Origins
The origin of Ka-tzetnik's story is not clear. Some say it is based on a diary kept by a young Jewish girl who was captured in Poland when she was fourteen years old and forced into sexual slavery in a Nazi labour camp. However, the diary itself has not been located or verified to exist. Others claim, and the author suggests as much in his later book Shivitti, that it is based on the actual history of Ka-tzetnik's younger sister (House of Dolls is about the sister of Ka-tzetnik's protagonist, Harry Preleshnik). However, Ka-tzetnik did not have a sister in real life.
Between 1942 and 1945, Auschwitz and nine other Nazi concentration camps contained brothels (Freudenabteilung "Joy Division"), mainly used to reward cooperative non-Jewish inmates. Not only prostitutes were forced to work there. In the documentary film, Memory of the Camps, a project supervised by the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information during the summer of 1945, camera crews filmed women who had been forced into sexual slavery for the use of guards and favored prisoners. The film makers stated that as the women died they were replaced by women from the concentration camp Ravensbrück.
The book Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler's Germany, a biography of Stella Goldschlag, says she was threatened with being forced into sexual slavery unless she cooperated with the Nazis.
Read more about this topic: The House Of Dolls
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
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—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
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