Shivitti: A Vision

Ka-Tzetnik 135633 ( House of Dolls ) is the pen name of Yehiel De-Nur, a pseudonym derived from the tattoo branded on his arm in Auschwitz. In an unusual footnote to the large body of Holocaust literature, the Israeli author describes the LSD treatments he underwent in 1976 under the supervision of a Dutch psychiatrist and specialist in the so-called Concentration Camp Syndrome. The hallucinogen incongruously prettifies some memories (in his European heder ``our rabbi's sidecurls are a bouncing phosphorescence, while we little ones are translucent, ethereal, floating''). But, for the most part, the drug allows De-Nur to combat his demons as it intensifies his recollection of grotesqueries that were the order of the day in Auschwitz, the ``planet of death.'' From the fragmented, impressionistic account emerge trenchant images of martyrs: De-Nur's naked mother en route to the gas chamber; his sister branded between her breasts with the words ``field whore''; a Dutch Jew covered in marmalade by Nazis and bitten to death in mass frenzy by fellow prisoners. (Feb.)