Preleshnik survives – whether by luck or by judgement – to become a witness. House of Dolls, based on the tragic life of the author’s own sister, recounts the experiences of Harry’s sister, young Daniella Preleshnik, in a German army officers’ brothel. The book’s descriptions of cruelty, degradation and hopelessness – neither euphemistic nor voyeuristic – are exceeded in camp literature by only one other book, namely Ka-Tzetnik’s Kar’u Lo Piepel (1961, translated as Piepel the same year), which is the story of Daniella’s fictional younger brother Moni.Ka-Tzetnik is the most obsessive of the major Holocaust writers. Certain themes and images, leitmotifs, occur time and again, such as the “darting tongues” of the skeletal figures, caught up in the daily cycle of murder and fear. He conveys powerfully the hopeless bravado of a man’s cunning theft of a turnip, unseen, or so the man imagines. It is the desperate man’s last action before, inevitably, he is discovered and murdered.Ka-Tzetnik 135633’s only explicitly autobiographical book is Shivitti (1987, translated as Shivitti: a vision, 1989). This is a remarkable account of the controversial treatment by a Dutch psychiatrist, Professor Bastiaans, which involves the use of the drug LSD: drugged, the patient relives the past in the company of the therapist, in order to cure what Bastiaans has called the Concentration Camp Syndrome, in this instance Ka-Tzetnik’s nightly dreams of Auschwitz.

The book is a telling reminder of the high price paid by all survivors of traumatic cruelty, active remembrancers or not.In Ka’Hol mi-Efer (1966, House of Love, 1971) Harry, a broken vessel, is put together by the love of Galilea, a Sabra woman who awaits him having spent all night reading his anonymous first book about the camps (referring to Ka-Tzetnik’s own first book, Salamandra, 1946, translated as Sunrise over Hell, 1977). Ka-Tzetnik’s only prose book written in Yiddish rather than Hebrew, it was composed in Italy after his escape from the death march Harry and Galilea marry. A Hebrew prayer for the dead is played at their wedding.Galilea takes on Harry’s suffering and attempts to exorcise his demons They have two children, named for Moni and Daniella. As in real life, the couple will promote reconciliation between Jew and Arab. For Harry: love and writing; for Galilea: love and politics.A direct line ran within her from the suffering of the Jews in Europe to the humiliation of these Arabs.Suffering is no excuse for cruelty, and Jewish suffering in the diaspora, Ka-Tzetnik believed, is no excuse for improper behaviour towards Arabs in or by the Jewish state. He believed that writing should incarnate memory and truth, political action peace and justice:Like drifting smoke, the lesson of Auschwitz will disappear if man does not learn from it.

And, if Auschwitz is forgotten, man will not deserve to exist.When he died, he weighed 30 kilos. In mind and body, he had returned to Auschwitz.Anthony Rudolf. Arthur Wilkinson Worsley, ventriloquist: born Failsworth, Lancashire 16 October 1920; married Audrey Hewitt (one son); died 14 July 2001. Arthur Wilkinson Worsley, ventriloquist: born Failsworth, Lancashire 16 October 1920; married Audrey Hewitt (one son); died 14 July 2001.
Arthur Worsley was simply the best ventriloquist of his day, with a unique and memorable act. No good “vent” moved his lips when the dummy was “speaking”, but Worsley carried this idea to an insanely logical conclusion: his doll, “Charlie Brown”, had all the dialogue, and he never said a word.Worsley was the blank sheet of paper on which Charlie scrawled an unstoppable avalanche of oral insults at his master’s expense, impudently directing these subversive remarks across the footlights toward his audience.