-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 9, 2007 12:41:35 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: In HOLOCAUST PORN, Jews Get to Rape Buxom Aryans
HOLOCAUST PORN
Israel’s Unexpected Spinoff From a Holocaust Trial
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/world/middleeast/06stalags.html?
ex=1346817600&en=b8c106c737bec67c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&ex
prod=permalink
Courtesy of Heymann Brothers Films
Pocket books called Stalags were practically the only pornography
available in the conservative Israeli society of the early 1960s.
Though it was claimed that the Stalags were translated from
English, they were actually created and written by Israelis.
By ISABEL KERSHNER
New York Times, September 6, 2007
JERUSALEM, Sept. 5 — 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 Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic pocket books
called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers
throughout the land.
Courtesy of Heymann Brothers Films -- Hitler made a rare appearance
on the cover of a Stalag.
Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often
the children of survivors, 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 outfitted 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 re-
emerging in 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” had
its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be
broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. “We were in
elementary school,” he noted. “I remember how embarrassed we were.”
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 pornography?” 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
specialty secondhand bookstores and among furtive groups of
collectors.
Mr. 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,” Mr. Narkis said.
K. Tzetnik was a pseudonym for 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, many scholars now describe it as
pornographic and likely made up.
"It was fiction," said Na'ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, The
Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. "There were
no Jewish whores in Auschwitz." 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. Mr. 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,” Dr. 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 K.
Tzetnik’s work was based on reality.
But Mr. 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.
Correction: September 7, 2007
The Jerusalem Journal article yesterday, about the pornographic
pocket books with Nazi themes that were circulated in Israel in the
1960s, misquoted Na’ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, The
Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, regarding the
pocket book “Doll’s House,” about a Jewish woman serving in a
notorious brothel called Block 24 in Auschwitz. She said the book —
not Block 24 — was fictional.
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