![]() But none of the children moved.” This mother who survives as a witness to the monstrosity asks the narrator of the story “. ![]() ‘Now each of you go and run to your parents.’. “They were sitting on straw, one beside the other. We may ask, why must we go back yet again and tell of this monstrosity? This question is answered in the story “Traces” by a mother who has watched her own children deny her in order to spare her life. These stories all take place during the German occupation of Poland, if not slightly before, then during-but never afterwards, even if set upon a calendar page after the chronological end of the war, since for those few who survived and do the telling, time and life in a “normal” way will never resume. The source of this wetness is always fresh human blood. This meadow is soggy in summer, and the snow is stained bright red in winter. There’s always a central square or marketplace into which Jews are being assembled by Nazi decree, and several miles away is a meadow surrounded by woods. With a few exceptions, the place is always a small rural village in Poland sometimes called Lubianki, or N-, sometimes bisected by the river Gniezna, of “the dirty-yellow color of beer.” The characters have tongue-twisting names like Wojciech, Ludeczek, Tadeusz. Tzetnik's series of six novels that.Scraps, remnants, swatches of reconstituted memory are patched together in this extraordinary collection of semiautobiographical stories by Ida Fink. With the exception of Shivitti, (9) the last of Ka. (7) Reflecting solely the perspective of the victims who were captured within its boundaries, and avoiding almost any panoramic view of historical affairs, his texts are confined to the territory enclosed by the electric fences surrounding the "concentrationary universe." (8) Tzetnik presented a realistic portrayal of the world of extermination as a closed system, detached from any surrounding context. (6) Whereas other writers of the time expressed an almost exclusive concern with how the Yishuv (the prestate Jewish settlement in Palestine) responded to the Shoah and the relations between the survivors and Israeli society, Ka. Tzetnik's works constitute a uniquely direct confrontation with those events. In the context of the relatively limited belletristic responses to the Holocaust that characterized the Israeli cultural arena during the late 1940s and 1950s, Ka. (4) It was on the witness stand at the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 that Dinur revealed himself as the person behind the novels, which by then had attracted wide attention. More than a decade was to pass before the identity of its author, previously known only by his pseudonym, became familiar to the general public. (1) Together with his two following novels, Beit ha-bubot (House of Dolls) (2) and Piepel, (3) it was the first work to expose Israeli society to the details of Jewish suffering under the Nazi regime and to the inside of the concentration Lager (camp) in particular. His novel Salamandra was written in Yiddish in 1945 in an Italian Displaced Persons camp, where he had arrived after two years in Auschwitz, and appeared in its Hebrew translation a few months later under the pseudonym Ka. Yehiel Dinur is the author of one of the first literary representations of the Nazi concentration camps published in Israel. Tzetnik, concentrationary universe, dehumanization, gray zone, literary testimony Tzetnik's emphatic representation of existence in this "situation at the limits" is understood in relation to works by such authors as Jorge Semprun, Charlotte Delbo, Ida Fink, and Tadeusz Borowski. Tzetnik's oeuvre, this article presents it as a unique, daring, and nonjudgmental literary testimony to the "inside" of the Lager as a gray zone, a testimony that defies Levi's distinction between "the drowned" and "the saved." Ka. Tzetnik's novels Salamandra, Piepel, and House of Dolls are read in this article within the context of the polemic over the Jewish victims' alleged collaboration with the Nazi annihilation system-a polemic generated after World War II by Bruno Bettelheim, Raul Hilberg, Hannah Arendt, and others, and revived by Primo Levi in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved (1986). ![]() He became known to the public on the witness stand of the Eichmann trial in 1962. This article discusses the literary representation of the "concentrationary universe" in the works of Yehiel Dinur, the Yiddish and Hebrew author who published under the pseudonym Ka.
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