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Shivitti: Mystical vision of a holocaust survivor's years in Auschwitz
An extraordinary book written by an extraordinary person.
It is a long time since I have heard a voice like this: the voice
of a wounded soul whose cry is prayer.
--Elie Wiesel, author and Nobel Prize laureate
Imprisoned in Auschwitz for two
years, having eluded death by the
narrowest of margins, the man
known as Ka-Tzetnik 135633
survived the Holocaust to
discover that survival alone
would not end his torment. For
30 years, through nightly dreams
of terrifying intensity, the writer
remained captive to the horrors
of Auschwitz. Finally in 1976 he
sought help from Professor
Bastiaans, the Dutch psychiatrist
who first recognized
Concentration Camp Syndrome
and successfully treated camp
survivors with a therapy involving
doses of LSD. Shivitti is a
memoir of that experience, and
reading it may change your life.
Quality Trade Paperback 144 pages - ISBN: 0-89556-113-1.
An excerpt from the Author's
Foreword:
When Nike, my lifemate, heard that
a psychiatrist in Holland, Professor
Bastiaans-discoverer of the
Concentration Camp Syndrome--had
been healing camp survivors with a
new method of treatment
incorporating LSD, she came
rushing to me with this piece of good
news.
I will never forget the way she
suffered silently through my
nightmares, concealing her own
feelings. My own strangled cries
would awaken me, feverish and
dripping, with Nike by my side,
toweling away the fearsome seepage
of sweat, her eyes brimming with
unspoken fear and compassion.
To this day there's this one thing I
can't understand: why the nightmare
never took over when I slept during
the day. That is why I practically
turned day into night, and night into
day.
An excerpt from the Preface to the Italian
edition by Rabbi Don R. Singer: This book is the true testimony of a man who
knocked on the gates of Hell in order to reenter and
discover the meaning of the events he lived through
many years before in Auschwitz death camp. He
wrote his first testimony a few months after World
War II in a transit camp in Italy still wearing his
"Auschwitz shrouds." He was not expected to live.
Racing death he wrote as in a trance completing the
book, Salamandra, in exactly two and a half weeks.
But he could not pen his own name to the
manuscript. The book was written by those who had
become fire in the ovens of the crematorium. He
chose, for author, the name shared by all the
captives: Ka-Tzetnik 135633, "Concentration Camp
Inmate," and the number the Nazis tattooed on his
arm. In Israel he changed his personal name to
De-Nur. De-Nur means "Of the fire."
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