During the first two decades following World War II, Israeli youths were exposed to a highly charged discourse on the Holocaust in which the encounter with the survivors and ideological biases, selective information and widespread ignorance, repressed shame and denial of guilt, prejudice and embarrassment all combined to make it exceedingly difficult for young men and women to make any sense of the event. That the Holocaust had been an unprecedented disaster for the Jewish people was generally accepted; that it was also perceived as an instance of national humiliation, whereby millions of Jews were said to have gone “like sheep to the slaughter,” made coming to terms with it an almost unbearable burden and a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Because the state of Israel was presented as the definitive and only possible answer to the (destruction of the) Jewish Diaspora and because the new Israeli Jews—armed, aggressive, and victorious—were depicted as the polar opposite of the defenseless, weak, and submissive Jewish victims of European persecution, identifying with one’s ancestors in the Exile was ideologically a contradiction in terms, especially as far as young Sabras (Jews born in Israel) were concerned. The inhabitants of ghettos and the inmates of concentration camps could hardly serve as a model for youths raised on the myth of Masada and Tel Hai, according to which dying for one’s country and sacrificing oneself for the national cause was the greatest achievement a person could strive for. Indeed, it might be said that, during those early years of statehood, Israeli identity was largely based on a negative model, whereby “we,” the Sabras, were defined as being the opposite of “them,” the Jews of the Galut (exile), and the new national entity was constructed as the extreme negation of the discredited Diaspora.
There were of course positive models—historical, mythical, and fictional—ranging from the biblical Israelites, the Maccabees, and the Zealots’ anti-Roman rebellion to the early Zionist defense organizations, such as Ha-shomer, and, to be sure, the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and other instances of Jewish resistance to the Nazis. But because the Holocaust (along with, though also in contradiction to, the wars with the Arabs) was so central to the minds of young Israelis, yet furnished the most distinct negative example of Jewish helplessness and victimhood, and because the Nazis were perceived as strong, relentless, and victorious (in that they had achieved their goal of annihilating Jewish existence in much of Europe), it was difficult to avoid a complex, bizarre, and highly disturbing attitude toward the persecutor. For the Nazi manifest will to sacrifice, devotion to a cause, urge to take revenge on real and imagined enemies, and unbound ruthlessness and cruelty were constructed as an ambiguous example to the future generation of Israeli warriors. Thus, if from one perspective the Nazi perpetrators were the epitome of evil and the Jewish victims the fundamental legitimation of Israeli statehood, 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.
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, whereby the heroic youths of the ghettos rise against their elders, rebel against the age-old Jewish tradition of compliance and compromise with the enemy, and react to adversity just as their brethren in Palestine would have by taking up arms and dying as warriors rather than victims. Alongside these tales, which appropriated the rebels of the ghettos into the Zionist pantheon, were also stories about heroic children who smuggled food (as well as guns and ammunition) into the ghettos and of some adults, such as Janusz Korczak, who sacrificed themselves for the children. Hence the focus of these stories was on action, sacrifice, and meaningful death. The vast majority of the Jews in the ghettos and camps were ignored, and by implication were treated as having lacked the qualities necessary to give their existence a meaningful content of struggle and resistance; surrounded by an embarrassed silence rooted in an unwillingness to understand how they had allowed themselves to be murdered without fighting, the millions of victims were hidden in the shadow cast by the heroic few. While the rebels were presented as the link between the Diaspora and the “new” Jews in Israel, the rest were portrayed as almost inevitably doomed precisely because they had not learned how to adapt to a new environment, that is, to fight rather than hide, to be like their enemies rather than like their fathers.
The second type of literature, which might be called “illegitimate,” was passed secretly from one youth to another, read at night under a street lamp far from the eyes of adults, hidden under stones in the backyards of tenements, never brought home, hardly ever discussed, 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, written by anonymous (but most probably Israeli) writers, replete with perverse sex and sadistic violence. The excitement evoked in young readers by such pulp fiction stemmed both from the encounter with forms of human activity kept tightly sealed from them by the puritanical nature of pre-1967 Israeli society and from the fact that the central sites for these actions were the concentration camps. Nothing could be a greater taboo than deriving sexual pleasure from pornography in the context of the Holocaust; hence nothing could be as exciting. That Israeli youth learned about sex and perversity, and derived sexual gratification, from books describing the manner in which Nazis tortured Jews, is all the more disturbing, considering that we are speaking about a society whose population consisted of a large proportion of Holocaust survivors and their offspring. What effects such extracurricular sexual “education,” combined with the elevating and generally optimistic “legitimate” literature on the Holocaust, may have had on the evolving psychology of young Israelis and eventually on society as a whole can only be guessed; generalizing would hardly do justice to this underresearched phenomenon. But there is little doubt that subsequent generations, although exposed to a much more elaborate and sophisticated discourse on the Holocaust (and far more explicit pornography), have not been wholly liberated from this pernicious trap, whereby they must have more of the violent and ruthless attributes associated with the perpetrators so as not to become their victims (whom on some level of consciousness they are still defending). Simultaneously, in the course of this liberating transformation of roles, they may also discover a whole range of illicit fantasies and secret pleasures.