Holocaust survivor chronicled atrocities
Otto dov Kulka, who has died aged 87, was an award-winning Israeli historian and survivor of the concentration camps at Terezin (Theresienstadt) and Auschwitz.
For decades he taught at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem about the origins of Nazi ideology and the Holocaust, and wrote extensively on the subject, without telling students that he himself was a survivor.
but his highly personal 2013 book, Landscapes of the Metropolis of death: reflections on Memory and Imagination, translated into 17 languages within a year of its being published, brought his own experience to international attention, winning prizes in several countries, including the Jewish Quarterly-wingate literary prize in britain.
It was the historian Ian Kershaw, who had read the random notes that Kulka had started scribbling in Jerusalem cafés about his childhood (he was 10 when he was deported from Terezin to Auschwitz), who persuaded Kulka to write the book, barely 100 pages long. Kershaw called it “one of the most remarkable testimonies to inhumanity that I know.”
Kulka recalled that, as a child in the Auschwitz “family camp” (a deception effort by the Nazis), he did not experience the “acute, murderous, destructive discord and torment felt by every adult inmate” and had no idea of the camp’s real purpose. Instead he was curious to know whether the perimeter fence was “really electrified” and dared himself to touch it. He bore the scars until death.
Kulka shied away from using the terms “Holocaust” or “Shoah,” telling friends that he preferred saying “the final solution” because students should understand the singular nature and aim of Nazi genocidal policies was to eradicate not just Jews but Jewish books, art, culture and history.
He was born Otto deutelbaum on April 16, 1933 in Nový Hrozenkov, a small town in the Czech province of Moravia, to Jewish parents. He changed his surname after the war to Kulka, his mother’s maiden name. She had died in Stutthof concentration camp in 1945. His sister and relatives were murdered in camps.
He emigrated to Israel in 1949 at age 15. Otto studied at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem, where he later became a distinguished professor, and at Goethe university, Frankfurt.
“He was a real gentleman, retaining a prewar mittel-european sense of decorum and culture right up to his death,” his former student, Michaela rozov, said.