access carries a primarily symbolic meaning, its importance cannot be underestimated. Our increasing distance from the generation of the survivors will have a critical influence on the future of both scholarly and popular discourses about the Holocaust. We have seen far-reaching and critical developments in the field of Holocaust memory especially since the turn of the millennium.2 The mass crime perpetrated against the Jewish people across Europe has, over the course of time, assumed central importance in the constitution of a European identity—at least in terms of its publicly staged political self-conception.3 It is against the backdrop of the Holocaust that the European Union has sought to constitute itself as a community of shared values and to formulate a shared identity. In this context, “Auschwitz,” along with World War II, has become Europe’s negative founding myth. But the Holocaust’s acquired status as a negative political and cultural norm is one that is no longer restricted to Europe. For reasons related both to

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domestic politics and foreign policy, the Holocaust was being invoked as early as the 1980s and 1990s in the United States in the construction of an American memory and identity. This is not particularly surprising considering that the United States is a country of immigrants with predominantly European roots, that American soldiers had been confronted with evidence of Nazi crimes when they liberated the camps at the end of World War II, and that the country played a role in bringing Nazi perpetrators to trial. The global relevance of the Holocaust lies in the historical events themselves and their geographical range. Nearly the entirety of the European continent was transformed during World War II into a site of anti-Jewish discrimination, expropriation, and mass murder. But the global dimension of engagement with the Holocaust is not simply the result of emigration and displacement brought about by National Socialist policies. It is instead the inverse of the universal pretensions of a racist and antisemitic Nazi ideology that negated all known moral boundaries, thus transforming this German crime of unprecedented mass scale into a general ethical challenge. Over time various groups have begun to compete for attention and status alongside Jews as victims of the Holocaust. Our contemporary understanding is no longer a simple one of German perpetrators and Jewish victims. The symbolic forms in which admissions of guilt have been made and apologies given—to say nothing of more practical efforts to provide compensation by means of restitution and financial settlements—have transformed the Holocaust into a global reference point and benchmark for understanding other historical and contemporary mass atrocities, offering hope to many that these too will be recognized, “redressed” or, where appropriate, subjected to intervention. The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (1998), the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (2000), the United Nations’ Holocaust Outreach Programme (2005), and the establishment of an International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27—the day on which the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz was liberated—all bear witness to the fact that the National Socialist-organized genocide has long since become a fixture in the transnational politics of memory.4 The AuschwitzBirkenau concentration camp has been inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979, and the camp’s name was officially changed from “Auschwitz Concentration Camp” to “Auschwitz-Birkenau: German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp 1940–1945” on the request of Polish authorities in 2007. And in 1999, the Ringelblum Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto was entered into UNESCO’s “Memory of the World Register” of world heritage documents.

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These measures constitute an official pronouncement of the global importance of the Holocaust as an exhortation to respect and adhere to human rights— a call not only to draw political and moral lessons from what happened, but also to encourage research and to disseminate historical knowledge. The Holocaust is therefore quite possibly the first historical event in which the efforts to memorialize it have been institutionalized on a supranational level and on a global scale. This sets it apart rather sharply from other events characterized by a similar transnational dimension, such as World War I, which have not received analogous attention or treatment. National memory cultures, never entirely separate from one another, have become impossible to disentangle in an age of global political and economic integration, communication, and mass tourism. Meanwhile, the interpretations and representations of the events of the Holocaust have undergone significant change. Many European nations have been forced to revise myths of resistance and victimhood that had been common in the post-war period, and they have had to confront their collaboration in the crimes initiated and organized by the Germans. The forced universalization of Holocaust memorialization seems to have turned these mass crimes into global lieux de memoir (sites of memory), producing, on one level, a homogenization of memory cultures. Paradoxically, however, it is exactly this universalization that on other levels of Holocaust discourse have led to an intensification of national peculiarities and differing perspectives that have by no means fostered the recognition of the singularity of the genocide committed against the Jews. Quite the opposite: The more hegemonically established, governmentally controlled, and instrumentalized they have become, the more memory cultures have given rise to critique and competing memories. This phenomenon is often obscured by catch phrases such as the “globalisation of Holocaust memory.”5 Recognizing the Holocaust as the paradigmatic crime against humanity and acknowledging one’s own national complicity in Nazi crimes has come to serve as a type of entry stamp for belonging to the western world. Country-specific attitudes toward the Holocaust have become intertwined with positions on human rights questions generally and with specific national narratives about traumatic and violent pasts. The national framework remains formative, even in times of globalization, which is too often simplistically perceived as a linear development producing the disintegration of the national and a progressive homogenization.6 But national memory cultures can also no longer be understood without their transnational interrelationships. National and transnational trends have a complex reciprocal relationship, and transnational processes should not simply be

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understood as globalization, but within the frameworks of Europeanization and Americanization, all of which influence and compete with each other. National cultures of memory are then not simply dissolved, but they are certainly influenced and changed; they are overlaid and infiltrated with transnational tendencies. In many countries of Europe, the memory of German policies of conquest and genocide are intertwined with various historical experiences of dictatorship and violence. The collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe led to the thawing of the frozen ideological stalemate of the Cold War, helping to produce not only the globalization of Holocaust memory but also the larger historicization of the twentieth century. Since 1989, however, Stalinist crimes and communist rule in Eastern Europe after 1945 have competed with the Holocaust for public attention, just as the victims of both have competed for political recognition. But other authoritarian-fascist regimes have also become the focus of attention. The inclusion of these other stories has meant that the roles of victim and perpetrator are not as easily assigned; the positions change with the historical circumstances—a phenomenon with wide-reaching consequences for national memory.7 Although this has produced a new insecurity for traditional identities in most European countries, it has long ceased to be a thorn in the side of reunified Germany, instead becoming a virtual reference point and confirmation of identity, as historians have declared both the general history of post-war West Germany and the more concrete process of coming to terms with the twentieth-century past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) to have been a success. Immigration has also increasingly transformed memory culture in western and central Europe, and this is likely to become even more evident in the near future: Immigrants often have a different perspective on the events of World War II and on Nazi genocidal policies than the majority population of the country to which they are immigrating. In some cases they feel entirely disconnected from these histories and bring with them their own historical experiences of war and violence.8 Societies characterized by a variety of identities produced by immigration resist being reduced to uniform national historical narratives. More than ever before, such societies are influenced by the different and competing historical imageries and experiences of old and new citizens. National memories are, of course, never monolithic or uniform but rather fragmented and fissured; they are shaped by competing and contradictory private and local memories and formed through group dynamics and institutional structures, which are then expressed in various venues—through art, science, and politics—each with its own functional norms.

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Interpretations and representations of the events that constitute the Holocaust have, over the intervening decades, been subject to a number of shifts and changes. The discourse surrounding the Holocaust has in many contexts been uncoupled from the historical events themselves, becoming instead a concise metaphorical code for evil. The disappearance of ideological blockades with the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe has led to a concretization of sites and connections between distinct acts. These had evaded attention behind the Iron Curtain, as did the recognition of and reparation for individual suffering, thanks to Cold War animosities. Eastern Europe was after all the principle theater in which the Holocaust took place, in the form of the gas chambers in the extermination camps and the “killing fields” where victims were shot in mass executions. What form might the relationship between literature and contemporary history take in a time marked by wide-ranging, critical changes in our understanding of the Holocaust and its commemoration? The authority to represent and to interpret historical events no longer resides solely or even primarily with professional historians. The public unquestioningly prefers the testimony of eyewitnesses (whose authority is derived from their own experiences) to the contributions of professional historians born long after these events. On the other hand, eyewitnesses’ personal involvement in the events being recounted and the passage of time more generally might force us to ask whether we should be more skeptical of personal memories. While the public tends to underestimate how constructed the memories of eyewitnesses really are, they overestimate the constructed nature of accounts produced by professional historians. We must become more aware of the fact that it is popular culture, not traditional historical scholarship that can plausibly be recognized as the primary force behind the globalization of the Holocaust. Even though historians of various nations assumed the ethical task of engaging with Nazi crimes, they also diligently contributed to the construction of their nations’ respective mythologies of victimization and resistance. Visual media such as photography and film play an important role in this regard, particularly images of the Third Reich that circulate in our memory culture—both contemporary and those produced subsequently.9 The topic is omnipresent—on television, in cinemas and in bookshops. Imre Kertész’s 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, as important as it was, does not mark the start of literature’s role in this process. With some hesitation, one must then agree with American historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmis’s perspective on the relative importance of popular and literary versus scholarly accounts of these events: “The Holocaust has stimulated more research activity than any

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other event in Jewish history, but for me there is no doubt whatsoever that its character is forged not on the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible.”10 Nevertheless boundaries between genres and forms seem to be increasingly blurred and, as a result, thoroughly disparate, sometimes even contradictory functions of engagement with the past—history and memory, education and commemoration, scholarship and literature—are beginning to commingle with each other. Documentary evidence and reconstructions are interspersed with interviews and fictionalized vignettes. In addition to the recollections of eyewitnesses themselves (victims and perpetrators), accounts by and stories about the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are growing in number. Feature films directly emulate the visual character of documentary film; they are filmed in authentic historical locations or in black and white (as in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List), or they simply emphasize a documentary-like quality through reference to meticulous historical research (as in the use of Joachim Fest’s work in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang [Downfall]). In addition to this, a vast number of still and moving images and documents from the Nazi period continue to circulate—both as part of and independently of contemporary texts and films. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, these representations were created to serve the aims of the perpetrators, but they continue to be used with little hesitation or reflection.11 Even the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which opened in Berlin in 2005 and is popularly referred to as the “Holocaust Memorial,” does not adhere to typical boundaries. The subterranean exhibition space underneath the field of stelae creates the impression of oscillation between monument, memorial, and museum. This combination is rather unusual since a monument ought to be able to speak for itself, not requiring any accompanying commentary in the form of an exhibition. That a novel and more lighthearted access to the past has taken hold, is also apparent in the fact that the memorial serves multiple functions as a sight of commemoration, a tourist and excursion destination, a playground and a picnic site. But even sites of commemoration, including the actual sites of crime, have by now become sites of an event culture, as the example of the former concentration camp at Mauthausen makes clear.12 Scholarly publications no longer appear in an academic vacuum but position themselves, presumably for marketing purposes, within the broader culture of commemoration and memory. A new sixteen-volume collection of primary source documents, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945 (soon to appear in English as The Persecution and Destruction of the European Jews by Nazi Germany,

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1933–1945), produced jointly by the German Federal Archives, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich and the Chair for Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Freiburg, is the first comprehensive scholarly edition of primary source documents on the topic and has been explicitly conceived not only as a “scholarly reference work,” but also as a “textual monument to the murdered Jews of Europe.”13 This specific case is all the more astounding not only because a scholarly edition of primary sources is a rather cumbersome and dry genre of publication, but also because this multivolume work contains not only documents of the victims but also those of the perpetrators. How can victims be commemorated through perpetrators’ texts, which are marked not only by their racist, antisemitic perspectives and intent, but which moreover served to administer and document discrimination, persecution, forced displacement, dispossession, and mass murder? Opinions vary widely regarding what literature specifically can contribute to the representation and understanding of the Holocaust—as do opinions on the question of the possibilities and limits of the study of history.14 Yerushalmi argued that the novel provides a modern surrogate for metahistorical myth since the Jews were unwilling to face this history directly. Similarly, the literary scholar Ruth Klüger, who herself published one of the most impressive memoirs on the topic ever to appear in print, claims that “literature that engages with history is a form of coming to terms with reality” (Wirklichkeitsbewältigung).15 If, as Klüger writes, scholars of literature and film did nothing more than just avail themselves of history, “cannibalize it so to speak,” then their writing would amount to nothing more than kitsch. The Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész, whose novel Fatelessness disturbed readers with its narrative combination of naiveté and incomprehension, ruthlessness and openness, goes a crucial step further: “The concentration camp can be imagined only as literature, not as reality. (Not even—perhaps especially not even—if we are directly experiencing it.)”16 The French philosopher Sarah Kofman, whose father was murdered in Auschwitz, has posited a duty to speak, to bear witness, even in the face of the impossibility of narration.17 Referring to Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones (2006/2009), French historian Pierre Nora notes that literary descriptions of mass executions by firing squads are superior to historical depictions and their “document-based methods.”18 The mass execution and the means by which it was carried out constitute, according to Nora, a blind spot for historians. At the very least, historians have been unable to describe them in a satisfactory manner, leaving Littell to supplement their work. Countering this perspective, Nora’s German colleague

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Hans-Ulrich Wehler, a social historian, takes a sideswipe at Hayden White and postulates that “No matter where attempted, whether in reference to the French, American, or English Revolutions, to National Socialism, the Holocaust, the crucial problems have never been truly comprehended in fictional form. The apostles of narrativity have completely failed.”19 Meanwhile the French philosopher, journalist and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah (1985) is justifiably considered an original contribution to Holocaust research, took advantage of the occasion of the publication of Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones to repeat the criticism he had previously leveled against Steven Spielberg, among others: “But you cannot show how three thousand people die in the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. . . . For me this is clear: you cannot create fiction from the gas chamber.”20 Lanzmann has also asserted on numerous occasions that he would have destroyed any film of an actual execution by gas had he ever found such a thing, because there is nothing such a film could explain or make comprehensible. Meanwhile, Lanzmann has praised the French author Laurent Binet and his 2009 novel HHhH (an acronym for “Himmler’s Hirn heißt Heydrich”—Himmler’s brain is named Heydrich). He is quoted on the dust jacket of the 2011 German translation extolling the novel as “Fantastic! Splendid!”21 In his two books nachschrift (“Postscript”) and nachschrift 2, the Austrian publisher, photographer and writer Heimrad Bäcker (1925–2003) took an extreme position on the question of the role of literature in Holocaust discourse. Using isolation, montage and the adaptation of quotations from sources produced by both perpetrators and victims, and deploying the aesthetic form of concrete poetry to present his material, Bäcker claims to have made the mass murder of European Jewry—previously considered beyond description and representation—representable in an incontestable and quasi-objective manner, thus surpassing the achievements of scholarly historiography.22 While historical scholarship has largely acknowledged its narrative-constructivist character and, therefore, its relationship to literature, Bäcker professed to have been able to create absolute objectivity through literary means. When the historical fact of a subject is fundamentally called into question and denied repeatedly in spite of a copious amount of verifiable scholarly evidence, reference to authenticity and objectivity assume particular importance.23 This gesture is consistently evident in nearly all genres. Here too exceptions prove the rule and refer to that which is normally considered absolutely necessary when dealing with this subject matter, such as the subtitle of filmmaker Dani Levy’s comedy My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler (2007).

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Most notably, Saul Friedländer, a Holocaust survivor himself, spoke for historians when he said that “in the face of these events we feel the need of some stable narration.”24 Saul Friedländer is perhaps the most important historian of the Holocaust to have undertaken empirical study of the genocide while remaining consistently engaged with questions of representation. His essay “Kitsch and Death” (1984), which appeared long before the current torrent of work on memory and representation, remains as relevant as ever.25 Given its foresight and eminently clear-sighted perspective, it is as valuable a read today as it was when it first appeared. His magnum opus Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997/2007), which sets out to provide an “integrated history” of the Holocaust that gives victims a voice that the perpetrator-centered nature of German historical research has long denied them, has not only been praised as a masterpiece of historical writing, but has also been described as having “qualities of a literary narrative” (Confino).26 In contrast to Friedländer’s earlier call for preserving a level of commentary in historiographical work on the Holocaust that would serve to interrupt the linear narrative and, above all, to prevent any form of “closure,” there is astonishingly little commentary in Nazi Germany and the Jews, which primarily features description.27 The narrative is interrupted repeatedly by the voices of the victims, not the reflections of the author, who mostly retreats behind the organization of his material. But it is precisely with this compositional form, which is presented in an ostensibly harmless and superficial way as strictly chronological, that allows Friedländer to achieve the goals he had always declared to be necessary in representations of the Holocaust:  “disbelief,” a “sense of strangeness,” “sensation,” “uncanniness”, and “shock.” This is where Friedländer’s real accomplishment becomes apparent. With this form, he is able to break through the dominant pattern, in which the constant, ritual and routinized invocation of unrepresentability and incomprehensibility are then discounted by conventional descriptions, representations, and attempts at explanation without the underlying contradiction ever becoming apparent. There will of course never be a representation of Nazi crimes that definitively satisfies all needs for explanation. The emphasis on unimaginability and indescribability can easily veer toward exoneration and exculpation. At the same time, neither overemphasis on the difficulties related to representation and understanding, nor a simplification of complex connections can do justice to these historical events or their importance to our contemporary societies. An obsessive focus on the inconceivable and the unrepresentable prevents us from understanding what occurred and fashioning a narrative about it. We are

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still faced with the challenge of formulating an understanding of the events as a form of empathy and an intellectual process of comprehension. Those who believe it impossible to describe how this systematic genocide took place—the persecution, dispossession, and displacement that preceded it and the consequences of these—end up assisting the perpetrators in their project after the fact. The truth is that the problems associated with representing the Nazi genocide—whether they are presented in literary or historical form—are no different from those related to representing life in the Middle Ages, the horrors of the Thirty Years War or death in the trenches during World War I. After all, the Holocaust was not a natural catastrophe, as is so often implied. It was put into action by human beings and, like all human undertakings, it is therefore accessible to human explanation and comprehension. The key difference is only that this event, unlike more distant historical developments, poses evidently more pressing problems for our present, which is why both historical and literary possibilities for representation have been criticized as displaying inadequacy and superficiality: historiographical interpretations for their narrativity or simplistic factography and austerity, literary analyses for their fictionality. We hear constant complaints about the inadequacy of historical analysis and/ or literature and art when it comes to adequately representing and explaining the Holocaust. Meanwhile, both reciprocal critiques between disciplines and the increasing blurring of boundaries between the genres are closely related to the omnipresence of discourses about the supposed impossibility of adequately representing or comprehending Nazi genocide. Ritually and routinely articulated assertions of this impossibility and incomprehensibility nonetheless stand in contrast to the flood of images, descriptions, and attempts to explain in scholarship and public discourse, without this contrast ever really being appreciated. The taboo of depicting the dying in the gas chambers remained intact through indirect depiction in the 1978 American television series Holocaust when we watch an observer voyeuristically looking through a peephole; and in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List, the gas chamber is revealed to be an actual shower, contradicting historical reality. More recently the dying in the gas chambers is also directly depicted in the models of crematoria II in Auschwitz-Birkenau created by Polish sculptor Mieczyslaw Stobierski, which realistically and figuratively depict the various processes in the gas chambers and crematoria and which have been exhibited at the memorial site in Auschwitz (1949), at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (1989), the German Historical Museum in Berlin (1994) and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (2005). Consequently, a central site of Holocaust representation and knowledge

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transmission has become the gaze into the gas chamber, meaning that the black box surrounding the act of murder has been cut open and made accessible. Meanwhile not only the Holocaust or other genocides, but also animal transports, quotidian violence in the family and society at large, armed conflict and natural catastrophes are still said to be unrepresentable and incomprehensible. The plethora of talk and the omnipresence of the theme “Holocaust” has replaced its marginalization and masking. But the ubiquity of mass media representations is in no way conducive to the dissemination of differentiated understandings, as empirical studies repeatedly demonstrate. Post-war memory cultures have undergone countless shifts, but one can hardly speak of progress, since despite the variety of representations, we are mostly talking about repeated tropes—the periodic return of the already known, which is then presented in the guise of the new. It still somehow remains necessary to express surprise in discussions about the fact that Nazi perpetrators, from the Führer on down, were not psychopaths or sadists but apparently totally normal men, who can be seen as representative of the German population from the social average up to academics and scientists. We see this phenomenon repeated in various venues of popular culture: the film Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004), which brought Hitler’s last days in the bunker to the big screen; in the discovery of the private photo album that belonged to an adjutant of the last camp commander of Auschwitz and contained pictures of SS men and women as they relax after their strenuous work in the camp (2007)28; and with the publication of Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones (2006/2008), which tells the story of the Holocaust through the perspective of a fictional SS officer. Aside from the superficiality of the public debate and the limited learning capacity of collectives, this circularity also particularly emphasizes how controversial, current, and relevant the topic remains. This is a history that, for the time being at least, must be rewritten in every present—a history that remains unfinished and has not yet been fully worked through. The historical details play at most a marginal role in these public memory rituals, which generate a comforting horror that is necessary for cathartic cleansing.29 The goal is not really knowledge or enlightenment but rather redemption and personal edification, and public discourses often ignore the fact that memory and forgetting play completely different roles for victims and their descendants than they do for perpetrators and their descendants. This logic has begun to take hold even within current historiographical debates. At the same time that historians have lost control over models of representation and explanation, they have simultaneously been assigned quasi-official roles on historians’

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commissions, which have become fashionable with governments, public institutions, and private companies. As in the discourses within popular culture, these commissions are motivated by the hope of achieving lasting deliverance from that which one tends to vaguely call the “shadows of the past,” a goal that directly contradicts the internal logic and dynamics of the discipline of history, whose requirements conflict with the commissions’ imperatives, purposes, and limitations. The historical discipline cannot, after all, be saved from the burdens and controversies of history, even though the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, itself often debunked as illogical, always suggested that this redemption might be possible. The term, perhaps unintentionally or unconsciously, anticipated the now common demands for a clean break (Schlußstrich) with the past.30 While we must continue to combat those who spread repressive lies and slanders, we must also pay attention to the more subtle yet insidious ways that the Holocaust can be misused. Less frequently denied, the crimes are instead cleverly integrated into various other discourses, because they have become code for victimization and mass murder on a global scale. It is therefore increasingly important to protect the memory of the Holocaust from increasing trivialization, unjustified analogies, and a simplistic instrumentalization in national and supranational rituals of commemoration. The ubiquitous availability and omnipresence of the theme on the international stage seems to have flattened and deflated the discourse, since the subject can be inappropriately and easily operationalized and interchanged for other purposes; it becomes a means to an end. Routinization and ritualization of thought has produced a leveling and normalization, which had previously often been desperately striven for but never achieved. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Dan Diner’s term Zivilisationsbruch (rupture of civilization) had become a keyword for the events for which the single place name “Auschwitz” is the most widespread symbol, producing, as one might expect, considerable anxiety about the feasibility of historicization.31 Imre Kertész has justifiably pointed out that “incomprehensible” can mean nothing else but “intolerable”—a defense mechanism against the view that the Holocaust does not only represent a “peculiar and disconcerting— incomprehensible—history of one or two generations,” but rather a “general possibility of human beings.”32 An inadequacy in the available possibilities for historical reconstruction and understanding is likely to remain: “an opaqueness remains at the very core of the historical understanding and interpretation of what happened,”33 whether this applies to the psychology and motives of the perpetrators or the concrete processes of mass murder and the experiences and suffering of the victims.

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The task of a conscientious confrontation with the Holocaust, particularly under present-day prevailing conditions and still beyond literature and scholarship, has to be the relentless search for adequate representations that do justice to the specific demands of the subject. An appropriate representation would take complexity and tangibility into consideration, it would work out the specificities, and it would reflect upon the challenges and problems that the Holocaust presents while reflecting upon both the determinants and limitations of the author’s own position. This self-reflection means above all never forgetting what might be hidden or forgotten in one’s own presentation. Since one can never hope to achieve much more than an approximation of historical truth, definitive answers are particularly unlikely to be part of the historian’s repertoire, nor are they in any way compatible with the character and function of scholarship. And yet the longing for definitive solutions is part of the problem. Open questions and insecurities are more appropriate to scholarship than final certainties: They are more productive and enduring, and they are the impetus for the inconclusive processes that we call the pursuit of knowledge—a perpetual motion machine. In an earlier phase of debate about Holocaust memory prompted by the trial of Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon,” French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut noted that memory can always be marshaled against forgetting, but there is no rescue from memory that opens up the past to the living, soothes their consciences, hardens their ideological certainties and entertains them in keeping with the Zeitgeist of their particular time and place.34 His diagnosis may be as apposite as ever. However great the need for ethical guidance and pedagogy, it is nearly impossible to draw a straightforward lesson from Auschwitz that would amount to anything more than banal insights that are a gross simplification of highly complex events and that hardly require crimes of this magnitude in order to be elucidated. Any understanding of how the Holocaust came to pass absolutely requires that one “dwells on horrors” (Hannah Arendt).35 Uneasiness is the only appropriate result of the confrontation with historical events. But neither the dwelling on horrors nor the admission of unease is very evident in the routine of memory and mourning as it is regularly practiced today. We therefore urgently require corrective action against the prevailing rationalizations and processes of smoothing over, against abstracted concepts and placatory rituals. History, literature, film and art are all equally capable of taking on this responsibility, differing only in their methods. We must make this demand of current historical writing and of all forms of creative engagement with the Holocaust. The boundaries have become blurred. This does not

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mean, of course, that one ought to ignore the fact that creative approaches and historical scholarship serve different functions and are certainly not the same thing. This also means that historians ought to refrain from critiquing artistic creations with the same criteria they would use for their own colleagues’ work. Historians, in other words, would do well to rethink the “internal war” and “family dispute” between their discipline and literature. Rather than a battle, we might indeed better understand this conversation as an opportunity for engaging with new impulses and different perspectives: Clio may not speak in verse, but she certainly makes use of language and narrative structures.36 In the end, one cannot overlook the fact that even a narrative and contingent understanding of historical writing relies upon a source-based evaluation of the facts, even while it acknowledges that the author’s own particular perspectives will determine the interpretive framework. We can take seriously the constructed, narrative, and contingent nature of historical writing without surrendering to any form of relativism.37 We can counter Holocaust deniers with the facts that they deliberately obscure or falsify in their texts. The fact that these rebuttals do nothing to alter their positions reveals that their politically antisemitic agenda has nothing to do with the scholarly research that they purport to conduct. It would be equally misleading to claim that there could exist a positivist historical factual science that would be free of any and all forms of interpretation and perspective. This notion too, whether offered as an ideal or a conscious form of deception, distorts the actually existing relationships between scholarship and ideology, between facts and interpretation, thereby evading the verifiability that comes from rigorous and fundamental transparency. Or, as Hayden White so aptly put it: “Nothing is better suited to lead to a repetition of the past than a study of it that is either reverential or convincingly objective in the way that conventional historical studies tend to be.”38

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,

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Dirk Rupnow 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. Michel de Certeau, Theoretische Fiktionen: Geschichte und Psychoanalyse (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1997), 59. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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). 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. See Viola B. Georgi, Entliehene Erinnerung: Geschichtsbilder junger Migranten in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003); Nora Sternfeld, Kontaktzonen

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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. 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). Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zachor: Erinnere Dich! Jüdische Geschichte und jüdisches Gedächtnis (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988), 104. 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. 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. 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

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Dirk Rupnow Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945: Ein neues Editionsprojekt,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 53 (2005): 4, 651–9. A general discussion of this debate can be found in Manuele Grüttner, “ShoahGeschichte(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. 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). Imre Kertész, Galeerentagebuch (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1997), 253. Sarah Kofman, Erstickte Worte, trans. Birgit Wagner (Vienna: Passagen, 1988), 53. 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). Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Literarische Erzählung oder kritische Analyse? Ein Duell in der gegenwärtigen Geschichtswissenschaft (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2007), 43. 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. Laurent Binet, HHhH. Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich, trans. Mayela Gerhardt (Reinbek: Rowoht, 2011). 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. 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 Alex

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Grobman, 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. 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. 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). 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). 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. 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. Ulrike Jureit, “Vom Zwang zu erinnern,” Merkur 61 (2007): 2, 158–63. 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.

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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

It is no accident that Ka-Tzetnik’s testimony at Adolf Eichmann’s trial has been mentioned so frequently in the individual chapters of this book. Aside from having created a media sensation and providing a central metaphor for future popular representations of the Holocaust, Yechiel Dinur’s dramatically self-punishing attempt to explain that his writing should be understood as a chronicle of human experience at Auschwitz nicely encapsulates the tension between narrative, fact, and temporal context that make his books so powerful and controversial. He presented himself as both the author of fiction and the teller of truths, as a survivor but also as a Muselmann, as both an explainer of the Holocaust and the creator of fictional descriptions of an unknowable world. At that precise moment, as he sat in the witness-box balancing these various personae, Dinur was confronted with the fact that he was also an historical actor; he was playing a role at a very specific moment in time and asserting his agency as a witness to Eichmann’s crimes. As he tried to frame his testimony in the poetic language of his fiction, emphasizing both his identification with the Muselmann and the otherworldliness of the setting for the crimes being assessed by the court, the contradictions between his artistic authorial voice and his role as an historical actor overwhelmed him. It is difficult to imagine a more poignant symbol for the difficulties of narrating the meanings of the Holocaust than his dramatic collapse. Dinur’s crisis at that precise moment in Jerusalem in 1961 arose from the collision between the various demands of Holocaust representation: the ethical demand to listen to the voice of the victims; the meaning-making influence of the precise temporal and spatial lenses through which we view these crimes; our ever-present doubts about the feasibility of definitive explanation; and the ethical challenge of reconciling acts that can only be described as evil with the fact that the perpetrators were also human. Each of these demands

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is represented in the chapters of this book, and they run like tangled threads though the scholarly literature of Holocaust studies. As Dirk Rupnow argues, the boundaries between the various genres of historical, literary, and artistic representations of the Holocaust have become blurred, challenging the plausibility that strict disciplinary rules of interpretation can be maintained or were ever really viable.1 This blurring is at least in part the result of the passage of time. While the experiences of the victims and survivors were once thought too raw and personal to serve as evidence, their passing has, perhaps ironically, shifted our perspective from the perpetrators and their plans to those who suffered. We have moved, Rupnow argues, from the realm of the communicative— a mode of explanation that was cognizant of an audience of eyewitnesses—to the mode of cultural memory, with its implications for present-day political meaning-making and instrumentalization. In this atmosphere, the voice of a survivor who was so painfully aware of how the Holocaust presented unique challenges to individual acts of speech, location, moral understanding, and explanation is more valuable than ever.

Speech: The role of the author/survivor As each of the contributions to this volume have demonstrated, Ka-Tzetnik’s voice was unique. Despite his reliance on the framework of a family story and the creation of the fictional alter-ego Harry Preleshnik, Ka-Tzetnik wrote not in the first person but in the third. He presented an eyewitness account in the form of literature while insisting on its factual basis. In doing so, he mapped out a unique role for literature in the historical representation of the experience of survivors, and it took him until almost the end of his life to be able to explain why this blurring of genres was the only way that he could proceed or to even become fully conscious that he had chosen this voice. As Iris RoeblingGrau notes, he viewed the sudden and quite unconscious shift to the first person in his final book, Shivitti, as a personal transformation—an overcoming of the “contortions” that he had to go through in his previous writing to use a voice consciously chosen to speak not only for himself but for those who had died.2 “I have never written on this subject in the first person,” he wrote: In all my books I wrote in the third person, although that form of writing was difficult for me, since all I wrote was a kind of personal diary, a testimony: I saw these things, I experienced these experiences, I lived through the events, I, I, I, and yet while writing I had to transformed [sic] the “I” into “he.” I felt a splitting,

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a discomfort, a strangeness, and worst of all—I felt myself, God forbid, as if I were preoccupied with literature. Yet I knew that if I did not write in the third person I might have not been able to write at all. And all of a sudden, without even noticing it, for the very first time, and already in the first line: “I, I, I . . .”3

As we have seen, the splitting of his authorial voice—the contrast between his insistence that he was presenting an eyewitness account and the fact that he wrote in the mode of fiction and through the distancing mechanism of the third person had apparently been an unconscious choice, a fact that perhaps briefly became apparent to him on the witness-stand in Jerusalem but that he was only willing to face at the end of his life. As Iris Milner argues in her chapter in this volume, this distancing allowed Dinur to speak. He created the persona of Ka-Tzetnik—a “bizarre and self-contradictory” figure that hid the real person behind an “uncannily foreign, anonymous, permanent Häftling [inmate], deprived of his name and identity, who conducted a peculiar, chaotic life, existing outside of normal social order and ultimately outside of speech.” And yet, despite the distance it created between the voice of Ka-Tzetnik and the person of Dinur, splitting was Dinur’s only path to speech. As he asserts in Shivitti, it was a necessary act in order for him to be able to write about forms of violence that “in the works of many other writers of the Holocaust remain permanently unspeakable.”4 Omer Bartov and Roebling-Grau also point out that it was only after his LSD treatment that Dinur became consciously aware that the split between KaTzetnik and Dinur had allowed him to avoid facing the reality that his attempt to keep the hell of Auschwitz carefully separated from the “man-in-the-imageof-God” had been an illusion. “Auschwitz and the splitting?” he asks in the final lines of Shivitti, “God and Satan? The other planet and man? Questions, questions. And the answer? End!”5 Ka-Tzetnik made a public statement of this realization even before the original Hebrew version of Shivitti was published in 1987. In a very rare interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, he answered Mike Wallace’s question about how he now felt about Adolf Eichmann in impassioned but somewhat broken English: Wallace: What do you feel about Adolf Eichmann now? K.Zetnik [the spelling used on screen]: No hatred. But hatred about human being. I was, I was afraid about myself. [Gap in editing of film . . .] Then came a . . . [unintelligible word] . . . I’m capable to do this? I’m capable exactly like he? Not God. It’s not a God, it’s not a Hitler. It’s not a Heydrich. It’s not, it’s not other Eichmann.

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Wallace: It’s me. K.Zetnik: It’s me.6

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

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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.

Location: Time and place in Ka-Tzetnik’s work and its reception The peculiar poetics of Ka-Tzetnik’s writing tend to place Auschwitz outside of conventional understandings of time and space/place. In Piepel, Ka-Tzetnik writes: 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. EverywhereAuschwitz. 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

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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

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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

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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.

Moral understanding: Sexualized representations of evil It is important to pay attention to the extremely sensationalized way that KaTzetnik’s work was marketed in North American and Europe from the late 1950s into the 1970s, not only because it prevented scholars outside of Israel from taking his work seriously, but also because it is itself a documentation of the slow transformation of understanding about the role of sexual violence in the Holocaust. As Pascale Bos argues in this volume, “Dinur’s portrayal of Nazi sexual violence is not as unique or as isolated as is often thought,” and the fact that historians have until recently ignored the various references to this theme in poetry, in newspaper exposés and in the archival evidence itself tells us more about the unwillingness of the post-World War II generation to face these aspects of genocide than it does about Ka-Tzetnik’s particular courage in raising these themes.25 If sex has too easily stood as a usefully instrumentalized symbol for immorality in both Jewish and Christian cultures, however, I would agree with Bos that “it is the unprecedented nature of the violence that led to the use of this analogy.” It is certainly part of the story that, as Sara Horowitz argues, the symbol of “sexual violation universalizes the experiences of Nazi atrocity, making it more accessible to American readers and writers.”26 The growth of Nazisploitation in Italy and the West that Guido Vitiello investigates as part of his argument about the “eroticization of witnessing” is hardly understandable without paying attention to how sexual violence served as a more comfortable stand-in for racial violence in the 1970s and 1980s. In this sense, Horowitz is

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right that “sexual violence . . . domesticates the Holocaust, diminishing its horror to something more ordinary and sparing the reader a more disturbing confrontation.”27 But fear of this domestication, not to mention the very justified fear of repeating the violation of women by displaying images of their sexual degradation, must not dissuade us from explaining why Ka-Tzetnik’s representation of sexual violence was so courageous and necessary. As several of the authors in this volume insist, Ka-Tzetnik’s intent was not exploitative, despite the uses to which his imagery was put in Israel (in the Stalags) and abroad, in film and literature of both the “high” and “low” variety. As one of the most viscerally emotional of all survivor authors, Ka-Tzetnik understood that fear of sexual violation was pervasive in the Holocaust, and the honesty with which he represented this fear must be respected. This does not mean, of course, that we should leave his specific historical errors unchallenged, especially when he describes violence that he had not himself experienced. As far as we know, no Jewish women served in concentration camp brothels, and the depiction of the “Joy Division” in House of Dolls must be read as fiction rather than as direct testimony. And yet to limit our reading of Ka-Tzetnik’s description of sexual violence to the mode of fact checking is to entirely miss the point that he was only capable of writing about this particular form of violence because he refused to write about it in the first person. We know almost nothing about Dinur’s wife or sister. But the extremely sensitive and non-pornographic way that he depicted the violation of Daniella in House of Dolls should dispel concerns that he wished to exploit the suffering of the women he had known who perished in the camps. It is more likely, I submit, that his fictional characters and the implausible scenarios he placed them in where his way of describing emotions associated with having witnessed incidents of violence that he could not find the words or courage to describe.

Explaining the Holocaust: Legitimate versus illegitimate modes Whether or not Dinur ever contemplated expressing what he needed to express about the Holocaust in a genre other than literature, the tension between his desire to present a true chronicle of Auschwitz and his choice of a fictional framework to do so demonstrates the tensions and productive possibilities that a combination of literature and historical factuality represents. After decades of research and public discussion and after several generations of historical reaction

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to the enormity of these crimes, we have moved away from an overemphasis on objective and therefore de-emotionalized accounts. Having weathered various waves of popular sensationalization and moralization, we must now accept that debates about explainability will never (and should never) end and that there are no clear “limits of representation”—no obvious rules for the integration of the history of the Holocaust into national or international narratives.28 Historians have come to accept that even within the confines of an empirically stringent discipline, their narratives are at least in part artistic creations. “History,” Alon Confino writes, “is a form of narrative art practiced with tools that permit verification of our knowledge about the past. Differently put, historical writing is an art that uses scientific methods of inquiry.”29 Historians privilege the factual but still construct a narrative with their prose; novelists seeking to narrate the Holocaust begin with a story (a fiction) but insist upon its basis in factual reality. These are certainly different modes but they complement rather than contradict one another. Even if historians like Confino reject Hayden White’s assertion that “when it comes to apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of constructing its meaning over another,”30 they accept the underlying truth that their narratives are not factual in the same way that a mathematical equation can be solved.31 While novelists certainly have even more narrative flexibility, they will forsake all claims to historical explanation unless they frame their stories within convincingly factual boundaries. The Holocaust was not a natural catastrophe. It was not, as some ideologically motivated post-World War II historians hoped to convince us, an “industrial accident” (Betriebsunfall) that simply befell the Germans without any individual agency.32 “It was,” Rupnow insists, “put into action by human beings and, like all human undertakings, it is therefore accessible to human explanation and comprehension.”33 Yet the moral complexities of interpreting the extreme violence of the Holocaust have made it a limit case of historical explanation—a “foundational past . . . that represents an age because it embodies a historical novum that serves a moral and historical yardstick, as a measure of things human.”34 Together the essays in this volume underline this point by insistently combining various modes of analysis and various strategies of exegesis to uncover the meaning in Ka-Tzetnik’s explanation of the Holocaust. Rupnow’s overview of the tension between literary and historical accounts makes it clear that we do not give up the quest for historical truth by conceding that all historical representation is contingent and that even the most idiosyncratic literary accounts can contain elements of historical explanation.

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Of course, Dinur himself vacillated on the question of whether the Holocaust could be explained. The image of the other planet suggested a world entirely separate from the rules and conventions of scholarly and/or objective explanation. Yet, at the end of his life, his refutation of the clear division between victim and perpetrator reinforced the sentiment behind the “Auschwitz oath” he had sworn as a member of the Ha’Bricha. With all its distractions and despite its clearly fictional elements, Ka-Tzetnik’s work must be read as an authentic testimony of the Holocaust. We cannot ignore the risks of Ka-Tzetnik’s approach, and the varied reception of his work across the world makes his writing difficult to categorize. The fact that his novels were read as “legitimate” in Israel while often being framed as “illegitimate” in the rest of the world underlines the influence of audience and the judgments about genre that have only become more apparent as popular representations of the Holocaust have proliferated. But the strict boundary between legitimate and illegitimate representations was more pressing in the era before the loss of direct communication with the survivors. The tension between Ka-Tzetnik as the author of fiction and Ka-Tzetnik as the witness to historical events can now be read as a productive tension. Indeed, the coexistence of Dinur the person (the tortured survivor who never left the Muselmänner behind) and Ka-Tzetnik the author (whose fictional accounts were simultaneously contrived and authentic) makes his work an exemplar of the hybridity of the global culture of Holocaust memory. The set of images created by the collision of his authorial and eyewitness voices on the witnessstand in Jerusalem in 1961 can stand as a symbol for the conflicts of Holocaust memory that still bedevil us. In the context of Eichmann’s prosecution, KaTzetnik’s metaphors and historical missteps could easily be co-opted by popularizers seeking to capitalize on a lack of public knowledge about the extent of the crimes. Today the same stories can more easily be read as sensitive attempts to grapple with extremes of violence for which others had no words and which can easily be eclipsed behind static or politically instrumentalized rituals of public remembrance. We have now moved into a world that Ka-Tzetnik could not have anticipated, a world in which the features of the other planet have become so familiar as to be risking cliché. But historically situating the reception of his writing, as the essays in this volume have done, should be understood as an attempt to respond to Rupnow’s call for “corrective action against the prevailing rationalizations and processes of smoothing over, against abstracted concepts and placatory rituals.”35 Having become more comfortable with the blurring of boundaries between

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historical writing and various creative engagements with the Holocaust, we can appreciate that Ka-Tzetnik’s novels were written long before and completely independent of formalized rhetorics about the Holocaust. Ka-Tzetnik refused to present a conciliatory narrative and he insisted on his right to present truth through fiction. This unsettles us. As it should.

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.

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15 Or Rogovin, “The Poetics of the Other Planet: Testimony and Chronotope in KaTzetnik’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.

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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 Agudat Israel Youth 17 Améry, Jean 160–1 Appelfeld, Aharon 14 Apt Pupil (King) 6, 147–8 Apt Pupil (dir. Singer) 147–8 Arab-Israeli War (1967) 42 Arendt, Hannah 44, 167, 196 Asherman, Nina 14, 28–9, 167 At the Mind’s Limits (Améry) 160 Auschwitz 1, 3, 5–9, 15, 17–23, 37, 53–4, 72, 80–7, 93–4, 97–8, 120, 167–72, 175–7, 195, 203, 207 as alien world. See other planet Buna sub-camp 155 Günthergrube sub-camp 21–2, 118 in literature and film 24, 27–8, 145–6, 190–1, 194 as memorial 184–5, 193 as metaphor 153–5, 158–60, 162 See also concentrationcamps; Holocaust; Other Planet; slave labor Bäcker, Heimrad 191 Barbie, Klaus 196 Bartov, Omer 3–4, 52–3, 79, 106, 139, 141–2, 145, 170, 177–8, 180, 205 Bastiaans, Jan 7, 30, 167–8, 176–7. See also LSD treatment Bavli, Hillel 110, 113, 118, 120 Beit habubot. See House of Dolls Bricha 18, 22–4, 27 Broder, David 41 Bucharest, Romania 22–3 Central Jewish Historical Commission 40 Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine 41 Code: E.D.M.A., The (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Shivitti: A Vision Cold War 43, 45, 187–8 concentration camps 1, 6–7, 71–3, 79–81, 88, 105

Bergen Belsen 120 Birkenau 118, 155 Concentration Camp Syndrome (KZ Syndrome) 30, 168, 176 Dachau 21, 141 Mauthausen 189 Niederwalden 17 physical geography of 81–5, 87, 91–3, 95 Ravensbrück 108, 120 Starachowice 49–50 survival narratives 6, 8–9, 39–43, 45 tattoos 8, 13–14, 16, 23, 28, 32, 54, 107, 119, 178–9 Zakrau 17 See also Auschwitz; Holocaust; slave labor Derrida, Jacques 39 Diaspora 114, 117–18, 124 Dinur, Yehiel 1, 15, 68, 79–80, 85, 90, 93, 96, 105, 108–9, 118, 120–1, 123–5, 139–40, 158, 162, 171, 205–8, 211–13 at Eichmann trial 3, 15, 29, 32, 37–8, 44, 50, 68, 70, 80, 85, 90, 97, 140, 162–3, 167, 203, 205–6, 208, 213 See also Feiner, Yechiel; Ka–Tzetnik 135633 Draier, Alfred 20 Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi) 156, 160–1 Dworkin, Andrea 52 Eichmann, Adolf 3, 20–1 trial 3, 4, 14–16, 24, 29, 31–2, 37–40, 42, 44, 50, 68, 70, 80, 85, 90, 97, 140–3, 162–3, 167, 203, 205–9, 213 Eretz Israel (Palestine) 16, 18–19, 22, 24–5, 27, 108, 112, 114, 118, 206. See also Yishuv Feiner, Yechiel 1, 5, 9, 15–25, 33, 153, 157, 162, 208

240

Index

childhood and education 15–16 as Holocaust victim 17–23 see also Dinur, Yehiel; Ka–Tzetnik 135633 Felman, Shoshana 167 Fortunoff Video Archive 40 Fragments (Wilkomirski) 6 Frank, Anne 107, 147 Friedländer, Saul 46, 50, 67, 192 Funktion 86, 88, 90, 94, 96 German Historical Museum (Berlin) 193 Goldblum, Halinka 19–21 Goldblum, Sanya 16, 19, 28, 70 Goldenberg, Eliyahu 26 Grossman, David 83–4 Gruenbeum, Eliezer (Atshe) 32 Ha’Imut (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Like Sand out of the Ashes Haganah 118 Hagermann, Rabbi Moshe Yitzhak 173–5, 180 Hayim-Idle 81–2, 90 Herzliya, Israel 28–9 Hilberg, Raul 45 Holocaust 70–1, 87, 108–9, 112–14, 159, 185 denial 197 desire for revenge 24–7, 116, 159 memory and representation 19, 24, 27–8, 38–43, 45–50, 54, 67–8, 74, 79–81, 110, 113, 117, 123, 139–40, 143–5, 149, 154, 177–9, 184–96, 203, 207–8, 211 modernity of 95, 158–9 motivations 50, 177, 205–6 psychological effects 30, 41, 68, 72–5, 82–9, 91, 93, 142, 167–70 study of 5, 39–43, 45–50, 51–3, 54–5, 184, 188, 195–6, 204, 208, 211–12 treatment of female survivors 112–20, 122 understanding and study in postwar Germany 48–9, 178–9, 187, 189–90, 192, 212 victims 4, 5, 8, 14, 30, 38, 109, 114–16, 118, 167, 169, 177 See also Auschwitz; concentration camps

House of Dolls (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) 1, 2, 13–14, 31, 39, 43, 52–4, 68–70, 72–3, 81, 97, 105–6, 118–24, 140, 144–5, 211 historicity 54, 72, 97, 108, 122 publication 105–8 translations 106 I. G. Farben 22, 155 International Military Tribunal. See Nuremberg Trials Israel 4, 5, 27, 52–3, 105, 108, 159; attitude toward Holocaust survivors 113–17, 123–4, 177, 208–9 Holocaust education 154, 179 militarism 177 Ministry of Defense 14, 31 Ministry of Education 31, 105 nuclear weapons program 171–2 postwar culture 28, 79, 106, 114, 163 refugees in 114–18 Israel Defense Forces 14, 17, 105 Etzel 27 Jewish Brigade 18, 25–6, 118 Jewish Historical Institute (Źydowsky Instytut Historyczny) 40 Jewish resistance 14, 19–21, 23–5, 42, 114, 124, 139 Joy Division. See sex slavery Kabbalah 15–16, 31 Kafka, Franz 160–1 kapos 32, 74, 96, 115 Ka-Tzetnik 135633 1, 8, 13–14, 79–80, 93–8, 105, 153–9, 162–3, 167–71, 178, 203–7 faith and religion 7, 17, 168, 172, 174–5 family in writings 3, 4, 13, 19, 68, 70–4, 204 identification with perpetrators, other victims 171–3, 175, 178–9, 205–6, 209, 213 pseudonym 26, 97, 205 reception and legacy 4, 5, 47, 54, 79, 139–40, 144, 209–10, 213 reclusiveness 28–31 writing process 25, 28, 96, 170, 204–5, 207, 211 See also Dinur, Yehiel; Feiner, Yechiel

Index Kertész, Imre 188, 190, 195 khurbnforshung (destruction research) 40 Kindly Ones, The (Littell) 6, 147, 190–1, 194 Kofman, Sarah 190 Kovner, Abba 24–5 Lanzmann, Claude 191 Levi, Primo 6, 14, 71–2, 121–2, 147, 153–62, 209 Levy, Dani 191 Like Sand out of the Ashes (The Confrontation) (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) 14, 26–8, 30 Lithuania 23–4 Londner brothers, Manek and Ze’ev 21–2, 25 LSD treatment 7, 14, 30, 32, 162, 167–8, 175–6, 180, 205. See also Bastiaans, Jan Lubetkin, Zivia 23 Meir, Golda 140 miscegenation. See Rassenschande Moni: A Novel of Auschwitz (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Piepel Muselmann 7, 22, 72–3, 80, 86–9, 92–6, 119, 122, 153–63, 203, 206–7, 209, 213 Naranjo, Claudio 175–7 Nazis. See Auschwitz; concentration camps; Holocaust; sex slavery, sexual violence Nazisploitation genre 3, 6, 145, 210 Night Porter, The (dir. Cavani) 6, 145–6 Nuremberg Trials 38, 43 oral history (methodology) 5, 38, 45, 68 other planet 6, 24, 26, 30–2, 37, 68, 71, 79–83, 86–98, 140–3, 153–4, 162, 167–9, 177, 203–7, 213. See also Auschwitz concentration camps Piepel (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) 4, 14, 32, 39, 52–3, 68–70, 72–3, 81, 84–86, 90–2, 96–8, 206–7 pornography 6, 53, 68, 79, 106–8, 139–44, 146, 148. See also sexploitation Preleshnik, Daniella (character in Salamandra series) 1, 14, 16, 28, 52, 54, 73, 81–2, 105, 118–22, 211. See also House of Dolls

241

Preleshnik, Harry (character in Salamandra series) 26, 68–70, 94, 105, 118–21, 157–8, 204 Preleshnik, Moni (character in Salamandra series) 14, 28, 52, 72, 73, 81–2, 85–6, 90–4, 96, 206. See also Piepel prostitution (forced). See sex slavery Rassenschande 52 Red Army 23 Ringelblum, Emanuel 41 Sadeh, Yitzhak 115–18, 120, 122 Salamandra (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) 4, 13, 16, 19–20, 25–8, 68–70, 79, 86, 97, 118, 154–7 Salamandra (poem: Ka-Tzetnik 135633) 25, 27, 79, 206, 208 Salamandra (series: Ka-Tzetnik 135633) 3, 6, 14–15, 43, 79–81, 84, 86, 90, 94, 98, 153 historicity 68, 97, 183 publication of 26, 105–6, 210 religion in 7, 27 sexualization of 3, 106–8, 139–42, 144, 210–11 as testimony 48, 53 as vengeance 25, 27 Schindler’s List (dir. Spielberg) 145–8, 189, 193 Schneersohn, Isaac 41 See Under: Love (Grossman) 83–4 sex, history of 54–5 sex slavery 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 31–2, 52, 54, 85–6, 94, 96, 105–6, 108–12, 117, 119–23, 211. See also sexual violence sexploitation 3, 6, 140–3, 146, 148, 210. See also pornography sexual violence 4, 5, 6, 39, 51–5, 72, 94, 96, 105–12, 117, 119–21, 144, 210–11 politicization of 6, 111–12, 117, 122–5 study of 6, 39, 51–5 treatment of victims 6, 109, 112–18, 122–5, 210–11 See also sex slavery Shivitti, A Vision (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) 7, 14, 31, 68, 70, 90, 167–80, 204–5 Shoah Visual History Foundation 40 Simon Wiesenthal Center 148

242

Index

Singer, Bryan 147–8 slave labor 1, 5, 14, 17–18, 49–50, 54, 112, 155. See also Auschwitz; concentration camps; Holocaust; sex slavery Sosnowiec, Poland 15–16, 18 Spielberg, Steven 145–6, 148, 189, 191, 193 SS (Schutzstaffel) 7, 17, 30, 54, 96, 110, 141, 145–7, 156, 162, 170–1 Stalags (books) 6, 139, 140–3, 148, 211 Star of Ashes (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) 14 Survival in Auschwitz (Se questo è un Uomo) (Levi) 7, 154–7, 209 Szeintuch, Yechiel 3, 15, 79, 163 Tarvisio, Italy 26 Tel Aviv 5, 27 They Called Him Piepel (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Piepel Trial, The (Kafka) 160–1 Tsofen: E.D.M.A (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Shivitti, A Vision Tsveiuntsvantsig: Lider (Feiner, Yechiel) 16, 79, 153 destruction of copies 5, 16, 207

Twilight Zone, The (TV series) 6, 141 United States 106, 108, 185 intervention in Second World War 111 Jews in 109, 113, 123–4 US Holocaust Memorial Museum 40, 193 Vanunu, Mordechai 171 Vichy France 41 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. See Jewish resistance Wendlin Frei, Aloise 21 Wiener, Alfred 41 Wiesel, Elie 22, 29, 32, 87, 140 Wilkomirski, Binjamin 146–7 Woerl, Ludwig 21 World Jewish Congress 18 Yad Vashem 4, 21, 39–40, 42, 193 Yishuv 9, 20, 24, 25, 32, 109, 113–14, 122. See also Israel Zionism 17, 19, 28, 113–17, 120, 124, 139, 154