The trauma of evil and identity

The trauma of evil and identity

Film documents the painful dissolving of a survivor’s pseudonym

A scene from “The Return from the Other Planet.”
A scene from “The Return from the Other Planet.”

“The Return from the Other Planet,” the new Israeli documentary being screened by Cinematec and the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades on February 1 (see box), tells the story of Yechiel De-Nur, a Holocaust survivor who moved to Israel after the war and wrote about the horror under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik.

After surviving Auschwitz, Mr. De-Nur’s goal was to let the world know what he had seen, Etti Inbal said. Dr. Inbal, who holds a Ph.D. in genetics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, is the founder and director of Cinematec, which brings Israeli films to northern New Jersey.

She’s also a filmmaker. Dr. Inbal released her first effort, “Outside In, Life of a Figure Model,” in 2023, and it has been screened in 25 film festivals, winning a number of awards. She’s now working on her second documentary, a film about how her grandparents, Dora and Richard Stein, hid during the Holocaust. The Steins fled from Berlin to Amsterdam when the Nazis came to power; after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Steins hid on a farm there. The film is based on the diary Ms. Stein kept while hiding and on Dr. Inbal’s search for the farm and for members of the families who risked their lives to help her grandparents survive.

“Ka-Tzetnik,” which means concentration camp inmate in German, “symbolized for De-Nur his commitment to tell the stories of all the people who did not survive,” Dr. Inbal said. He wrote books in Hebrew that were translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of copies all over the world. His “harrowing accounts of Auschwitz shocked the world and offered unparalleled insight into the darkest chapters of human history.”

Mr. De-Nur also used his pseudonym as a way to cope with the trauma he had experienced. “He could not live a regular life when he was writing,” Dr. Inbal said. “He coped with the trauma of Auschwitz by splitting himself into two. He had a wife and a family and a home — but he needed to go somewhere else and be dressed as he dressed in Auschwitz while he wrote. He needed to connect with the part of his personality that was still in Auschwitz.

“Nobody connected the well-known author Ka-Tzetnik with Mr. De-Nur, who lived a seemingly regular life.”

Nobody connected the two, that is, until Mr. De-Nur testified in the 1961 Eichmann trial., Dr. Inbal added. Mr. De-Nur gave his name as Ka-Tzetnik and the judge asked for his real name. “But he was there in his Auschwitz persona, as Ka-Tzetnik, and he could not be the two of them — Mr. De-Nur and Ka-Tzetnik — together,” Dr. Inbal said. “When the judge pressed him to say his name, he broke. He physically collapsed.

“At that time, people were not sensitive to trauma,” Dr. Inbal continued. “To who is the person, what is happening with him, that he must be post-traumatic. The judge just pressed him to give his real name. When he needed to connect these two parts of him, he collapsed.”

Dr. Inbal described this scene as a very dramatic point in the trial, and it is in the film as well. It is also “a very critical part of the history of how the community reacts to someone who is post-traumatic,” she said. “Now we also encounter people who are post-traumatic, but we at least know how to recognize it, we know that we need to be careful, we know that after trauma people need support and understanding. This is an important aspect of the film — how to deal with someone living with the aftermath of trauma.”

After the trial, Mr. De-Nur had a very hard time living with his newly merged personas and sought help from an experimental LSD treatment in the Netherlands. The treatment helped him and also resulted in a change of perspective, Dr. Inbal said. In many of his books, Mr. De-Nur had described Auschwitz as another planet, suggesting that “the cruelty, those hurtful people, Nazis, were not people like us, were not from our planet. It was as if they were from another planet.” After the treatment, during which he relived his Holocaust experiences, he concluded that people who commit extremely evil acts are not in fact different from other people. They are not from another planet. He recognized that “regular people, who live around us, can be evil. That evil exists on our planet, and in our communities.”

The film was made before October 7, but Dr. Inbal finds that it’s particularly relevant now. Some of the terrorists who murdered innocent people on that day had worked in the kibbutzim near the Gaza border, she said. Residents of the border communities “felt like they were so good to them.” Kibbutz members would take the workers, their families, or other residents of Gaza to Israeli hospitals for medical care. “They seemed like normal, nice people, and the people in the kibbutzim felt that they were nice to their neighbors so their neighbors would be nice back.”

But some of these workers gave the terrorists specific details about the communities, and about the residents, that made it easier for them to find people and murder them, Dr. Inbal said.

The film raises important issues, she continued. “The question of cruelty, of whether cruelty is part of the behavior of regular normal people, is relevant to what is happening right now. The film challenges us to confront the potential for evil within our own communities.” And its themes of coping with trauma, and the importance of understanding and documenting cruelty, are also very relevant, she added.

One meaning of the film’s title is that Mr. De-Nur “returned from the planet of Auschwitz to life,” Dr. Inbal said. Another meaning is that his understanding of evil — that it must come from another planet — is what changed. “Before, he thought that such cruelty, such behavior, is not human, is not part of the community of people.

“His latest understanding was no, it’s here, people that you meet in your everyday life, people who can listen to nice music or smile at you, in specific conditions they can be very, very cruel. And that’s what we experienced now.”

“The Return from the Other Planet” recently won awards for original music and artistic design from the Israeli Documentary Forum.

The screening will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with the film’s director, Assaf Lapid, and Dr. Inbal.


What: Screening of “The Return from the Other Planet,” an Israeli documentary about Holocaust survivor and author Yechiel De-Nur, followed by a discussion and Q&A with film director Assaf Lapid and Cinematec director Etti Inbal. The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles.

When: Saturday, February 1, at 7 p.m.

Where: The Eric Brown Theater at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly.

Cost: $30; $25 for JCC members.

Register at: www.jccotp.org/event/cinematec

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