Ka-Tzetnik 135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym

AUTHORS WHO PUBLISH their works under a pseudonym usually do so to conceal some essential fact about their identity. For the Holocaust survivor who calls himself Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (Concentration-Camp Inmate 135633), however, pseudonymous publication has served just the opposite function: it forces readers to confront what he presents as the one and only significant aspect of who he is. Ka-Tzetnik adopted this strategy with the publication of his first book about his wartime experiences, a volume titled Salamandra, which appeared in Hebrew in 1946, and he has maintained it down to the present day. Even after he became a national celebrity in Israel—a result due both to his writings and to his spectacular appearance at the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, in which he fell unconscious on the witness stand—Ka-Tzetnik refused to allow his photograph to appear on the jackets of any of his books, would not speak in public or grant interviews, and did not attend ceremonies for the presentation of the Ka-Tzetnik book prize, an award endowed in his honor by one of his admirers. ¹ Only a transformative experience in the 1980s, when he was almost seventy, led him to modify his attempt to live a symbolic life as a pseudonym.

When Salamandra was published in 1946, the process of gathering first-hand testimony about the ghettoes and death camps was just beginning. Ka-Tzetnik's book, written in Hebrew and published in a Palestine preoccupied with the postwar struggle for a Jewish state, attracted little attention elsewhere; it was not published in English until 1977. ² His second Holocaust volume, House of Dolls, based on his sister's gruesome fate as a prisoner in a concentration-camp brothel, appeared in 1956 and had considerably greater success. It was promptly translated into numerous other languages, and the English version had gone through fifty printings by 1977. ³ House of Dolls was followed by Atrocity (also known as Piepel), based on the experiences of the author's younger brother, and Phoenix over the Galilee, in which the main character from Salamandra sought his place in the new state of Israel. ⁴ In Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, Ka-Tzetnik became a best-selling author, especially among younger readers who appreciated his direct and uncensored portrayal of a historical period that their elders were unwilling to discuss honestly. ⁵ Outside Israel, however, Ka-Tzetnik's work has failed to achieve a place in the literary canon of Holocaust survivor literature. The emotional nature of his writing, his limited success in sketching characters with psychological depth, and his frankness about details of the physical and moral humiliations inflicted on the Jews during the war make it easy to classify his writing with that of popular novelists who did not personally experience the Holocaust, such as Leon Uris. Today, despite enormously increased interest in the Holocaust, the English-language versions of his books on the Holocaust are all out of print, a degree of neglect that is certainly unjustified. ⁶

In everyday life, the author who calls himself Ka-Tzetnik does indeed answer to a given name. He was born in Poland in 1917 as Yehiel Feiner. Like many survivors who made their lives in Israel after the war, he marked his new life by assuming a new Hebrew name, Yehiel De-Nur. ("De-Nur" means "From the Fire," a direct reference to his Holocaust experience [SM 4].) But a rigorous separation between his everyday identity and that of Ka-Tzetnik 135633 has been central to his attempt to communicate the essence of the Holocaust experience. The use of the number tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz as an authorial name communicates two fundamental facts about his camp experience: that Auschwitz deprived him of the personal identity that would justify a claim to a proper name, and that the purpose of his writings is not to speak of his own experiences...