Another in the 'you couldn't make it up' series...

Jon Cloke
Loughborough

Documentary spotlights Stalags, Israeli pocket books based on Nazi themes

By Isabel Kershner

Published: September 6, 2007

JERUSALEM: It was one of Israel's dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s, 
as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking 
testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a series 
of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became 
best-sellers throughout the land.

Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the 
children of survivors themselves, the Stalags were named for the World War 
II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse 
tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female 
SS officers kitted out with whips and boots.

The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping 
and killing their tormentors.

After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar 
Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are emerging back into the 
public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural 
representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been 
unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has 
permeated even the school curriculum.

"I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up 
here, were of naked women," said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film, 
"Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel," premiered at the Jerusalem 
Film Festival in July and is scheduled to be broadcast in October and shown 
in movie theaters. "We were in elementary school," he noted. "I remember how 
embarrassed we were."
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Hanna Yablonka, a professor of history at Ben Gurion University of the 
Negev, says the film highlights what she calls the "yellow aspects of 
nurturing the memory of the Holocaust."

"Are we taking it into the realm of semipornography?" she asked. "The answer 
is, we are."

The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli 
society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out 
almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition 
was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an 
Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography. The 
most famous Stalag, "I was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch," was deemed to 
have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to 
hunt every copy down.

The Stalags went out of print and underground, circulating in specialist 
secondhand bookstores and among furtive groups of collectors.

Libsker's 60-minute documentary puts the Stalags under a spotlight for the 
first time and exposes some uncomfortable truths. One is that the Stalags 
were a distinctly Israeli genre, created by Israeli publishers and penned by 
Israeli authors, although they had masqueraded as translations from English 
and were written in the first person as if they were genuine memoirs.

Until the Eichmann trial began in 1961, the voices of the Holocaust had 
hardly been heard in Israel. The survivors sensed the ambivalence of the 
old-timers who blamed them for not having emigrated in time and questioned 
what immoral deeds they might have done in order to stay alive.

In the movie, the publisher of the first Stalag, Ezra Narkis, acknowledges 
that it was the trial, in all its sensational and often gory detail, that 
gave momentum to the genre.

More provocatively, the movie contends that Stalag pornography was but a 
popular extension of the writings of K. Tzetnik, the first author to tell 
the story of Auschwitz in Hebrew and a hero of the mainstream Holocaust 
literary canon. K. Tzetnik "opened the door," and "the Stalag writers 
learned a lot from him," Narkis said.

K. Tzetnik was a pseudonym of Yehiel Feiner De-Nur. The alias, short for the 
German for concentration camper, was meant to represent all survivors, a 
kind of Holocaust everyman. One of K. Tzetnik's biggest literary successes, 
"Doll's House," published in 1953, told the story of a character purporting 
to be the author's sister, serving the SS as a sex slave in Block 24, the 
notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz.

Though a Holocaust classic, scholars now describe it as pornographic and 
likely false.

"It was fiction. Block 24 didn't exist," said Na'ama Shik, a researcher at 
Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in 
Jerusalem.

Yet "Doll's House" and other writings of K. Tzetnik, who died in 2001, are 
treated as historical fact by many in Israel, and are included in the high 
school curriculum. Libsker's movie shows the vice principal of an Israeli 
school guiding a group of teenagers through Auschwitz, pointing out Block 24 
and quoting from K. Tzetnik.


This approach to Holocaust education is being eschewed by an increasing 
number of Israeli academics. "The Holocaust was bad enough, without making 
things up," Yablonka said.

Sidra Ezrahi, a professor of comparative Jewish literature at the Hebrew 
University of Jerusalem, said, "His books were so graphic and so barbaric." 
Maybe at first they had an important impact, she said.

"But over time," she added, "if this is what they have chosen to leave in 
the Israeli curriculum, it's a scandal."

For many Israelis, the most dramatic part of the Eichmann trial was the 
testimony of K. Tzetnik. His true identity was revealed for the first time 
on the witness stand, where he passed out. Simultaneously, the Stalags were 
reaching the peak of their commercial success.

Yechiel Szeintuch, a professor of Yiddish literature at the Hebrew 
University, rejects any link between the smutty Stalags and the writings of 
K. Tzetnik as "an original sin." He insists the work of K. Tzetnik was based 
on reality.

But Libsker, 35, himself the grandson of Holocaust survivors, contends that 
it is the same mixture of "horror, sadism and pornography" that serves to 
perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust in the Israeli consciousness to this 
day.

Copyright © 2007 the International Herald Tribune All rights reserved