Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik

Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik

Edited by
Annette F. Timm

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
 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 An Author as His Own Biographer—Ka-Tzetnik: A Man and a
Tattooed Number  Dina Porat
2 Testimony in Holocaust Historiography  Annette F. Timm
3 The Evil Spirits of the Shoah: Ka-Tzentik’s Literary Testimony to
Death and Survival in the Concentrationary Universe  Iris Milner
4 The Poetics of the Other Planet: Testimony and Chronotope in Ka-
Tzetnik’s Piepel  Or Rogovin
5 Sexual Violence in Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls  Pascale Bos
6 The Eroticization of Witnessing: The Twofold Legacy of Ka-Tzetnik
 Guido Vitiello
7 Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, and the Muslims  Uri S. Cohen
8 How to Understand Shivitti?  Iris Roebling-Grau
9 Beyond Boundaries: History, the Holocaust, and Literature   Dirk
Rupnow
Conclusion Annette F. Timm

Bibliography
Index
 Illustrations

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

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

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 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, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jonathan Littell. They are
interpreted and located within the long theological tradition of texts as a
mirror for their readers. Iris Roebling-Grau 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 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.
 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 out-of-print translations of his books, an
experience that those who read his works only in the original Hebrew are
largely spared. It is, therefore, useful to foreshadow some of the arguments
to come by describing the salacious marketing of British and American
presses of the novel with which Ka-Tzetnik had by far the most success
outside of Israel: his 1953 Beit habubot (House of Dolls).
The novel purports to narrate the story of the author’s sister, Daniella,
and it ends with a nightmarish account of the brothel in a concentration
camp where she was forced to serve and for which Ka-Tzetnik coined the
name “Joy Division.” After Moshe M. Kohn’s English translation first
appeared with Simon & Shuster in New York in 1955, several English and
American publishing houses picked up House of Dolls for inclusion in
their series of cheaply produced reprints—at least fifty printings by 1977.3
Through the 1950s and 1960s, these presses adorned the book with covers
that played to the appetite for various forms of exploitation in the pulp
fiction market of the day.4

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

1960.

The most common trope of the covers has an attractive woman baring
her chest to reveal the word Feld-Hure (field whore—the German label for
prostitutes who served soldiers) along with a six-digit number, which
sometimes precisely matches and sometimes slightly deviates from the
number in Dinur’s penname. As Pascale Bos will demonstrate in her
contribution to this volume, the image mimics some of Ka-Tzetnik’s
historical errors in House of Dolls since this branding of the word and
number onto the chests of prostitutes never occurred and since Jewish
women never served in the brothels of the concentration camps. But more
significantly for our purposes in explaining the author’s reception outside
of Israel, this image was a perfect stylistic match with a trend toward
sexploitation in the 1950s and 1960s that fed a slightly later trend of
Nazisploitation in the 1970s and early 1980s.5 After all, the 1956 Lion
Books version of House of Dolls was placed in a numbered series that also
contained titles such as Hot Date (1949), The Blond on the Street Corner
(1954), The Flesh Baron (1954), and The Big Rape (1956).6 Although
Lion Books and other purveyors of sleaze often republished novels that
were not intended to be sensationalistic (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
appeared in 1953, for instance, with a lurid cover hinting at rape), English-
speaking audiences unfamiliar with Ka-Tzetnik’s standing as a survivor of
Auschwitz could be forgiven for falling victim to this misleading
classification of his work—for consigning him, as Omer Bartov has put it,
“to the lunatic fringe.”7
The lurid marketing of Ka-Tzetnik’s books in the English language
press contrasts with the author’s respectable reputation in Israel during the
same period. By the time he finally revealed his real name and collapsed
during his testimony at Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem (an
event that is depicted on the cover of this book and that will be repeatedly
mentioned in the chapters to follow), Dinur’s sextet of novels, known
collectively as Salamandra: Chronicle of a Jewish Family in the
Twentieth-Century, had already made him famous. As Israeli scholar
Yechiel Szeintuch tells us, Dinur began writing under the name Karl
Tzetinski while he was recovering from his time at Auschwitz in a British
army hospital near Naples, Italy. Beginning with a poem and a volume in
Yiddish, both under the name Salamandra, Dinur started furiously
recording what he later represented as the history of his own family. He
wrote, says Szeintuch, with “a strong feeling of life running out while the
task of testimony is endless.” Seeing himself as an exegete (in the
Talmudic sense) and as a guerrilla fighter, Dinur consciously intertwined
literature with history and testimony in his writing,8 and he wrote with the
goal of explaining, not sensationalizing, the Holocaust. Shortly before the
Eichmann trial, Dinur described his urge to write in an interview with the
journalist Rafael Bashan:

When I arrived in Italy in 1945,1 felt that I had to tell the story. I did
not know if I would have enough strength; I did not know how long
I would still live; I did not know if I would manage to complete the
manuscript ... Then they gave me a little room, in the attic, that had
only three walls—the fourth had been destroyed by a bomb. I closed
myself up there and started writing—I write standing ... I hurried, as
if someone pursued me: the door was closed. I did not let anyone in.
They would hand me my food through a little window; I hardly
touched it. I came out of the room only after I finished the book,
Salamandra. And I say, why don’t others do the same? We have to
tell, and tell, and tell, without end or boundary, about all that
happened there. Not just for the archives. Not just for the basements
of Yad-Vashem. Millions of people in the world have to read and
know. Are we not the self-appointed guardians of the annals of the
Holocaust; have we not been called a sort of literary guerilla fighters
[sic] of the Holocaust? Why are we waiting for Tolstoy?!!!9

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 Ka-Tzetnik’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 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 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 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 ‘Ka-Tzetnik 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 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.
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 Ka-Tzetnik’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, K. Tzetnik, and Ka-Tsetnik. I have chosen the spelling
that has become most common in English writings.
3 This is Jeremy D. Popkin’s estimate in Jeremy D. Popkin, “Ka-Tzetnik
135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History 33, no. 2 (2002):
343.
4 I thank Guido Vitiello for his encouragement to include a discussion of the
book covers in this volume (conversations at the conference “Ka-Tzetnik:
The Impact of the First Holocaust Novelist in Israel and Beyond,” March 10–
11, 2016, University of Calgary) and Pascale Bos for agreeing to include a
summary of a forthcoming investigation into this question in her chapter in
this book. See also Pascale Bos, “‘Her Flesh Is Branded: For Officers Only’
Imagining/Imagined Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the
Holocaust,” in Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the
 Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014).
5 For a useful collection of essays exploring these links, see Daniel H.
Magilow, Elizabeth Bridges, and Kristin T. Vander Lugt, eds.,
Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture (New
York: Continuum, 2011). See also Insa Eschebach, “Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-
Konzentrationslagern. Geschichte, Deutungen und Repräsentationen,”
L’Homme 21, no. 1 (2010): 65–74; and Silke Wenk, “Rhetoriken der
Pornografisierung: Rahmungen des Blicks auf die NS-Verbrechen,” in
Gedächtnis und Geschlecht: Deutungsmuster in Darstellungen des
Nationalsozialistischen Genozids (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2002),
269–96.
6 Lion Books had originally belonged to the publishing empire of Martin
Goodman, who also owned Marvel Comics and many other pulp series. Most
of these novels are now difficult to find but are traded through ebay and
collectors’ sites like “Pulp Trader”
(www.philsp.com/pulptrader/web/pulp_mag_liste2da.html, accessed
February 8, 2016).
7 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth
Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 54.
8 Yechiel Szeintuch, “The Myth of the Salamander in the Work of Ka-
Tzetnik,” trans. Daniella Tourgeman and Maayan Zigdon, Partial Answers 3,
no. 1 (2005): 102–3. As with Ka-Tzetnik, this more ephemeral pen name has
several spellings. Dinur also used the spelling Karol Cetinsky and Karl
Zetinsky, the spelling that Dina Porat favors in her contribution to this
volume.
9 Quoted in Ibid., 101–2 from Raphael Bashan, “K. Z. 135633 ‘Kulam Hayu
Eichmanim!’” [“K. Z. 135633 ‘They were all Eichmanns!’”] Maariv (Tel
Aviv), April 4, 1961.
10 Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and
Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 189–90.
11 See Bartov, Murder in Our Midst; Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism”; Popkin,
“Ka-Tzetnik 135633”, Amit Pinchevski and Roy Brand, “Holocaust
Perversions: The Stalags Pulp Fiction and the Eichmann Trial,” Critical
Studies in Media Communication24, no. 5 (2007): 387–407, esp. 393; and
Jeffrey Wallen, “Testimony and Taboo: The Perverse Writings of Ka-Tzetnik
135633,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 28, no. 1 (2014): 1–16, esp. 10.
12 Dan Miron’s 1994 (vol. 10) article in the Israeli journal Alpayim is
summarized in Wallen, “Testimony and Taboo,” 4. Bartov writes that the Ka-
Tzetnik prize was created when a father, grateful after a son’s reading of Ka-
Tzetnik helped pull him out of drug addiction, donated a sum of money to
Yad-Vashem. Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and
Modern Identity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
284, n. 129.
13 Quoted from Noah Kliger, “Haish Mi-kokav Haefer,” Yediot Ahronot, July
23, 2001, in Dvir Abramovich, “The Holocaust World of Yechiel Fajner,”
Nebula 4, no. 3 (2007): 20. In 2014, the Kestenbaum & Company auction
house sold a copy of this collection for $11,000, claiming that it was
“possibly the only complete copy extant of Ka-Tzetnik’s first publication,” a
claim that has since been disputed. See “KATZETNIK 135633. Auction 62.
June 26, 2014,” Kestenbaum & Company, accessed September 9, 2016,
www.kestenbaum.net/content.php?item=4463; and Menachem Butler, “The
Lost Poems of Ka-Tzetnik Are Found, in the Library,” Tablet Magazine,
accessed February 12, 2016, www.tabletmag.com/scroll/177165/the-lost-
poems-of-ka-tzetnik-135633.
14 I am very grateful to the late Israeli historian Gilad Margalit, who first made
me aware of the Stalags and provided me with copies of them after hearing
my presentation about the sexualization of the Nazi Lebensborn program at
the conference “Democracy and Intimacy: Toward a Moral History of
Postwar Europe” at the Université de Montréal, November 22–24, 2007.
These conversations spurred an interest in Ka-Tzetnik’s writings, which
started me on the path to editing this book.
15 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision, trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa
Herman (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), cover page.
16 Galia Glasner-Heled, “Reader, Writer, and Holocaust Literature: The Case of
Ka-Tzetnik,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 120.
 1
An Author as His Own Biographer—Ka-Tzetnik: A
Man and a Tattooed Number
Dina Porat

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 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 Ka-Tzetnik’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.
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 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
well-known 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 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.
• 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 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 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 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 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 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
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. Kovner had himself been a writer from an early age, and
he expressed sympathy with Feiner’s burning anxiousness to write.
Despite the crowded accommodation conditions, Feiner was given a place
of his own for this purpose. Edek Retman, a descendant of a wealthy
family from Bedzin who had also reached Bucharest, hosted Feiner in an
apartment he had managed to acquire in Bucharest, paying for all of the
writer’s needs.26 It was there, in the room in Bucharest, that the poem
“Salamandra,” which preceded the first part of his family saga written later
under the same title, was written, representing Feiner’s first post-World
War II literary output. Manek Londner, who had maintained a close
friendship with Ka-Tzetnik since the ghetto days, related how the
Auschwitz group witnessed the various stages of the evolving poem and
how Feiner asked him their opinion of it.
The poem is imbued with the desire to take revenge, and it describes
how this revenge was carried out by Salamandra, a fire monster that burns
for seven years, just a little longer than the six years the war lasted. The
monster marches, thirsty for revenge, all over the world’s continents,
casting an eternal curse “until revenge will not extinguish the fire in its
intestines.”27 The word “not” discloses the writer’s conviction that revenge
is a never-ending task.
The relationship with Kovner deteriorated, because Feiner wished to
make Aliyah (to immigrate to the Land of Israel), and Kovner could not
include him on the list of immigrants, which was initially limited by the
fact that the Yishuv emissaries had so far provided only one ship and could
therefore only accommodate the sick, the wounded, pregnant women, and
naturally children. Ka-Tzetnik later testified in very harsh words about
Kovner, his anger likely intensified by the mental agony that he continued
to suffer and his perspective weakened by strong medication. “Anger built
with time,” said Zvika Dror, a historian and member of the Ghetto Fighters
Kibbutz to whom Ka-Tzetnik dictated his testimony. Even in retrospect he
refused to understand that Kovner’s decision about who would be allowed
on board the first ship was taken out of responsibility for those who
needed urgent medical care and rest in Eretz Israel. Ka-Tzetnik forgot the
favor that Kovner had done in agreeing to provide a room for writing, an
enormous luxury in those circumstances in Bucharest. He also forgot his
promise to continue from Bucharest to Italy, following the route of the
Bricha, in order to get closer to the Jewish Brigade stationed there. The
plan had been for him to finish writing his poem “Salamandra” so that it
could be published close to the time and place where Kovner and his
avengers would perform a grand act of revenge. Years later, when Dinur
spoke to Dror in Tel Aviv, he did not even mention the money that the
Kovner group had provided to sustain him while writing in Italy.28
Despite these later lapses, Feiner did travel with the Bricha organizers
and with the Auschwitz group from Bucharest to Tarvisio, the town near
the triple border between Italy, Austria, and Slovenia where the Jewish
Brigade was stationed and gathered survivors. There he met Eliyahu
Goldenberg, an actor and director of the Entertainment National Service
Association group that came to entertain the soldiers, and the two traveled
together to Naples. He again got a place of his own, a tiny room with only
three walls left standing Allied bombardments. “All your needs will be
supplied by the soldiers,” promised Goldenberg, who was deeply
impressed by Feiner and his wish to write. It was there that he wrote the
first part of the family saga, Salamandra, “without a stop, without a
respite. He did not eat and did not sleep. He peeled off his own circle and
moved into the Planet Auschwitz that was moving in other orbits, outside
the limits-of-time.”29 A strong bond of friendship was forged between him
and Goldenberg, who later helped him to settle in Israel, and with whom
he remained close for many years thereafter. Feiner made Goldenberg
swear he would take care of the manuscript. When Goldenberg first saw
the title page, he wondered why the name of the author was absent. Feiner-
Zitinsky’s forceful response was that those who went to the crematorium
had written the book, and their name is Ka-Tzetnik. This is perhaps how
and when the pen name was born. Goldenberg brought the manuscript with
him from Italy to Eretz Israel, gave it to Zalman Shazar, later Israel’s third
president, who had it translated from the original Yiddish into Hebrew. It
was then revised by Yitzhak Dov Berkovic, son-in-law of the great author
Shalom Aleichem, and published in 1946 in a major publishing house,
Dvir. In other words, it was handled with great respect by extremely
prominent people, and it was translated and published before Ka-Tzetnik
had even arrived in the country.30
When the writing of Salamandra was completed, the avengers were no
longer in Italy. They had moved into Germany to prepare the groundwork
for their planned actions, and Feiner chose not to join them despite the fact
that he was, according to the group’s testimonies, committed to taking
revenge and was deeply disappointed when their plan did not work out.
We might speculate that this decision had less to do with him being in the
midst of a writing trance in Naples than with the fact that he was beginning
to harbor doubts and second thoughts regarding practical revenge as the
right course of action. In his book The Confrontation, parts of which were
published as a booklet under the title Revenge, his protagonist, Harry
Preleshnik—the main literary figure in the saga, who most probably
corresponds to Feiner/Dinur/Ka-Tzetnik—is described in the midst of an
act of revenge. He feels “terribly alien, dispensable and orphaned ... he did
not see any point in victory or in revenge,” about which he had dreamt and
for which he had yearned. Instead, he found a different channel of revenge,
to “cry onto the ears of the entire world the agony of the ghetto, which was
set on fire and has no voice,” and to write in Israel about the Holocaust and
the war, so that they are not pushed beyond the curtain of oblivion, and so
that he could be a part of the underground fight for the resurrection of the
people.31 These wishes show the change in his political views. After
arriving in Eretz Israel the views he had held as a youth in Poland
radicalized, and he began sympathizing with the right-wing Revisionist
party and with the activities of its military underground, the Etzel.
Once he realized that he would be choosing another direction, he turned
to God—the vengeful Biblical God—and asked him: if not now, when?
When he writes in Ha’Imut (the confrontation) about his first meetings
with the woman he fell in love with, later to become his second wife, he
describes how he warned her about his attitude to revenge: she should
realize, he said, that he had nothing in his body, except ashes and revenge,
yet she ended their conversation by speaking about the children they
would have, whose mere existence would indeed represent the true
revenge. Despite her comforting words, revenge proved to be a central
theme in Ka-Tzetnik’s writings over the years, beginning with his
descriptions of Salamandra, the vengeful fiery monster. It is a theme he
kept coming back to, in many forms, like an axis around which his main
protagonists circle, finding their own forms of revenge, each in his or her
own way. This was his way to fulfill the oath he took: to take revenge
through writing and thus prevent forgetfulness, and, as he said in the
Bricha meeting, to elevate the status of the Jewish people. He wished to do
that by interweaving in his works elements from Jewish sources, from
Biblical times to the Zionist writings, thereby confronting the Jewish
people with symbolic representations of their long history and forcing
them to face their murderers and collaborators, lest the Jewish people
engages after the Holocaust in building a new life, and starts forgetting the
horrors and those who perpetrated them.32

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 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 father-in-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 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 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.
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 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 Ka-Tzetnik’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.
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.
Figure 1.1 Aron Dotan, Elie Wiesel, and Dina Porat. Courtesy Adv.
Itshak Japhet Halevy.

Notes
I would like to warmly thank my friends and colleagues: Dr. Avihu Ronen, an
expert on the Zaglebie area during the Holocaust, for valuable details and
insights; Dr. Joel Rappel, director of the Elie Wiesel Archives in Boston, for
sending me four letters of Ka-Tzetnik to Wiesel; and Prof. Dan Miron for
clarifying a number of issues.
1 Author’s conversation with Dorit Sharir, a relative of Ka-Tzetnik by
marriage, on March 29, 2014. Sharir knew him quite well and categorically
claims that the figures and names in his books are fictional and can indicate
no biographic details of any member of the family.
2 Yechiel Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiach Lefi Tumo: Śiḥot ʻim Yeḥiʾel Di-Nur
(Jerusalem: Bet loḥame ha-geṭaʾot, 2003) contains the protocols of telephone
conversations between them over seven years. Yechiel Szeintuch,
Salamandrah: Mitos Ṿe-Hisṭoryah Be-Khitve K. Tseṭniḳ (Jerusalem: Carmel,
2009).
3 I would like to thank Dr. Isaac Hershkowitz for the information on the river in
Jewish sources.
4 Conversation with Dorit Sharir.
 5 The poem is reprinted in Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiach Lefi Tumo, 113.
6 See his birth certificate in Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiach Lefi Tumo, 23. The Hebrew
Language Lexicon mistakenly states 1917 as the year of his birth, but all other
sources state 1909. The later date is much more probable, since had he been
born in 1917, he would have published a book of poetry in 1931, when he
was only fourteen years old.
7 On the burning of the booklet, see Dan Miron, “Bein Sefer Le’Efer,” Alpayim
10 (1994): 196–224.
8 See an interview with Halinka in Iris Milner’s chapter in this volume.
9 Described in a letter from Dan Miron to me, January 11, 2014.
10 For a description of these two camps, see Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, ninth
printing (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1997), 101–11. See also Avihu Ronen, “Ovdei
Kfi’ya Bemahanot shel ‘Irgun Schmelt’ Be’Schlezia,’ 1940–1944” Dapim 11
(1994): 17–42.
11 About Sanya: in Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 9–138.
12 For example, Avihu Ronen, Nidona La’Chaim (Haifa: Sifrei Hemed, 2011),
65, 166, 253, 318, 322, 339, and 530.
13 Fredka Mazia, Re’im Basa’ar (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1964), 114–15.
14 Dina Porat, “First Testimonies on the Holocaust: The Problematic Nature of
Conveying and Absorbing Them, and the Reaction in the Yishuv,” in
Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and
Achievements, eds. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem: Yad
Vashem, and New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 437–60; and Avihu Ronen,
“Shlichuta shel Halinka,” Yalkut Moreshet 42 (December 1986): 55–80.
Halinka, later named Prof. Yehudit Sinai (1925–2013), fought in the 1948
War of Independence, was an officer in the IDF, served as a women’s
battalion commander in the reserve, and dedicated her professional life to
microbiology and pioneering research of cancer. Her brother, Nathan, found
the first vaccine against polio that was used in Israel.
15 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 81–5.
16 Moshe Ronen, “Hamra’ah Me’Hagehinom” Yediot Aharonot, September 24,
2013, p. 107. And in a conversation the author had with Manek, on May 21,
2014, during the Shiva on his brother, Ze’ev, who passed away that week, at
the age of ninety-two. The group included two more brothers, Kalman and
Eizik Belachash, Alther Brukner, Reuven (family name not remembered), and
a few others.
17 Ibid.
18 See the horrifying description of Harry Preleshnik (the character who
represents the author himself in his various writings), a few minutes before a
Russian tank arrives: Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 184.
19 In an earlier conversation of the author with Manek Londner on July 10,
2010.
20 Yonat Sened, Kazik (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uchad, 2008), 76.
21 Pnina Greenspan, Yameinu hayu Haleilot. Mizihronoteha shel Havera
 ba’irgun Hayehudi Halochem (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters House and
Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1984), 140. Pnina, a Warsaw ghetto fighter survivor,
named the members of the Auschwitz group: Yechiel Zitinsky, Alther
Bruckner, the brothers Kalman and Eizik Belachash, and Manek (Pnina
spelled his name Majek) Londner.
22 In an interview with Zvika Dror, in Hem hayu Sham—Bimhitzat She’erit
Hapleita (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uchad, 1992), 76–7.
23 See Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 207 and 213.
24 Dina Porat, “Hativat Sridei Mizrach Eropa—Protocolim shel Yeshivote’ha,
April 4 ad Juli 23, 1945,” in Brichim shel shtika; sheerit ha-plita ve-eretz
yisrael, ed. Joel Rappel (Jerusalem: Masuah, 2000), 177–201, especially 183
and 186.
25 Ka-Tzetnik, Nakam (Tel Aviv: Ketsin hinukh rashi, Anaf hasbarah, Misrad
ha-bitahon, 1981), 35.
26 Conversations with Manek Londner, 2010 and 2014.
27 See the poem, in Yiddish and Hebrew, in Szeintuch, Salamandrah, 235–7.
28 Conversation with Dror in the Tel Aviv Bazel recuperation house, May 16,
1990. I would like to thank Dror for sending me the minutes of this
conversation.
29 Ka-Tzetnik, Nakam, 38. For Goldenberg’s testimony, see Szeintuch,
Salamandrah, 126–36.
30 In 2009, Szeintuch published a full Yiddish and Hebrew annotated edition of
the novel Salamandra. The actual translation was done by Y. L. Baruch. See
the cover in Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiach Lefi Tumo, 41. According to Szeintuch,
Ka-Tzetnik came to Eretz Israel on November 14, 1945, but I could not verify
this date.
31 Ka-Tzetnik, Nakam, 15, 80, 84, and 92.
32 Szeintuch, Salamandrah, 258–9.
33 For details about this meeting and relations with Nina, see Ka-Tzetnik,
Haimut (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad, 1975).
34 Lior Di-Nur, “Hishlamti et Hashlihuto shel Abba,” Yediot Hasharon, January
15, 2010.
35 Ibid.
36 See the letter, dated October 26, 1987, in the Elie Wiesel Archive, Howard
Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
37 Eli-yah Nina De-Nur, Shyarai (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1987). The poem about his
name is found on pp. 15–16. On her illness, see his letters to Elie Wiesel,
September 29, 1987, and November 26, 1987, the Elie Wiesel Archive,
Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. I would like
to thank my friend, Dr. Joel Rappel, director of these archives, for sending me
four of the letters Ka-Tzetnik had sent to Wiesel.
38 Letter dated August 15, 1961.
39 Letter dated November 26, 1987.
40 In a letter to Wiesel about E.D.M.A. (more on which later), dated September
29, 1987, Ka-Tzetnik tells how poets such as Haim Guri and Ya’akov Orland,
among the most known and appreciated in Israel, made efforts to convince
him to publish the new book by chapters in a column that poet Nathan Zach
had in Ha’olam Haze, a controversial but widely read weekly.
41 Tom Segev, Hamillion Hashvi’i (Jerusalem: Keter, 1991), 1–9. Segev
managed to speak with Prof. Bastians and hear an explanation of his methods.
42 Dorit Sharir was active in the distribution of his books by the Ministry of
Education.
43 Author’s conversations with Dorit Sharir and Yechiel Szeintuch, both of
whom had many conversations with Ka-Tzetnik.
44 Ka-Tzetnik, Kar’u Lo Piepel, reprint ed. (Tel Aviv: Am Hasefer, 1988
[1961]), 53–6. Yehuda Bauer warned in 1982 against the impact of Ka-
Tzetnik’s work (see Yehuda Bauer, Hashoah—Hebetim Hitoriim [Tel Aviv:
Moreshet-Sifriat Hapoalim, 1982], 81–3), and so did Omer Bartov in “Kitsch
and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the
Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 42–76.
 2
Testimony in Holocaust Historiography
Annette F. Timm

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 failure in this juridical setting. Although his words have
since been frequently cited in discussions of the difficulty of describing the
events of the Holocaust, they contributed nothing to the more pressing and
practical demands of providing material evidence. His emotion-filled
testimony and his desire to discuss the identity-transforming impact of
surviving Auschwitz found little resonance in a court of law.5 As judges
Moshe Landau, Binyamin Halevy, and Yitzhak Raveh put it in their
opening statement, “Holocaust survivors who [will appear] on the witness
stand and [will present] testimony in this courtroom will open the lock to
their hearts. Material of great value for the researcher and historian is
contained here. But for the court, these are only byproducts of the trial.”6
Although the prosecutors of Adolf Eichmann had set out to make up for
what they perceived to be the failures of the Nuremberg trials—where the
victims of Nazi crimes were hardly heard—they were bound to the
structures of the law and felt forced to contain Dinur’s poetic, emotional
outcry.7 But, perhaps more importantly, Dinur’s sudden inability to
communicate his experiences on the witness stand despite his publishing
success as the author of semi-autobiographical novels stands as an iconic
example of the complexities and variety of forms characterizing public
testimony about the Holocaust. It is, thus, not simply because it was a
media sensation that Dinur’s collapse and the Eichmann trial itself is so
often cited as a turning point; the event highlighted the conflicts between
the law, the public interest, and demands to take survivor testimony
seriously as both historical evidence and descriptions of individual
experience that contain ethical meaning.8
This chapter will provide an overview of the role of survivor testimony
in Holocaust historiography. Beginning with an analysis of the supposed
silence of survivors before 1961, and relying on recent studies of the early
efforts of “survivor documentarians,”9 I will question whether the
Eichmann trial really represented as dramatic a turning point as has been
supposed while tracking the place of testimony and its various definitions
in historical approaches to the Holocaust from 1945 to the present. This
exercise requires us to keep separate various levels of reception: the
popular and political, the scholarly, the archival, and the literary. In the
public sphere, the Eichmann trial was certainly a “formative event for
Israeli consciousness.” Sales of transistor radios skyrocketed as the
population followed the testimony,10 and Israelis today remember the
event as the occasion of “meeting the survivors as human beings” for the
first time.11 It also did begin a slow process of transformation in
historians’ appreciation of the value of first-person accounts, an approach
that had been explicitly rejected by early experts, like Raul Hilberg.12 We
can track a significant transformation in historians’ attitude toward
testimony after 1961, and the explosion of “memory studies” in the 1980s
and 1990s has often been remarked upon.13 This more intense focus on the
individual produced a growing willingness to tackle the theme of sexual
violence, which had been all but ignored by earlier historians. But, as we
shall see, thousands of testimonies had been collected before the Eichmann
trial, and authors like Ka-Tzetnik had written literary accounts of the
Holocaust in an explicitly testimonial mode.
Writing as Ka-Tzetnik, Yehiel Dinur provided an early window into
both the force and the difficulties of all first-person accounts of the
Holocaust, since the stories that he told, particularly the sexual themes that
were central to House of Dolls and Piepel, did not conform to modes of
Holocaust representation that were being established in both the political
and the scholarly discourses of his day. The fact that he chose the form of
the novel to convey his “chronicle” did not diminish his self-perception as
belonging to the group of “self-appointed guardians of the annals of the
Holocaust,” who would leave behind records “about all that had happened
there. Not just for the archives. Not just for the basement of Yad
Vashem.”14 To take Ka-Tzetnik seriously thus entails expanding our
definition of “testimony” beyond the courtroom, the archive, or the
historian’s interview. It might even require historians to expand their
overly concrete definition of “the archive” to include literary
representations. Although historians might be reticent to follow in the
footsteps of literary scholars who rely on Jacques Derrida’s psychoanalytic
theory of how “archives” are defined, created, and destroyed, we should
remain conscious of the contingency of our own definitions of evidence
and our tendency to valorize certain types of sources over others.15 Dinur’s
insistence that his literary writing was a form of witnessing is an invitation
to use his work as a lens through which to understand the role of testimony
in historical scholarship on the Holocaust.
 Were the survivors ever silent?
Historians who lecture to undergraduates about the Holocaust frequently
assert that the Eichmann trial dramatically transformed the landscape of
Holocaust research, jumpstarting an interest in the experience of the
survivors and solidifying the terminology used to describe the destruction
of the Jews in Europe.16 This story is not entirely false. The trial certainly
did much to raise awareness of the crimes of the Nazis and to reveal the
specific experiences of the survivors even in Israel, where the focus of
remembrance up to that point had been on Jewish resistors and heroes.17
As late as 1959, the state of Israel instituted a National Remembrance Day
for the Holocaust and its Heroism (Yom Hashoah Vehagvura), and as Alon
Confino has argued, popular stories of the Holocaust emphasized heroism
and focused on “politically motivated narratives of well-intentioned but
deeply misleading clichés.”18 The presence of testimonies of
approximately one hundred survivors at Eichmann’s trial called into
question the heroism of survival. The collective impact of their stories also
“gave the genocide of the Jews faces and voices previously missing or
forgotten,” Eric Sundquist writes, while firmly establishing the use of the
word “Holocaust” to describe their experience and the polices that
Eichmann carried out.19 And yet this focus on the trial as turning point has
hidden from view the fact that enormous collections of Holocaust
testimonials were gathered immediately after the war. Historians now
working on Holocaust testimony emphasize collections like the Fortunoff
Video Archive at Yale (founded in 1981), Steven Spielberg’s Shoah
Visual History Foundation (founded in 1994), and the collections of Yad
Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. They have been less
likely to point out that the collection of survivor testimony began much
earlier, as the 7,300 testimonies gathered by the Central Jewish Historical
Commission (CJHC, founded in Lublin in 1944) and collected at the
Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH) in
Warsaw makes clear. Representing the largest single collection of written
testimonies from the Holocaust, the testimonies collected by the CJHC are
comprised primarily of narratives that researchers composed after
interviewing survivors who had returned from concentration camps or
hiding places in Poland in the immediate postwar years.20 Even these
testimonies, in other words, must be read as composed narratives—as
interpretations of witnessing recorded by interviewers with their own
perceptions of the questions that needed to be asked and the answers that
needed to be preserved.
How testimonies were collected and recorded has varied dramatically.
As Laura Jockusch has documented, organized efforts to collect survivor
testimony got underway in various countries before the end of the war and
attest to an immediate realization on the part of survivors and some
historians that documentation of the individual memories of suffering and
persecution would be a critical aspect of both historical reconstruction and
legal retribution. In the first phase of this process, Jews began gathering
testimonies and documents while they were still being persecuting,
following a tradition of khurbn-forshung (destruction research) that had
begun in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.21 The most famous
of the early efforts was the secret archive established by Emanuel
Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto on November 22, 1940.22 Isaac
Schneersohn, an Orthodox Jew who fled to France in 1943, created the
Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, which published
collections of documents about the treatment of Jews in Vichy France and
gathered tons of material in the interests of post-war justice.23 Similar
commissions were founded in wartime Poland and in post-World War II-
occupied Germany.24 A German Jew, Alfred Wiener, who fled to
Amsterdam in 1934, immediately started amassing a collection of
documentation that would become the Wiener Library in London. And in
the summer of 1946, Chicago-based psychologist David Broder conducted
over a hundred interviews with survivors in Displaced Persons (DP) camps
in Europe, later making the transcripts available to at least forty-five
libraries all over the world.25 Together, these efforts produced an
enormous trove of survivor testimony. Less than a decade and a half after
the end of the war, Jockusch tells us, the collective archive of these various
commissions and documentation included some 18,000 written testimonies
and 8,000 questionnaires.26
So with this wealth of survivor testimony, how did the myth of silence
ever arise? An obvious, though rarely mentioned reason for the scant
attention that historians paid to these documents in the early years is the
preponderance of Yiddish language materials. Mark L. Smith has
researched the extensive efforts of mostly amateur historians to document
the experiences of the victims in the immediate post-war period. A vast
amount of writing was produced: from monographs, to journal articles, to
one-page essays in popular newspapers and magazines. But much of the
early material on survivors was written in the language of the majority of
the survivors—Yiddish—and was thus inaccessible to many university-
based scholars of the Holocaust.27 Other factors are more specific to
national contexts.
Hasia Diner insists that the culture of post-war America had much to do
with this supposed “silence.” Her book, We Remember with Reverence and
Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–
60, investigates the outpouring of memory work conducted by American
Jewish communities after the war, research that contradicts the prevalent
view that survivors were not heard from until the 1960s. She attributes this
contradiction to the influence of the 1960s’ youth movement, which had an
interest in trumpeting their discovery of a “hidden” truth.

That fact, that the post-war generation had ignored the Holocaust,
allowed [the youth movement] to claim that not only had they
“discovered” it but also that they, unlike those who had directed the
organizations, institutions, schools, summer camps, community
centers, synagogues, and such in the post-war period, did so from an
assertively particularistic and uncompromising perspective which in
an unembarrassed manner asserted Jewish difference and
distinctiveness.28

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 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.

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 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 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 test-case 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 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 discourses, Ka-Tzetnik’s novels should
not be described as either mythical or even exclusively literary but as
constructive elements of a memory culture that helped produce historical
meaning.
The process of taking testimony and memory culture seriously was
somewhat slower in Germany than in English-speaking countries and was
characterized by the focus on the tension between scholarly and popular or
political modes of representation. This is not surprising, given the heat of
the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute), which highlighted the difficulty
of integrating the Holocaust into the German national narrative. (The
Historikerstreit erupted in 1986 when the philosopher Jürgen Habermas
objected to Ernst Nolte’s argument that the Holocaust was “above all a
reaction born out of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian
Revolution.”)62 Up until this time, German historians had tended to react
defensively whenever their professionally bestowed authority to
monopolize historical explanation (neatly summed up in German as
Deutungsmacht) was questioned,63 and memory, testimony, and the
contributions of eyewitnesses were often viewed with suspicion. As
Konrad Jarausch complained in 2002, many German historians viewed
“the whole ‘history and memory’-trend as nothing but hype,” a reaction
that he and Martin Sabrow at the Centre for Contemporary History at
Potstdam made an effort to undermine in a March 2001 conference entitled
“The Historicisation of the Present.”64 In his contribution to the resulting
conference volume (Verletztes Gedächtnis: Erinnerungskultur und
Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt—Injured Memory: Memory Culture and
Contemporary History in Conflict) Jarausch comments that eyewitnesses
had often been treated as the natural enemies of the historian, and he called
for a more “open admission of the experience-dependent nature of
contemporary history.”65 Meanwhile Hans-Günther Hockerts defined
memory culture as designating “the entirety of the not specifically
scholarly use of history in public—with the most diverse methods and for
the most diverse reasons,” and he warned that there would always be
tension between “contemporary history as personal memory, as public
practice and as scholarly discipline.”66
These warnings have not gone unheeded. Particularly the work of Jan
and Aleida Assmann and their differentiation between individual and
communicative memory (short-term memory) and political and cultural
memory (long-term memory) has prompted a reconsideration of the
tension between popular, scholarly, and political memory cultures among
German historians.67 Building upon the work of the Assmanns, along with
Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora, German discussions about memory
and the Holocaust have circled around the question of tensions between
the historical discipline and public memory. As is to be expected in the
land of the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust, and as Dirk Rupnow
discusses in his contribution to this volume, German historians have
slowly been forced to accept the existence and power of a strong memory
culture (Erinnerungskultur) over which they cannot exert seamless
control.68 By the early 2000s, the subject of history and memory had
received comprehensive attention, and in more recent years concerted
efforts have been made to engage in interdisciplinary discussions,
particularly with anthropologists and scholars of literature.69
In this regard, the work of American literary scholar Lawrence Langer
has been particularly important in pointing out the weakness in popular
memory culture. In various books about memory and the Holocaust,
Langer has critiqued the simplistic moral messages that analyses of
testimony sometimes promote.70 “In framing the Holocaust through the
lens of heroic rhetoric,” Langer argues, “Holocaust chroniclers exhibit
their own discomfort with the facts left to us by Holocaust victims, dead
and alive, and reveal the inadequacy of our language in the face of what
there is to tell.”71 Although more traditional historians are unlikely to be
persuaded, and although the historical and the literary approaches to the
Holocaust have up until recently tended to exist in isolated parallel, a slow
transformation was underway.72
These developments seem to have had a significant influence on the
willingness of historians to take testimony seriously, even when a strict
adherence to traditional modes of historical argumentation is maintained.
Having established his reputation as a meticulous archival researcher with
his book about the civilian police battalions and their involvement in the
murder of Jews on the Eastern Front, for instance, Christopher Browning
has more recently begun to rely on survivor testimony as a way of filling
in holes for which we have no archival evidence.73 Browning’s Collected
Memories rests on 173 survivor testimonies from the Starachowice slave
labor camp in Poland. An obscure camp about which little was previously
known, Starachowice left behind few archival traces. Browning explicitly
rejects analyses of testimony that focus more on their form (their modes of
representation) than on their content. (He distances himself from
approaches like that of Lawrence Langer.) His goal, he argues, was neither
to tell a story of suffering and endurance, nor to establish the
“authenticity” of the testimony nor to produce a “collective” memory.
Instead, he seeks to compare and analyze the testimonies en masse in order
to reconstruct a plausible narrative.74 He developed this approach further
in his more detailed history of the Starachowice in Remembering Survival:
Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp, for which he found additional
testimonies and conducted his own oral interviews, gathering a total of 292
eyewitness accounts. Here he insists on the necessity of finding ways of
reconciling the contradictions and “clearly mistaken” recollections within
witness testimony. “Such critical judgment of eyewitness testimony is self-
evident and commonplace for historians of other events,” he writes, “but it
is emotionally freighted in the study of the Holocaust, where survivors
have been transformed into “messengers from another world” who alone,
it is claimed, can communicate the incommunicable about an ineffable
experience.”75 While they are certainly taken seriously, the testimonies
retreat into the background behind Browning’s omniscient voice, not
unlike the way that archival documents disappear behind any other
historian’s narrative. Although he is certainly sensitive to the individual
stories he tells, what Browning wants from his survivors is what the court
wanted from Yihiel Dinur.
Saul Friedländer takes an entirely different approach to testimony. In
his already seminal two-volume exploration of the Holocaust, Nazi
Germany and the Jews, and particularly the second volume The Years of
Extermination, Friedländer choses a methodology that is a calculated
response to historians who seek to “normalize” the Holocaust—to treat it
like any other historical event and to use “scientific” methods to neutralize
its uniqueness.76 The Years of Extermination combines meticulous archival
research and a comprehensive chronological narrative of the political,
military, administrative, and ideological aspects of the Nazi regime with
frequent testimonies from its victims. The testimonies stand virtually
without comment; they are allowed to speak for themselves and to
intensify what Confino has called the “sensation of disbelief.”77 They
fracture Friedländer’s narrative while serving to create an “integrated
history” that combines testimony with historical chronology and
explanation. “[By] its very nature,” Friedländer writes,

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 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 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 so-called 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
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 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 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.
2 Quoted in Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas
in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 136. I
have followed Felman’s choice of spelling—K-Zetnik instead of Ka-Tzetnik
—in the quotation, but we have used the more common English spelling of
Ka-Tzetnik throughout this volume.
3 In an interview with Tom Segev in 1987, Dinur said that he had fainted
because this was the first time he had been asked to admit that he was Ka-
Tzetnik. Up until this point, he had remained anonymous and avoided all
public appearances. Segev, The Seventh Million, 5.
4 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 127; and Anita Shapira, “The Eichmann
Trial: Changing Perspectives,” in After Eichmann: Collective Memory and
the Holocaust since 1961 (London: Routledge, 2005), 20. Dinur’s full
testimony can be found on the website of the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum, “Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive,”
https://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=2285,
accessed August 16, 2016.
 5 Rachel Auerbach, the director of the department for the collection of
testimony at Yad Vashem during the trial and herself a survivor, had pushed
for the inclusion of the victims’ perspective but was disappointed with the
result, saying that trial officials “wanted only official documents that could
serve as direct proof of [Eichmann’s] guilt. Witnesses, if any, would only be
those who could produce direct evidence as to his culpability.” See Rachel
Auerbach, “Witnesses and Testimony in the Eichmann Trial,” Yad Vashem
Bulletin, 11 (April–May 1962): 37–45.
6 Hanna Yablonka, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel:
The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials,” Israel Studies 8, no.
3 (2003): 1–24, 3. Yablonka’s English translation contained grammatical
problems, which I corrected.
7 For an excellent examination of how the dictates of criminal law courts can
conflict with the achievement of justice for genocidal crimes, not to mention
the goals of sensitively representing the experiences of its victims, see Devin
Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History and
the Limits of Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
8 “In the annals of public awareness of the Holocaust period,” a page about the
trial on Yad Vashem’s website explains, “nothing rivals the Eichmann trial as
a milestone and a turning point, whose impact is evident to this day.”
“Eichmann’s Trial in Jerusalem: Shaping an Awareness of the Holocaust in
Israeli and World Public Opinion,”
www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/eichmann/awareness_of_the_holocaust.asp
accessed August 16, 2016. Aleida Assman, one of the most important
historians of memory in Germany, includes the trial, along with the creation
of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in
Ludwigsburg in 1958 and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials between 1963 and
1965, as marking the second phase in Germany’s memory culture after a post-
war period of “communicative silence” between 1945 and 1957. Aleida
Assmann, “Wendepunkte der deutschen Erinnerungsgeschichte,” in
Gedächtnis—Identität—Interkulturalität: ein kulturwissenschaftliches
Studienbuch, ed. Andrea Horváth and Eszter Pabis (Budapest: Bölcsész
Konzorcium, 2006), 42–50, 44.
9 The term is from Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust
Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012).
10 Segev, The Seventh Million, 350. On the impact of radio on Israeli public
reception of the trial, see Amit Pinchevski and Tamar Liebes, “Severed
Voices: Radio and the Mediation of Trauma in the Eichmann Trial,” Public
Culture 22, no. 2 (2010): 265–91.
11 Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research: Birth and Evolution (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2012), 190. For a comprehensive exploration of the cultural
impact of the trial, see Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel Vs. Adolf
Eichmann (New York: Schocken, 2004). An account that focuses on the legal
 drama of the trial can be found in Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial
(New York: Schocken, 2011).
12 Raul Hilberg cites absolutely no survivor testimony in his classic book: The
Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, [1961]
1985). I will address his methodology in more detail later in this chapter.
13 For an overview of the various phases of memory culture related to National
Socialism, see Arnd Bauerkämper, Das Umstrittene Gedächtnis. Die
Erinnerung an Nationalsozialismus, Faschismus und Krieg in Europa seit
1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2012).
14 Quoted in Yechiel Szeintuch, “The Myth of the Salamander in the Work of
Ka-Tzetnik,” trans. Daniella Tourgeman and Maayan Zigdon. Partial
Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 3, no. 1 (2005): 101
from Raphael Bashan, “K. Z. 135633 ‘Kulam Hayu Eichmanim!’” [“K. Z.
135633 ‘They Were All Eichmanns!’”] Maariv (Tel Aviv), April 4, 1961. I
provide a longer version of this quotation in the introduction of this book.
15 See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric
Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For an historian’s
reflection, see Peter Fritzsche, “The Archive,” History & Memory 17, no. 1–2
(2005): 15–44. Referring to visual rather than literary evidence, Elissa
Mailänder has recently insisted that historians branch out from their fixation
on the “positivist ‘extractive’ logic of the archive” to develop “a
complementary close reading of empirical sources, which rather than peeling
away their uncertain and subjective elements instead directly engages with
their ambiguous and contradictory meanings.” Elissa Mailänder, “Making
Sense of a Rape Photograph: Sexual Violence as Social Performance on the
Eastern Front, 1939–1944,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 3
(2017): 489–520.
16 For a description of standard assumptions about the “silence” of the survivors
before 1961, see David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, “Introduction,” in
After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, ed. David Cesarani and
Eric J. Sundquist (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–2. On the use of
the term “Holocaust” as compared to other terms, such as “Shoah,”
“genocide,” and “Judenvernichtung,” see Omer Bartov, Murder in Our
Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 56–60.
17 Segev, The Seventh Million, 70–71, 424, 440, and 479–80.
18 Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical
Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 19.
19 Eric J. Sundquist, “Silence Reconsidered: An Afterword,” in Cesarani and
Sundquist, After the Holocaust, 211.
20 The testimonies are now also available at Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum. For a discussion of the “polyphony” of these narratives—
the fact that the interviewers’ voices, questions, and intentions are somewhat
obscured and can overshadow the voices of the interviewees—see Beate
 Müller, “Trauma, Historiography and Polyphony: Adult Voices in the
CJHC’s Early Postwar Child Holocaust Testimonies,” History & Memory 24,
no. 2 (2012): 157–95.
21 Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 19.
22 The archive is variously known as the Ringelblum Archive, Oneg Shabbat,
Oyneg Shabes, or Oyneg Shabbos. It is now housed at the Jewish Historical
Institute in Warsaw (www.jhi.pl/en/archives), and selections have been made
available in an online exhibition at Yad Vashem, “Let the World Read and
Know,” www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/ringelbum/intro.asp, accessed
August 15, 2016. For general accounts of the archive, see See Samuel D.
Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw
Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2007). See also Zoë Waxman, “Testimony and Representation,” in The
Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Houndsmills and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 490.
23 David Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence’: Postwar Responses to
the Destruction of European Jewry,” in Cesarani and Sundquist, After the
Holocaust, 15.
24 See Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence,’” for details.
25 Alan Rosen, “‘We Know Very Little in America’: David Boder and Un-
belated Testimony,” in Cesarani and Sundquist, After the Holocaust, 102 and
110. Rosen notes that even combined with other efforts to interview 7,000
survivors in Poland, 3,500 in Hungary, and 2,500 in Germany, only about 2–3
percent of DPs were every interviewed and that most did not want to speak
(102 and 110).
26 Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 11. By way of comparison, she writes that the
Shoah Visual History Foundation holds 52,000 testimonies (48,361 from
Jews); and the Fortunoff Video Archive holds 4,400 testimonies (p. 12).
27 Mark L. Smith, “No Silence in Yiddish: Popular and Scholarly Writing about
the Holocaust in the Early Postwar Years,” in Cesarani and Sundquist, After
the Holocaust, 55–65
28 Hasia R. Diner, “Origins and Meanings of the Myth of Silence,” in Cesarani
and Sundquist, After the Holocaust, 195. See also Hasia R. Diner, We
Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence
after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University, 2010).
29 Diner, “Origins,” 196–8.
30 Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 197–8.
31 This is true, for example, of accounts by resistors like David Rousett, Eugen
Kogon, and Pelagia Lewinska, who barely mention Jews in their books. See
also Janusz Nel Siedlecki, Krystyn Olszewski, and Tadeusz Borowski, We
Were in Auschwitz, trans. Alicia Nitecki (New York: Welcome Rain, 2000)—
the Polish original was published in 1946 under the title Byliśmy w
Oświęcimiu; and Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and
Gentlemen, ed. Barbara Vedder, trans. Barbara Vedder and Michael Kandel,
 Reissue (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992)—originally published under the
title Pożegnanie z Marią in 1959.
32 Pieter Lagrou, “Facing the Holocaust in France, Belgium, and the
Netherlands,” in Lessons and Legacies VI: New Currents in Holocaust
Research, ed. Jeffrey M. Diefendorf, vol. 6 (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2004), 482–3.
33 Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence,’” 22–4.
34 Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 45. Cited from Lawrence Douglas, The
Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 12.
35 Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence,’” 29. The earlier quotation is
from Nehamiah Robinson of the Institute for Jewish Affairs.
36 Ibid., 32.
37 Waxman, “Testimony and Representation,” 493.
38 One might contrast Ka-Tzetnik’s success with the difficulties that Primo Levi
had in getting his memoir published in Italy. The manuscript of Se questo è
un uomo—“If This Is a Man,” but unfortunately changed in English to
Survival in Auschwitz—was rejected by six publishers before being published
in 1947 in a print run of only 2,500 copies by a press that folded soon
thereafter. See Confino, Foundational Pasts, 49; and Waxman, “Testimony
and Representation,” 496.
39 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 7 and 164. On the cultural construction
of trauma, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,”
in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron
Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 1–30. Cultural trauma is constructed,
Alexander argues, when a representative of a collectivity makes a claim that
goes beyond identifying guilt to address the broad social impact of the injury.
“It is a claim to some fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying
profanation of some sacred value, a narrative about a horribly destructive
social process, and a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic
reparation and reconstruction” (p. 11).
40 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Revised ed. (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1963), 6.
41 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 5 and 223–4. Felman points out that Dinur
did not volunteer to testify, but did so only very reluctantly as one of the few
material witnesses to have met Eichmann. Felman, The Juridical
Unconscious, 143.
42 In a German radio interview with Günter Gaus in 1964, Arendt described
how she and her husband refused to believe what they heard about Auschwitz
in 1943. The dawning realization of the extent of Nazi crimes later produced
existential trauma. “It was as if an abyss had opened,” she told Gaus. Quoted
in Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 150.
43 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 151.
44 Ibid., 153. Felman cites Claude Lanzmann’s argument that “[t]he worst moral
and artistic crime that can be committed in producing a work dedicated to the
Holocaust is to consider the Holocaust as past. Either the Holocaust is legend
or it is present: in no case is it a memory.” See Claude Lanzmann, “From the
Holocaust to ‘Holocaust,’” Dissent 28, no. 2 (1981): 194.
45 Michael Geyer and Konrad H. Jarausch, “Great Men and Postmodern
Ruptures: Overcoming the ‘Belatedness’ of German Historiography,”
German Studies Review 18, no. 2 (1995): 262–3 and 255.
46 Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the
Jews of Europe (London: Elek Books, 1956 [1951]), xiv. Quoted in Tony
Kushner, “Saul Friedländer, Holocaust Historiography and the Use of
Testimony,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul
Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies, ed. Christian Wiese and
Paul Betts (London & New York: Continuum, 2010), 67.
47 Raul Hilberg, “The Development of Holocaust Research—A Personal
Overview,” in Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges,
Polemics and Achievements, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 25–36, quotation from p. 29.
48 For a brief overview, see Kushner, “Saul Friedländer,” 69–70. The work of
Luisa Passerini in Italy and Paul Thompson and Raphael Samuel in Britain
was particularly significant.
49 See, for example, Saul Friedländer, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in
Historical Interpretation,” History & Memory 1, no. 2 (1991): 61–76.
50 Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
Final Solution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
51 Martin Broszat, “A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism,” in
Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate, ed.
Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 77–87. The term “morality-
free” is Confino’s. See Foundational Pasts, 33. Various summaries of the
debate and its later phases can be found in Dan Diner, ed., Ist der
Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit
(Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987).
52 Friedländer, “The ‘Final Solution,’” 32.
53 Confino, Foundational Past, 50. Browning, it should be noted, was quite
open to applying social scientific theories to historical arguments. See
Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and
the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper, 1993). But in the final
analysis, his methodology can still be described as following traditional
empirical methods. I will discuss his more recent research later in this
chapter.
54 Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York & London: W. W.
Norton, 2000).
55 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
 1975).
56 Hayden White, The Content and the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987), 21.
57 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 1.
58 Ibid., 8–9.
59 Ibid., 17. He particularly criticizes Arno Mayer’s methodological approach in
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
60 James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1988), 4.
61 Ibid., 5.
62 Ernst Nolte, “Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986. A comprehensive account that
dispassionately describes both the left- (Habermas) and the right-wing (Nolte)
sides of the debate can be found in Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past:
History, Holocaust, & German Nation Identity (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1988).
63 Dirk Rupnow’s contribution to this volume delves into this topic in more
detail.
64 Konrad H. Jarausch, “Zeitgeschichte und Erinnerung. Deutungskonkurrenz
oder Interdependenz?” in Verletztes Gedächtnis: Erinnerungskultur und
Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt, eds. Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow
(Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2002), 34.
65 Ibid., 10.
66 Hans Günter Hockerts, “Zugänge zur Zeitgeschichte. Primärerfahrungen,
Erinnerungskultur, Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Verletztes Gedächtnis, 41.
67 Aside from their individual publications, which are too numerous to list here,
see Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, “Das Gestern im Heute. Medien und
soziales Gedächtnis,” in Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die
Kommunikationswissenschaft, ed. Klaus Merten, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and
Siegfried Weischenberg (Munich: Westdeutscher, 1994), 114–40.
68 Rudolf Jaworski, “Die historische Gedächtnis- und Erinnerungsforschung als
Aufgabe und Herausforderung der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Verflochtene
Erinnerungen: Polen und seine Nachbarn im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed.
Martin Aust, Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, and Stefan Troebst (Cologne, Weimar,
and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 19.
69 See, for example, the three-volume study edited by Etienne François and
Hagen Schulze, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001);
Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit,
Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach
1945 (DVA: Stuttgart, 1999); Christian Gudehus, Ariane Eichenberg, and
 Harald Welzer, Gedächtnis und Erinnerung: Ein Interdisziplinäres Handbuch
(Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2010). These are just a
few examples of a very rich literature that cannot be explored in detail here.
70 Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, new
edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). This book is an extended
exploration of the video testimonies housed at the Fortunoff Video Archive
for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University.
71 Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 31.
72 See also Allan Megill, “Two Para-Historical Approaches to Atrocity,”
History and Theory 41, no. 4 (2002): 104–23. A concerted recent effort to
bring historical and literary approaches into dialog can be found in Iris
Roebling-Grau and Dirk Rupnow, eds., Holocaust’-Fiktion: Kunst jenseits
der Authentizität (Paderborn: Fink, Wilhelm, 2015).
73 See Browning, Ordinary Men. This book certainly discusses the individual
experiences of perpetrators, but it relies on recorded trial testimony rather
than freely narrated accounts.
74 Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and
Postwar Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 38–9.
75 Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor
Camp (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 8.
76 He is specifically responding to Martin Broszat. For a description of the long-
running debate between these two historians, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi
Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London & New
York: E. Arnold & Routledge Chapman and Hall, 1993), 223; and Dan Diner,
“Between Aporia and Apology: On the Limits of Historicizing National
Socialism,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’
Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 135–45.
77 Confino, Foundational Pasts, 53–4.
78 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945: The Years of
Extermination (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xxv–xxvi.
79 Confino, Foundational Pasts, 53.
80 The original German version of this plea (cited in its English translation
above) was Martin Broszat, “Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des
Nationalsozialismus,” Merkur, no. 435 (May 1, 1985).
81 Ibid., 52 and 54.
82 The list of examples would be vast, but for a particularly influential example,
see Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, Opa war kein
Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt:
Fischer, 2002).
83 The history of emotions has also taken hold in German academia, as Ute
Frevert’s “History of Emotions” institute at the Max Planck Institute for
Human Development in Berlin makes clear. For a description of
methodological developments, see Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of
 Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian
Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012):
193–220.
84 Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel claim that there is virtually no
reference to sexual violence in German documents. See their “Introduction,”
in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, ed. Sonja M.
Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Lebanon: University Press of New
England, 2010), 2. In light of more recent research, this claim certainly
requires revision. See the various accounts of documented sexual violence in
David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (London:
Macmillan, 2016); and Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldiers: On
Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret Second World War Tapes of German
POWs (London: McClelland & Stewart, 2012), esp. 164–75.
85 The experience prompted Saidel and Sonja Hedgepeth to begin work on their
collection of essays, Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust.
For an account of this experience, see Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua, “Silence
Surrounding Sexual Violence during Holocaust,” Haaretz, July 16, 2014,
www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/.premium-1.599099, accessed March 22,
2017.
86 One of the transcribers of the tapes of the POW conversations uncovered by
Neitzel and Welzer clearly found the discussions of incidents of sexual
violence so trivial that he stopped typing out the details of the conversations,
noting only the word “women” four times with time stamps at half-hour
intervals. Ibid., 170.
87 Ruth Seifert has argued that “one rule of the game [of war] has always been
that violence against women in the conquered territory is conceded to the
victor during the immediate postwar period.” See Ruth Seifert, “War and
Rape: A Preliminary Analysis,” in Mass Rape: The War against Women in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer, trans. Marion Faber
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 58. On rape as a weapon of
war, see Regina Mühlhäuser, “Reframing Sexual Violence as Weapon of
War: The Case of the German Wehrmacht during the War and Genocide in
the Soviet Union, 1941–1944,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 3
(2017): 366–401. On the myth that Rassenschande laws prevented rape, see
Helene Sinnreich, “‘And It Was Something We Didn’t Talk About’: Rape of
Jewish Women during the Holocaust,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of
Culture and History 14, no. 2 (2008): 1–22. On Rassenschande in general,
see Patricia Szobar, “Telling Stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: Race
Defilement in German, 1933 to 1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11,
no. 1/2 (2002): 131–63; and Alexandra Przyrembel, “Rassenschande”:
Reinheitsmythos und Vernichtungslegitimation im Nationalsozialismus
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003).
88 Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women’s Liberation
(London: Virago Press, 2000). Early and useful work on prostitution can be
 found in Christa Paul, Zwangsprostitution: Staatlich Errichtete Bordelle Im
Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1995). I relied upon Paul’s
arguments in my two articles: Annette F. Timm, “The Ambivalent Outsider:
Prostitution, Promiscuity and VD Control in Nazi Berlin,” in Social Outsiders
in the Third Reich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 192–
211; and “Sex with a Purpose: Prostitution, Venereal Disease and Militarized
Masculinity in the Third Reich,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no.
1/2 (2002): 223–55. Important work on sexual violence as part of the
occupation of Eastern Europe (as opposed to within the concentration camps)
has been conducted by Regina Mühlhäuser. See her Eroberungen: Sexuelle
Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion
1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010); and Regina Mühlhäuser,
“The Unquestioned Crime: Sexual Violence by German Soldiers during the
War of Annihilation in the Soviet Union, 1941–45,” in Rape in Wartime, ed.
Raphaelle Branche and Fabrice Virgili (London and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), 34–46. See also Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and
Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
89 A volume currently in production and edited by Mark Roseman, Devin
Pendas, and Richard Wetzell will explicitly tackle the dominance of this
racial paradigm. See Beyond the Racial State (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2017). My contribution to the volume is entitled “Mothers,
Whores or Sentimental Dupes? Emotion and Race in Historiographical
Debates about Women in the Third Reich,” 335–61.
90 A focused, though not very convincing, argument about House of Dolls can
be found in Miryam Sivan, “‘Stoning the Messenger’: Yihiel Dinur’s House
of Dolls and Piepel,” in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the
Holocaust, 201–16.
91 It has perhaps become more common for survivors to acknowledge this
aspect of their experience. In the interviews conducted by the Shoah
Foundation, there are more than 500 that discuss rape. If we include other
forms of sexual violence and coerced sex, the number rises to 1,000. See
Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, “Introduction,” in Sexual
Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, 1.
92 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli
Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 47.
93 Carolyn J. Dean, “Empathy, Pornography, and Suffering,” Differences 14, no.
1 (2003): 92–8.
94 Ibid., 93.
95 For general accounts of these slave labor camps, see Ulrich Herbert,
Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des “Ausländer-Einsatzes” in der
Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1999);
Felicja Karay, Death Comes in Yellow: Skarzysko-Kamienna Slave Labor
Camp, revised ed. (Amsterdam: Routledge, 1997); and Mark Spoerer,
 Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter,
Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa,
1939–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt DVA, 2001). The German
federal archives also provides a useful summary. “Zwangsarbeitslager /
Zivilarbeitslager,” Das Bundesarchiv, accessed August 16, 2016,
www.bundesarchiv.de/zwangsarbeit/haftstaetten/index.php?tab=27.
96 In earlier works, Sommer had only found 174 cases (see Robert Sommer,
“Sexual Exploitation of Women in Nazi Concentration Camp Brothels,” in
Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, 46–60, esp.
52), but by the time he wrote his book, he had uncovered at least
circumstantial evidence for around 200. See Robert Sommer, Das KZ-
Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in Nationalsozialistischen
Konzentrationslagern (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).
97 A similar argument might be made about other popular depictions of sexual
violence in the Third Reich, particularly the wave of Nazisploitation films
that were produced primarily in North America and Italy in the 1970s. Guido
Vitiello’s contribution to this volume explores this aspect of Ka-Tzetnik’s
reception in more detail. Silke Wenk argues, however, that the
“pornographization” of the Holocaust—the explicit appeal to emotions
through sexual themes—has the effect of fetishizing trauma and the female
body in particular in order to preserve the historical narrative from the
ruptures of the Holocaust. Silke Wenk, “Rhetoriken der Pornografisierung:
Rahmungen des Blicks auf die NS-Verbrechen,” in Gedächtnis und
Geschlecht: Deutungsmuster in Darstellungen des Nationalsozialistischen
Genozids, ed. Insa Eschebach, Sigrid Jacobeit, and Silke Wenk
(Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2002), 269–96, esp. 290.
98 Pascale Bos goes into more detail on this question in her contribution to this
volume, citing the work of Mühlhäuser, along with: Dalia Ofer, “Gender
Issues in Diaries and Testimonies of the Ghetto: The Case of Warsaw,” in
Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 143–68; and Katarzyna Person, “Sexual
Violence during the Holocaust: The Case of Forced Prostitution in the
Warsaw Ghetto,” Shofar 33, no. 2 (2015): 103–21, 156.
99 On the truth claims in Ka-Tzetnik’s work, see Iris Milner, “The ‘Gray Zone’
Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in Ka. Tzetnik’s Literary
Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (July 25, 2008): 113–55, esp.
115. On his techniques of literary realism, see Jeremy D. Popkin, “Ka-Tzetnik
135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History 33, no. 2 (April
1, 2002): 343–55.
100 Galia Glasner-Heled, “Reader, Writer, and Holocaust Literature: The Case of
Ka-Tzetnik,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 114.
101 The work of Dagmar Herzog has been path-breaking. See Dagmar Herzog,
“‘Pleasure, Sex and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and
the Sexual Revolution in West Germany,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998):
 393–444; and Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in
Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
102 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 77.
103 He was interviewed for Jessica Ravitz, “Silence Lifted: The Untold Stories of
Rape during the Holocaust,” CNN, June 24, 2011,
www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/06/24/holocaust.rape/, accessed March
22, 2017.
104 It is striking that Langer seems to feel quite differently about the taboos
surrounding another form of violence that is notable in the testimonies he
explores but is rarely discussed in general accounts of the Holocaust:
cannibalism. In this case, he accepts that witnesses’ refusal to talk about
things “too terrible to describe” should not distract us from the fact that
cannibalism was a central component of the overall experience of the
Holocaust, in this case “the disruptive effects of hunger in the extreme camp
situation.” Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 213, fn. 28 and 208, fn. 18.
 3
The Evil Spirits of the Shoah: Ka-Tzentik’s Literary
Testimony to Death and Survival in the
Concentrationary Universe
Iris Milner

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’ 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 in Post-Holocaust Poetry,” in Friedländer, Probing the Limits of
Representation, 259–76.
6 See the use of these terms in James Young, “Holocaust Documentary Fiction:
The Novelist as Eyewitness,” in Lang, Writing and the Holocaust, 200–15.
Young mentions D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981) and Anatoly
Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel (1967) as examples of docu-
novels. The entire third section of Writing and the Holocaust, titled “Fiction
as Truth,” deals with relevant questions.
7 Rote Pops, Das Leed Fon Ghetto (Warsaw: Yiddish Buch, 1962). Joseph Gor,
the editor of Landsberger Lager Zeitung, a Yiddish newspaper published in
the DP camp in Landsberg, Germany, similarly referred to the “inflation of
poetry” (Inflazia fon poezia). See a discussion of the literary activities in the
DP camps and of Gor’s comments about it in the introduction to my book Ha-
narativim shel sifrut ha-Shoah (Ramat Gan: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008).
 8 Ka-Tzetnik 135633 [Yehiel Dinur], Shivitti, trans. Eliyah Nike de-Nur and
Lisa Herman (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989). The book’s Hebrew title
is Ha-tzofen: E.D.M.A (Code: E.D.M.A.).
9 Yehiel Dinur, Salamandra, trans. Y. L. Baruch (Ramat Gan: Hakibbutz
Hameuchad, 1987 [1946]); and Ka-Tzetnik 135633 [Yehiel Dinur], House of
Dolls, trans. Moshe M. Kohn (London: Grafton Books, 1985 [1956]). Piepel
was originally published in Hebrew in 1961. It appeared in English both as
Piepel, trans. Moshe M. Kohn (London: Anthony Blond, 1961) and as Moni:
A Novel of Auschwitz, trans. Moshe M. Kohn (New Jersey: Citadel Press,
1963).
10 I borrow the term “concentrationary universe” from title of French survivor
David Rousset’s book L’Univers Concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions de
Minuit, 1965 [1946]).
11 On the reception of Dinur’s works as pornographic literature, particularly in
the 1950s, see Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other
Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2
(1997): 42–76.
12 Omer Bartov discusses these flaws in Ibid. For another harsh criticism of
Dinur in all these aspects, see Dan Miron, “Bein Sefer Le-Efer,” in Alpayim
10 (1994): 196–224.
13 Tom Segev relates some details of Dinur’s private life: his residence in a dark
cellar apartment in Tel Aviv and his habit of spending the nights on a bench
in Rothschild Boulevard; his marriage with Nina Asherman who had read his
novel Salamandra and had been determined to find its anonymous author; his
hiding from the public eye prior to and since the Eichmann trial; and his habit
of secluding himself for long periods of time in an empty hut in order to
write. See Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust, trans.
Haim Watzman (New York: Henry and Holt, 1991).
14 These theatrical gestures include his choice of the family name Dinur
(meaning in Aramaic “out of the fire”) and the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik
(derived from the German term Konzentrationslager); his habit of burning his
works upon completing them (Yechiel Szeintuch quotes Dinur on this subject
in his book Kemesiach Lefi Tumo [Jerusalem: Beit Lohamei Hagetaot & Dov
Sadan Institute, 2003]); his stealing and burning of library copies of a Yiddish
poetry book he had published in Poland at the age of twenty-two (Dan Miron
discusses this episode at length in his essay “Bein Sefer Le-Efer”); and the
recording and publication of his hallucinations in a post-trauma LSD
treatment he received in the 1980s (see Tom Segev on “Ka-Zetnik’s Trip,” in
Segev, The Seventh Million, 3–14).
15 The Preleshnik family possibly correlates, to some degree, to the author’s
family, originally named Feiner, although, as Dina Porat discusses in this
volume, there is great uncertainty about Dinur’s background. As Segev has
demonstrated, Dinur consistently refused to disclose any details regarding his
original family (Tom Segev, “Shiur Be-historia: Ha-achot She-hayta o lo
 Hayta,” Haaretz, April 23, 2009). In a telephonic interview I conducted in
1999 with Prof. Yehudit Sinai, the half-sister of Dinur’s first wife Sanya
(portrayed in Salamandra as the little girl Lily), Prof. Sinai told me that in the
Sosnowiec ghetto Dinur lived in a small flat with Sayna and herself. Their
father, a wealthy shoe manufacturer, had left for Eretz Yisrael prior to the
war, to join his son who had studied in the Technion in Haifa. According to
Prof. Sinai, Dinur’s mother had died before the war, and his father lived in the
ghetto with Dinur’s younger brother and sister, Yitzhak and Malkale. Prof.
Sinai did not know if Dinur had another sister named Daniella or whether the
destiny of Moni and Daniella in The House of Dolls and Piepel reflects in any
way the fate of Dinur’s siblings.
16 Gorgio Agamben uses the term “new terra ethica” in this context. See
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 69.
17 Primo Levi uses this term in his book The Drowned and the Saved (I
sommersi ei salvati) published in 1986, written a short time before his death
by suicide on April 11, 1987. See Primo Levi, “The Gray Zone,” in The
Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage
Books, 1989 [1986]): 37–69.
18 Nazi racial laws prohibited sexual relations between Germans and Jews.
Thus, Jewish women could not be used in the concentration camps’ brothels,
which served German officers. According to Robert Sommer in his book Das
KZ-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen
Konzentrationslagern (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009), the women forced to
work in these brothels were of German, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, and
Polish origins, and none of them were Jewish.
19 Naama Schick, “Haguf Hamisken Hazeh—Hahitnasut Hanashit Al Pi
Haautobiografiot Shenichtevu Bein Hashanim 1946–2000 Al Yedei Nitsolot
Auschwith-Birkenau” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2004).
20 Iris Milner, “The ‘Gray Zone’ Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in
Ka-Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008):
113–55.
21 The issue of the acceptance of Holocaust survivors by Israeli society in the
first decades after the Holocaust is in itself a rather controversial one. Hanoch
Bartov has vehemently refuted the assertion that survivors were treated by the
Israeli collective (at the time highly devoted to the nation-building project and
to myths of heroism that supported it) in a paternalistic manner and denies
that they were blamed for their inability to fight back. See Hanoch Bartov,
“Hadiba Haraa’ al Adishuteinu Lashoah,” in Ani Lo Hatzabar Hamitology
(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1995), 26–36.
22 Saul Friedländer has commented that in the later decades of the twentieth
century, Israeli society had grown mature enough to confront the destruction
and desperation of the Shoah without attempting to place it within a
framework of heroism, as had been common in the first years after World
War II: “we can simply face [the Shoah] as it was, a catastrophe of untold
 magnitude.” Saul Friedländer, “Roundtable discussion,” in Lang, Writing and
the Holocaust, 287–9. Quotation from p. 289.
23 Cathy Caruth, “Traumatic Awakenings,” in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative and History (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University
Press, 1996), 91–112.
24 Ibid., 102.
25 Lawrence Langer coined the term “choiceless choice” in his Versions of
Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University
Press, 1982), 72.
 4
The Poetics of the Other Planet: Testimony and
Chronotope in Ka-Tzetnik’s Piepel
Or Rogovin

The past two decades have yielded a rich body of studies examining the
life and writing of Yehiel Dinur, who published the Salamandra sextet
(1945–87) under the name Ka-Tzetnik 135633. This is a significant and
encouraging development because, even today, the available scholarship
on Ka-Tzetnik is fairly limited, certainly in comparison to the vast and
unique body of his work and to the profound impact it left on the shaping
of Israeli Holocaust consciousness. The prolific use, in all types of Israeli
discourse, of the phrase the “Other Planet” to refer to the Nazi
concentration camps is but one example of such impact by a public figure
who, as Dan Miron observes, “fulfils in Israeli culture an almost official
role as the ‘spokesman’ of the Holocaust and its atrocities.”1 It is perhaps
because of Dinur’s iconic status and the testimonial value of his texts that
the poetics of his writing has received little scholarly attention. Although
Yechiel Szeintuch’s recent biographical investigation of this writer-
survivor is essential to any discussion in the field, it provides only a partial
examination of Ka-Tzetnik’s literary art, and it focuses on only one poem
and one book, both titled Salamandra.2 Dan Miron’s study of the 1993
scandal, which resulted when Dinur removed and destroyed an original
copy of his 1931 book of Yiddish poems from the national library in Israel,
zeroes in on Ka-Tzetnik’s persona and his work as a pre-war poet, while
the author’s craft in his Holocaust writing is of secondary interest.3
Although both Omer Bartov’s investigation of the author’s reception in
Israel and Iris Milner’s analysis of the ethical dimension of his writing
provide important observations on Ka-Tzetnik’s technique, neither focus
on poetics.4 While these and other studies certainly shed some light on
Salamandra’s narrative art, there has been a tendency to dwell too
narrowly on what has been described as “pornographic” descriptions or
“Kitsch and death” in Ka-Tzetnik’s narratives, to the detriment of serious
attention to the literary aspects of his writing.5 What is missing from the
existing scholarship, as valuable as it otherwise is, is a comprehensive
investigation of Ka-Tzetnik’s poetics: an attempt to identify the underlying
system of his writing, to formulate how the multitude of elements,
techniques, and dimensions of the Salamandra texts function
cooperatively to convey a worldview or experience and generate a readerly
effect. Such a system can reflect how Ka-Tzetnik’s vast textual project—
as well as the act of writing itself—is tied to extratextual factors, such as
the conditions of writing and the author’s biography, and it can allow for a
fuller integration of the literary text and the historical and cultural
circumstances of its creation.
A useful entry point into this system may be Yehiel Dinur’s brief
testimony at the Eichmann trial, most tellingly his denial of literary
calculation:

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 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
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 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, 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 Ka-Tzetnik’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 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 inside-Germans. He’s been “outside.” That’s where
the Germans brought him from. He knew that “outside” no more
home or family existed. Not only his home, and not only his family.
Outside there were only Germans. Everything else was here, inside.
 Everything ended on the inner side, at the barbed wire, at the electric
mesh.21

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, 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
block-master’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 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. Everywhere-Auschwitz. As far as the eye can
see—an Auschwitz-latticed sky.31

In the agonizing and desperate experience of camp life, time and space
fuse into an indistinguishable, inescapable, and infinite sequence that
language can capture only from within: an “Auschwitz day,” an
“Auschwitz sky.” The Other Planet erases any different, previous, normal
existence, along with one’s ability to sense or even imagine such an
existence. There is only Auschwitz, from within and from without. There
is nothing but it, in time, space, and mind.
The temporal experience of the Other Planet distorts the conventional
perception and measurement of time. While the counting of hours
dominates the characters’ sense of time as their bodies collapse into the
irreversible stage of becoming Muselmänner, days, months, and years are
suspended in a world where, to quote Elie Wiesel, “the stomach alone was
measuring time.”32 And the stomach can only measure hours between
meals, leaving the hungry temporally disoriented and helpless, without a
concrete grip on the time that has passed and without the basic ability to
draw comfort from the length of survival or to make plans for the future.
The inhabitants of the Other Planet are as lost in time as they are in space.
Making this perception of time into a readerly effect is no simple task
given that writing about fictional or factual events of the Holocaust always
assumes a well-defined timeframe that stretches between 1933 and 1945.
Even readers only remotely familiar with the history of the Holocaust tend
to be aware of when plots located in the Nazi camps must end, and this
assumption holds even more strongly for Hebrew and Yiddish audiences.
Ka-Tzetnik approaches the challenge by extending the temporal
experience of the Other Planet from the declarative and thematic level into
his poetic design. Moni’s six-hour timeframe is a key factor in shaping his
line of plot, and his growing psychological distress as he observes the
hours pass in hunger is shared with the reader since the world of the camp
is discovered through this character’s mediating consciousness. Through
the coordinated reworking of these two opposing timeframes—accelerated
biologized hours and suspended longer units of time—Ka-Tzetnik
weakens his readers’ grip on the historical timeframe as they move further
and further into his story, replacing it with an experiential, inner sense of
time. Although describing a place with a familiar temporal setting and an
obvious date of termination, Ka-Tzetnik desynchronizes our—and his
characters’—sense of historical and camp time, allowing only the latter to
dominate the text. From a perspective that is interior to the camp, clock-
time quickly becomes obsolete, and the devastating otherness of the
Auschwitz planet and the sense of isolation and helplessness it imposes
upon its concentrationees is revealed.33 All that is left is the sense of the
rapidly collapsing body over a calendar that has frozen.
The temporal dimension of the Other Planet is observed most clearly
when considered against the background of the chronotope of the Greek
romance, which Bakhtin uses as a point of departure for his theoretical
discussion. In the abstract, interchangeable, and alien space of the Greek
romance, where no organic relationship between people and world can be
developed, characters are passive and lack initiative; they are constantly at
the mercy of the absolute power of chance. This vulnerability in space,
however, is balanced by the temporal dimension of a chronotope, in which
the order of events could be altered and even reversed while leaving
characters unaffected. “Greek adventure time,” Bakhtin observes, “leaves
no traces—neither in the world nor in human beings,” and characters can
continue to be thrown from one adventure into another infinitely and in
any order.34 Bakhtin’s definitions help us to understand the daunting
invincibility generated by the chronotope of the Other Planet. Its spatial
dimension is atypical of the modern European novel, especially the realist
novel, with its localized events and depiction of concrete details of a world
which is familiar or native to its dwellers, hence a world offering the
potential to empower characters and limit the absolute power of chance.
This type of space Ka-Tzetnik reserves for scenes set in the ghetto. In
contrast, his narration of the camp adopts the spatial dimension Bakhtin
observes in the Greek romance (with its interchangeable, alien, and
abstract space), which renders the characters powerless. Time in the camp,
on the other hand, does comply with the conventions of the European
novel in terms of having an impact on characters and in the way that the
author utilizes the theme of “becoming” and a “man’s gradual formation”
through developing experience.35 However, while European novels tend to
actualize characters’ growth in the form of “education” or “coming of age”
(as in the genre of the Bildungsroman), in the camp time has the opposite
effects almost exclusively. Even as every passing moment in principle
brings the Ka-Tzets closer to possible liberation and allows time to procure
a life-saving Funktion, it also weakens their bodies and minds. Every
moment on the Other Planet accelerates mental and physical aging toward
becoming a Muselmann. The intersection of time and space in Ka-
Tzetnik’s textualization of the camp constitutes a diabolic hybrid that
might be called a “concentrationary chronotope.” In the world governed by
this chronotope, the individual is powerless and isolated in an alien and
interchangeable space, always at the mercy of the absolute power of
chance and defenseless before psychological and physical formation. This
formation almost exclusively takes the form of dwindling spiritual and
biological resources to the inevitable point of collapse.

“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 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.
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,” Ka-Tzetnik’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.
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
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 the walls they stood, wiping the
excreta oozing from their trousers. Unheard they stood, as though
they had no tongue. All identically occupied, each sealed off within
himself. A row of shadows silent beside dark walls. The latrine now
seemed emptier and more ominous than before. The stillness, too,
was more menacing.45

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 Ka-Tzetnik’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 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 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, 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 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’sfirst book, Salamandra (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1946), 216.
Yet, considering the phrase is merely given in passing in a large novel, it is
unlikely that it is from Salamandra that it made its way to public discourse.
Ka-Tzetnik’s most extensive use of the phrase is made in his final book,
Tsofen: EDMA (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz hameuhad, 1987), translated in English
as Shivitti, trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa Herman (New York: Harper &
Row, 1989); Dan Miron, “Beyn sefer le’efer,” Hasifriya haiveret (Tel Aviv:
Yediot Ahronot, 2005), 148. Originally published in Alpayim 10 (1994): 196–
224.
2 Yechiel Szeintuch, Salamandrah: Mitos Ṿe-Hisṭoryah Be-Khitve K. Tseṭniḳ
(Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009). For some of this study’s findings in English, see
Yechiel Szeintuch, “The Myth of the Salamander in the Work of Ka-
Tzetnik,” trans. Daniella Tourgeman and Maayan Zigdon, Partial Answers:
 Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 3, no. 1 (2005): 101–32.
3 For more about the event, see Miron, “Beyn sefer le’efer.”
4 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth
Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 42–76. Iris
Milner, “The Gray Zone Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in Ka.
Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 113–
55.
5 Galia Glasner-Heled investigates reader responses to Ka-Tzetnik’s daring and
hard-to-bear descriptions of atrocity, and Howard Needler analyzes the
scriptural dimensions of Ka-Tzetnik’s use of Hebrew: Galia Glasner-Heled,
“Reader, Writer, and Holocaust Literature: The Case of Ka-Tzetnik,” Israel
Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 109–33; and Howard Needler, “Red Fire upon Black
Fire: Hebrew in the Holocaust Novels of K. Tsetnik,” Writing and the
Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes, 1988), 234–44. See also
Galia Glasner-Heled, “Et Mi Meytseg Ka-Tzetnik,” Dapim le-Kheker ha-
Shoah 20 (2005): 167–200. Rina Duday discusses Dinur’s use of fictional
writing as a protective barrier between him and the horror, a barrier that
enables his testimony. Rina Duday, “Kitsch vetraquma—mikre mivhan: Beit
habubot me’et Ka-Tzetnik,” Mikan 6 (2005): 125–42.
6 Dinur’s testimony is available in English at
www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-
068-01.html, accessed March 22, 2017. The website provides the complete
protocol of the trial. All quotes from Dinur’s testimony included in this
chapter are from this website, and in some cases, they have been slightly
amended to reflect the Hebrew original more accurately.
7 The most extensive analysis of Dinur’s testimony and court performance is
provided in Shoshana Felman’s The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and
Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2002), 131–66. Felman’s discussion uses “psychoanalytical vocabulary
informed by jurisprudential trauma theory” and conducts a dialog (146) with
Hannah Arendt’s report on Dinur in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil, revised edition (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1963).
8 The term “concentrationary universe” (“L’univers concentrationnaire”) is
David Rousset’s. See his The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New
York: Reynal & Hitchcok, 1947).
9 The Hebrew edition is Kar’u lo Piepel (Tel Aviv: Am Hasefer, 1961),
translated as Moni: A Novel of Auschwitz, trans. Nina De-Nur (New York:
Lyle Stuart, 1963). Throughout this chapter, I refer to the book as Piepel,
which is closer to the original Hebrew title, and I quote from Moni while also
providing the reference to the Hebrew original.
10 Ka-Tzetnik, Beit habubot (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), 172; House of Dolls, trans.
Moshe M. Kohn (London: Senate, 1997), 131.
11 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 176; Moni, 198.
12 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Piepel, 73; Moni, 85.
13 M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl
Emerson, revised ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 100.
Bakhtin’s vague definition of the term “chronotope” as “the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature” poses a continuous challenge to scholars (84).
Holquist and Emerson define the term in their glossary as “a unit of analysis
for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial
categories represented ... an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at
work in the culture system from which they spring” (425–6). Gary Soul
Morson and Caryl Emerson provide a thorough discussion of Bakhtin’s essay
in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1990), 366–432. More useful for our purposes is Bernhard Scholz’s
approach to the chronotope. He sees it as a “principle of sequentially and
appositionally ordering a manifold of events.” It must not be thought of as an
element of the work, but as a “principle of generating plots of narratives.” See
his “Bakhtin’s Concept of ‘Chronotope’: The Kantian Connection,” in The
Contexts of Bakhtin: Philosophy, Authorship, Aesthetics, ed. David Shepherd
(London: Routledge, 1998), 160.
14 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 224–5; Moni, 252.
15 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 72; Moni, 85 (translation with my modifications based on
the Hebrew original).
16 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 108.
17 David Grossman, See Under: Love, trans. Betsy Rosenberg (New York:
Washington Square, 1989), 187.
18 The use of the fantastic is one of the distinguishing markers of Holocaust
representation in the fiction of the second generation, where it serves as a
means of dealing with the taboos involved in writing about the topic. For an
elaborate discussion of the issue, see Gilead Morahg, “Breaking Silence:
Israel’s Fantastic Fiction of the Holocaust,” in The Boom in Contemporary
Israeli Fiction, ed. Alan Mintz (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1997),
143–83.
19 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 100–101.
20 Ibid., 243.
21 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 225; Moni, 252.
22 For discussions of time and routine in camp life, see, for example, Wolfgang
Sofsky, The Order of Terror, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 73–93; and Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice
of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them,
trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 73–80.
23 As we know from Dina Porat’s biographical essay in this volume, Dinur’s
testimony conflated the time that he spent in the main Auschwitz camp (about
six months after his arrival in August 1943) and the Auschwitz sub-camp
Günthergrube camp in Lędzin (then called Lendzin), from where he left on
 the death march that led to his escape in January 1945.
24 The term Muselmann refers to inmates in the final stage of emaciation and is
commonly explained as an allusion to the fatalism or prayer movements of
Muslims. See Sofsky, Order, 199–205. The spelling of the term varies, and it
is standardized here following Sofsky as “Muselmann” in singular and
“Muselmänner” in plural. For a compelling discussion of Funktion, see Primo
Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York:
Vintage, 1989), 36–69.
25 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 32; Moni, 41. Italics in Moni.
26 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 205; Moni, 231.
27 Ibid.
28 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz hameuhad, 1987), 27; Ka-
Tzetnik, Sunrise over Hell, trans. Nina de-Nur (London: Corgi, 1977), 29. All
references are to these two editions. The first edition of the novel Salamandra
was written in Yiddish in 1945 and published in Hebrew translation in 1946.
In 1971, Dinur published a revised Hebrew edition, which served as basis for
the English translation.
29 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 211; Moni, 237–8.
30 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 84.
31 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 102; Moni, 119.
32 Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day, trans. Marion Wiesel
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 70.
33 “Concentrationee” is David Rousset’s term for the inhabitants of the
concentrationary universe, the Ka-Tzets. Rousset, Kingdom, 102.
34 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 106.
35 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, 392–3.
36 Felman, Juridical Unconscious, 147.
37 Piepel, 225; Moni, 252–3.
38 Aharon Appelfeld, “After the Holocaust,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed.
Berel Lang (New York: Holmes, 1988), 92.
39 Boaz Neumann, Reiyat haolam hanatzit (Heifa: University of Heifa Press,
2002), 208.
40 Zdzisław Ryn, “Between Life and Death: Experiences of Concentration
Camp Mussulmen during the Holocaust,” Genetic, Social, and General
Psychology Monographs 116, no. 1 (1990): 7.
41 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans.
Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier, 1961), 82.
42 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 43; Moni, 53.
43 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 73; Moni, 85.
44 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 43; Moni, 53.
45 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 199–200; Moni, 224–5.
46 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 203; Moni, 228. Ka-Tzetnik’s spelling is
“Mussulmanity,” which is standardized here according to “Muselmann.”
47 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 154; Sunrise over Hell, 210
48 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 205; Moni, 230.
49 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 154; Sunrise over Hell, 210.
50 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 247. For a concise discussion of the term
“chronotopic motif,” see Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin, 374–5.
51 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 247.
52 Ibid.
53 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 85.
54 Ibid., 107.
55 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 393.
56 M. M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of
Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and
Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. Mcgee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 23.
57 Ibid. Italics in original.
58 “Focal character” or “focal hero” is the character through whose perspective
the story is narrated. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in
Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 189–
98.
59 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 105, 81; Moni, 122, 94. See also p. 9 of the Hebrew for
descriptions of Moni’s eyes, which are not rendered in the translation.
60 Levi, Survival, 82. Another survivor describes the Muselmänner as having
sad faces and “vacant expression, eyes lacking luster did not react to their
environment.” Others describe them as “messengers of death in the camp”
and “apathetic ... seemed to be already dead, did not reflect the will to live,
but blind and vacuous hunger.” Cited in Ryn, Life and Death, 12.
61 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 43; Moni, 53
62 Ka-Tzetnik, Piepel, 256; Moni, 286.
63 In the original Hebrew, the judge and Dinur use the phrase shem sifruti
(“literary name”) for “pseudonym,” hence Dinur’s reference to “writer of
literary material.” The most extensive discussion of Dinur’s enigmatic choice
and use of the name “Ka-Tzetnik” is Jeremy Popkin’s, who observes that
“‘Ka-Tzetnik 135633’ is not a pseudonym, but the real identity of the author
who wrote the words that were published as Salamandra and all the books
that followed. The continuous reenactment of the loss of identity that
occurred in Auschwitz is only part of the significance of Ka-Tzetnik’s
gesture, however. The other half is his insistence that the story he tells is that
of all the prisoners, and particularly of those who did not survive” (347). See
his “Ka-Tzetnik 135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History
33.2 (2002): 343–55.
64 For a discussion of the chronicle’s characteristics, see Philippe Carrard,
“Chronicle,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David
Herman, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 63–4;
Harry E. Barnes, A History of Historical Writing (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1937): 64–8.
65 The Hebrew original in fact reads that the chronicle is “out of” (Heb. mitoch
haplaneta) rather than “of” the planet, which strengthens Dinur’s inner view:
not a chronicle “of,” written in retrospect, but a chronicle “out of,” as if
extracted from the place.
66 The phrase the “Other Planet” appears in the 1971 Hebrew edition of
Salamandra (140), but is missing from Sunrise over Hell (188). The quote
“distanced from the land of men” appears in the Hebrew Piepel (53) but is
omitted from the English Moni (64).
67 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 243.
68 Ibid., 243, 85.
69 Ibid., 85. Bernhard Scholz, “Bakhtin’s Concept of ‘Chronotope’: The Kantian
Connection,” The Contexts of Bakhtin, ed. David Shepherd (London:
Routledge, 1998), 161.
70 Indeed, as Scholz indicates, “what Bakhtin actually does in all of his analyses
of historically manifest chronotopes” is to “reconstruct chronotopes and plots
as corollaries of each other.” Ibid., 160.
 5
Sexual Violence in Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls
Pascale Bos

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 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.
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 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 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 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 authored and
invented story designed to draw American attention to Nazi atrocities in
Europe and to the increasingly desperate plight of Polish Jewry.30
What made this narrative of sexual violence by Nazi men so compelling
is that it could serve so many purposes. First and foremost, the story of
sexual brutality and/or of immoral sexuality (depending on how one
interprets it) affirmed the Nazis’ purported depravity, as stories about
enemy rape tend to do. The Holocaust, imagined as the scandal of brutal
Nazi sexual enslavement of pious Jewish girls became a press agenda item,
a subject of political engagement. Politicizing sex and sexual violence
serves as a powerful ideological tool in nationalist wars, as a culturally
shared ideal of “respectability” is central to the construction of modern
European national identity, and a “normative” (heterosexual, consensual)
sexuality is pivotal in the solidification of this respectability, as George
Mosse has shown.31 Thus, some antifascist discourse deliberately
sexualizes fascism and fascist nations and pronounces them sexually
perverse, deviant, and sexually violent in order to politically discredit these
nations and their politics as culturally debased.32 Furthermore, with its
focus on young “innocent” females, the story generated a degree of
empathy for its victims that exceeded the reaction elicited by military
deaths or even summary execution of male civilians. As Nicoletta F.
Gullace has shown, a paternalistic appeal for intervention on behalf of
women and children has traditionally been effectively used as one of the
main justifications to get involved in military conflicts.33 Such a story
about sexual enslavement created outrage while serving as a call for action
to pressure the US government for intervention in Nazi Europe on behalf
of the Jews. In that sense, the story functioned much like accounts from
The Black Book of Polish Jewry, a large US-published volume from
December 1943 that contained information from eye witness accounts
(mostly affidavits and depositions made by refugees who escaped), press
reports, bulletins of the Polish Telegraphic Agency, and photographs,
recounting the Nazi persecution of Jews in Poland while it was still
unfolding. The purported aim of the volume was to inform a broad
American audience of the details of the ongoing massacre, to elicit
sympathy for the victims, “to awaken the hearts and conscience of the
nations of the world” and provoke outrage at the crimes and the
perpetrators, and to call for intervention to “save the remnants of Polish
Jewry.”34
In addition, the narrative’s focus on the girls’ devotion fit a traditional
religious interpretation: the story’s plot of Jewish resistance and the
confirmation of the values of piety and chastity could be read as spiritually
redemptive within the observant Jewish community. Because both the
news article and the poem touch only obliquely upon the horrors of the
Holocaust and end in self-chosen martyrdom, they confirm the strength
and resistance of the observant Jewish girls, rather than their
powerlessness in the face of Nazi violence. The horrors of the Holocaust
were thus made less threatening to the Jewish religious community. While
the suicides were tragic, the girls’ honor and the community’s honor
remained intact: “Theologically speaking,” Horowitz argues, “nothing ...
changed.”35 However, an interpretation that celebrates martyrdom in the
face of rape betrays a troubling vision of sexual violence as primarily a
transgression of Jewish law rather than as an act that causes emotional and
physical harm to its victims while implying that it is better to die than to be
raped.36
Finally, at a time when very little accurate information about the events
in Europe was available, this fictive story about sexual violence helped
bridge the gap of comprehension that separated an American (Jewish)
audience from understanding the devastating nature and scale of Nazi
atrocities, for which there was no historic precedent in Jewish history.
Horowitz suggests that sexual violation “domesticates the Holocaust,
diminishing its horror to something more ordinary.” It “universalizes the
experience of Nazi atrocity, making it more accessible to American
readers and writers.”37 While that may indeed be its effect, I argue that it is
the unprecedented nature of the violence that led to the use of this analogy,
rather than an actual intent to domesticate, familiarize, or universalize it.
Without an adequate analogy to convey the horror, this violence was
instead imagined in the form of rape or sexual enslavement, both of which
were crimes for which there was historic familiarity, thus making the
inconceivable conceivable.
Yet, picturing Nazi violence as sexual slavery in the context of a
traditional understanding of gender and sexuality—deeming men to be
“naturally” sexually aggressive and women passive and vulnerable—and
depicting forced prostitution as a sexual act rather than as an act of
violence through sexual means, would result in concrete consequences for
actual female Holocaust victims after the war. The broad dissemination of
a wartime narrative of Nazi sexual slavery of Jewish women and the
association of Nazi atrocities with sexual violence forged a powerful link
between the two within the American Jewish community’s (still
rudimentary) understanding of the Holocaust that proved difficult to
remediate even after 1945. The effect of imagining this violence as sexual
in nature and as common Nazi practice meant that all female survivors
were perceived as possible rape victims, which implied the accusation that
they must have “submitted” to rape in order to survive—indeed, that they
served as Nazi prostitutes willingly. As this story took hold, it came to
obfuscate the actual form that sexual violence took during the Holocaust—
within the ghettos and labor camps, it was often as likely or even more
likely for Jewish women to have experienced sexual coercion and violence
at the hands of other inmates, non-Jews as well as Jews38—and it silenced
survivors.39
This particular reading of the Holocaust with sexual slavery at its center
and Jewish communal honor and integrity at stake would become even
more pronounced as the story traveled to another Jewish community
removed from the Holocaust, British mandate Palestine, and later Israel.

The 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.
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.”56Those 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 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.
Read by its contemporaries as a historical essay—as fact rather than as
a poem that bespeaks a very particular Zionist and gendered imagination
of the Holocaust in service of the present political and military situation—
this poem had a significant impact. The portrayal of the survivor and the
soldier is thoroughly structured by a gender binary that assigns positive
attributes to the male and negative attributes to the female.63 Whereas
Israel’s soldier is masculine, strong, rooted (native, at home), and hopeful,
the Jewish survivor from the Diaspora is feminine, vulnerable, uprooted
(foreign, homeless), and in despair. This binary gets likewise extended to
her morality and virtue: while the soldier is intact, virile, brave, and pure,
the survivor as prostitute is damaged, defeated, tainted, and to blame. The
image of sexual slavery does not elicit pity, but contempt. Tom Segev
argues that it is not a coincidence that the Holocaust is “symbolized by a
prostitute” as it is “a continuation of a common stereotype that depicted
[the Diaspora] as weak, feminine, and passive, and the [Y]ishuv as strong,
masculine, and active. The sabra represented a national ideal, and the
Holocaust survivor its reverse.”64 It is important to note that there is still
quite an imaginary leap from depicting European Jews as feminine,
vulnerable, and powerless (and in need of masculine protection) to their
portrayal as sexual slaves. Thus whereas the poem seems to suggest that
the survivor will be embraced by the new nation as a sister, a mother, an
equal, the subtext is one in which her survival—at the cost of prostitution
—makes her guilty and in which her (female) body bears the literal stamp
of her shame and complicity. It is the woman’s “defilement” that became
her “ticket to life,” as Idith Zertal puts it,65 while this very defilement
brings a humiliation to Jewish men that needs to be avenged, or as the case
may be, prevented in future wars.
The poem not only fits with how most survivors were perceived in
Palestine at the time: as “diminished” physically, psychologically, morally,
and as “pathetic creatures who had no control over their fate,”66 it also
confirmed a commonly held suspicion that many Jewish women had been
victimized by rape, sexual slavery, and sterilization. Such judgment hit
female survivors particularly hard. Once more detailed news about the
concentration and death camps became available, many in the Yishuv
found it simply impossible to imagine that young women could have
survived the camps at all and therefore assumed that they could have only
done so by “offering up” their bodies.67 Here, wartime rumor and
assumption led to the creation of a mythical narrative that was read by its
audience as truth, as historical fact.
In Sadeh’s patriotic Zionist narrative, the arresting “knowledge” about
the Nazi sexual violation of Jewish women transformed from a quasi-
religious eulogy on the ninety-three martyred maidens that still engendered
the reader’s compassion to a poem in which a female victim of Nazi sexual
exploitation symbolizes the physical and moral ruin of Diaspora Jewry.
Despite the soldier’s assertions, Sadeh’s “sister on the beach” is clearly no
longer “whole” nor “holy.” It is this view of survivors as weak and as
morally compromised that Dinur and tens of thousands of Jewish
immigrants from Europe encountered when they arrived in Palestine. Most
could do little to counteract this discourse, as they were as of yet “still
outside the social mainstream.”68 Yet as someone who was already
reasonably fluent in Hebrew, Dinur’s integration may have been somewhat
easier. His voice entered this discourse as one of the first survivors, and his
alternative vision of the Holocaust experience as recounted from within—
from the perspective of the survivor—was instrumental within Israeli
literature of the late 1940s and 1950s.

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
post-war 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
post-war 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 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).
6 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israel Youth
Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 42–76; and
Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Bartov argues that what made
Dinur’s literature so appealing to a young readership is the work’s “obsession
with violence and perversity” and that the novels resemble juvenile literature.
Bartov, Mirrors, 189.
7 The US mass marketing of paperbacks began in 1939 as a copy of the UK
model of Penguin paperbacks: by bringing inexpensive editions of hardcover
books on the market outside of the traditional literary marketplace (in
drugstores, newsstands, stations, and grocery stores). The genre only really
took off when American publishers added attractive, colorfully illustrated
covers. Following World War II, other publishing houses joined this market,
and as books could now be published directly as paperbacks (the so-called
 “Paperback Original”), this allowed for the publication of more risqué
storylines and cover art. This new genre of cheap, delinquency-oriented
novels was heavily influenced by the presumed reading taste of the GI and
geared toward the male customer more generally, as editors assumed that “If
we can make this interesting for the boys, we don’t need to worry about the
girls. The boys will accept them, and the girls won’t have any choice. The
girls always go along anyway.” Ann Bannon, “Foreword,” in Jaye Zimet,
Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1949–1969 (New York:
Viking Studio, 1999), 9. This “fed a broader range of fiction exploiting
deviant behavior of all sorts; books sensationalizing sex, drugs and illegal or
salacious activity of every kind found their way onto paperback racks, their
title and cover art fighting each other for attention.” Zimet, Strange Sisters,
17.
8 In the novel, the inscription “Feld-hure” is not a tattoo but “branded into the
skin with a stamp” (Ka-Tzetnik, Dolls, 133). This discrepancy suggests that
the illustrator may have had some general sense of the novel’s content but had
not actually read the text. While the stamp seems unusual, before the Nazis
began to tattoo Auschwitz inmates on their lower left arm with a single
needle, they did experiment with a metal stamp made up of needles with
which they could punch any set of numbers onto the prisoner’s left upper
chest (after which ink would be rubbed into the needle wounds). See “Tattoos
and Numbers: The System of Identifying Prisoners at Auschwitz,” US
Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed September 9, 2016,
www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007056. Note, however,
that such tattoos were only used in Auschwitz and that Daniella supposedly
received this tattoo at another camp. There is furthermore no historical
evidence that the Nazis ever used a “Feld-Hure” branding or tattoo.
9 The image also reappeared in languages other than English. The 1955
Yiddish hardcover edition (k. Cetnik 135633, Dos Hoiz Fun Di Lialkes,
Bikher-Serie Dos Poilishe Yidntum 115 [Buenos Aires: Union Central
Israelita Polaca en la Argentina, 1955]) first featured this illustration in black
and white, with the title and author name set in white and yellow type. The
1960 GOPA German-language edition, which was published in Paris under
the title “Freuden-Abteilung!” exclusively for the German readers in Israel (it
explicitly forbade the sale of this book in Germany), uses the same image but
here a photo is used, framed by an orange background and the title is in white.
The photo is identical to the image of the Yiddish edition, and all illustrated
covers with this image, even those that were published before this edition,
seem to be based on this photograph. There are also later editions that have
new and stylistically updated versions of this image on the cover, such as the
1965 Serbian Epoha edition (the woman on the photo looks out of the frame
sideways), the 1980 American Mayflower/Granada edition (with an updated
version of the photo), and a 1987 Spanish edition by Ediciones
Internacionales Futuro (this cover contains a new but similar illustration and
 adds a Nazi figure standing right behind the shoulder of the woman, with
watchtowers in the background).
10 Meyer Levin, “Out of the Depths of Nazi Bestiality,” New York Times, May
1, 1955.
11 This version is #G326 in the Pyramid Books series and was published in
1958. The cover painting is by Gerald Powell, who was a popular illustrator
of pulp paperback and magazine covers in the 1970s. As a fascinating aside,
this exact same cover illustration, minus the tattoo, was used by a competing
paperback publisher (Digit/Brown, Watson) in the same year for an entirely
different Holocaust memoir, Ravensbrück (translation of Un camp très
ordinaire from 1957) by the French political prisoner Micheline Maurel. It
even carries the same byline borrowed from the Meyer Levin review of
House of Dolls: “As Real as The Diary of Anne Frank.” This suggests that the
mass marketing of such texts in the United States was aimed at selling the
greatest number of copies possible and that such marketing was formulaic and
even came at the cost of truthful advertising.
12 The women-in-prison genre emerged first in the cheap 1930s’ pulp novel in
the United States. Usually it offers a melodramatic story of a young woman
who finds her way back to a righteous life after a temporary transgression, but
not until the reader has gotten a voyeuristic view at a female universe where
men only appear as jailors. By the 1950s, this genre had been readapted to the
more upscaled paperback market, after the immense success of Tereska
Torrès’s Women’s Barracks (published in the United States in 1950 as a
paperback original). The Jewish Torrès had fled her native France to join the
Free French forces in London, and her book was meant to be a fictionalized
but serious account of this experience. As the novel contained lesbian
relationships and was published with a salacious cover, it inadvertently
became a scandalous bestseller (selling over two million copies between 1950
and 1955) and was singled out as an example of moral corruption by the
House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in their 1952
hearings. This only gave the book more notoriety and led to a revamping of
the genre in both paperback and film.
13 See the covers of the Pyramid paperback editions, illustrated by Larry Lurin
and published in 1968 and 1969.
14 While serious consideration of Dinur’s work has increased in Israel since the
author’s death in 2001, up until this point, major works of international
Holocaust scholarship have not included this novel. See Bartov, Mirrors, 280.
Bartov’s 1997 essay was one of the first scholarly discussions of House of
Dolls in English.
15 I quite like Bartov’s description of Dinur’s writing as a “bizarre and startling
mixture of kitsch, sadism, and what initially appears as outright pornography,
with remarkable and at times quite devastating insights into the reality of
Auschwitz.” Bartov, Mirrors, 188.
16 Ben-Ari detects in translations a tendency to avoid “the spoken vernacular”
 and instead a choice of “a register that is overall high in stylistic and
linguistic markers” (Ben-Ari “Suppression,” 524). Whereas House of Dolls is
technically speaking not a translation, there are strong indicators that it was
thought up as, and perhaps even written as, a Yiddish-language text initially,
and that the difficulty in translating the graphic descriptions of the “Joy
Division” scenes to Hebrew led to its awkwardness, which subsequently can
be found as well in the English translation from the Hebrew.
17 See, for instance, Regina Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen: sexuelle Gewalttaten
und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1945
(Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 2010), and Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen,
“Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during
World War II” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2004). On incidents of
Jewish barter sex as well as coercion and rape in the Warsaw ghetto, see
Dalia Ofer, “Gender Issues in Diaries and Testimonies of the Ghetto: The
Case of Warsaw,” in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J.
Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 143–68; and
Katarzyna Person, “Sexual Violence during the Holocaust: The Case of
Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Shofar 33, no. 2 (Winter 2015):
103–21, 156.
18 For a thorough historical examination (and rejection) of the claim that Jewish
women were sexually enslaved by the Nazis for use in military or
concentrationcamp brothels, see, for instance, Christa Paul and Robert
Sommer, “SS-Bordelle und Oral History: Problematische Quellen und die
Existenz von Bordellen für die SS in Konzentrationslagern,” BIOS 19, no. 1
(2006): 124–42; Robert Sommer, “Camp Brothels: Forced Sex Labour in
Nazi Concentration Camps,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in
Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2009), 168–96; and RobertSommer, “Sexual Exploitation of
Women in Nazi Concentration Camp Brothels,” in Sexual Violence against
Jewish Women during the Holocaust, eds. Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle
Saidel (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010): 46–60. For more
on the Nazi practice of forced prostitution generally, see Christa Schikorra,
“Forced Prostitution in the Nazi Concentration Camps,” Lessons and
Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar
Herzog (Chicago: Northwestern Press, 2006), 169–78; Helga Amesberger,
Katrin Auer, and Brigitte Halbmayr, Sexualisierte Gewalt: Weibliche
Erfahrungen in NS-Konzentrationslagern (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2004); and
Brigitte Halbmayr, “Sexualized Violence against Women during the Nazi
‘Racial’ Persecution,” in Hedgepeth and Saidel, Sexual Violence, 29–44.
19 Despite evidence on the contrary, the argument that there indeed was
organized sexual enslavement of Jewish women is made by scholars such as
Helene Sinnreich, who claims that “Jewish women were forced to serve in
German brothels” (9). Helene Sinnreich, “‘And It Was Something We Didn’t
Talk About’: Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust,” Holocaust
 Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 14, no. 2 (2008): 9–13. However, if
one looks closely at the sources Sinnreich cites, they all reflect cases of Nazi
soldiers or even officers going into ghettos and even barracks of
concentration camps, hand-picking one or more Jewish women, taking them
away to private quarters or another location outside of the ghetto or camp,
and raping them (and often subsequently murdering them). However heinous
such crimes of sexual violence are, and however common they may have
been in certain locations and at certain points in time, these cases should not
be misconstrued as a form of organized recruitment of Jewish women into
German military brothels with the intent to make them work as prostitutes for
Nazi soldiers. There is no evidence to support the latter claim.
20 Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz, German Holocaust Literature (New York: Peter
Lang, 1985), 62.
21 Most English editions of the novel contain statements on the front or back
covers that suggest that the work is autobiographical, based as it is on the
author’s experiences and on the author’s sister’s “authentic diary.” For
instance, Meyer Levin’s review of the novel in New York Times called it “As
real as The Diary of Anne Frank.” Levin, “Out of the Depths,” BR4. See also
the advertising for this book: “Just published: The story of a young Jewish
girl forced into prostitution by the Nazis ... A novel based on an authentic
diary.” Display ad in New York Times, May 1, 1955, BR23, and “This novel
has been acclaimed for its dramatic impact and, above all, its truth ... Why
should such accounts as these be written? The answer is simple: the truth, no
matter how shameless, must be known.” Display ad in New York Times, June
5, 1955, BR32.
22 Besides the artistic license Dinur took in writing about a kind of Jewish
sexual slavery that never existed, the question of what is autobiographical in
his work is difficult to assess, since, as Dina Porat explains in her contribution
to this volume, many details of his personal life cannot be verified.
23 Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
24 Hanna Yablonka, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel:
The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials,” Israel Studies 8, no.
3 (2003), 6. It is the general consensus of Israeli historians that this particular
view of survivors would not substantially change until after the 1961
Eichmann trial. See also Idit Gil, “The Shoah in Israeli Collective Memory:
Changes in Meanings and Protagonists,” Modern Judaism 32, no. 1 (2012),
84–5; Yechiam Weitz, “Political Dimensions of Shoah Memory in Israel
during the 1950s,” Israel Affairs 1, no. 3 (1995), 129–45; Julia Resnik, “Sites
of Memory’ of the Holocaust: Shaping National Memory in the Education
System in Israel,” Nations and Nationalism 9, no. 2 (2003), 293–313; and
Roni Stauber, “The Jewish Response during the Holocaust: The Educational
Debate in Israel in the 1950s,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish
Studies 22, no. 4 (2004), 57–66.
25 “93 Choose Suicide before Nazi Shame,” New York Times, January 8, 1943,
8.
26 Hillel Bavli, “The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens,” Hadoar 22, no.
12 (January 22, 1943), 186. English translation in High Holiday Prayer Book
for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: A Contemporary Service. Compiled by
Marlboro Jewish Center, Congregation Ohev Shalom (Marlboro, NJ: 2011),
135.
27 See Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust
(London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), 118–38.
28 See Baumel, Double, 122.
29 Sara R. Horowitz, “Martyrdom and Gender in Jewish-American Holocaust
Memory,” Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures,
eds. Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick (New York: Routledge, 2006),
180.
30 It is not known who wrote the letter. The back story is that the letter
supposedly came to the United States by way of Switzerland and was sent on
to the secretary of World Beth Jacob Movement in New York at the
beginning of 1943. Subsequently, a rabbi wrote an accompanying
explanation, and the Chair of the American Beth Jacob Committee sent a
translated and abridged version on to New York Times. See Baumel, Double,
118, 121. Whether any of these men created the forgery, were in on it, or
were deceived themselves, is unknown.
31 George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual
Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 6.
While Mosse refers to Nazi ideas about sexual deviancy, as Laura Frost
points out, such standards of sexual normality and deviance were just as
central in the construction of respectability and national identity in modern
Britain, France, and the United States as they were in Germany. Laura Frost
Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell
Universiy Press, 2002), 6.
32 Germans were already depicted as rapists during World War I in British and
French literature: “Germany’s sexual practices are imagined to be as
aggressive and undemocratic as her politics: Germany is a nation of rapists
and sadomasochists.” Frost, Sex Drives, 20.
33 Gullace argues that during World War I this strategy was effectively used in
British anti-German propaganda directed at Americans, which marketed “an
evocative, sentimental, and deeply gendered version of the conflict to the
wider American public” by way of a “highly sexualized image of German
monstrosity.” Nicoletta F. Gullace, “War Crimes or Atrocity Stories? Anglo-
American Narratives of Truth and Deception in the Aftermath of World War
I,” in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era
of Human Rights, ed. Elizabeth Heineman (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 107. Gullace does not mean to argue that the
Germans did not commit acts of sexual violence during this war, but merely
 that many of the British reports had no bearing on these actual crimes and
need to be understood as atrocity propaganda.
34 Jacob Apenszlak, Jakób Kenner, Isaac Lewin, and Moses Polakiewicz, eds.,
The Black Book of Polish Jewry: An Account of the Martyrdom of Polish
Jewry under the Nazi Occupation (New York: American Federation of Polish
Jews in cooperation with the Association of Jewish Refugees and Immigrants
from Poland; Roy Publishers, 1943), xvi. A small subsection of Chapter 2
deals with the charge of Nazi sexual slavery under the heading “Brothels for
the Conquerors.” It describes two separate statements claiming that in either
November of 1939 or early 1940, or both (it is unclear whether the statements
refer to the same purported incident), the Nazis sought to establish a brothel
in Warsaw for their soldiers and that they were seeking local women to work
there, including “fifty Jewish girls.” The Jewish Council members were
outraged at the request and refused. The Black Book concludes in the next
paragraph that the Germans did not pursue this plan but did commit many
other acts of sexual violence against Jewish women in Warsaw, and it sums
up a set of other incidents in the following paragraphs, which proves that the
“racist principles of the Nuremberg Laws were not always strictly applied to
the Germans to the Jews of Poland” (25).
35 As Horowitz has argued, by interpreting their deaths by suicide as an act of
martyrdom, the story provides “religious comfort and theological meaning.”
Sara R. Horowitz, “The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust
Memory,” in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and
Its Aftermath, eds. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York:
Berghahn 2005), 168.
36 For a critical analysis of Talmudic thought about martyrdom in the face of
sexual violation, see Horowitz, “Martyrdom and Gender,” 180–86.
37 Sara R. Horowitz, “Mengele, the Gynecologist, and Other Stories of
Women’s Survival,” in Judaism since Gender, eds. Miriam Peskowitz, and
Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997), 210.
38 See Dalia Ofer, “Gender Issues in Diaries and Testimonies of the Ghetto: The
Case of Warsaw,” in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Leonore J.
Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 143–68; Joan
Ringelheim, “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust,” in Women in the
Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Leonore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998), 340–50; and Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times
of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 3 (2013): 503–33.
39 See also Pascale Bos, “Her Flesh Is Branded: ‘For Officers Only’
Imagining/Imagined Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the
Holocaust,” in Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the
Holocaust in a Changing World, eds. Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014): 59–85.
40 Baumel, Double Jeopardy, 123–4.
41 The Zionist leadership’s ambivalence toward the European Jewish
community during and right after World War II has been the source of much
scholarly debate in Israel for the past twenty-five years. For good overviews
of this discussion, see Gulie Ne’eman Arad, “Israel and the Shoah: A Tale of
Multifarious Taboos,” New German Critique 90 (2003), 5–26; Hanna
Yablonka, “The Formation of Shoah Consciousness in the State of Israel: The
Early Days,” in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, ed.
Efraim Sicher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 119–36; Hanna
Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel after the War (New York: New
York University Press, 1999); Hanna Yablonka, “Development”; Segev,
Seventh, 1993; Weitz, “Political Dimensions,” 1995; Stauber, “The Jewish
Response”; Gil, “The Shoah in Israel,” 76–101; Idith Zertal, From
Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Idith Zertal, Israel’s
Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, 2nd ed., trans. Chaya Galai
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Zertal offers the most
critical assessment of Ben Gurion’s and Mapai’s political leadership.
42 “The rise of the Nazis was seen as confirming the historical prognosis of
Zionist ideology.” Segev, Seventh, 18.
43 “The story of the [Y]ishuv leaders during the Holocaust was essentially one
of helplessness,” Segev argues. “They rescued a few thousand Jews from
Europe. They could, perhaps, have saved more, but they could not have saved
millions.” Segev, Seventh, 82. About 50,000 Jews arrived in Palestine during
the war, of which 16,000 were smuggled in illegally.
44 See Segev, Seventh, 84–5.
45 By the spring of 1947, the number of Jewish Displaced Persons neared
250,000.
46 See Segev, Seventh, 154.
47 Yablonka suggests that even though Holocaust survivors made up only one-
third of all the troops during the 1948 war (as many were unable to learn
Hebrew well enough to function in administrative roles), survivors were
disproportionally assigned to fight at the front. Hanna Yablonka, “Holocaust
Survivors in the Israeli Army during the 1948 War: Documents and
Memory,” Israel Affairs 12, no. 3 (2006): 465. One-third of the survivor
troops died during this war. See Segev, Seventh, 177.
48 See Segev, Seventh, 154.
49 See Judith Tydor Baumel, “Bridging Myth and Reality: The Absorption of
She’erit Hepletah in Eretz Yisrael, 1945–48,” Middle Eastern Studies 33, no.
2 (1997): 362–82.
50 Arad, “Israel,” 7.
51 In Ari Libsker’s (otherwise problematic) documentary film Stalags, Uri
Avnery—Israeli journalist, author, and former politician, who himself arrived
with his parents from Nazi Germany in Palestine in 1933—states that “During
the war we all ignored what was happening to the Jews. There were rumors,
 some information, but the general tendency was to simply ignore them.”
Many Israelis argued that the European Jews should have saved themselves:
“why didn’t they come here?” This is their own fault—they could have
emigrated in time, as we did. There was absolute alienation. Also, there were
always questions asked: “what did you do in order to stay alive? How come
you survived?” Ari Libsker, Stalags [Stalagim] (Heymann Brothers Films,
Yes Docu, New Israeli Foundation for Cinema & TV, Cinephil, 2007).
52 As Segev points out, “the bluntest expression” of this contemptuous view of
survivors can be found in a Hebrew slang word that was used at the time to
refer to survivors: “sabon” or soap, which was based on the erroneous notion
that the Nazis turned Jewish corpses into soap. Segev, Seventh, 183.
53 Whereas this group of resistance fighters had been very small and only some
of them had been Zionists, they were claimed as “men of the land of Israel in
the Diaspora.” Many had in fact been Bundists (secular Eastern European
Jewish socialists who were for the most part anti-Zionist), socialists, or
communists rather than Zionists. Stauber, Response, 62. See also Mooli Brog,
“Victims and Victors: Holocaust and Military Commemoration in Israel
Collective Memory,” Israel Studies 8, no. 3 (2003), 65–99; Daniel Gutwein,
“The Privatization of the Holocaust Memory, Historiography, and Politics,”
Israel Studies 14, no. 1 (2009): 36–64; Weitz, Political, 1995; and Yablonka,
“Formation.”
54 Arad, “Israel,” 8.
55 Yablonka offers an interesting, dissenting view from the common narrative
by suggesting that it was actually the small group of Zionist Jewish resistance
fighters who came to Palestine between 1945 and 1947 who set the tone for
this narrative of “contrary possibilities: The Judenrat ... that played by the
German rules ... and, the armed underground that fought the Nazis, redeemed
Jewish honor” (“The Development of Holocaust Consciousness,” 5). Even in
the early 1950s, she argues, “Holocaust discourse in Israel took place ... as an
internal discourse among the survivors that radiated outward to general Israeli
society” (Ibid., 10). Myers Feinstein argues similarly that for survivors the
identification with the resistance fighters and Partisans already took place in
the DP camps of Europe and that they brought this narrative to Palestine,
rather than that Zionist ideology imposed it. Margarete Myers Feinstein, “Re-
imagining the Unimaginable: Theater, Memory, and Rehabilitation in the
Displaced Persons Camps,” in After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of
Silence, eds. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (London: Routledge,
2012), 52.
56 This is a biblical term first used in this context by famed survivor-poet and
former resistance fighter Abba Kovner in 1941 (Segev, Seventh, 120).
57 Segev, Seventh, 118–19. One survivor recounts that “In almost every
[encounter] ... the question would come up of how we had remained alive. I
was asked again and again and not always in the most delicate way. I had a
feeling that I was being blamed for having stayed alive.” Segev, Seventh, 160.
58 Rachel Feldhay Brenner, “‘Ideologically Incorrect’ Responses to the
Holocaust by Three Israeli Women Writers,” CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture 11, no. 1, accessed September 7, 2016.
59 Yitzhak Sadeh, “My Sister on the Beach” in Zertal, Catastrophe, 262–3. First
published under the pen name Y. Noded as “Ahoti al hahof,” in Alon
Hapalmach in 1945, republished in Sefer Hapalmach (The Palmach Book),
ed. Zerubavel Gilead (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchdad, 1953), 725.
60 In actuality, only a very small number of survivors made it to Palestine in this
fashion, but much was made of these illegal attempts to land on the shores of
Palestine despite British blockades and strict immigration quotas. “[E]ven
though it was the Jewish refugees who made the clandestine immigration
campaign possible, and bore it ‘on their shoulders’ much more than they were
borne by the sons and daughters of the Land of Israel, it was these Zionist
natives who were immortalized in poem and mythic tale.” Zertal,
Catastrophe, 221.
61 These historians rewrote the history of the formative years of the state (1947–
1952) from a critical perspective rather than from a Zionist standpoint, to
show the lack of successful rescue attempts of European Jewry by leaders in
the Yishuv, the effects of the Zionist ideology of “negation of the Diaspora,”
and the Yishuv’s post-war focus on settlement, development, and defense,
rather than on survivors. The work of Segev and Zertal is most well known in
the United States. For overviews, see Anita Shapira and Ora Wiskind-Elper,
“Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the ‘New Historians’ in
Israel,” History and Memory 7, no. 1 (1995), 9–40; and Ilan Pappé, “The
Vicissitude in the 1948 Historiography of Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies
39, no. 1 (2009), 6–23.
62 “In belligerent disputes the abuse of women is an element of male
communication” that intends to humiliate men. Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape:
A Preliminary Analysis,” in Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 59.
63 Both Idith Zertal and Ronit Lentin focus on this gendered aspect of the poem.
Ronit Lentin, Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the
Territories of Silence (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 206–9. While Lentin’s
reading is insightful, she does not comment specifically on the depiction of
the woman as victim of sexual violence. Zertal reads “My Sister on the
Beach” as an “internal ... mobilizing speech” in which nevertheless a trace of
the “repressed, the silenced, the erased” within the Zionist myth of Jewish
redemption is apparent. Rather than “encounters of love and compassion ...
acceptance, of homecoming” that it professes on the surface, the poem reveals
“terror and horror ... about the immanent threat” these survivors embodied
“for the sons of the land” (Zertal, Catastrophe, 264, 266).
64 Segev, Seventh, 179–80.
65 Zertal, Catastrophe, 269. “Her very survival, her being alive after the
 Holocaust is shameful testimony to her double betrayal—her betrayal of
herself, her femininity, and her betrayal of her people—by surrendering her
body to [Nazi] officers.” Zertal, Catastrophe, 268.
66 Yablonka, “Formation,” 121.
67 Na’ama Shik suggests that it was deemed “common knowledge” in Israel
“that Jewish women ‘served’ as whores for the SS and for German soldiers in
some camps and on the Eastern front.” Na’ama Shik, “Sexual Abuse of
Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Brutality and Desire: War and
Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 242. Halbmayr argues similarly: “Jewish women
who as concentration camp survivors arrived in Israel or pre-Israel Palestine
... were falsely condemned as having been prostitutes off the SS.” Halbmayr,
“Sexualized Violence,” 39. Nili Keren has also argued that “In the first years
after the end of the war, following initial encounters with relatively young
women who survived even the death camps, many in Israel, and perhaps
elsewhere, believed that these women had paid for their survival with their
bodies, with their sexual purity. There was much talk of German brothels and
of the medical experiments conducted on women’s bodies.” Nili Keren, “A
Voice Grown Strong,” Haaretz, May 25, 1997. See also the discussion in
Libsker, Stalagim (Stalags): survivor author Ruth Bondy and Shik both
recount how Israelis assumed in the 1940s (and some continue to believe to
this day) that one needed to have been ruthless in order to survive, and that it
was a process of a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” rather than “mere
chance.” Whereas male survivors were accused of having been kapos, female
survivors were thought to have been prostitutes—especially if the women
were beautiful, young, and childless. Whereas Bondy links these assumptions
as stemming directly from House of Dolls, my analysis shows that such
presumptions predate Ka-Tzetnik’s work by at least a decade.
68 Yablonkla, “Formation,” 9.
69 He seems to have written his first two novels (and possibly three) in Yiddish
first and subsequently to have translated them to Hebrew.
70 What makes the work difficult to classify as either memoir or fiction is “Ka-
Tzetnik’s avowed purpose to give a comprehensive account of the experience
of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime: for that purpose he wrote
episodes dealing with situations that he had not personally witnessed, in
particular, several sections of The House of Dolls.” Yechiel Szeintuch, “The
Myth of the Salamander in the Work of Ka-Tzetnik,” trans. Daniella
Tourgeman and Maayan Zigdon, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and
the History of Ideas 3, no. 1 (2005): 120. The desire to speak not only of his
own experiences but that of all victims of the Holocaust is also visible in his
choice of an impersonal pseudonym—going by Ka-Tzetnik rather than
Yechiel Dinur—which suggests that he is merely one inmate among millions.
71 Segev claims that Dinur mentioned that the woman in Sadeh’s poem was a
relative of his and that the poem served as the inspiration for House of Dolls.
 Whereas Dinur thus reaffirms what he claims is the historical basis of his
story, I read it as a confirmation that he knew of this influential poem. Tom
Segev, “Dreaming with Shimon: If Shimon Peres’ Dreams Had Become
Reality, They Would Have Changed the Face of History,” Haaretz, July 19,
2007.
72 Technically speaking, the novel has an auctorial narrator—an omniscient
narrator who is not a participant within the story—yet the emphasis within the
story on Dinur’s alter ego Harry receiving Daniella’s writing after she dies
suggests otherwise. As Popkin points out, “At the time when [Dinur] wrote
Salamandra, autobiographical literature that was written in the form ‘of
novels [narrated] in the third person’ was quite common.” Popkin, “Ka-
Tzetnik 135633,” 345.
73 House of Dolls is typical for what David Roskies calls khurbn-literatur:
“True tales of the ghettos and camps that employed modes of enhanced
authenticity, such as confessions, autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries, lest
... they be read as ‘mere’ fiction.” David G. Roskies, “Dividing the Ruins:
Communal Memory in Yiddish and Hebrew,” in Cesarani and Sundquist,
After the Holocaust 91. The diary functions as a device that allows Ka-
Tzetnik to be a legitimate narrator in a story about Jewish women inmates
that he would otherwise by definition not have been privy to as a male. The
presence of the diary fabricates this part of the novel’s authenticity. As James
Young points out, the words of Holocaust diaries can be read “as material
fragments of experiences ... the current existence of [the] narrative is causal
proof that its objects also existed in historical time.” Moreover, “diaries can
be far more convincing of their factual veracity than more retrospective
accounts ... the diary accrues the weight and authority of reality itself.” James
E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1988), 23, 25.
74 The terms used in the book in German are “Arbeit durch Freude” and
“Freudenabteilung” (“Joy Division”). These are probably bastardizations of
the German term “Freudenhäuser,” popular parlance for brothels, and can be
read as a conflation of the notorious slogan “Arbeit macht frei” on the gate of
Auschwitz and “Kraft durch Freude” (strength through joy), a popular Nazi
program of leisure and travel that ran through 1939.
75 It is important to note that all of these details are fictitious: while sterilization
was part of the medical experimentation conducted at a number of
concentration camps, the (non-Jewish) women who worked in camp brothels
were not sterilized. The branding or tattoo on the chest was never used in
brothels, either. The term Feldhure was a generic German term for prostitutes
who served soldiers on the front.
76 His wife Nina Dinur claims that “In order to cauterize the subject matter of
any trace of pornography and get at the quintessence of this unprecedented
grief, Ka-Tzetnik rewrote the book five times. House of Dolls is the fifth and
 final version.” “Ka-Tzetnik 135633,” Contemporary Authors Online,
accessed September 6, 2016, http://infotrac.galegroup.com/default.
77 See Anna Przyrembel, “Transfixed by an Image: Ilse Koch, the
‘Kommandeuse of Buchenwald,’” German History 19, no. 3 (2001): 369–99.
It is important to note that “The sadistic female Nazi is an almost exclusively
postwar image ... created by the press after the war.” Frost, Sex Drives, 154.
Frost argues that this phenomenon should be understood “as a gendered
extension of the earlier trope of fascist male sadism, since female violence
and sexual violence are even more culturally aberrant than male sadism.”
Frost, Sex Drives, 154.
78 Significantly, this has been incorrectly translated in the English edition. “Bais
Ya’acov” or “Beit David” is misread as Bas Ya’acov or “Bat David” and thus
(mis)translated as “Daughters of Jacob” rather than “House of Jacob,”
obscuring the link between this novel and the story of “the 93” and the Bavli
poem. The correct translation opens up a reading of House of Dolls as a
deliberate reworking of this now-almost-archetypical Holocaust narrative.
79 Ka-Tzetnik, Dolls, 36.
80 Ibid., 152.
81 Ibid., 200.
82 Ibid., 42–4.
83 Ibid., 185.
84 Iris Milner, “The ‘Gray Zone’ Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in
Ka. Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008),
118.
85 Iris Milner, “The Evil Spirits of the Shoah: Ka-Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony
to Death and Survival in the Concentrationary Universe,” lecture at
conference Ka-Tzetnik: The Impact of the First Holocaust Novelist in Israel
and Beyond, University of Calgary, March 2013, 4.
86 Milner, Spirits, 5.
87 Ka-Tzetnik, Dolls, 137.
88 What complicates matters is the emergence in the early 1960s in Israel of a
genre of pulp porn novels set in German POW (Stammlager) camps, named
Stalagim. These stories imagined a Nazi universe in which Allied soldiers—
never Jews—were tortured and sexually assaulted by female SS orderlies
(who did not exist in real life). Although this bore no relation to actual
historical events, so little information on the Holocaust was available at the
time, and the novels were so popular and notorious, teenagers read these texts
next to the work of Ka-Tzetnik and came to associate the two. In Libsker’s
2007 film Stalags, both Omer Bartov and Libsker suggest that the readers get
the two confused and thus think that they remember that the Stalagim “depict
sex forced by Nazis on Jewish women,” which they do not. Conversely, I
suspect that the confusion also works the other way around: stylistically, Beit
ha Bubot’s depictions of Nazi sexual violence are not pornographic or even
erotic, but those in Stalagim were, and this association makes Dinur’s work
 now retroactively appear in this light as well. As to the argument that Beit ha
Bubot inspired the Stalag genre as renowned literary scholar Dan Miron
argues in this film, I strongly dispute this as there is, in fact, a very different
progenitor to these novels, in terms of their cover illustrations, content, and
basic plot, namely American Men’s Adventure Magazines. I say more on this
in a forthcoming article.
89 Young, Writing, 5.
 6
The Eroticization of Witnessing: The Twofold
Legacy of Ka-Tzetnik
Guido Vitiello

The 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 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.

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 Ka-
Tzetnik’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 . . . 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 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 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 “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 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 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 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 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, no. 3 (2007): 109–33; Jeremy D. Popkin,
“Ka-Tzetnik 135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History 33,
 no. 2 (2002): 343–55; and Miryam Sivan, “‘Stoning the Messenger’: Yehiel
Dinur’s House of Dolls and Piepel,” in Sonya M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G.
Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust
(Lebanon: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 200–16.
5 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, House of Dolls (London: Granada, 1973 [1955]), 198.
6 Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 130.
7 On this episode, see Hanno Loewy, “Zwischen Judgment und Twilight:
Schulddiskurse, Holocaust und das Courtroom Drama,” in Sven Kramer, ed.,
Die Shoah im Bild (Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 2003), 133–69.
8 Amit Pinchevski and Roy Brand, “Holocaust Perversions: The Stalags Pulp
Fiction and the Eichmann Trial,” in Critical Studies in Media Communication
24, no. 5 (2007): 394.
9 Quoted in Pinchevski and Brand, “Holocaust Perversions,” 398.
10 Ibid., 388.
11 Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism,” 59.
12 Nanette C. Auerhahn and Dori Laub, “The Primal Scene of Atrocity: The
Dynamic Interplay Between Knowledge and Fantasy of the Holocaust in
Children of Survivors,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 15, no. 3 (1998): 372.
13 The formulation comes from Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Imagining Hitler
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 53.
14 Saul Friedlander, Réflets du nazisme (Paris: Seuil, 1982).
15 Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin, “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 25, no. 1 (1996): 65–83.
16 Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the
Holocaust (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 4.
17 Terrence Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed.
Berel Lang (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 216–33.
18 James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in
Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2000), 55.
19 For analyses of this genre, see Marcus Stiglegger, Sadiconazista. Faschismus
und Sexualität im Film (Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag, 1999); Mikel J. Koven,
“‘The Film You Are about to See Is Based on Documented Fact’: Italian Nazi
Sexploitation Cinema,” in Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation
Cinema since 1945, eds. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (London and
New York: Wallflower Press, 2004); Lynn Rapaport, “Holocaust
Pornography: Profaning the Sacred in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS,” in Monsters
in the Mirror: Representations of Nazism in Post-War Popular Culture, eds.
Sara Buttsworth and Maartje Abbenhuis (Westport: Praeger, 2010), 101–30;
and Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust(New York: Continuum, 2011). On
the eroticization of Nazism more broadly, see also Laura Frost, Sex Drives:
Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2002); Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics
 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Silke Wenk,
“Rhetoriken der Pornografisierung: Rahmungen des Blicks auf die NS-
Verbrechen,” in Gedächtnis und Geschlecht: Deutungsmuster in
Darstellungen des Nationalsozialistischen Genozids, eds. Insa Eschebach,
Sigrid Jacobeit, and Silke Wenk (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2002),
269–96.
20 Robert S. C. Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2012), 59.
21 Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); on pop music and the Holocaust, see
also Jon Stratton, “Jews, Punk and the Holocaust: From the Velvet
Underground to the Ramones: The Jewish-American Story,” Popular Music
24, no. 1 (2005): 79–105.
22 Omer Bartov, “Spielberg’s Oskar: Hollywood Tries Evil,” in Spielberg’s
Holocaust. Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 49. See also Omer Bartov,
Murder in Our Midst. The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 170.
23 Lawrence L. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006), 51.
24 Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing.
25 Mark Browning, Stephen King on the Big Screen (London: Intellect Books,
2009).
26 David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers, 2nd ed.
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
27 Stephen King, Different Seasons (London: Futura, 1982), 127.
28 Claudia Eppert, “Entertaining History: (Un)heroic Identifications, Apt Pupils,
and an Ethical Imagination,” New German Critique 86 (Spring–Summer
2002): 71–101. See also Caroline Joan Picart and David A. Frank, Frames of
Evil: the Holocaust as Horror in American Film (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2006).
29 Eddie Cockrell, “Apt Pupil. One Good Hard Step Beyond Innocence,” Nitrate
Online, October 30, 1998, www.nitrateonline.com/faptpupil.html, accessed
August 2, 2016.
 7
Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, and the Muslims
Uri S. Cohen

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
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 the changing
trajectories of insight both authors offer into this figure and to notions of
survival.
Levi’s description of his experience of internment at Buna, an
Arbeitslager (labor camp) at Auschwitz that serviced I. G. Farben’s Buna
Werke,9 is indeed metonymic of the camps. Levi is but one survivor,
whose story is part of what both Iris Milner and David Rousset have called
the concentrationary universe.10 Buna, though different from Birkenau, is
Auschwitz, and its description allows us to induce and deduce the contours
of other stories, even those untold. There are by now many stories of
experience in the camp, but Levi’s work stands out in its operation of the
poetic upon the historical, its ability to capture and linguistically design the
figures and to shape the story to offer a deep and true essence of the Camp.
In this sense, Levi’s first book, Se questo è un uomo, is truly more
philosophical in Aristotelian terms than Ka-Tzetnik’s Salamandra,
precisely because it is more historical. Levi poetically captures the general
sense of his experience in a story of great suffering and chilling insight
into the banality of that suffering. He never resorts to hyperbole, the tone
is composed, and not without irony, the narrative is straightforward even
though figurative language creates other, darker, possibilities of reading.
As Levi writes, it becomes clear that his suffering, even suffering itself, is
not the novelty of Auschwitz. What Levi seems to say is that the reasons,
or lack of reasons, for internment are new, but the mode of producing
death is the main novelty, and it is captured in the figure of the
Muselmann:

All the Muselmänner who go to the gas chambers have the same
story, or more exactly, have no story; they have followed the slope
down to the bottom, naturally, like streams that run down to the sea.
Once they entered the camp, they were overwhelmed, either through
basic incapacity, or through misfortune, or through some banal
 incident, before they can adapt; ... their body is already breaking
down, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by
exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they the
Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an
anonymous mass, continually renewed and always the same, of non-
men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within
them, already too empty to truly suffer. One hesitates to call them
living; one hesitates to call their death death—in the face of it they
have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.11

Here Levi makes an acute observation about the nature of narrative and the
form of narrative that is testimony. The drowned do not have a story, or
rather, their story, which is the true story of Auschwitz, cannot be told,
because narrative is the work of the survivor. This is the reason the
Muselmann can have no voice, and Levi’s own voice, though observing
them, fails to represent those who he constantly ignored in the camp. Levi
may not have been a “Prominent,” one who has a position in the camp that
allows him to rise above the dying mass, but he was lucky in many ways;
he was helped by an Italian civil worker (Lorenzo Perrone) and worked
indoors.12 The survivor is certainly a victim, but what does this make the
Muselmann? When he faces the Muselmann, Levi himself drowns in the
image:

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

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.
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

non-human 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.
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 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

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 what they used to eat at home. It’s even less
worthwhile to make friends with them, because they have no
important connections in the camp, they do not gain any extra
rations, they do not work in profitable Kommandos, and they do not
know any secret method of organizing. And in any case, it’s clear
they’re only passing through here, that in a few weeks nothing will
remain of them but a handful of ashes in some nearby field and a
checked-off number in a register.31

Here is an insight shared by Ka-Tzetnik and Levi: one looked away, one
had to look away, and one never got over the guilt of having done so, even
if constrained to do so by the will of the true perpetrator. In Auschwitz,
Ka-Tzetnik writes, “in order to survive you must kill another.”32
Levi tried valiantly to ward of the realization that one’s own survival
was predicated on the death of others, and the terror of it seems to invade
every aspect of what he wrote in the eighties. In the harrowing poem The
Survivor, for example, Levi pleads his innocence in front of the multitude
of victims haunting him. Though he repeats that he has not taken anyone’s
place, that he never stole another’s bread, he still realizes that he was part
of the machine that produced the Muselmann, a machine that was created
by the Nazis but driven by the survivors. Dinur reached a very similar
conclusion in the process of analyzing the meaning of his LSD-induced
visions. As Iris Roebling Grau explores in her contribution to this volume,
late in his life Ka-Tzetnik underwent experimental LSD treatment and
experienced a vison that he had himself become an SS officer.33 This led
him to the realization that Auschwitz was not another planet but our very
own and he himself not only the victim but also its very other.
In the end, it seems that Ka-Tzetnik and Levi followed almost opposite
though converging trajectories and that they covered similar ground. Levi
begins as a returned subject or at least a metonym of an erased subject,
telling a carefully crafted tale of his experience of survival as
representative of the camps. Eventually he comes to see his own
experience as exiguous and the Muselmann as the true core of Auschwitz.
His own experience becomes a metaphor that undoes his own possibility
of subjectivity. Ka-Tzetnik began with a metaphoric-symbolic story, told
through the metaphor of a non-subject, the erasure of Yehiel Feiner—the
Man he was—is decisive and consciously formulated: “My name went up
in the flames of the crematorium,” he told all who would listen. Ka-
Tzetnik achieved something special in the form of literature that erases its
own literariness, and he finally arrived closer to the erased metonymic
subject—Feiner—through the Eichmann trial and the public’s interest in it.
Both come to realize that they cannot avoid the Muselmann, the memory
of constant pleading for help, or the fact that they could do nothing to
change the circumstance—that survival itself involved a form of
collaboration with the machine that produces death by survival. To truly
come close to the Muselmann is to realize that one was oneself an
instrument of death. Ka-Tzetnik seems to have slowly inched away from
such a perception, perhaps because he was part of an Israeli culture that by
the 1980s had become obsessed with erasing the difference between
survivors and victims. Perhaps, as Shoshana Felman argues, Ka-Tzetnik
did manage to embody the absence of the Muselmann; by fainting at the
Eichmann trial while speaking of Muselmänner, Ka-Tzetnik allowed
himself to undo his disembodiment to some extent. His talks with Yechiel
Szeintuch, which slowly uncovered the biographical subject, also allowed
him to gradually draw out the metonymic Feiner.34
Unlike Ka-Tzetnik and perhaps because he was part of an Italian
culture bent on denying collaboration, Levi grew steadily more aware that
the mechanism of annihilation, production of death by work, depended on
the will to survive of the few who were able to work, whether simply by
some lucky circumstance or because they possessed a special skill or
characteristic. He also realized that the valorization of the anomalous
minority of survivors could make it seem as if they were living proof that
all had ended well. He could not escape realizing that the survivor was
awarded the same prize offered by Polyphemos the Cyclopes to Nobody in
the story of Odysseus: to be the last of his companions to be eaten.
Suicide, then is to deny society the comfort offered by the presence of the
survivor, because it is a rebuttal of the prize—a denial of the very will that
made one a survivor, the will to live.

Notes
 1 Dan Miron, “Bein sefer le’efer,” Alpayim 10 (1994): 200–1.
2 Note that the spelling of Muselman varies, often within the same work. In one
English version of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir, for instance, he uses all
of the following spellings: Muselmann, musselman, muselmann, and the
plural forms mussulmans and Muselmänner. (See Primo Levi, If This Is a
Man [New York: Orion Press, 1959].) I have chosen the follow the usage of
the recent publication of Primo Levi’s work in English: Primo Levi, The
Complete Works of Primo Levi (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,
2015).
3 Miron, “Bein sefer le’efer,” 200–1.
4 Gershom Shofman, “Slamandra,” in Madrih la’moreh (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz
Hameuchad, 1993), 101.
5 Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literature: Essays toward
the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 8.
6 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 36.
7 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Salamandrah (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1946); Primo Levi, Se
questo è un’uomo (Torino: De Silva, 1947). The precise history of both texts
are complicated and evolved through multiple editions. On Levi, see Marco
Belpoliti, Primo Levi (Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 1998), 144–55.
8 See Yechiel Szeintuch, Salamandrah: Mitos Ṿe-Hisṭoryah Be-Khitve K.
Tseṭniḳ (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009), 177–85.
9 For a descriptions of the camp system, see the website of the Memorial and
Museum, Auschwitz Birkenau at http://en.auschwitz.org/h/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=5j accessed March 23, 2017;
and Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz
Death Camp (Bloomington: Published by Indiana University Press in
association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC,
1994).
10 See Milner’s chapter in this volume; and David Rousset, L’univers
concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946).
11 Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi (New York: Liveright
Publishing, 2015), If This Is A Man, vol. 1, 75.
12 See Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography (London:
Viking, 2002), 319–24.
13 Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 1, 75.
14 Ibid., 36.
15 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 1508.
16 Gil Anidjar, The Jew the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford
University Press 2003), 145; and Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz:
The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 80–86.
17 On the history of the poem Salamandra and its performance in Europe by the
Jewish Brigade’s entertainment unit, see Szeintuch, Salamandra, 191–259.
18 Levi begins his account with the phrase “Per mia fortuna,” and my use of the
 word is intended in this sense—with attention to the way that Levi echoes its
use by authors such as Machiavelli. For more on the concept of “fortune” in
the Holocaust, see Robert S. C. Gordon, “Sfacciata fortuna.” La Shoah e il
caso-“Sfacciata fortuna.” Luck and the Holocaust, trans. C. Stangalino
(Torino: Einaudi, 2010).
19 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1946), 235–6; and Ka-Tzetnik
135633, Sunrise over Hell (London: Corgi, 1977).
20 This is Giorgio Agmaben’s claim in Remnants of Auschwitz, 132–5.
21 On this matter, see Levi’s beautiful essay: Primo Levi, “Beyond Survival,”
Prooftexts 4, no. 1 (1984): 9–21.
22 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Levi himself uses the term
“biological and social experiment” in Survival in Auschwitz. See Primo Levi,
The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 1, 74.
23 On the question of survivor’s justice, see Mahmood Mamdani,
“Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?” Journal of Intervention and
Statebuilding 4, no. 1 (2010): 53–67.
24 A version of this view as historical narrative can be found in Benny Morris,
Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (New
York: Knopf, 1999).
25 Primo Levi, “Un Aggresione chiamato Kafaka,” in Primo Levi:
Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987, ed. Marco Belpoliti (Torino: Einaudi,
1997), 191–2.
26 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on
Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980);
and Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999). See also W. G. Sebald, On the Natural
History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003), 143–68.
27 Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 1528–38.
28 Ibid., 1534.
29 Franz Kafka, Il Processo di Franz Kafka nella traduzione di Primo Levi
(Torino: Enaudi, 1983).
30 Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 1434–5.
31 Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 1, 81.
32 Ka-Tzetnik, Salamandra, 219.
33 Yehiel Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiaḥ Lefi Tumo: Śiḥot ʻim Yeḥiʾel Di-Nur (Jerusalem:
Bet loḥame ha-geṭaʾot, 2003), 71–2.
34 Shoshana Felman, “Reading Legal Events: A Ghost in the House of Justice:
Death and the Language of the Law,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
13, no. 1 (2001): 241–8; and Szeintuch, Ke-Mesiaḥ Lefi Tumo, 168–71.
 8
How to Understand Shivitti?
Iris Roebling-Grau

As others in this volume have already discussed, the true identity of the
Israeli author Ka-Tzetnik became known to a worldwide audience when he
testified under his real name, Yehiel Dinur, at the Eichmann trail in
Jerusalem in 1961. This was where he first clearly articulated the metaphor
of the “other planet” of Auschwitz that later became central to his legacy.
While Hannah Arendt abrasively dismissed Dinur’s speech in her report of
the trial, Shoshana Felman later defended him and explained his choice of
words as a metaphorical way of speaking that should testify to the “utter
foreignness of Auschwitz.”1 Neither Dinur the citizen nor Ka-Tzetnik the
author provided any reflection on his use of the “other planet” metaphor
until the publication of his last book. In Shivitti: A Vision, first published
in Hebrew in 1987, Ka-Tzetnik picks up on this metaphor when he reflects
on the impossibility of talking about Auschwitz to the psychiatrist Jan
Bastiaans:

Prof. Bastiaans was never in Auschwitz. And even those who were
there don’t know Auschwitz. Not even someone who was there two
long years, as I was. Auschwitz is another planet, while we
humankind, occupants of planet Earth, have no key to decipher the
code name of Auschwitz. How dare I commit sacrilege by trifling
with those eyes on their way to the crematorium?2

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), 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 Ka-Tzetnik 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, Ka-Tzetnik 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 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 Ka-Tzetnik’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.

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:

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 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 Ka-Tzetnik sketches transgresses the
boundary between victims and perpetrators 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

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 Ka-Tzetnik becomes Rabbi Hagermann and is
crucified. The vision turns the scene in the photograph into a Jewish
imitatio Christi.
This reading makes the link between Ka-Tzetnik’s reading of the
photograph and his identification with the SS man clear, since in that
fantasy Ka-Tzetnik changes sides with the enemy because he believes that
“we are both created in the image of God.” As the boundary between
victims and perpetrators is also a boundary between Jews and Christians,
the transgression is repeated when Ka-Tzetnik turns the Jew in the
photograph into the figure of Jesus Christ (who, of course, was a Jew) and
then identifies with this Jewish Christian image.32
While Ka-Tzetnik’s imagining of himself as a perpetrator arises out of
fear, his identification with Rabbi Hagermann (who he believes to have
been killed by German soldiers) might well arise out of a wish—the wish
to have been among those who did not return. Ka-Tzetnik says this clearly
by quoting the first book of Samuel: “Would God I had died for thee!”33
This quotation is all the more terrible as it is part of the vision in which
Ka-Tzenik sees himself digging the grave for the Jew in the photograph,
thus making it clear that the wish to have died in Auschwitz arose out of
feelings of guilt.34 Feelings of guilt therefore seem to be at the center of
Ka-Tzetnik’s fascination with the photograph that hung over his desk for
many years, and it separates him, as it does for every survivor, from all
those who have been killed. The dead are also “others,” in other words,
and Ka-Tzetnik would like to see himself as one of them.

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, 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 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. 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 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.48On 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
 This essay is part of the project “Imitatio und Identifikation” funded by the
Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
1 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht über die Banalität des
Bösen (Munich: Piper, 2004), 335. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical
Unconscious. Trials and Traumas in the Tweentieth Century (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 131–66, quotation from p. 160.
2 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision, trans. Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa
Herman (San Francisco: Harper & Row), xvi.
3 Bezalel Narkiss, “Shivviti,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 18: San-Sol
(Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007), 492.
4 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, xvi.
5 Bastiaans wrote about his theory in German, using the term “psychische
Aufschließung.” See Jan Bastiaans, “Vom Menschen im KZ und vom KZ im
Menschen. Ein Beitrag zur Behandlung des KZ-Syndroms und dessen
Spätfolgen,” in Essays über Naziverbrechen: Simon Wiesenthal gewidmet, ed.
Wiesenthalfonds Amsterdam and the Bund Jüdischer Verfolgter Wien
(Amsterdam: Wiesenthal Fonds, 1973), 187.
6 Bastiaans, “Vom Menschen im KZ und vom KZ im Menschen,” 181.
7 Tom Segev, Die Siebte Million, trans. Jürgen Peter Krause and Maja Ueberle-
Pfaff (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, Reinbek, 1995), 20–21.
8 Iris Milner has argued just the opposite, insisting that Ka-Tzetnik’s
description of his use of drugs creates a hallucinatory atmosphere in Shivitti:
“Shivitti thus transgresses into the realm of the fantastic.” Iris Milner, “The
‘Gray Zone’ Revisited. The Concentrationary Universe in Ka-Tzetnik’s
Literary Testimony,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 148.
9 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 63.
10 Ibid., 53.
11 Ibid., 50.
12 Ibid., 53.
13 Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet. Israeli Youth
Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 59–62; and
Tom Segev, Die Siebte Million, 20.
14 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 72–3.
15 Jeremy D. Popkin also seems to be skeptical about an optimistic reading of
this passage and stresses that all of Ka-Tzetnik’s writings, including Shivitti,
are published under the same pseudonym. Jeremy D. Popkin, “Ka-Tzetnik
135633. The Survivor as Pseudonym,” New Literary History 33, no. 2 (2002):
354.
16 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 17.
17 Ibid., 12–13.
18 Ibid., 15.
19 Yoel Cohen, Whistleblowers and the Bomb, new ed. (London: Pluto Press,
2005), 28–9.
20 Ibid., 75–98.
21 Ka-Tzetnik does not really explain this concept. “Asmodeus (Ashmedai)” is
an “evil spirit” or “evil demon.” In the talmudic aggadah, Asmodeus is
described as “king of the demons” (Per. 110a). N. N., “Asmodeus
(Ashmedai),” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 2: Alr-Az (Detroit: Thomson
Gale, 2007), 592.
22 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 43.
23 Ibid., 111.
24 Ibid., 44.
25 Bezalel Naor, Kabbalah and the Holocaust (Spring Valley: Orot, 2001), 7.
26 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 13.
27 Ibid., xviif.
28 “German Police Activity in Olkusz,” July 31, 1940, Through the Lens of
History—Mini Exhibits from the Yad Vashem Collections, accessed August 4,
2016, www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/through-the-lens/olkusz.asp.
29 Ibid.
30 Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti, 85.
31 Ibid., 86.
32 The Hasidic culture does not know the concept of imitation, which is quite
common in Christianity. Zaddikim is not imitated as Jesus Christ is imitated
by Christian believers. Susanne Galley, Der Gerechte ist das Fundament der
Welt. Jüdische Heiligenlegenden aus dem Umfeld des Chassidismus
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003), 396–7. Thus, in his vision, Ka-
Tzetnik really creates an intermixture of Judaism and Christianity.
33 Ka-Tzentik, Shivitti, 86.
34 Ibid., 78.
35 Ibid., xi.
36 Ibid., xiv.
37 Ibid., 119.
38 Bastiaans, “Vom Menschen im KZ und vom KZ im Menschen,” 201.
39 Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet,” 67.
40 Ibid., 68.
41 Ibid., 48.
42 Ibid.
43 Oskar N. Sahlberg, Reisen zu Gott und Rückkehr ins Leben:
Tiefenpsychologie der religiösen Erfahrung (Gießen: Imago Psychosozial-
Verlag, 2004), 316–17.
44 Ibid., 26.
45 Ibid., 27.
46 Ibid., 28.
47 I am very grateful to David Patterson for explaining the term that “our
period” translates from the Hebrew original. In his words, “The Hebrew word
here is ‫( תקופתי‬tekufti), from ‫( תקופה‬tekufah), which means ‘epoch,’
‘period,’ ‘age’; it can also mean cycle. ‫ תקופתי‬literally indicates ‘my period,
epoch, age.’ So, strictly speaking, it is neither ‘our’ nor ‘this.’ So he is saying
 it is an age that he personally lived through.” David Patterson, email
communication with the author, April 26, 2016.
48 Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti. Eine Vision (Löhrbach: Der Grüne Zweig,
2005), 250.
 9
Beyond Boundaries: History, the Holocaust, and
Literature
Dirk Rupnow
Translated by Christopher Geissler and Annette F. Timm

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.

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 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 Auschwitz-Birkenau
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.
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 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.
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 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, 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 multi-volume 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 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). 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 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 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’
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 supra-national 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.
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 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, and Volker Kaukoreit (Vienna:
praesens, 2009), 67–97; “Jenseits der Grenzen: Die Geschichtswissenschaft,
der Holocaust und die Literatur,” in “Holocaust”-Fiktion: Kunst jenseits der
Authentizität (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), 85–99; and “Fakten und
Fiktionen: Der Holocaust zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft und Literatur |
lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de,” Lernen aus der Geschichte 04/2015: Kunst
und Geschichte. Künstlerische Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Holocaust,
accessed September 8, 2016, http://lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de/Lernen-und-
Lehren/content/12378.
1 Michel de Certeau, Theoretische Fiktionen: Geschichte und Psychoanalyse
(Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1997), 59.
2 Dirk Rupnow, “Transformationen des Holocaust: Anmerkungen nach dem
Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts,” Transit—Europäische Revue 35 (2008): 68–88.
I also provide a discussion of the extensive literature on the subject here. See
also Dirk Rupnow, “Zeitgeschichte oder Holocaust-Studien? Zum Ort der
Erforschung der nazistischen Massenverbrechen,” in Politische Gewalt und
Machtausübung im 20. Jahrhundert: Zeitgeschichte, Zeitgeschehen und
Kontroversen. Festschrift für Gerhard Botz, eds. Heinz Berger, Melanie
Dejnega, Regina Fritz, and Alexander Prenninger (Vienna, Cologne and
Weimar: Böhlau, 2011), 575–83.
3 See the chapter “From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European
Memory,” in Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New
York: Vintage, 2005), 803–31. For a critical view of the possibilities and
potentials of European memory politics, see Jan-Werner Müller,
“Europäische Erinnerungspolitik Revisited,” Transit 33 (2007): 166–75.
4 Moshe Zimmermann, “Die transnationale Holocaust-Erinnerung,” in
Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, eds. Gunilla
 Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2006), 202–16. For a different view, see Jens Kroh, Transnationale
Erinnerung: Der Holocaust im Fokus geschichtspolitischer Initiativen
(Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus Verlag, 2008). Kroh focuses
particularly on the Stockholm conference of 2000.
5 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der
Holocaust (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2001). Levy and Sznaider call the
process of hybridization and mixing in global culture “Glokalisierung”
(glocalization).
6 On the importance of the national level for transnational processes and the
complex interplay between the global and the local, see Saskia Sassen, A
Sociology of Globalization (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
7 Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Post-War
Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence
of the Past, ed. Jan-Werner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 157–83.
8 See Viola B. Georgi, Entliehene Erinnerung: Geschichtsbilder junger
Migranten in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003); Nora
Sternfeld, Kontaktzonen der Geschichtsvermittlung: Transnationales Lernen
über den Holocaust in der postnazistischen Migrationsgesellschaft (Vienna:
Zaglossus, 2013); and Büro trafo.K, “‘Und was hat das mit mir zu tun?’
Perspektiven einer transnationalen Geschichtsvermittlung zu Nazismus und
Holocaust in der Migrationsgesellschaft,” Zeitgeschichte 40 (2013) 1: 49–68.
9 Particularly useful examples from the rich literature include Cornelia Brink,
Ikonen der Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus
nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: De Gruyter,
1998); Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in der
deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001); Jeffrey
Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999); Peter Reichel, Erfundene Erinnerung:
Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater (Munich and Vienna: Carl
Hanser Verlag, 2004); and Waltraud Wende, ed., Der Holocaust im Film:
Mediale Inszenierung und kulturelles Gedächtnis (Heidelberg: Synchron,
2008).
10 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zachor: Erinnere Dich! Jüdische Geschichte und
jüdisches Gedächtnis (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988), 104.
11 See Dirk Rupnow, “Unser Umgang mit den Bildern der Täter. Die Spuren
Nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik—Ein Kommentar zu Yael
Hersonskis Film ‘Geheimsache Ghettofilm,’” Dossier Geheimsache
Ghettofilm, ed. Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, accessed September 8,
2016, www.bpb.de/geschichte/nationalsozialismus/geheimsache-ghettofilm/;
and Dirk Rupnow, “Die Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik und
unser Umgang mit den Bildern der Täter. Ein Beitrag zu Yael Hersonskis ‘A
Film Unfinished’/‘Geheimsache Ghettofilm,’” zeitgeschichte-online, October
 2010, www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/md=AFilmUnfinished.
12 See Bertrand Perz, Die KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen: 1945 bis zur
Gegenwart (Innsbruck, Vienna and Bozen: Studien Verlag, 2006), 235–58;
and Bertrand Perz, “Die Ausstellungen in den KZ-Gedenkstätten
Mauthausen, Gusen und Melk,” in Zeitgeschichte ausstellen in Österreich:
Museen—Gedenkstätten—Ausstellungen, ed. Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie
Uhl (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau, 2011), 87–116; and Heidemarie
Uhl and Bertrand Perz, “Gedächtnis-Orte im ‘Kampf um die Erinnerung’.
Gedenkstätten für die Gefallenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges und für die Opfer
der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft,” in Memoria Austriae I:
Menschen—Mythen—Zeiten, eds. Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller and Hannes
Stekl (Vienna: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004), 545–79.
13 See Wolf Gruner, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden
durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, vol. 1: Deutsches
Reich 1933–1937 (Munich: de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2008), 8; and Dieter
Pohl, “Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das
nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945: Ein neues Editionsprojekt,”
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 53 (2005): 4, 651–9.
14 A general discussion of this debate can be found in Manuele Grüttner,
“Shoah-Geschichte(n): Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden im
Spannungsfeld von Historiographie und Literatur,” in Literatur und
Geschichte: Ein Kompendium zu ihrem Verhältnis von der Aufklärung bis zur
Gegenwart, eds. Daniel Fulda and Silvia Serena Tschopp (Berlin and New
York: de Gruyter, 2002), 173–94.
15 Ruth Klüger, Dichter und Historiker: Fakten und Fiktionen (Vienna: Picus
Verlag, 2000), 50f. See also Ruth Klüger, weiter leben: Eine Jugend
(Göttingen: dtv Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992).
16 Imre Kertész, Galeerentagebuch (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1997), 253.
17 Sarah Kofman, Erstickte Worte, trans. Birgit Wagner (Vienna: Passagen,
1988), 53.
18 Jonathan Littell and Pierre Nora, “Gespräch über die Geschichte und den
Roman,” in Jonathan Littell, Die Wohlgesinnten: Marginalienband, trans.
Doris Heinemann et al. (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2008), 22–64, esp. 37 and 45.
See also Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones: A Novel, trans. Charlotte Mandell
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2010). The French original appeared under the
title Les Bienveillantes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2006).
19 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Literarische Erzählung oder kritische Analyse? Ein
Duell in der gegenwärtigen Geschichtswissenschaft (Vienna: Picus Verlag,
2007), 43.
20 Claude Lanzmann and Jürg Altwegg, “Littell hat die Sprache der Henker
erfunden,” in Littell, Die Wohlgesinnten: Marginalienband, 15–21, esp. 18.
See also Claude Lanzmann, “Ihr sollt nicht weinen: Einspruch gegen
‘Schindlers Liste,’” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 5, 1994; and
Claude Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of Understanding. An Evening with
 Claude Lanzmann,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 200–20.
21 Laurent Binet, HHhH. Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich, trans. Mayela Gerhardt
(Reinbek: Rowoht, 2011).
22 See Heimrad Bäcker, nachschrift (Graz and Vienna: Droschl, 1993) and
Heimrad Bäcker, nachschrift 2 (Graz and Vienna: Droschl, 1997). I have
written on the subject in detail in Dirk Rupnow, “Die Unbeschreibbarkeit des
Beschreibbaren: Anmerkungen zu Heimrad Bäckers ‘nachschriften,’” Modern
Austrian Literature 36 (2003): 1–2 and 17–31.
23 On the problem of Holocaust denial, see Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the
Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Plume,
1994); Deborah Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David
Irving (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005); Richard J. Evans, Lying about
Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New York: Basic
Books, 2002); Michael Shermer and AlexGrobman, Denying History: Who
Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 2002); and Robert Jan van Pelt, The
Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indian University Press, 2002). On the question of the authentic,
see Achim Saupe, “Authentizität,” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte: Begriffe,
Methoden und Debatten der zeithistorischen Forschung, accessed August 8,
2012,
http://docupedia.de/zg/Authentizit%C3%A4t_Version_3.0_Achim_Saupe;
and Achim Saupe, “Authentisch/Authentizität,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe:
Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al., vol. 7
(Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2005), 40–65, esp. 63.
24 Saul Friedländer, “Introduction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation:
Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–21, esp. 5.
25 Saul Friedländer, Kitsch und Tod: Der Widerschein des Nazismus (Munich:
dtv Deutsche Taschenbuchverlag, 1984). The English version was published
in the same year: Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch
and Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
26 See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews. 2 volumes (London:
HarperCollins, 1997 and 2006). Saul Friedländer, Den Holocaust
beschreiben: Auf dem Weg zu einer integrierten Geschichte (Göttingen:
Wallstein Verlag, 2007). For a discussion of Friedländer’s work, see the
contributions from Alon Confino, Christopher Browning and Amos Goldberg
in “Forum: On Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination,” History and
Theory 48, no. 3 (2009).
27 For Saul Friedländer’s earlier arguments, see Saul Friedländer, “The ‘Final
Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” in Lessons and
Legacies: The Memory of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter
Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 23–35; and Saul
 Friedländer, “Trauma, Memory, and Transference,” in Holocaust
Remembrance: The Shape of Memory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Oxford and
Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994), 252–63.
28 See “Collections Highlight: Auschwitz through the Lens of the SS,” US
Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?
ModuleId=10007435, accessed August 9, 2016. The album was put together
by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker (1911–2000), a defendant in the first
Frankfurt Auschwitz trial who received a sentence of seven years of
imprisonment for complicity in the mass murder of at least 3,000 people.
29 Ulrike Jureit, “Vom Zwang zu erinnern,” Merkur 61 (2007): 2, 158–63.
30 In this context, see also Peter Schünemann, “Vergessensschuld: Vortrag bei
der Gedenkveranstaltung für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus am 27. Januar
2000 in Darmstadt,” Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung:
Jahrbuch 2000 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 9–15.
31 See Dan Diner, “Vorwort des Herausgebers,” in Zivilisationsbruch: Denken
nach Auschwitz, ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1988),
7–13; Dan Diner “Den ‘Zivilisationsbruch’ erinnern: Über Entstehung und
Geltung eines Begriffs,” in Zivilisationsbruch und Gedächtniskultur: Das 20.
Jahrhundert in der Erinnerung des beginnenden 21. Jahrhunderts, ed.
Heidemarie Uhl (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003), 17–34; and Dan Diner,
Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse: Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).
32 Imre Kertész, Eine Gedankenlänge Stille, während das
Erschießungskommando neu lädt, trans. György Buda and Christian Polzin
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 21.
33 Friedländer, “The “Final Solution,’” 23.
34 Alain Finkielkraut, Die vergebliche Erinnerung: Vom Verbrechen gegen die
Menschheit (Berlin: Klaus Bittermann, 1989).
35 Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft: Antisemitismus,
Imperialismus, totale Herrschaft (Munich: Piper, 2000 [first English edition,
1951]), 912. See also Harald Welzer, Verweilen beim Grauen: Essays zum
wissenschaftlichen Umgang mit dem Holocaust (Tübingen: ed. discord,
1997).
36 Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, “Dichtet Clio wirklich?,” in Sprache der
Geschichte, ed. Jürgen Trabant (Munich: de Gruyter, 2005), 77–85.
37 See, for example, Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance:
Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006); and Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History,
Language, and Practices (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1997). For a concrete historical investigation of the problem of
objectivity in the discipline of history, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream:
The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). A more positivistic view of
the topic can be found in Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York
 and London: W. W. Norton, 2000). In this context, see also Chris Lorenz,
Konstruktion der Vergangenheit: Eine Einführung in die Geschichtstheorie
(Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1997); and Ludolf Herbst,
Komplexität und Chaos: Grundzüge einer Theorie der Geschichte (Munich:
C. H. Beck Verlag, 2004).
38 Hayden White, The Content and the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987), 82.
 Conclusion
Annette F. Timm

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 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 Roebling-Grau 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, 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
Ka-Tzetnik 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-image-of-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.
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 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. Everywhere-Auschwitz. As far as the eye can
see—an Auschwitz-latticed sky.14
As Or Rogovin writes, in this passage, “time and space fuse into an
indistinguishable, inescapable, and infinite sequence that language can
capture only from within: an ‘Auschwitz day’, an ‘Auschwitz sky.’”15
That Ka-Tzetnik was trying to establish the otherworldliness of Auschwitz
—its status as the “other planet”—is necessary to grasp how he intended to
convey the experience of the Muselmänner. Unlike Dinur’s unconscious
choice to adopt the third person, the image of “the planet of Auschwitz”—
with its chronotope of “interchangeable space” and its different
relationship to time (where “every fraction of a minute ... passes on a
different scale of time”)—was carefully crafted.16 It was an effort to
convey the enormity of the crimes committed during the Holocaust and the
helplessness of its victims. But having investigated how important this
destabilization of time and space is to the “the underlying system of his
writing,” we must locate the writer himself in time and space in order to
take his readings seriously as an eyewitness account. Both Dinur and the
readers of his works are influenced by their particular location in time and
space: the specific historical context from which we view the experience
of the Holocaust.
Ka-Tzetnik began writing in a time when the communication between
survivors and those seeking historical understanding was possible but
incredibly fraught. As I argued in Chapter 2, before the Eichmann trial,
both the attitudes of professional historians and the political atmosphere in
Israel during the period of nation building militated against the
valorization of the voices of individual survivors. Of course, Dinur—or,
more accurately for this time, Feiner/Zitinsky—had chosen to speak in
fiction and in the third person before he had any exposure to this particular
atmosphere. His recourse to the mythic symbol of Salamandra and his
assumption of the voice of the omniscient narrator took place in Bucharest
and Italy, while he was part of the Ha’Bricha and when he was still writing
in Yiddish. He received various encouragements and material rewards
from this refugee group and swore an “Auschwitz Oath” to represent their
experiences in writing. In other words, the choice to write in the third
person is only understandable in the context of this particular biographical
experience of having been designated the representative of a group of
survivors. It is not surprising that the author maintained this more
distanced third-person approach to the stories he told once he had
succeeded in making a life for himself in an Israel that was not yet open to
hearing about the suffering of individual survivors.
 In other words, we cannot understand the poetic choices that Ka-
Tzetnik’s made in his early novels without tracking the specific
geopolitical context in which they were written. As Bartov has argued,
before the 1960s, survivors could not easily assume the role of
representatives of the nation since in the context of a militarized state
under threat from surrounding enemies it seemed more powerful to “be
just like one’s enemies so as to avoid the fate of one’s ancestors.”17 This
fact influenced both scholarly and literary investigations of the Holocaust,
and it was only after the forced resignation of Ben-Zion Dinur from Yad
Vashem in 1959 that research into the experiences of survivors could
begin.18 If we once again take Yechiel Dinur’s testimony at the Eichmann
trial as the turning point, it is fairly understandable how his fame
transitioned from one based on distance—in the sense that his family saga
was written in the third person—to one based on identification. Before the
1960s Israeli survivors, particularly those with Eastern European heritage,
could not be easily integrated into the national narrative of the creation of
an independent state, despite the fact that the Holocaust more generally
had been a central argument for the creation of the state of Israel.19 “The
trial of Adolf Eichmann,” Tom Segev argues, “served as therapy for the
nation, starting a process of identification with the tragedy of the victims
and survivors, a process that continues to this day.”20 This transition also
created a new standpoint from which Ka-Tzetnik’s novels were read, both
in Israel and abroad.
Aside from shining a spotlight on the author that connected his work to
the trial’s detailing of graphic violence, the shift in attention toward
survivors also enabled a new reading of Ka-Tzetnik’s identification with
the Muselmann. A connection that Ka-Tzetnik had framed in mythic and
theological terms was henceforth read more politically: the Muselmann
now appeared as a symbol of the “entire Jewish world.” As Uri Cohen
argues, a deeper reading of Ka-Tzetnik’s novels reveals a primarily
Eastern European understanding of the fate of the Jews, an understanding
that was quite alien to Western Jews. Even Jews of German-speaking
origin who had emigrated to Israel (and who were known, often
disparagingly, as yekkes) were unlikely to frame their experiences in
spiritual terms and often refused to identify with their more spiritual
counterparts from Eastern Europe, to whom they still often applied the
extremely derogatory label: Ostjuden (Eastern Jews).21 Ka-Tzetnik’s
particular mode of identifying with the Muselmann, particularly his
insistence that he was one, contrasts with the perspective of the Italian
survivor Primo Levi, who self-consciously framed his memoir, Se questo è
un Uomo (If This Is a Man but later translated as Survival in Auschwitz), in
the terms of the Enlightenment. “Levi,” Cohen argues, “is writing of
Man’s Auschwitz, of the destruction of the West’s crowning
achievement,” while “Ka-Tzetnik is writing the Jewish Holocaust.”22
The question of point of view, of identification with the victims of the
Holocaust as Jews or as fellow human beings, is quite obvious in the
context of the young Israeli state. But it has not in any way lost its
significance for our understanding of the survivors’ writings. This volume
has presented considerable evidence that Ka-Tzetnik’s works have been
read and marketed very differently in Israel than they have been in the rest
of the world, and we must be aware of how they will enter a fundamentally
reconfigured global memory culture as we move into what, following
Rupnow, we might call the post-communicative phase of Holocaust
research, memorialization, and remembrance. Rather than contributing to
the flattening of discourse surrounding the Holocaust (produced by
endlessly circulating media images that “can be inappropriately and easily
operationalized and interchanged for other purposes”23) scholarly
explorations of Ka-Tzetnik’s work must stay attuned to how the different
translations, marketing methods, and receptions reveal specific national
memory cultures along with the influence of what has become a global
culture of Holocaust remembrance. Segev notes that “Over the years, there
were those who distorted the heritage of the Holocaust, making it a bizarre
cult of memory, death, and kitsch. Others too have used it, toyed with it,
traded on it, popularized it, and politicized it. As the Holocaust recedes in
time—and into the realm of history—its lessons have moved to the center
of a fierce struggle over the politics, ideology, and morals of the
present.”24 The temptations to read Ka-Tzetnik’s work as kitsch have been
particularly strong outside of Israel, where taboos against its sexual themes
held sway in the academy while simultaneously nursing the titillating
instrumentalization of his storylines and metaphors in popular culture.

Moral understanding: Sexualized representations of evil

It is important to pay attention to the extremely sensationalized way that
Ka-Tzetnik’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 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 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.
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
witness-stand 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, Ka-Tzetnik’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 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.
15 Or Rogovin, “The Poetics of the Other Planet: Testimony and Chronotope in
Ka-Tzetnik’s Piepel,” this volume.
16 Ibid. Rogovin takes the phrase “interchangeable space” from M. M. Bakhtin,
“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson,
revised ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 100.
17 Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism,” 48.
18 Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in
Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 197–8.
See my longer discussion of these developments in Chapter 2.
19 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim
Watzman (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991), 18.
20 Ibid., 11.
21 For an extended discussion of the difficulties that German-speaking Jews had
in integrating into Israeli culture in the 1930s and beyond, see Segev, The
Seventh Million, 15–66, esp. 51–2; and Rakefet Sela-Heffy, “‘Europeans in
the Levant’ Revisited—German Jewish Immigrants in 1930s Palestine and
 the Question of Culture Retention,” in Deutsche(s) in Palästina und Israel:
Alltag, Kultur, Politik, ed. José Brunner, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche
Geschichte/Tel Aviv Yearbook for German History 41 (Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag, 2013), 40–59, esp. 48.
22 Cohen, “Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi and the Muslims,” this volume.
23 Rupnow, “Beyond Boundaries.”
24 Segev, The Seventh Million, 11.
25 Pascale Bos, “Sexual Violence in Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls,” this volume.
26 Sara R. Horowitz, “Mengele, the Gynecologist, and Other Stories of
Women’s Survival,” in Judaism since Gender, ed. Miriam Peskowitz and
Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997), 210.
27
28 Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
Final Solution (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992).
29 Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits
of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),
12.
30 Hayden White, The Content and the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987), 75.
31 Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance, 13.
32 On the Betriebsunfall thesis and its origins, see Nicolas Berg, The Holocaust
and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretation and
Autobiographical Memory, trans. Joel Golb (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2003), 48–50.
33 Rupnow, “Beyond Boundaries,” this volume.
34 Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical
Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5.
35 Rupnow, “Beyond Boundaries,” this volume.
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 Index

Agudat Israel Youth here

Améry, Jean here
Appelfeld, Aharon here
Apt Pupil (King) here, here
Apt Pupil (dir. Singer) here
Arab-Israeli War (1967) here
Arendt, Hannah here, here, here
Asherman, Nina here, here, here
At the Mind’s Limits (Améry) here
Auschwitz here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here
as alien world. See other planet
Buna sub-camp here
Günthergrube sub-camp here, here
in literature and film here, here, here, here, here
as memorial here, here
as metaphor here, here, here
See also concentrationcamps; Holocaust; Other Planet; slave labor

Bäcker, Heimrad here

Barbie, Klaus here
Bartov, Omer here, here, here, here, here, 141–here, here, here, here, here,
here
Bastiaans, Jan here, here, here, here–7. See also LSD treatment
Bavli, Hillel here, here, here, here
Beit habubot. See House of Dolls
Bricha here, here, here
Broder, David here
Bucharest, Romania here

Central Jewish Historical Commission here

Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine here
Code: E.D.M.A., The (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Shivitti: A Vision
Cold War here, here, here
concentration camps here, here, here, here, here, here
Bergen Belsen here
Birkenau here, here
Concentration Camp Syndrome (KZ Syndrome) here, here, here
Dachau here, here
Mauthausen here
Niederwalden here
physical geography of here, here, here, here
Ravensbrück here, here
Starachowice here
survival narratives here, here, here, here
tattoos here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Zakrau here
See also Auschwitz; Holocaust; slave labor

Derrida, Jacques here

Diaspora here, here, here
Dinur, Yehiel here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
at Eichmann trial here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
See also Feiner, Yechiel; Ka–Tzetnik 135633
Draier, Alfred here
Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi) here, here
Dworkin, Andrea here

Eichmann, Adolf here, here

trial here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Eretz Israel (Palestine) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here. See also Yishuv

Feiner, Yechiel here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
childhood and education here
as Holocaust victim here
see also Dinur, Yehiel; Ka–Tzetnik 135633
Felman, Shoshana here
Fortunoff Video Archive here
Fragments (Wilkomirski) here
Frank, Anne here, here
Friedländer, Saul here, here, here, here
Funktion here, here, here, here, here

German Historical Museum (Berlin) here

Goldblum, Halinka here
Goldblum, Sanya here, here, here, here
Goldenberg, Eliyahu here
Grossman, David here
Gruenbeum, Eliezer (Atshe) here

Ha’Imut (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Like Sand out of the Ashes

Haganah here
Hagermann, Rabbi Moshe Yitzhak here, here
Hayim-Idle here, here
Herzliya, Israel here
Hilberg, Raul here
Holocaust here, here, here, here, here, here
denial here
desire for revenge here, here, here
memory and representation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here
modernity of here, here
motivations here, here, here
psychological effects here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
study of here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
treatment of female survivors here, here
understanding and study in postwar Germany here, here, here, here,
here, here
victims here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here
See also Auschwitz; concentration camps
House of Dolls (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
historicity here, here, here, here, here
publication here
 translations here

I. G. Farben here, here

International Military Tribunal. See Nuremberg Trials
Israel here, here, here, here, here, here, 159;
attitude toward Holocaust survivors here, here, here, here
Holocaust education here, here
militarism here
Ministry of Defense here, here
Ministry of Education here, here
nuclear weapons program here
postwar culture here, here, here, here, here
refugees in here
Israel Defense Forces here, here, here
Etzel here

Jewish Brigade here, here, here

Jewish Historical Institute (Źydowsky Instytut Historyczny) here
Jewish resistance here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Joy Division. See sex slavery

Kabbalah here, here

Kafka, Franz here
kapos here, here, here, here
Ka-Tzetnik 135633 here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here
faith and religion here, here, here, here, here
family in writings here, here, here, here, here, here, here
identification with perpetrators, other victims here, here, here, here,
here, here
pseudonym here, here, here
reception and legacy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
reclusiveness here
writing process here, here, here, here, here, here, here
See also Dinur, Yehiel; Feiner, Yechiel
Kertész, Imre here, here, here
khurbnforshung (destruction research) here
Kindly Ones, The (Littell) here, here, here, here
Kofman, Sarah here
Kovner, Abba here

Lanzmann, Claude here

Levi, Primo here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Levy, Dani here
Like Sand out of the Ashes (The Confrontation) (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) here,
here, here
Lithuania here
Londner brothers, Manek and Ze’ev here, here
LSD treatment here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. See also
Bastiaans, Jan
Lubetkin, Zivia here

Meir, Golda here

miscegenation. See Rassenschande
Moni: A Novel of Auschwitz (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Piepel
Muselmann here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here

Naranjo, Claudio here

Nazis. See Auschwitz; concentration camps; Holocaust; sex slavery, sexual
violence
Nazisploitation genre here, here, here, here
Night Porter, The (dir. Cavani) here, here
Nuremberg Trials here, here

oral history (methodology) here, here, here, here

other planet here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here. See also Auschwitz concentration camps

Piepel (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here
pornography here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. See also
sexploitation
Preleshnik, Daniella (character in Salamandra series) here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. See also House of Dolls
Preleshnik, Harry (character in Salamandra series) here, here, here, here,
 here, here, here
Preleshnik, Moni (character in Salamandra series) here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here. See also Piepel
prostitution (forced). See sex slavery

Rassenschande here
Red Army here
Ringelblum, Emanuel here

Sadeh, Yitzhak here, here, here

Salamandra (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here
Salamandra (poem: Ka-Tzetnik 135633) here, here, here, here, here
Salamandra (series: Ka-Tzetnik 135633) here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here
historicity here, here, here
publication of here, here, here
religion in here, here
sexualization of here, here, here, here, here
as testimony here, here
as vengeance here, here
Schindler’s List (dir. Spielberg) here, here, here
Schneersohn, Isaac here
See Under: Love (Grossman) here
sex, history of here
sex slavery here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here. See also sexual violence
sexploitation here, here, here, here, here, here. See also pornography
sexual violence here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here
politicization of here, here, here, here
study of here, here, here
treatment of victims here, here, here, here, here
See also sex slavery
Shivitti, A Vision (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here
Shoah Visual History Foundation here
Simon Wiesenthal Center here
Singer, Bryan here
slave labor here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. See also
Auschwitz; concentration camps; Holocaust; sex slavery
Sosnowiec, Poland here, here
Spielberg, Steven here, here, here, here, here
SS (Schutzstaffel) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here
Stalags (books) here, here, here, here, here
Star of Ashes (Ka-Tzetnik 135633) here
Survival in Auschwitz (Se questo è un Uomo) (Levi) here, here, here
Szeintuch, Yechiel here, here, here, here

Tarvisio, Italy here

Tel Aviv here, here
They Called Him Piepel (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Piepel
Trial, The (Kafka) here
Tsofen: E.D.M.A (Ka-Tzetnik 135633). See Shivitti, A Vision
Tsveiuntsvantsig: Lider (Feiner, Yechiel) here, here, here
destruction of copies here, here, here
Twilight Zone, The (TV series) here, here

United States here, here, here

intervention in Second World War here
Jews in here, here, here
US Holocaust Memorial Museum here, here

Vanunu, Mordechai here

Vichy France here

Warsaw Ghetto uprising. See Jewish resistance

Wendlin Frei, Aloise here
Wiener, Alfred here
Wiesel, Elie here, here, here, here, here
Wilkomirski, Binjamin here
Woerl, Ludwig here
World Jewish Congress here

Yad Vashem here, here, here, here, here

Yishuv here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. See also Israel

Zionism here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

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First published 2018

© 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.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-1209-7

ePDF: 978-1-3500-1210-3
eBook: 978-1-3500-1211-0

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

Cover image: Survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp during his testimony
at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Alias: K. Zetnik. (Photo by Popper Ltd./ullstein
bild/Getty Images)

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