HOUSE OF DOLLS (Beit ha-bubot)

Novel by Ka-Tzetnik 135633, 1953

Gershon Shofman, one of Israel's preeminent authors, once wrote that House of Dolls (1955) by Ka-Tzetnik 135633 is "a holy book." Certainly the most famous and widely read of his novels, House of Dolls, originally published in Hebrew as Beit ha-bubot in 1953, centers on a young Jewish girl, Daniella Preleshnik, in reality the writer's own sister. Three days before the outbreak of the war, the 14-year-old is captured in Poland while on a trip at the end of the school year and transferred to a Nazi women's camp, the ironically named Camp Labor Via Joy, where she is forced to become a prostitute for German soldiers. Formally, the plot is based on the notebook kept by Daniella.

The story is told in flashback, and the narrator is Daniella's brother Harry, who is assigned to the sick bay, although he had never graduated from medical school and although there are no medicines, no beds, no instruments, and, most importantly, no patients. Instead, he is charged with overseeing the burial of the piles of Jewish bodies, all the while struggling not to surrender to the impending debasement of life that turns those interned into Mussulmen, or "living skeletons." These are the deformed, crippled, near dead men who are the embodiment of human misery and lost hope. Over the course of the novel Harry loses all of those who are close to him, including his friend Tedek, once a member of the ghetto resistance who is now enamored with Daniella.

As the girls enter the camp and are directed to their division, they are first sterilized and then inducted into the abhorrent master-slave relationship of the so-called House of Dolls, for which they are simply not prepared. The extreme sexual abuse and their treatment as mere objects in this brothel clearly illustrate the familiar trope of Ka-Tzetnik's series of novels: the Holocaust as a unique event and as the most horrifying and obscene of modern situations. We learn, for instance, that the "dolls" must be in perfect physical condition for the visiting soldiers, those en route to the Russian front or those coming from the transit terminus, who stop by to prey upon the weak and vulnerable Jewesses. In addition, the discovery of a venereal infection means immediate doom, for any damage results in transportation to the ovens. Worse, if the concentration camp guards or other "German warriors" leave unsatisfied with their entertainment, they need only convey their displeasure and report the number tattooed on the girl's breast. In the event that three such complaints are recorded, death is instant. In a similar vein, we read that every girl must smile to show her appreciation of the pervasive cruelty meted out day and night, knowing that her life depends on seeming happy and content for the "guests." One could venture the observation that, in portraying such events and situations, there exists the risk of trivialization and objectionable eroticism, of seducing the reader to participate voyeuristically in the sexual victimization presented rather than to focus on the horror perpetrated. Still, it is equally clear that on a different reading the text gravitates to the other central theme hovering over the novel, the facility of the women-victims to survive spiritually the gory dehumanization of the Nazis in spite of the beatings and rape. In fact, among the pages of the book can be found various instances of the will to live and to preserve one's sanity and dignity. One is the tale of Tzevia, an orthodox girl from the seminary of Beit Ya'acov who purposefully and stubbornly refuses to acquiesce to her tormentors' advances, although she knows the result of such repudiation. Inevitably, Tzevia is bludgeoned to her death, standing naked in the execution arena, defiant and strong, admirably victorious in keeping her chasteness and virtue whole, "as a tough shell." Another striking case is Daniella, who keeps her head up and who against the odds upholds her moral integrity. As the novel draws to a close, the heroine seeks to escape her dreaded existence by sauntering toward the barbed wire fence. Not surprisingly, she is shot by an SS sentry who knows that he will be rewarded with three days of leave for ending her bid for freedom. Following the murder, he bursts out singing, intoxicated with euphoria, for "Tomorrow he's going to his family. Maybe—to mother, waiting at home. Maybe—to sister, or—to little only—daughter who he so pines for as he stands here on the bridge."

Doubtless, the dark, violent barbarism of the German officers knows no bounds, and there is a panoply of monstrosities. Elsewhere, the same sentry clobbers Tzevia's sister Hanna to death in a methodical, gut-wrenching display. To the pious woman's shouts of "God all mighty, save me," he responds with well-directed and vicious blows to her head, legs, arms, and ankles, watching calmly as she writhes in pain, plunging her teeth into the ground, and tearing out her hair. Afterward he coolly rests to devour his sandwich. And there are the medical experiments conducted by the German professor on the girls, including artificial inseminations, tests on twins, and coerced abortions and castrations, or the raw cruelty of Elsa, the brothel overseer.

While the narrative limns in graphic detail Daniella's, Harry's, and the other inmates' ordeals and sexual exploitation, Ka-Tzetnik ensures that the teenager's memories of family love and tradition engraved deeply in her psyche are not erased. To wit, as a counterpoint the author undercuts his sequences of sheer Dantean hell with the quotidian innocence and loyalty that guyed Daniella and her brother Moni's life before the war in the town of Kongressia. Among other things, this serves to further underscore the nauseating degradation they are subjected to and to emphasize the two realities, each stridently polar from the other.

Through the succession of vignettes padded with interior monologues, Ka-Tzetnik pulls the reader into Daniella's world, dramatizing and compounding the sadism to which the protagonist must adapt but ultimately cannot. It is interesting that the scenes of battery and psychical defilements are inscribed in a nonjudgmental, neutral manner, perhaps as a tacit acknowledgment that what is being chronicled is at the peak of the objective mode since the satanic acts speak volumes and do not require a braiding of the subjective.

—Dvir Abramovich