It has recently been suggested that the historiography of the Holocaust lacks a “thick description” of the event. This desire to complement, if not replace, the more complex but seemingly detached interpretations of the Nazi genocide of the Jews with the gory details of the horror per se may itself be motivated by a variety of conscious or unconscious urges and intentions. Indeed, there is a great deal to be said on the prevalence of such “thick descriptions” in the scholarly literature and their potential effect on the historical reconstruction of the Holocaust. But for those on the lookout for evidence of sadism and brutality, degradation and inhumanity there is no dearth of documentary, biographical, and literary sources. One of the most extraordinary examples of this kind of representation can be found in the writings of Yehiel Dinur, formerly Feiner, an author who has remained relatively unknown outside of Israel despite translations of his books into numerous languages, but whose impact, under the pen name Ka-Tzetnik, on several generations of young Israelis has been enormous. By analyzing some of the most pertinent themes in Ka-Tzetnik’s oeuvre, we may gain some insight into the merits and perils of plunging directly into the man-made anus mundi of Auschwitz— for the writer as individual, for his literary representation of the event, and for his readership.
Yehiel Feiner was born in Poland in 1917, studied in a yeshiva in Lublin, and published a volume of poetry in Yiddish with the Warsaw publishing house Kultur Liga in 1931. During the German occupation of Poland he was first in a ghetto and then in Auschwitz, where, according to his own account, he escaped from a selection despite the fact that he had already been reduced to the level of a mussulman. He once more escaped from a death march only moments before the prisoners were executed by their SS guards (who then proceeded to put on the prison uniforms of the dead so as to avoid punishment by the Red Army). Feiner came to Palestine as part of the Brihah (illegal immigration) operation organized by the Jewish Brigade and the Haganah (the defense organization of the Yishuv) and changed his name to Dinur, or of fire in Aramaic (the name may also be associated with the Hebrew word din, which can mean trial, justice, and punishment, and especially with the Di-nur River mentioned in the Book of Daniel and interpreted by the Kabbalah as “a river of fire in the upper reaches of hell that descends upon the evil after their death to purify them”). For the next four decades he devoted himself to writing on his own experience in the camps, on the fate of his parents, siblings, and wife, who all died in the Holocaust, and on his post-Auschwitz life in Israel and his struggle to build a new identity, while remaining totally obsessed with the genocide he had survived.
Until the early 1960s Dinur retained his anonymity. His books were all published under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik, which is derived from the German acronym for concentration camp (KZ, for Konzentrationslager) and was a commonly used term among the inmates (but may also be associated with Franz Kafka’s character K). His identity was revealed during the Eichmann trial, where his testimony, which was cut short when he collapsed in the courtroom and was ushered to a hospital, made public his assertion that Auschwitz was “another planet,” that is, a universe in which the conventional rules and customs of human civilization did not apply. This concept, which has since been repeatedly employed, often without reference to its originator, constituted the central theme of Ka-Tzetnik’s literary production, although, as we shall see and contrary to what most critics have claimed, in his later writings he completely reversed its meaning.
At the heart of Ka-Tzetnik’s oeuvre is the sextet Salamandra, subtitled A Chronicle of a Jewish Family in the Twentieth Century. This subtitle is somewhat misleading, since only some of these semiauto-biographical volumes are concerned with Dinur’s family, and especially the latter books can be read more as ruminations on the personal, metaphysical, and mystical meanings of the Holocaust. The first volume, titled also Salamandra, opens with a citation from an ancient Hebrew source: “When fire burns in one place for seven years without pause, a creature emerges from it called Salamandra.” The word salamandra, or salamander in English, which came into these languages from Greek, denotes both a lizard-like animal and a mythical creature supposed to live in fire. Another Hebrew source describes it as “being born of fire; he who is covered by its blood will not burn.” Hence the whole sextet, totaling over a thousand pages in its latest edition, is dominated by the notion of being (re-)created by or forged from fire, living through annihilation, and emerging as a different being, whose bridges to the past have been burned and whose present existence is made meaningful only through that essential link to total destruction. There is here both a sense of profound vulnerability and insecurity, derived from long exposure to imminent death, and a sense of tremendous strength, almost invincibility, by one who survived the fire and lived to tell the tale, even if he is no longer the same person who had originally been thrown into the flames. This heroic mode, reminiscent of the Nibelungenlied, where Siegfried became invincible by bathing in the dragon’s blood, is of course also deeply ironic, since it is Siegfried’s descendants, so to speak, who are out to cremate Ka-Tzetnik and indeed destroy his world. And yet, while Siegfried is eventually slain by Hagen’s spear, aimed at the only vulnerable spot in his body where the dragon’s blood had been obstructed by a leaf fallen from the mythical Germanic linden tree, Ka-Tzetnik’s initiation to the rite of blood and fire is so thorough that he can no longer succumb even to his own raging psyche.
The sextet, written between the late 1940s and the late 1980s, is constructed as follows. Volume 1, Salamandra, tells the story of Harry Preleshnik, a thinly veiled Yehiel Feiner, his fiancee and future wife Sonia Schmidt, and some members of his family. It begins just before the war and ends with Harry’s final escape from the Germans at the very last phases of the war. Volume 2, House of Dolls (Bet ha-bubot), focuses on Harry’s sister Daniela, who is made into a so-called Feld-Hure, a prostitute for German soldiers, and dies by exposing herself to gun fire by the camp guards. Volume 3, Piepel, is the story of Harry’s young brother Moni, who is made into the servant and sexual slave of various barracks commanders (Blockleiter) in Auschwitz until he too is finally killed (such child prostitutes were called Piepel in the jargon of the camps, a term apparently derived from the German provincial word for lad and penis). Volume 4, The Clock (Ha-shaon), is a kind of summary of and initial rumination on the central themes and events of the first three volumes. Volume 5, The Confrontation (Ha-imut), which continues Harry’s life after his survival and describes his arrival in Palestine, the beginning of his literary career, and his encounter and later marriage with Galiliya, culminates with his wife’s mental crisis provoked by both his persistent obsession with the Holocaust and the confrontation between the Jewish and Arab populations in Israel. Finally, volume 6, Shivitti (Ha-tsofen, literally The Code), is apparently a purely autobiographical account of the author’s treatment for depression by a Dutch psychiatrist using controlled doses of LSD, and it ends in a mystical kabbalistic vision whereby Ka-Tzetnik’s initial perception of Auschwitz as “another planet” is radically reversed and his mind is liberated from its haunting memory by accepting that Auschwitz was and remains an integral part of the human experience.