A Man Lies Dreaming

by Tidhar, Lavie

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and walked away.

  Hebrew word of the day is machaneh, meaning camp.

  Ship’s Journal, 2nd December 1939

  Skirted Cyprus. Palestine full steam ahead.

  …

  Opening and closing doors Shomer tumbles through half-worlds and fraction-worlds, ‘No, this isn’t it,’ falling down trapdoors and out through endless corridors, ‘No, this isn’t it, either,’ for how long he cannot tell, for there is no time here, where there is no space, until:

  He opens the door and steps onto a beach. The sand is yellow, coarse. Dust fills the sky. The air is humid, warm, scented with citrus trees and late blooming jasmine. On the horizon the first star appears: Venus, which in Hebrew is called Noga, meaning light.

  The night is quiet, peaceful. He looks up, to the darkening sky, as more stars come into being overhead. And for a moment it seems to him a woman and two children hover there, outlined in light, and that they’re waving: but he can’t be sure and in another moment they’re gone.

  The sea is calm. In the distance, the lights of a town. Shomer stands still, breathes in this wondrous air. ‘This must be it,’ he says to Yenkl; but Yenkl is no longer with him.

  Shomer stands on the shore of that sea on that ancient land and looks out over the water. He sees a ship gliding into safe harbour as the sun fades in the east.

  He stands there like a man suspended. Or, perhaps, like a man released.

  …

  The Exodus arrived in Jaffa as the sun was setting. They waited on board ship until officials came. An argument broke out. On the shore people gathered, waiting for them. At last something was decided, small boats came towards them in a fleet, shouts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German and English, a scramble to get off, along the wharves sacks filled with oranges awaiting export, stamped Jaffa.

  On the shore they formed again into queues and there again waited their turn with the officials. The man waited in line meekly. When it was his turn he handed over his documentation and after careful examination a stamp was placed on the page. The man smiled his thanks.

  ‘Welcome to Palestine,’ the official said.

  …

  In that other time and place, the camp prepares to wake for another day of work and death. Beyond the walls, perhaps, the war continues. There is a rumour that the Red Army is advancing on the camp, intent on liberation, but will it be today, tomorrow, in an hour, in a year? The camp prepares for waking as it has done every day, in every block the inmates rise preparing for inspection. The prisoners rise but for the ones who had expired in the night. Slowly they shuffle, these skeletal men. Ka-Tzetnik wrote of Auschwitz, ‘It was another planet’, but later in life he went back on himself. ‘Auschwitz was not created by the devil,’ he wrote, ‘but by men, like you, or me.’

  …

  In the morning they came for Shomer, but Shomer wasn’t there.

  THE END

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  In 1888, the leading Yiddish novelist Sholem Aleichem launched an extraordinary attack on the shund writer whose pen name was, simply, Shomer. This remarkable document, Shomers Mishpet (‘Shomer’s Trial’), ran to many pages, and categorised Shomer’s writing as being ‘ignorantly composed, poorly constructed, highly repetitious [and] morally bankrupt’.

  Why Sholem Aleichem – the leading writer of his time – should feel the need to launch such a bitter attack on a humble purveyor of shund, or pulp fiction, is perhaps a mystery. Whatever the cause, Shomer – at the time a prolific author of hundreds of novels and plays – is now all but unknown, while Sholem Aleichem’s place in literature remains assured.

  This Shomer died, peacefully, in New York City in 1905. Thankfully, he never saw the Holocaust that was about to erupt some three decades later.

  How does one write the Holocaust? In Chapter 8, two prisoners briefly discuss that question. Prisoner 174517 is, of course, Primo Levi, whose If This Is A Man (1947) remains one of the defining works of Holocaust literature. His ‘opponent’, prisoner 135633, wrote under the name Ka-Tzetnik (a word which means ‘concentration camp inmate’), including the infamous novel House of Dolls, which first described the Nazi ‘Joy Divisions’, or camp brothels where women were kept as sexual slaves. Where Levi is cool and dignified, Ka-Tzetnik burns with the clear-eyed madness of a shund writer. His books were ‘often lurid novel-memoirs, works that shock the reader with grotesque scenes of torture, perverse sexuality, and cannibalism,’ noted David Mikics in Tablet magazine, adding: ‘House of Dolls is, unavoidably, Holocaust porn.’

  During the 1920s, Adolf Hitler used the nom de guerre of ‘Wolf’ (‘Adolf’ means, literally, ‘Noble Wolf’). Though countless books have been written about him, so much yet remains uncertain, shrouded in rumour and misinformation and propaganda. Certainly, it seems clear that he was an abused child; that his experience as a runner in the First World War led to that extraordinary scene (described in Chapter 10) where his blindness was seemingly cured by the psychiatrist, Edmund Forster; and that, though women were powerfully attracted to him, his relationship with them was far from simple.

  Kershaw, in his vast, two-volume biography of Hitler, is surprisingly reticent about the question of Hitler’s sexuality. While discussing the experiences recounted by Hitler’s friend August ‘Gustl’ Kubizek (in Adolf Hitler, My Childhood Friend, published in 1951), Kershaw concludes that ‘Later rumours of Hitler’s sexual perversions are similarly based on dubious evidence. Conjecture – and there has been much of it – that sexual repression later gave way to sordid sadomasochistic practices rests, whatever the suspicions, on little more than a combination of rumour, hearsay, surmise, and innuendo, often spiced up by Hitler’s political enemies.’

  Indeed, in their highly entertaining and scurrilously gossipy Hitler and Women, Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting note that ‘Investigating the private life and sexual inclinations of Adolf Hitler has been like trying to work one’s way through an Elizabethan maze built on a tidal mudflat.’ They go on, however, to discuss Hitler’s ‘copulation business’ with some considerable, if often suspect, detail.

  Many erstwhile Nazis weave their way through this novel. Of these, Josef Kramer (Chapter 2) was a ruthless concentration camp guard who was eventually put in charge of the gas chambers in Auschwitz, and later became the commandant of the Bergen-Belsen death camp. He was executed by hanging after the war.

  Ilse Koch (Chapter 2) was known as ‘The Beast of Buchenwald’. She was notorious for acts of violence and sadism against prisoners, and was accused of taking mementos off the corpses of her victims – including using their skin to make lampshades. She committed suicide in prison in 1967. She was also the inspiration behind the ‘classic’ Nazisploitation film Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and its sequels.

  Klaus Barbie (Chapter 6) was known as ‘The Butcher of Lyon’, where he was the head of the local Gestapo. He was known for torturing prisoners, including the use of electroshock and severe sexual abuse. Some prisoners were skinned alive. He was behind the deportation of some 14,000 Jews to the death camps. After the war, Barbie worked for American intelligence in its battle against communism. He emigrated to South America, and while there it was rumoured he was behind the eventual capture and murder of the revolutionary Che Guevara. He was finally extradited to France in 1983, and was convicted for war crimes in 1987. He died in prison.

  As for the higher-up Nazis in this book – Hess was Hitler’s long-time deputy; Göring, the founder of the Gestapo and commander-in-chief of the German air force (he was a decorated World War I ace fighter pilot); Goebbels his propaganda minister. Adolf Eichmann, whom Wolf fails to recognise in the novel, joined the SS in 1932. He rose quickly through the ranks, working for the Jewish Department of the SS. He was the recording secretary at the Wannsee Conference, in which the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was first formulated, and became the effective administrator of the Jewish genocide. He escaped to South America after the war but wa
s captured by Israeli Mossad agents in 1960. He was put on trial, in Jerusalem, and executed in 1962. The author Ka-Tzetnik (revealed at that time as Yehiel De-Nur) famously testified during the trial, collapsing unconscious after delivering a short statement. He did not resume the stand (see Chapter 8 Endnote).

  One unexpected by-product of the Eichmann trial was the short-lived flourishing in Israel of ‘stalag’ novels. Published as pulp paperbacks during the 1960s, and featuring garish, lurid covers, they began with the infamous Stalag 13, by a ‘Mike Baden’: the cover portrayed two female guards in skintight leather, cut to expose a great deal of cleavage, as they torture a male prisoner of war down on his knees. A string of such books – which featured sexual domination and torture of POWs by sadistic Aryan ‘nymphomaniacs’ – was published, available under the counter. They sold in unprecedented numbers, perhaps enabling many Israelis, for the first time, to talk openly about the great taboo that was the Holocaust. The pulp novels were themselves possibly inspired by Ka-Tzetnik’s 1955 novel, House of Dolls, which was considered canonical, and became a part of the Israeli high-school curriculum. Whatever the causes, the relationship between desire and dominance, coupled with the power of taboo, continues to exert a fascination to this day.

  In the margins of history one comes across, from time to time, remarkable yet obscure figures. Robert (Boris) Bitker (Chapter 8) was a militant Zionist, a Polish immigrant who worked in the film industry in Hollywood, fought in both China and Palestine and died in 1945 in San Francisco. In contrast, Leni Riefenstahl was famous as the golden girl of Nazi cinema. A close personal friend of Adolf Hitler, she created Nazi propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will (1935), which chronicles the triumphant Nuremberg victory rallies of the previous year, and Olympia (1938), which details the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin under the Nazis. She was never convicted of a crime and died of old age in 2003, when she was 101 years old.

  Oswald Mosley, an admirer of Hitler, founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932. His paramilitaries, the Blackshirts, wore one-piece jumpsuits designed by Mosley himself. They are perhaps best remembered today for the Battle of Cable Street, in 1936, when they attempted to march on – and were repelled from – the mostly Jewish East End. By 1940 the organisation was outlawed: Mosley and his wife spent the majority of the war in London’s Holloway Prison. His second wife was Diana Mitford. They married in 1936, at the house of Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was the guest of honour. Diana’s sister, Unity, was a fervent devotee of Hitler, and for a time competed for his affection with Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. She remained in Germany as part of Hitler’s close circle for five years before the outbreak of the war. She attempted suicide in 1939, returned to Britain, and died in 1948 of complications relating to the bullet still lodged in her head. She was 33.

  The Exodus, Salvador and Taurus were all ships used by the Mossad Le’Aliyah Bet to illegally bring Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine. The Salvador was wrecked in the Sea of Marmara in 1940, carrying some 300 refugees. The Taurus was the last refugee ship to operate during the war. It sailed in 1943 from Romania, carrying some 900 refugees. They arrived safely in Istanbul and from there caught the train to Palestine. The Exodus, famously, was stopped by British forces at Haifa harbour in 1947, and its cargo of some 5000 Holocaust survivors sent back to camps in Germany. My own mother came to Palestine on board a similar ship when she was two years old: she was born in a refugee camp near Munich after the war, to parents who had each survived Auschwitz. The majority of my family, on both sides, died in the camp.

  Adolf Hitler finally married his long-term mistress, Eva Braun, in a private ceremony on the 29th April 1945, in the Führer’s bunker in Berlin. They committed suicide, together, one day later, and their corpses were carried to the garden outside, placed in a bomb crater, doused with petrol and burned.

  END NOTES

  Chapter 1

  1. ‘She had the face of an intelligent Jewess …’

  Wolf is possibly echoing here the words of the crime novelist Raymond Chandler (1888–1959). We know he was fond of popular, or ‘pulp’ crime novels, though they comprised but a small part of his extensive library. See The Big Sleep (1939).

  2. ‘The Jews are nothing but money-grubbers, living on the profits of war …’

  See My Struggle.

  3. ‘I was so cold, and it was going to be a cold winter …’

  Wolf isn’t wrong – the winter of 1939–1940 was the coldest in 45 years, with record temperature lows. Frost and fog were common in London. By January snow storms had hit Britain and the Thames froze for some eight miles between Teddington and Sunbury.

  4. ‘The painting on the wall showed a French church tower rising against the background of a village, a field executed in a turmoil of brushstrokes …’

  The painting is, possibly, The Church of Preux-au-Bois, a large watercolour dating to Wolf’s time in Vienna before the Great War.

  5. ‘A personally inscribed copy of Fire and Blood, Ernst Jünger’s memoir of the Great War …’

  Feuer und Blut’s nationalistic ideology was an early inspiration for the nascent National Socialist movement. It was first published in Germany in 1925.

  6. ‘One could tell by the number of darkened windows how trade was going …’

  The incident is similarly recalled in the memoirs of Wolf’s friend, August ‘Gustl’ Kubizek.

  7. ‘Whores. How I hated whores! Their bodies were riddled with syphilis and the other ills of their trade. The disease was but a symptom. Its cause was the manner in which love itself has been prostituted …’

  Wolf expresses a similar sentiment in My Struggle.

  Chapter 2

  1. ‘Sometimes he thought he would drown in words, all those words …’

  ‘Books, always more books!’ recalled Wolf’s childhood friend, Gustl. ‘Books were his world.’

  2. ‘[The Jews] were a parasitic race, preying upon the honest portion of mankind …’

  See My Struggle.

  3. ‘Wolf liked his women cute, cuddly and naïve, or so he liked to say at his more expansive moments back in Munich: he liked little things who were tender, sweet and stupid …’

  Wolf’s friend Gustl quotes a similar sentiment in his memoirs.

  Chapter 3

  1. ‘I respected my father, but I loved my mother …’

  Wolf says much the same in My Struggle, though in that earlier book he does not delve as deeply into the matter of his childhood and his father’s subsequent death. That Elois was a violent drunk, and that the young Wolf felt freed by his passing, however, there seems little doubt.

  Chapter 4

  1. ‘And yet worse was the time we had been approached in the street by an older man, on the corner of Mariahilferstrasse-Neubaugasse …’

  This incident is indeed also recounted in Gustl’s memoirs.

  2. ‘There was this, too, about Gustl: he was a compulsive masturbator. At any given opportunity, in his bed, in his wash, behind his piano, sometimes at his desk in class or even on the corner of the street, his hand in his pocket, Gustl would relieve himself the way I had denied myself …’

  Wolf is perhaps being unkind here. Certainly Gustl had the normal impulses of a young man, and in his memoirs he recalls that Wolf, himself, did not seek physical release in this way. Perhaps, for Wolf, any kind of masturbatory impulse would have seemed excessive.

  3. ‘as the personification of the devil, as the symbol of all evil, assumes the living shape of the Jew …’

  Wolf expresses a similar sentiment in My Struggle.

  4. ‘“Marxism must be destroyed,” Mosley said. “It is the poisoned ideology of the Jewish race …”’

  Perhaps unconsciously, Mosley is here echoing Wolf’s own words (see My Struggle).

  Chapter 5

  1. ‘In 1917, Lord Balfour wrote a letter to Baron Rothschild, in which he asserted British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine …’

  ‘His Ma
jesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

  2. ‘[Palestine was] then still in the possession of the Ottoman Empire …’

  Palestine fell to the British forces, commanded by General Edmund Allenby (1861–1936), by early 1918.

  3. ‘You were always steadfast in your hatred of them, Valkyrie …’

  Wolf is perhaps thinking of this letter to Der Stürmer, in which Unity wrote: ‘The English have no notion of the Jewish danger. Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes. We think with joy of the day when we will be able to say England for the English! Out with the Jews! P.S. please publish my name in full, I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater.’

  4. ‘The alcohol hit me like an upper cut from Max Schmeling …’

  Schmeling was a German boxer and heavyweight champion of the world 1930–1932.

  Chapter 6

  1. ‘One day walking down the street he saw one of their number in the black Hasidic garb and he was plain bemused: was this a Jew?’

  Again, much the same instance is similarly recounted in My Struggle.