""There was nothing unusual in the way they lined up" ""holding their heads up nigh." ""Nothing unusual except for the fact these soldiers were women." ""Two platoon of female SS brutes" ""in tight pants, shiny boots," ""and jackets stretched over blooming breasts." ""Under the caps cropped haircuts were visible," ""but the hair was fine and the necks delicate and feminine." ""'Holy Jesus; someone muttered." ""Real dames with asses and breasts."" "STALAGS" "I first saw the Stalags in a second hand book store." "Booklets with colorful covers and illustrations of busty SS women torturing tough men." "It costs 140 shekels." "140 shekels?" "Yes." "Look." "This costs 140 shekels?" "And people buy them." "They're no longer available." "They're from the 60's." "Stalag plots are all alike," "Variations on the same theme." "The time:" "World War ll." "The Allies constantly bomb Nazi forces." "The protagonist is an American or British pilot whose plane is hit he parachutes onto occupied European territory." "He is taken captive and placed in a camp, a "Stalag"." ""Stammlager" in German, which means permanent camp." "To his surprise he discovers that the guards are sadistic SS women who rape and torture him." "The few Stalag books still around are purchased by a secret group of collectors addicted to this literary genre." "I found one of these books at my father's house." "It was a great shock to me," "really severe." "Look, you don't... in this context you don't talk with people about feelings." "That whole sexual, emotional and warlike charge produces a strong sexual stimulation." "You want to be there." "Reading the description of the hero in bed with his mistress, in Stalag 217, I wanted to be him." "I wanted to be there with that guard, that officer, sleep with her and love her and feel her as a woman." "I mean, I would even... try to come on to one of them." "Personally." "I would stay in that camp until the war ended," "I wouldn't want to escape." "What to?" "To my military service?" "To combat?" "I wouldn't want that." "But with Nazis?" "That wouldn't bother me." "Nazi women!" "It wouldn't bother me." "I saw them as females, not as Nazis." "The plot ends with the hero who'd been tortured and raped defeating his guards, raping and murdering them." "But in fact the protagonist has been strongly attracted to his tormentors all along." "An aficionado with no qualms about his own attraction to Germans is Eyal Liani." "I was a police inspector." "Now I'm retired." "Susanna, it's Liani Eyal." "How are you?" "As you know, Im going to be in Germany the few next days." "So call me." "Good day and kisses." "Being a reserves officer in the Israeli army while she... her grandfather was an SS officer," "I get turned on thinking of this gentile German, that I fuck her on behalf of the six million." "Fuck her in a way that... have anal sex with her, or use force... it turns me on and it really turns her on." "I imagine her grandfather when I look at her face and I say:" "You killed Jews, but look what this Jew is doing to your granddaughter." "I'm no pervert." "Just an Israeli enjoying life." "Everyone read Stalags in the early 1960's, not just a handful of collectors with a German fetish." "They were sold at the Tel Aviv central station." "In Stalags we didn't look for content or anything of the kind." "We were looking for... the erotic parts." "I didn't really know about erotic stuff." "I knew nothing about fucking until I was 14, 15, 16." "I didn't know there was such a thing." "But everyone read them, so I did too, to seem informed." "It doesn't smell." "Does it?" "They had that smell." "Here: "The Nazis could torture him."" "As much as they liked." "They could do anything." "Masters of the world." "Start here, with the Nazis." "Without the eroticism." "The nipple paragraph is one I'll never forget." ""Rada Anthony Tchlochova was staring at her own reflection" ""in the window looking out into the dusk." ""Rada Tchlochova smiled and sighed."" ""Gave a light sigh..." -"A light sigh."" ""She squeezed the man's groin." -"His groin"." "She touched his balls." "You knew what "groin" was when you were 11?" "Sure." ""When she was through with the man," ""the whole plank was spotted floury white."" "What?" "I don't know." "What is this?" "Floury?" "Floury." ""She took the man's pride between her fingers."" "His pride." ""And she whispered..."" ""in broken English..." his pride soon to go limp." ""And she whispered in broken English:" "this is mine"'." "Look at that picture." "What sex!" "In puritan, conservative Israel of the early 60's this was the prominent pornography available." "It could very well be that the first time you masturbate, given that this is the only sexy literature around, and literature is the best object for masturbation if you're 12, you don't even have to be reading while you do it." "It activates your imagination." "Bentzi, what are you doing in there?" "Taking a bath." "Turn the radio down." "You're not alone here." "In the all-time hit teen film, "Lemon Popsicle"" "the protagonist is seen holding a Stalag book." "I would climb on the kitchen table and then..." "I climbed onto the chair, then over to the table, from the table to the pantry where the most interesting things would be hidden." "I knew that thing happened..." "I just knew it." "I heard about it, I read there was a Holocaust and I understood it was a part of something hidden, or a part of something people need to read about and such things really did happen." "Most Stalags are at the National Library." "The covers note that the books were originally written in English by Americans depicting their captivity by the Nazis." "The authors' names remained the same:" "Mike Longshot;" "Ralph Butcher and Mike Baden." "I was certain that this author, say, Mike Baden, is real, and he had really been there in that camp, a soldier, a pilot." "He was captured, fell in love, and went through everything that he describes in genuine factual terms, his personal experience." "This cabinet contained pocket books and Stalags." "As you see, it's very ugly." "They deteriorated here until I found and salvaged them years later." "I thought they were translated books." "I see myself as an investigator of mysteries in Israeli popular culture that no one even imagined existed." "I found the Stalags by simply looking up in the catalogue any book titled "Stalag" and there are plenty." "Look." "Here, the computer gives you "Blood Stalag"," ""American Stalag", "Hitler Stalag", "Hindenburg Stalag"," ""Death Stalag", "Special Stalag" and so on." "Baden, Mike." "Here." "Baden, Mike." "See?" "21 titles next to his name." "Look." "Mike Baden." ""Here Comes the Sweet Undertaker" by Mike Baden." "Hebrew:" "E. Keidar." "Here there's an explicit note " ""The author is the translator"." "Somehow it was known that the translation was fake." "The translator is the author." "it's written outright." "Stalags were original Israeli creations." "The cover illustrations were taken from American magazines with no sexual or sadistic contents." "The local writers hid behind fictitious names and wrote in the style of translated literature." "The high, artificial language of these books, with sentence structures similar to English, making use of the complexity of the language." "They sensed this was the way to convince people that... it was in fact a translation." "The only way to create sex appeal for these books in order to attract the Israeli readers, was to use English names, and they were very creative." "These people will eventually talk about it but the fact that they still haven't done so shows you that this taboo or this sense of the filthy past or of a stain on their history still exists." "Obviously, the man who wrote this knows literature." "He knows how to write prose." "I knew him." "I even read his eulogy." "Maxim Gilan." "Poet Maxim Gilan died in 2005." "He was a radical-left activist." "He edited Israel's first porn magazine, "Bull"." "In the early 60 's, when the Stalags came out, he made his living translating erotic literature." "Therefore, in bohemian circles he was considered a Stalag-author." "His mother was a German Jew." "The relationships between women officers... there were no female officers in the SS." "There was no such thing." "German women officers..." "It remains unknown whether Gilan actually wrote Stalags." "In 1962, "Ha'olam Haze" (weekly) published an item in which journalist Uri Aloni exposed the creator of the genre." ""Mike Baden is Eli Keidar"" "The publishers wanted publicity for their Stalags." "So they cooperated, whether explicitly or off the record." "That's how we met." "He was near to the bohemia." "He never really mingled with actors or bohemians, but he did hang out on Dizengoff Street." "He'd answer a question, but wasn't eager to chat." "Rather restrained." "Always well groomed." "Moving gingerly so his clothes would stay neat." "A character." "Interesting, in fact." "I'm a writer." "I wrote for a living." "I wouldn't have written a single line without being paid." "I used to avoid talking about the books." "I wasn't at the forefront." "I'm an anxious person, I fear I'm not good enough." "That I haven't got what it takes..." "I always prefer to stay on the sidelines." "I was told by my parents that I was bad." "I've been living with that image since I was 6 years old." "Even at a safe family moment I could be slapped." "I was never secure." "When I realized my parents were unpredictable and that I should be careful around them, somehow even when they smiled I cringed." "I wanted nothing from them." "They talked and I wrote." "I did what I wanted." "I could write in my own style, imagination, creativity," "I tried to dramatize as best I could." "That was my style." "After failing as a journalist," "Keidar tries his luck at popular literature." "A publisher shows him an American magazine cover:" "An image of SS-women." "The way to the first Stalag was paved." "We were adventurers." "We were the vendors like sellers in the market, not storekeepers." "We took the woman, who is usually a symbol of subjection, the rape victim etc., and turned her into the dominatrix." "We gave her male subjects, American officers," "American pilots, the pinnacle of manhood, turned them into wimps, and raped them." "When a young boy read such a book, we'd ask him:" "what impressed you most?" "He'd say: when the American was caught in bed with the female officer, and she received 50 lashes and his genitals were smeared with honey and tied to a bag of wasps." "The first Stalag to be published was "Stalag 13"." "The edition was sold out at newspaper stands and became an unprecedented best-seller." "At least 80,000 copies of "Stalag 13" were sold." "It is the equivalent of a million copies today." "My credibility amazed people." "Many thought I had been in that camp myself." "Like many of his peers Keidar grew up in the shadow of trauma:" "his mother had lost her whole family in the Holocaust." "Every other day she thought she was dying." "And every other day she thought I was dying." "She kept talking about death." "She constantly claimed, at the tiniest thing... if I refused her or argued with her or did not listen to her, she would... pretend she was dying." "Say, "I'm dying." and blame me for killing her." ""Colonel von Schultz dismissed army morals" ""everyone obeyed her." ""the punishment for the slightest dissidence was death." ""Mike Baden was a prisoner, he knew that hesitation" ""might cost him his life or at least,; a public whipping" ""or a week of solitary confinement." ""There was no sense in suffering." ""He hated her. "" "A child absorbs this atmosphere and is affected by it," "I must have been." "It took me years to get rid of it." "Kiedar's background and the provocative images produced the winning formula of Stalag-writing." "Following the success other books were published:" ""Stalag 3", "Stalag 190 " and "Stalag 217"." "The best Stalag was "l Was a Stalag Commander", the first one told from the commander's perspective, that of a raving sadist." "He describes, indifferently, his abuse of his male and female prisoners." "It's as though this commander sees himself merely as doing his job as best as he can." "A kind of Eichmann." "Obviously the author thought of Eichmann while writing, someone who follows orders." "A bureaucrat." "True, he performers horrific crimes, but only since someone has to do the dirty work." "In this place where I stand before you, judges of Israel, to accuse Adolf Eichmann," "I do not stand alone." "With me here at this time stand 6 million prosecutors." "The first Stalag came out just after Eichmann 's trial began." "The sadistic, pornographic depictions in the Stalags were read by a public that heard the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors for the first time." "The Eichmann trial itself was one of the boosters of this literature." "It simply... made a racket and gave us extra momentum." "Alongside the weekly coverage of the trial" ""Ha'olam Haze" ran regular ads for Stalags." "At the time I was in contact with "Ha'olam Haze"." "They were hungry for publicity so this was a respectable chance to publicize this book for a token price." "I think this was the first push and drive that hurled us into an unexpected whirlpool." "Young Keidar did not partake in the commercial success." "Like many youngsters, he wanted to see the world and tried to sell the Stalag formula to the Germans." "Had I been in the US," "I would now be writing for "multi level" companies." "At the rate I wrote, with my creativity and capacity" "I'd become a multi-billionaire at the age of 20." "Who knows?" "The sky's the limit." "I would end up where others wouldn't even dream of being." "My imagination, my inspiration would be endless." "Here I was constrained." "Narkis was left without a writer." "Then I made an agreement with a friend," "I'll gladly tell you who:" "Miron Uriel, he worked for Social Security." "I told him, you can quit your job." "And he started..." "He bought himself a little typewriter and churned out books." "I know he listened to the trial." "He was definitely aware and affected by it." "At times we took... it was from Crematorium 3." "We took the burnt ashes and in the winter we had to use that ash to pave roads..." "Was it human ash?" "Yes, it was." "The trial was one of his sources." "He used and integrated it in his writing." "This is Mr. Simhon." "The most famous man in the country." "The Stalags became a phenomenon." "In the most popular radio show of the time, "The Simhons", an episode was dedicated to them:" ""The Stalag Blow"." "Noah Simhon comes home and sounds off." "Tzfira, is dinner ready?" "It is." "Any mail?" "Yes." "Is Nava home?" "Nava's home." "Let's eat, then." "In one of the episodes, Noah Simhon comes home, sits down, and finds his daughter Nava holding a book under the table." "Reading clandestinely." "He asks her, what are you reading?" "A book, daddy." "I see it's a book." "But what book?" "Then he snatches it." "He takes a look at the cover, and says "Stalag"!" "He then opens it and sees..." ""The soldier stood up and stared at bare breasts."" "He hits the ceiling." "Noah Simhon, a founding father, holding a Stalag!" "What?" "Bare breasts?" "Is this what my Nava reading?" "!" "That was our life too." "Who would dare bring a Stalag home to his Jewish mother?" "Following this success, others published their own Stalags." "Competition was such that a new Stalag came out every day." "Each more extreme and shocking than the previous one." "Nahman Goldberg wrote "The Monster of Horror Stalag", describing cannibalism and incest." "After all I didn't invent the genre." "I joined it." "You read the first one, and saw how the plot works." "It's always the same story in slight variations." "The whip is different, the boobs are different." "We added juicy descriptions, making it sexy." "We embellished the cruelty, to make it more attractive." "Goldberg created the sub-genre called "Israeli avengers in Germany"." "In his books, "The Shortest Day", and "The Missile Mari Missed" Israeli avengers in Germany hunt Nazis and have sex with beautiful Arian women." "Goldberg actually described his own life in Frankfurt where Israeli Jews ran questionable clubs and played Germany's sex and crime scene." "One of the struggles amongst Israelis running the clubs was stealing girls from each ether's establishments." "This was also the ground for much violence and fighting amongst the Israelis themselves." "I remember one Israeli who had never seen a concentration camp, but whenever he dealt with the authorities, the police, to get some business permit, or the municipality etc." "And ran into difficulties, he'd grab his sleeve," ""I'll show you where I was in the war", as if he had a number." "Naturally it didn't come to rolling up his sleeve." "He'd be told:" ""No, no." "Don't do that."" "Usually he got what he wanted." "These Israeli exploits in Germany were known in Israel." "Stalag publishers hurried to translate the sensation into a sub-genre whose national heroes take vengeance on Nazis." "In Germany Keidar knew nothing of the Stalag's success." "I took the books and tried to translate them to German." "I knew someone who worked in the university there." "He read them and called me a liar, saying I couldn't have written them." "Having failed to sell this format to the Germans," "Keidar worked at a night club owned by an Auschwitz survivor." "This inspired his book:" ""Here Comes the Sweet Undertaker"." "He hated them from the bottom of his heart." "He was ready to get back at them right there with a machine gun." "This is really the Stalag behind the Stalags:" "the writer of the Stalags opens the curtain and lets his readers see what he really thinks." "Jews having sex with German women, wanting to rape them, and actually do it." "Jews?" "Israelis?" "Who are so moral?" "Germans are scum, but Jews cannot really hurt them, they're too moral." "No, Jews can indeed do this, says Eli Keidar." "They want to and they can and they do." "So they're no better than Nazis." "The book, explicitly depicting incest between the Jewish hero and his German mother was banned." "An even more notorious Stalag was published at the same time:" ""I Was Colonel Schulz's Private Bitch"." "Then came Gutman, an arrogant type." "He said, "Your Stalags are pornographic to a certain extent," ""I'll outdo you by far."" "He published a book which I haven't read to this day, but I'm told it was written in very bad taste." "Pornographically it crossed the lines, beyond normal." "The most famous Stalag of them all was the one that..." "It became a classic just for its title:" ""l Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch"." "The book must have been based on a real story about a Nazi officer who abused a Frenchwoman." "Every copy of the book was traced and destroyed by the Israeli Police." "Dozens of policemen are fighting a malignant apparition in our life:" "pornographic literature." "Under a literary guise thousands of books are sold written by experts of sexual urges." "2 years after the first Stalag appeared having outraged Holocaust survivors, the phenomenon was about to be terminated." "I tried to forget them because I found them to be plain filth, but they were around for a long time." "I was chair of a commission that had to read those books in order to voice our opinion." "It was very difficult." ""Ha'olam Haze", where Stalag ads appeared every week alongside reports of the trial, gave the scandal full coverage and devoted two back covers to it." "We handled Stalags when they were the center of attention." "The weekly's front page sported Eichmann's face and a noose, while its back cover showed a Stalag copy." "Alongside the Eichmann trial going into posterity, it got a rather high profile and almost equally popularity, people were interested in this pornography case." "An essential ruling was expected from the judge on the principle question of:" "What is pornography?" "Forcing people not to see something they wish to see?" "Or to see what they do not wish to see?" "This whole idea is warped and patronizing." "Imagining some moral authority setting standards for others." "Publisher Gutman said the books were harmless." "these war accounts meant to educate about the Nazis' crimes." "Everything written there had never happened." "There had been horrific things under German occupation, but not that." "That writing was a figment of sick Israeli minds." "I think that in reality there were similar situations and even much worse than those described in the worst of Stalag books." "I didn't invent the plot, it existed." "Those things did take place." "All I needed to do was reveal it." "Expose the story to the eyes of the world." "The prosecution was most shocked by mixing Holocaust horror and Jewish-German sex." "I don't think for a single moment that I created the least bit of anything" "that directly harmed anyone by reading the book." "The judge convicted Gutman for publishing "l Was Colonel Schultz 's Private Bitch" "In 10 minutes a friend agreed to write a book titled:" ""Schultz's Bitch"" "to profit from the aftermath of the banned book." "If I'm not mistaken, I sold three editions." "Finally the market was saturated and publication of Stalags halted." "I created an epidemic." "Things came to a point where these books no longer sold." "If 300-400 copies of a book were sold, that was a lot." ""fame is fleeting"." "Did Stalags portray a reality silenced by the establishment?" "Most booklets described women torturing men." ""l was Colonel Schultz 's Private Bitch" depicted the contrary:" "a man torturing a woman." "Did the book hit a truth closer to reality?" "When a Nazi officer or policeman happened to catch some female, wouldn't he rape her?" "You mean to tell me he didn't?" "Those Nazi beasts didn't screw Jewish women?" "They raped and murdered and killed." "In any book about the Holocaust you'll read that they raped women." "How did youth perceive the pornography and harassment depicted in Stalags?" "For an Israeli child in the 1960's, these are Jews." "He doesn't think of Poles or Frenchmen." "For him, the inmates are all Jews." "The victims of abuse are his parents," "His grandparents." "Potentially, himself." "The only way not to be subject to such abuse is to be the abuser himself." "The youngsters' attitude towards the Nazis has always been ambivalent." "In certain situations it wasn't obvious with whom Israeli youth identified." "There was often a figure invented by Auschwitz survivors and embodied in the person of Mengele." "A young man, tall, lean, handsome, elegantly dressed." "There was something very sexy in this character." "Very virile, attractive, strong." "The exact opposite of the beaten Jew led to the gas chambers." "I recalled people looking for SS boots in Jaffa, when these were sold on the flea market." "Wearing them enhanced your manhood." "When I see a Nazi parade I'm impressed." "It radiates an intoxicating power." "It profoundly affects your psyche." "It is amazing." "You see even rows, straight, impeccable uniforms, superb precision." "This army marches valiantly." "If you're suppressing sex, in a society where many issues are suppressed, many of them Holocaust-related, because of the hundreds of thousands of survivors, and your parents can't tell you what they had been through," "you breathe the thick air of suppression, and then this happens, too." "For some, these books offered information about the Holocaust at a time when very few sources were available." "After the founding of the State, in the 1950 's, survivors came comprising about half of the population but their voice was unheard and their story untold." "During World War II we all ignored what was happening to the Jews." "There were rumors, some information but the general tendency was to simply ignore them." "They were ignored." "And afterwards, there was some... perhaps not gloating but something similar." "The old-timers here said, "Why didn't they come here?" ""This is their own fault." ""They could have emigrated in time, as we did."" "There was absolute alienation." "Also, there were always questions asked, what did you do in order to stay alive?" "How come you survived?" "People were very reserved, since people thought that only the cruel survived..." "Survival of the fittest." "Namely, that only those capable of stepping on others survived." "People were unaware of the role of mere chance." "I had an Auschwitz number and it disturbed me terribly to show it to everyone... they all spoke to me about it." "So I went to have it removed, first thing." "Only one man dealt almost entirely with Jews, with them and with their extermination." "This man is Adolf Eichmann." "The public attitude changed only after the Eichmann trial." "This was actually the... watershed, when suddenly many people in Israel heard for the first time what had really taken place." "I was there for about 2 years." "Time there is not like it is here on Planet Earth." "K.Tzetnik was the first to tell the Auschwitz story in Hebrew." "They wore..." "I have it here." "That's what you wore there." "This was a man who had been in Auschwitz and stayed alive to tell the Auschwitz story." "He was the only one here, for at least 10 years." "Their name was... their number, "K.Tzetnik" (KZ)." "The Eichmann trials exposed the identity of Yehiel Feiner-Dinur who hid behind his pseudonym , "K. Tzetnik "." "He must have decided not to tell the story as Yehiel Feiner from his own personal point of view, but as the bearer of that KZ number." ""K.Tzetnik" was the acronym KZ, short for Konzentrationslager, (concentration camp)." "This is a literary stance, writing as the "everyman" who was there." "Since I went through it with them, I could speak for them as though I were all of them." "I see them." "They look at me." "I see them." "Sit down please." "I saw them." "No, Mr. Dinur." "Yes?" "Listen to the prosecutor." "Listen to me." "No, Mr. Dinur." "Quiet, quiet..." "Please remain seated." "Everyone please remain seated." "Remain seated." "The trial raised for the first time the Holocaust as a public theme." "K. Tzetnik's fainting was one of its high points." "What do you feel about Adolf Eichmann now?" "Now." "The last time you saw Adolf Eichmann was when you were testifying." "No hatred, but hatred about human being." "I was..." "I was afraid about myself." "Then came everything, then I saw, I'm capable to do this?" "I'm capable, exactly like he." "Not god." "It's not a god, it's not a Hitler, it's not a Heidler, it's not Adolf Eichmann." "It's me." "The trial' made K. Trzetnik The best known writer." "K.Tzetnik was a very special individual." "I'm not saying I really understood him, completely." "He wrote a book titled "The Dollhouse"." "He described a brothel with Jewish prostitutes run with frightful sadism, even sexually." "He published "The Dollhouse" in 1953, about a decade before the first Stalag." ""Elsa of Dusseldorf reigns almighty at Pleasure Bloc." ""Her body is slender" ""she emphasizes this by wearing tight riding pants" ""Jodhpur style, tucked into her boots." ""After hours of amusement when the soldiers left the camp," ""Elsa would pace around like an aroused predator." ""The girls trembled." ""After the Germans, it was Elsa 's turn," ""a turn from hell into damnation." ""She would grab one of the girls, drag her to her own cabin," ""pounce on her and sniff the man who had just left. "" "K.Tzetnik did what many people do as victims:" "they identify in a perverted, strange way with... their victimizer and absorb some of his violence." "That's why his stories were pornographic, in a way." "Unfortunately the Nazis managed to create such a reality." "K.Tzetnik always claimed, that he didn't write anything he hadn't experienced or known." "If you tell dryly, factually, about the sexual abuse of Jewish girls who were turned into camp whores for the Germans, you are documenting a part of what happened." "But the way he describes what a Jewish girl felt when a German soldier lay on top of her, abused her sexually, you turn this encounter as any pornography internalizes violence, you make it stimulating." ""By Daniella's bed the German hangs up his coat in the closet." ""Out of the screaming mass, his hoarse voice rises" ""whimpering in her ear." ""Her eyes are closed." ""The Neanderthal mummy's face crowded her own." ""She senses his odor." ""He claws her body like a crab." ""Schultze presses his long rod at her. "" "He described only what he saw." "So he's being scolded:" ""You told the truth and now we'll condemn you."" "I don't see any sense in that." "He caused enormous harm because those were the first books about the Holocaust here and that became the trademark." "Only in the late 90's, Dan Meron dared publish an unprecedented critique of K. Tzetnik's writing." "He dominated this niche." "And people didn't dare to object, saying "no" was stigmatized:" "saying "no" to "Mr. Holocaust", the one who represents the survivors." "I swear to God..." "That my testimony at this trial..." "That my testimony at this trial..." "Will be the truth..." "Will be the truth..." "The whole truth..." "The whole truth..." "And nothing but the truth..." "And nothing but the truth." "If you read Auschwitz memoirs today, everyone writes about arriving at the Auschwitz platform and the shouts "Schnell!" (hurry), and Mengele standing there performing selections." "Now, people arrived knowing nothing about such a man." "They never saw him before, nor would they, afterwards." "Could Mengele have... stood there 24 hours a day for years doing this single-handedly?" "No." "After all he was also in charge of hospitals, experiments." "So there were SS men standing there." "Did we know who?" "But Mengele, too, became a symbol." "In other words, selection at Auschwitz meant Mengele." "So memoirists, so-called, write that Mengele stood there sending people right or left." "Did they know it was Mengele?" "No." "Do I remember what he looked like?" "No." "K.Tzetnik, in a way, opened the door to... using the Holocaust in this manner." "I think that the creators of this Stalag genre learned a lot from K.Tzetnik who preceded them." "When I began to think of K.Tzetnik" "I realized that like my peers I recall books making the rounds." "Where were they from?" "Don't know." "They were passed on amongst us." "These were yellow booklets with illustrations, mainly the covers, called "Stalags", pornographic literature that dealt with events in the camps." "So we had either K.Ttzetnik who was legitimate or Stalags, that were not." "Both dealt with the same theme." "The camps." "Who were the camp victims?" "Jews." "Who were the people we grew up with?" "Half of them were survivors." "I grew up with children of survivors." "This generation, initiated by Stalags and K. Ttzetnik, confused the two genres." "They recall that Stalags depicted sex forced by Nazis on Jewish women, while most of them didn't." "The Stalags were not titled "Tales of Auschwitz"." "I knew Auschwitz and the camps existed." "Perhaps some people described in Stalags were saved through services rendered." "People survived through sexual favors?" "Yes, it's proven." "Don't you know?" "There were whorehouses." "They were accused:" ""How did you survive?"" "Men were asked, "Were you a Kapo?"" "And women, "Were you a whore?"" "Someone I know thinks her mother had sex with a camp commander in order to save her sister." "I don't know if that's true, but it's a possibility." "A daughter thinks this of her old mother." "She assumes it happened." "There's an unresolved chapter in the story." "Everywhere in Israel in any neighborhood street, village, suspicions were aimed mostly at beautiful childless women." "Such a woman was always very beautiful." "A very attractive woman." "People grew up knowing that." "Often, she was childless, and going back to 16th century witch-hunts, it's very easy to attribute this to such a woman, who's very attractive and that, for some reason, never had kids." "Say there were 50 girls or women who did this somewhere." "That's nothing." "That is absolutely irrelevant considering the horrific suffering of women as mothers." "The deeper you research and read testimonies..." "I cross-reference them with the Nazi records and many other resources." "I don't establish anything on a single testimony." "This was just not true." "If you refer to what really happened, there were no Jewish whores in the Holocaust." "No battlefield whores." "All those stories are not true." "It pains me that survivors had to hear such constant accusations." "The Holocaust was bad enough without this accusation of women, that they used their sexuality to survive, or that the Germans assaulted them sexually." "The Stalag phenomenon ceased 2 years after it appeared shortly after the court ruled that the books were pornography." "But in the 90's K. Tzetnik's books were included in high school matriculation curricula." "He became the school system's main Holocaust author." "This is Block no. 24." "Young Jewish beauties were brought here." "They were sterilized and brought to "the Pleasure Block"." "Each was allotted a cell, and given some makeup." "She had to be on call 24 hours a day to satisfy the lust of truckloads of German soldiers arriving here." "They would unload them here, at this building." "For sexual pleasure." "These girls were called "Battlefield Whores"." "How does the process work?" "K.Tzetnik talks about it in his book, "The Dollhouse"." ""The Pleasure Block." "In these pink barracks, no beatings." ""One spared the bodies of girls destined to be Germans' whores."" "All this interest and fascination with women and the Holocaust, comes up when I show a photo of Auschwitz with Block 24 known as the whorehouse." "So everyone tells me, "Here were Jewish whores"." "And I ask, "How do you know?"" ""K.Tzetnik wrote about it in "Dollhouse"." "What do we know about the Holocaust?" "On the one hand they know about resistance heroes and on the other, K.Tzetnik. "Dollhouse"." "Lovely." ""Dollhouse" was published in the 1950's and here it was coming true, as evil combined with forbidden fruit." "When you confront Israeli society with the Holocaust, or when people dare talk about the Holocaust and sex," "That's what you get." "There are Holocaust "experts" to this day." "There are Holocaust pornographers." "You name it." "And Holocaust mongers." "I face them when I guide them." "A session with 16-year olds is usually 1.5 hours long." "As soon as you start talking about the horror, they fall silent," "Mengele's name always draws silence and attentiveness." ""He pulled out babies' eyes?"" "Eager questions that become almost embarrassing." "I'll be frank." "In a way I make use of this." "The greatest tragedies in K.Tzetnik's "Salamandra"" "is when the 30 women hide with their babies..." "Those who recommended his books actually read them?" "How did they read them?" "What did they think is in them?" "How can this teach young people valor, sacrifice, patriotism?" "It tells you how people became beasts in hell." "I have no clear answer for this." "But I wonder how these questions weren't asked." "K.Tzetnik's book impressed me very much." "My kids will study it later as well." "It is included in the high school curricula." "I chose this paragraph to emphasize and somehow... inform them about the different human tragedies in the Holocaust." "These brief horrifying stories speak mostly to children." ""K.Tzetnik" " Salamandra"" "The images in K. Tzetnik's books and in the Stalags permeated Israeli consciousness and to this day this mixture of horror, sadism and pornography serves to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust." "I always thought that the Holocaust should be written about in minimal, most modest, simplest terms." "I mean, there are no words..." "There are no big words like "horror" that even get close." "And even then, you're only dealing with it partially."