Ackerman Chronicle

Thanks to PhD candidate Philip Barber, the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies has come into possession of the first edition of a most rare book in the field of Holocaust Studies: a first-edition copy of Salamandra by Yehiel De-Nur, the Holocaust author known as Ka-tzetnik 135633. In the late spring of 1945 De-Nur, an escapee from Planet Auschwitz, lay dying in a British army hospital in Italy. But before succumbing to death, he resolved to fulfill a promise made to the dead whose voices spoke from within him. He asked for pen and paper. Some two weeks later the patient produced the manuscript of the first Holocaust novel, Salamandra (translated as Sunrise over Hell in the English edition). He made a miraculous recovery, as though his testimony to and for the dead had released him from the grip of the Angel of Death. He entrusted the book to Eliyahu Goldenberg, a member of the Jewish Brigade. Noticing that the manuscript had no name on it, Goldenberg asked, “Who shall I say wrote this?” To which came the reply: “Who wrote it? They wrote it! Put their name on it: Ka-tzetnik!”

And now this book, this outcry of one who survived to tell us this tale, has found its way into the Arnold A. Jaffe Holocaust Collection at The University of Texas at Dallas, despite all odds and every effort to suppress this outcry. And yet the silenced voice of testimony speaks from the words and from the margins of this book, the first to cry out from the depths of the Shoah.

The Ackerman Center Podcast provides a space for the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies to publicly engage in a thoughtful and in-depth conversation about the Holocaust, genocide, and human rights studies. The Ackerman Center Podcast, edited and produced by UTD graduate students, can be found wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Listen to all of the episodes of the Ackerman Center Podcast by clicking here or on the thumbnail image to the left.