House of Dolls

Ka Tzetnik

Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Nazi-assigned pen name of an Auschwitz survivor (oddly, there seems to be some controversy as to who Ka-Tzetnik 135633 was; some say it was Yehiel De-Nir, others Karol Cetynski), here gives an account of life in a Nazi prison camp, but in the most roundabout of ways. This seemingly autobiographical novel (viz. Shvitti: A Vision, where he speaks of his own sister in Daniella's role) deals mostly with the stories of Harry and Daniella, a brother and sister living in the Jewish quarters of an unnamed town on the border of Germany and Poland. Roughly the first half of the book is a simple depiction of trying to get along day to day in the Jewish quarters, told mostly from Daniella's viewpoint. To be blunt, it's slow as molasses. The book picks up (and becomes the highly-recommended-by-the-underground book it is) when Daniella, not long after Harry, is taken to a concentration camp and ends up working in the House of Dolls, a camp brothel. Harry, in the next ca! mp over, has been made the camp medic for no reason anyone can discern. There is little plot to the latter half of the novel; instead, Ka-Tzetnik 135633 infuses the whole mess with a painful sense of irony. Imagine an O.Henry story that runs 250 pages and has a far, far darker cast to it than anything O.Henry ever wrote.

There is much to be gained from reading this book beyond the prurient; don't get me wrong. However, I'm guessing that its audience is going to be an exceptionally narrow one; those who both revel in (or are horrified by, but cannot turn their eyes from) degradation (Daniella, I should mention, is fourteen when the novel takes place; this is the dark and ugly flip side of Duras' wonderful novel The Lover) and are willing to put up with the diction that one had thought went extinct with the death of Henry James. Still, it is the literary equivalent of, say, Shoah, the excellent and painful nine and a half hour film that still stands as the be-all and end-all of concentration camp documentaries. It is brutal and unflinching, for all its slowness, and deserves a wider audience than that which it has already captured.