Ka-Tzetnik 135633
La Casa delle Bambole

KZ/Selektion 1: Buchenwald.

Daniella had been possessed by the Muse of Confusion. She stood for a long time watching until the image of Harrik, her brother, vanished, perhaps forever. The summer of 1939 was ending, and she was about to leave on a school trip from Kongressia, her city, to which she would never return. In the market square of Yablova, they were all victims of a roundup. She saw the crushed head of Viernik, her history teacher, the director of everything. By a useful coincidence, she managed to escape that seizure and randomly reach the Krakow ghetto, where she was taken in by a loving family and was granted work in a factory of textiles and footwear. The hallway was already populated by an impressive number of shadows. The streets were dead and dark. The curfew hung over that ghetto like a black blanket. In the dark, the shadows were silent, each rendered mute by its own secret sorrow. There, in the hallway, the darkness was different, it breathed heavily, on those stairs.
To the right, the cutting room opened up. People disappeared from that place without leaving a trace and were never heard from again. No one knew where the people who wore the clothes they worked on had gone and, after only a few hours, they would have been completely forgotten. No one knew what Auschwitz was, no one knew what a labor camp was, no one knew what they were working on, no one dared to ask what was being built in the other factories essential for war purposes.
The arrival of a flood, a downpour. The wrath of God.
A purpose that only the Gestapo knew. Everything was confiscated by the State.

There was as much space as one wanted now at the cutters' tables, and the areas of light that opened up between one worker and another filled their souls with anguish. They began to suddenly realize the nature of the materials being used, cut from many pairs of striped pants, exactly like those they wore. At the table sometimes someone would suddenly stop, just for a moment. Those clothes still seemed to be worn by living creatures, and it seemed they were of men, of men and women like them. Beams of light fell into the ghetto, exposing the fear. Lips pressed tight to keep the terror inside, lower jaws twitching convulsively, words emerging jagged and barely recognizable as such. Fear, held in too long, often erupted in uncontrollable bouts of diarrhea. In the dead of night, it was death knocking on the entrance.
The Jewish militia took them all away, every age and every gender, all the bodies and souls, an obedient and macabre array of corpses still unaware, traveling willingly one after the other towards their future mass grave, all in mute nighttime processions.

Tedek was the son of Vekve the Lithuanian, he had abandoned the ghetto for her. His obsession was how to get past the Beskid range to reach the Slovakian border and take her to Palestine, but in reality, he had not managed to leave the ghetto, he was caught. Menashe, the brother, was eliminated. Then Shlamek’s father. The military had seized him and with white-hot irons branded the word Jude on his forehead and Sieg Heil on his chest. Then they let him leave his apartment to show off that defacement. As if it were natural for those words to bleed. At the counter where soup was distributed for free, their cries rose to the heavens. Hunger united a massive human crowd. Every time the Gestapo requested a load of Jews for deportation, the Judenrat first laid hands on those who lived off the ration distributed for free. Those who managed to stay in the ghetto had laid hands on the fortunes of relatives now taken away. The Jews had suddenly become generous, some seemed to have abandoned their stereotypical stinginess. The tailoring shop was doing business: exquisite dishes, beer, and potassium cyanide. The most sought-after item now was cyanide. Whoever had it in their pockets knew they could continue to eat cheesecake, the shop had become the antechamber of a brothel. People sold everything they had, spent everything they had, and no longer cared about hoarding for the future. Christians had started buying anything from the Jews, everyone eagerly awaited opportunities from ghetto traders. They bought relics of other lives.

The Dulag had the capacity to drown human suffering. There were so many passing girls inside, many daughters of the privileged who had always had the means to use corruption to deviate from adverse situations, but inside nothing would work. The Dulag was the interim stop between the ghetto and death. Fella, from the Jewish city of Radno, was not a privileged one, she too would pass through that building. When she was also confined in a center in Krakow, she spent the night in the militia headquarters. In the morning, she returned to those bare rooms where she was relegated with a loaf of bread or whatever else she had managed to obtain, and distributed it to everyone without asking for anything in return. She didn't want to impose herself on anyone, didn't ask for anything from anyone. Fella was a good girl, she had a personality of steel, she only asked to be allowed to sleep in peace. The previous night those bastards hadn’t left her alone for a single moment. Dogs of the Judenräte. Holy Mother of Warsaw.

KZ/Selektion 2: Theresienstadt.

Ka-Tzetnik was an enigma. Yehiel Feiner/Yehiel De-Nur also known as Karol Cetinsky/Karl Zetinski was Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (Sosnowiec, 1909 – Tel Aviv, 2001).
Accused by Hannah Arendt in Germany of megadramatic sensationalism, by others in Israel of producing lowbrow stalag literature, insufficiently sophisticated, and pointed out by yet others abroad as the precursor of nazisploitation, namely the irresistible fascination with evil versus the immense banality of good, in essence, the pornography of terror, particularly, in this work, one reads only of a man plagued by a too-severe post-trauma who faints in a courtroom after having seen flames explode in front of the gates of the beyond and having understood what it truly meant, hell. Respect for the chronicler and his heart, less consideration as an author of a novel. He himself did not consider himself a writer writing literature. This is his chronicle of two years of deportation, of the non-existence of identity and reduction to a serial number. Time there was not the same, and inhabitants did not live according to the laws of the world. They no longer had names. Their name was the number Ka-Tzetnik.

House of Dolls (Beit habubot, 1953) is a peculiar offspring: almost intermittently rosy at the start with too many exclamations and too many left dislocations in the translation, then it lands at the house of darkness. The importance of the content is indisputable, it is not a high-quality literary work, it does not always succeed in translating the monstrousness of that disaster and its psyche, but it is a difficult task if one hasn’t been there, and, of course, even more difficult if one has lived it. Emotional writing of rather weak structure studded with long deliria and nightmares, the good is not in the plot – which is almost irrelevant – of the bridgeheads, but in the path that has been traveled. In a linear and clear language, the descriptions of strong negative lyricism regarding the anxieties of waiting for the impending grim fate and the macabre observations on appearances/interiorities of the condition of that captivity and the lost identities and torn individualities are instead effective and brutal. 135633 was found wandering adrift in a sky of ashes, the same in which his entire family and humanity had been reduced in the crematorium of Auschwitz. Ka-Tzetnik lived an extremely private life, becoming a myth. It is said that he wrote all night and never left the house despite his books selling millions of copies. He decided to name his daughter Daniella. As for the rest, what he did was secret. No interviews, no promotion for his books, not even by phone.
A strict separation between his everyday identity and that of Ka-Tzetnik 135633.

KZ/Selektion 3: Kraków-Płaszów.

Division of labor, Division of joy. The house of dolls. Feld-Hure A13653 and Feld-Hure A13652.
A matriculation number between the breasts, a long electric blue stamp. Joy, evidently, has many faces.
Red light bulbs, lit, indicated that the wire fence was crossed by high voltage current. Outside, there was a surprising expanse of flowers and trees. The walls of the barrack were covered with roses, they were red and, in the distance, the scientific department seemed to float on a lake of blood. The building was empty, its silence loomed like a nightmare over everything. The muteness of things grew, until it became unbearable. Thus Daniella was transferred to the Division of Joy.
The flame heat that had passed through her womb still burned from the inside. Her naked body was drenched in sweat. Only then did she realize she was immersed in a pool of fluids continuously exiting her body, through all her dilated pores. Through the lattice of her cell, she could see, in the cages across, pregnant girls intent on embroidering red flowers on white linen tablecloths. At the Division of Joy, girls were sent to the experimental surgery department to be sterilized en masse. Daniella had been sterilized in the research barrack. The experiments lasted for long periods: artificial inseminations, twins, abortions, premature births, and various methods of disutility.
Organs were removed from bodies and replaced with artificial organs. Toxic drugs of all kinds were experimented on humans. The quiet was absolute, as if one found oneself in an underwater aquarium. In an isolated cage, a creature stared intensely through the grid.
She had been a girl in the bloom of youth. Now it was no longer understandable whether that being was male or female. A fragment of life.
As if the camp military doctors had managed to recreate in the laboratory the Neanderthal man.

From an adjoining room entered a Slovak doctor. She held a glass jar. Inside floated in a clear liquid a piece of bloody flesh, shaped like a human heart. She handed it over to the chief who raised it to the window to examine the organ in daylight. He alternately observed the woman from whom it had been removed and the amputated object. Blood extracted, hidden nature to transfer through a glass tube into a vial, life smeared on a slide. The chief decided that the experiment unit would die. The scientific institute. As when one was bound to the torture table, in the Gestapo prisons, and the death instruments ceased for a moment to break bones, the marrow encapsulated in them seemed to suddenly want to start singing with joy; even though the black uniforms were always there, superior, one felt the desire to laugh with them. It was the relief of broken bones, it was that first moment of breath that compelled it, the marrow, suddenly, wanted to sing.
As in the Gestapo cells, one let oneself fall into the liberating arms of fainting.
Sleep was only a brief parenthesis of breath, in the relentless siege of pain.

In the pink-painted barracks, constant surveillance was exercised over the bodies of the camp girl whores. At the Division of Joy, they were required to undergo a health inspection once a week. Those afflicted with any deformity were preemptively eliminated. The KB was divided into two sectors. In one, which was closed, those who had contracted a venereal disease during pleasure service were placed. From that sector, the girls were sent to the hospital, from which they never returned. Fear was contagious, soon they would all be forced to smile. Those who committed an infraction, in that paradise of coercive sex and plentiful food, were reported in a report. If a guest was dissatisfied with the entertainment, all he had to do was report it, indicating the number tattooed on the girl's chest, leaving, carrying in his pocket the fate of that life. Punishments, purgations of sins, and sins of indifference. When there was a flogging, all prisoners had to witness the torture.
The more beautiful a girl was, the stronger Elsa's hatred.
In her room, the sanctuary of the New Human Civilization, Elsa of Düsseldorf was never satisfied.

On the headboard of each bed, the number tattooed in the flesh of its keeper was marked. In the morning inspection, the pillow of the first bed had to be perfectly aligned with that of the twenty-fifth. In the house, almost every night, Tzippora Shafran sang and all the girls formed a choir. She sang the lullabies her mother used to sing to her as a child. Songs in Hebrew because the mother, in her youth, had been a Hebrew teacher. The night received the song in its bare arms, lifted it beyond the wire fences to hide it in the safe refuge of its high vaults, on soft waves towards the silver gate of the full moon, the halo around the tortured head of Jesus of Nazareth. For a brief moment, reality vanished and the girls remained immersed in the sleep of eternity. The melody of another world, distant, vanished, forgotten. They could almost hear its weeping. Which then came. Punctually. It came for Hanna of Chebin, from whose mouth broken teeth protruded and from whose eye sockets erupted eyes. Hanna wanted to die, asked to die. She was made to suffer among bursts of prolonged beatings, as if her cries were music to Hentschel, the SS officer. It came for Tzippora. Tzippora remained silent, allowing herself to be abused without a single moan escaping from her mouth. Tzippora had already crossed the limit of consciousness. A procession left the barrack. The girls from the Division of Joy were looking towards a huge mass grave full of skeletons. The skeletons were naked. Bones. An incredible number of bones and the hideous calm that hung over that place. Closed and unknown faces advanced with majestic stride, aware of their importance, bringing death with them. And death followed them. And death came from their ranks. Terror, horror, and cessation passed like a gust across the execution yard. And it was the end.
Daniella, was forced to witness the execution. It was all useless. It was all over. She herself would no longer be there. No one would be there anymore. The living are not dead, the dead are not alive and the flowers are like people, they are alive. Everything happened in a vacuum. A moment later it was gone.

KZ/Selektion 4: Mauthausen.

Harrik had undertaken medical courses during the pre-war period.
Now, against his will, he was appointed as the camp doctor of Niederwalden. Hygiene and Swastika.
On the infirmary table, everything had to be perfectly columned, according to height and width criterion. White labels, written in Latin. He couldn’t be there, yet he was.
He didn't hear the screams, he saw them. Modern Civilization. Many of the deportees set out with medicines. But it was forbidden to be sick, at the camp. They had now become putrefying material.
The wastepaper basket was always filled to the brim with residues of decomposing material.

At the Baustelle, they became weaker and weaker, felt faint, and it was only fear keeping the men standing. The fear of blows and brutal beatings managed to overcome even the jaws of hunger. Often, the weak resisted longer than the strong. They would have preferred to be insensible, but they couldn’t. The conscience still refused to be annulled. In the evening the prisoners returned carrying the day's dead upon their shoulders, they lined up on the assembly ground and waited for the roll call, at which the doctor had to be present. The corpses were arranged. The heads had to be in line with the feet of the front row, the bodies side by side, hands crossed over hollow bellies, it was not permissible that the alignment was not perfect. The will of the deportees was now completely drained, they had become empty shells. They went where they were told to go and stopped where they were told to stop. The silence gong sounded and they crawled out of their lairs, headed for the area in front of the barrack, and arranged themselves neatly. They had to be led back to their cots. Dry bones, empty blood vessels. They never complained. Human semblance had already been erased for a long time. As if the dead were not those who had departed, but the others, the ones who remained.
The rising of the sun no longer interested anyone. Daylight was now useless.
Outside, the dawning day revealed a remote world to which they no longer belonged.

Mouths open tried to form words, but no sound came out. It was the eyes that pleaded for help. They had been quietly in line for hours. It was difficult to understand what they wanted. They just needed someone to help them cry. There it was, life, exhausted. It lingered outside the shell that had hosted it and was about to leave forever. Life, in a breath, was about to go.
Imprisonment had turned Tedek into an idiot. Now his pulse no longer beat, but he was still alive.
One could hear the cry compressed inside, coming out of the open wounds of his dead body.
His qualities now shone again in his living eyes. Tedek, finally, had vanished.
And no, that thing on the ground could not be Zanvil Lubliner. A dead thing, Harrik.
A Minian gathered, but then as now, one does not recite the Kaddish for the Prophet Elijah.

Death was the same everywhere. The beginning of existence and the end of passing were about to touch. The corpse shed and the SS quarters were equivalent. It was among them as one of the many, equal to each of them. He stared at them but didn’t see them, just as the others looked at him without seeing him. Now they would force him to enter. They would hold him still to make him see what they were about to do to her. The Führer watched the scene from inside a picture frame. He wore a black cloak on his shoulders and brown clouds gathered behind him. Harrik lay on the floor and his life lay beside him.
Harrik and Daniella glimpsed each other for a moment, or maybe not, both physically devastated and mentally clouded in those SS quarters, then no more. Then it was the end.
Simultaneously the night stretched out its black tongue to lick the blood of the seventeen-year-old doll. Among white wings the tortured life of Daniella Preleshnik. The sky covered the earth with a white shroud.
Fella, instead, could no longer even hate God. Fella will be destroyed at midnight.
No love lost, no life, and no joy in the house of dolls, in fact, the nox aeterna.