THE HOUSE THAT BORIS BUILT – Terence Sellers

Considering “HOUSE OF ANITA,”
A Novel by Boris Lurie

(aka, An Editor’s Foreword)

by Terence Sellers

Update October 2015

Read Chapters One through Six of “House of Anita”

Read Chapter 38, The Artist-Dealer’s Visit

Under a preliminary, superficial reading of Boris Lurie’s “HOUSE OF ANITA,” the book may seem but a rather arty piece of S&M erotica. But after a few pages, disturbing elements begin to obtrude, the first inkling being the realization that this “House,” wherein nearly every action takes place, is not only a fiction based on some unusually strict Sado-Masochistic [1] brothel, circa 1950-1960, but is the secret enclave of a certain psyche — in the throes of a specific torment.

The first edition, printed in 2010, gave the reader small indication of the dire truth, the inspiration for this literary Work — what its subtexts, and its realities encompass. This editor worked on it, did not quite complete it — work taken over by another editor — but thereupon commenced what I can honestly call a conversion experience: both a descent into, and a rise out of a very specific Hell.

And this is the underlying hellish reality: the Russian Jewish artist and author Boris Lurie lived out most of his adolescence in five different Third Reich concentration camps. From the age of sixteen through twenty, from 1941 through 1945, throughout his sexually formative period, his body, mind and spirit were all interfered with in specific ways we have now become familiar with.

During this worst time in Boris Lurie’s life, he survived something most hideous: incarceration in Buchenwald, where (as recorded) over 50,000 people expired — though he ended up in one of its satellite work-camps, Buchenwald-Magdeburg.

Buchenwald was built from scratch by the Third Reich, exactly to its satanic specifications. It housed the vilest of practices: one of the infamous medical experimentation clinics resided there. Echoes of the torments and mutilations of ‘slave’ bodies, albeit for ‘pleasurable’ purposes, resound through Lurie’s text. Therein we may read stark evidence of medical-sexual experiments undergone, transmuted within the pages of ‘House’ into fictive scenarios that disgust and profoundly disturb — but not for mere sensational purpose.

We ask the reader to overcome their disgust, their disturbance, and enter into a place — the House of Anita — where one man suffers, yet somehow rises above.

This text is a code, a fictive mask for the real relationship upon which the story is based: that of a Jew named ‘Bobby,’ to his Nazi Masters, here represented by four Dominatrices. Such women make both an art and profession of practicing sexual Sadism. I sometimes imagine that Boris thought: no-one will crack that code, so will not notice the truth; and thus protected, his entire truth could be told.

What led me as editor to go deeper, to research the ‘code,’ do much more than fix Lurie’s unruly English… and write footnotes? Why in a short work of fiction should such a plethora footnotes be required? Won’t they get in the way of a reader’s facile enjoyment of the book?

Boris Lurie spent his entire artistic life subverting anything like ‘facile enjoyment.’

Consider one early footnote, for ‘Kapo.’ If one may understand that in the context of of the camps that a Kapo is not just a term for head, or the head of, et cetera…

Ask yourself what does Lurie mean, within his fictive reality?

For that, we must go to the concentration camps.

In the camps, a Kapo was a prisoner given special privileges, able to lord it over other inmates. He was often a common criminal, someone culled from the ordinary prisons.

In the camps, a Kapo was a prisoner who had been given special privileges, and in that ravaged environment was thus able to lord it over other concentration camp inmates. (Though it is often considered as a form of ‘capo,’ the Italian for ‘head’ or ‘boss,’ the German would be ‘kopf.’)

“Kapo is the abbreviation of Kamaradischafts Politzei, roughly, ‘comrade police force.’ [He might be] a German prisoner serving a sentence for some non-political crime. A few of them tried to ease the lot of their fellow-sufferers, but most were the faithful servants of the SS.”

Ref.: “Auschwitz,” by Miklos Nyiszli, Chapter VI, p.43, translator’s footnote.

This recognition changes the character of the transvestite Aldo, a Kapo, from pink to black.

Could this seemingly erotic novel be a re-creation, through fiction, of Boris Lurie’s early sexual experiences? A sort of map of a grotesque sexual ‘training,’ which you mostly prefer to avert your eyes from?

Sex scenes abound; as does vomiting, defecating, and massacres. Corpses re-animate and possess penises of steel. A Dominatrix is placed in permanent bondage, and mutilated into an art-work. And throughout, a dominating political bent towards fascism both undermines and overrules any individuality, sexual or otherwise.

Once the code is revealed, I think the reader is hard put to say if “House of Anita” is erotic at all. It creates a new genre: Sex-Horror.

In the first chapter, entitled “A Modern Educational Avant-Garde Slave Establishment,” the narrator describes various regulations appertaining to slave behaviours, for example, how the slave must sleep:

Proper sleeping habits are particularly important in the matter of the grooming of a slave. The slave must not sleep on his stomach, nor must he turn over on his side away from the glass observation doors. The servant must always place himself in a position, even when asleep, so that he may be easily observed. It was explained to us that this rule is in our own best interest — for privacy in sleep, that interior retreat, negatively counters the slave’s education, giving rise to independent dreaming or brooding, and thus withdrawal from the control of his masters. [2]

Transpose these fantastical, picayune and irritating rules of conduct into the context of a Third Reich concentration camp, and the eroticism of being constantly under the eyes of a Master-Mistress is compromised by horror. There are also restrictions on dreaming, on not remembering dreams, even an imperative to not dream at all — the concept chilling.

As I continue(d) to edit this original, disturbingly fascinating work, I was, and am hard put to consider what other reader could thoroughly enjoy this work. (My oeuvre has been to appreciate permutations of the abnormal, and admittedly I have a high tolerance, like an old policeman, for human awfulness.) Then I realized — it isn’t meant to be enjoyed, but to be suffered. It’s not a modern entertainment. Boris Lurie in his oeuvre is, if nothing else, obsessed with the inherent difficulty of Art. Which is Art as many of us prefer to have it.

Devotees of S&M pornography might appreciate the book — but I‘d say it’s not sexy enough. It does not follow formulae; its images are unfamiliar. Mistresses misbehave sexually; the Goddess vomits on herself; the Jew-Domme is used as a semen repository, and develops a pregnancy. Slaves misbehave sexually, have visions and possess extraordinary powers. The writing is informed by language very distinctly drawn from something more than your everyday fetishistic, consensual BDSM culture. It might be extracted directly from the sadistic culture of Nazism.

We are fortunate the artist survived, to alchemize the horror. The author and artist of ‘House of Anita’ brilliantly sessions us, enacting the ultimate Sado-Masochistic magic: he transforms pain into pleasure.

May we be certain that he felt himself to be lucky to survive, and record? How happy, satisfied, gratified a person was the Artist able to be?

In some manner, ‘House of Anita’ is similar to the works of the illustrious Marquis: one can only read so much before disgust, monotony, disbelief and, in the average reader, indifference overcomes the will to go on reading.

However I do aver: that comparable to the works of De Sade, “House of Anita” illuminates an era of profound transformation in the history of human sexuality. For the first time, en masse, Sadistic pleasure came to be revealed, was elaborated upon, and even touted as an advancement. Within the Third Reich, Sadism functioned as a both a sexual and a political engine.

The reader must be prepared to become conversant with the sexual anomaly of Sado-Masochism. This is not even approaching any kind of twenty-first century fun, ‘fetishy’ sexual-play-time stuff; this is seriously hardcore sexual perversion, the strain of the parapathy that does not give a damn about either the Yes or the No from its chosen object. We’ve crossed the line into a hideous forcibleness, and the dreariest of submission. Certain detailed tortures of “House of Anita” reveal that Nazism perpetrated itself as the Sado-Masochistic cult par excellence.

One theory still developing: the idea that the stylizations of Nazism have infiltrated, possibly even helped create our modern-day BDSM… and that some of us are still working out, consciously or unconsciously, through psychodrama, in our choices in reading and viewing media, and by way of other sophisticated detachments — we are still working through the facts of those crimes, those waking nightmares, via Sado-Masochistic rituals.

A moot point, still to be made: historical research has uncovered evidence of Sado-Masochistic proclivities on the part of nearly every major actor of the Third Reich. Hitler himself has been alleged a major Masochist favouring verbal abuse, physical punishment, and urolagnia — from both paid professionals, and meted out by ‘Mistress’ Eva Braun herself. [3] In counterpoint, his Sadism is infamous, its ramifications world-shattering.

So there is evidence that Sado-Masochism fuelled the Third Reich; it was the passionate engine that ran the nightmare for fifteen years, until it self-destructed in flames and suicide.

The hyper-aesthetic horror of this species of Sadism bled down from its Fuhrer, in and through the elite violence of the SS, the Reich’s police and their countless infamies; into the camps, ultimate bondage; ending in the whims of the lowliest guards, the ‘Kapos,’ — prisoners recruited for their own cruelty, and encouraged in it — who were granted life-and-death command over the ‘slaves.’

There is evidence of the development of this Sadism, via occult Initiations, in the text “The Spear of Destiny.” Therein one may read of three men — philosophers, thinkers, and occultists — who are allegedly responsible for the extraordinary development of a supra-human hatred that Hitler, as its medium, unleashed upon western civilization, and beyond. [4]

Such sufferings then begun, evolved, and massively inflicted — have not yet come to an end. And not just because there are still, seventy years later, survivors who bear the physical and psychic scars from that era. Because it now behooves every thinking person to observe, within their own psyche, any traces or tracks of this evil, a virulent evil which lingers on in every culture — and to make a concerted effort to confront it, and eradicate it.

Boris Lurie’s first language was Russian, but he wrote “House” in English; certain qualities of the prose, though seemingly awkward, convey an original point of view. For one, there is very little direct recrimination against his Masters. In fact he rather adores his Mistress-Master Anita, accepts all the abusive conditions, agrees that he deserves to be maltreated. Could this be because: every torture is invested with sexual pleasure? Written in a rather cool, yet vivid style, we soon understand that the psychological inversion, “identification with the oppressor” — whereby the victim first suffers, then reflects and perpetuates the violence — is delineated in full, revolting blossom.

The narrator, called “Bobby” — though he himself admits he has no idea what his name is, nor where he comes from, nor indeed, how he came to be an inmate of the House of Anita — functions variously a servant, a slave, (even a “love-slave”), a toilet, a piece of furniture, and ultimately a witness to the four Mistresses who rule the premises.

And who is Anita? Who was her original?

One may be tempted to imagine that Ilsa Koch herself, the notorious “Hexe de Buchenwald” may be a template; could she have managed to interfere with the sexuality of Boris? Popularly depicted in modern films as ‘The She-Wolf of the SS,’ Ilsa is however no campy joke: she really did parade by starving prisoners on a fancy riding horse, whipping whomever struck her ill-tempered fancy.

But Ilsa and her husband Otto-Karl Koch ruled over Buchenwald from 1937 until 1941; according to Buchenwald records, Lurie did not arrive until early 1944, having lived in four other camps previously. [5]

However the Kochs were so atrocious we can be certain they lived on in the Buchenwald inmates’ imagination: they remained legendary, living monsters of an unspeakable truth. Herr Koch was actually tried by his own Nazis for “incitement to murder,” and was hanged in April 1945 shortly before the Liberation. Some twenty years later Ilsa hung herself in prison. And I say if Boris did not suffer at the hands of the Hexe herself, those activities had occurred… he heard of the tortures… and in such a context, where anything can happen, to just hear of them is enough to make one insane. Because you understand that anything, no matter how horrible, has become possible.

We can only imagine the infinite depth of the inmates’ internal terrors: the constant fear of dissolution, of being a rat or a guinea pig in the hands of a purulent “Master Race,” disgustingly brutal beyond any previous measure. So the Third Reich gave us a new measure; so now we all live with that.

In the book, with Lurie, we relive a multitude of sexual humiliations, experimentations upon his body; there is plenty of rough usage of the genitals, many disgusting uses for the mouth. Where did these fantasies come from, why are they so prevalent in this brothel? Because it’s not only a brothel — it’s a concentration camp.

In “House of Anita” we understand Bobby is captive for life, trapped within the cage of those images that revolt and shock. Even in the artistic transmogrification they horrify more often than they edify. Even the aesthetics feel cruel.

Students and scholars of the psychology of the Third Reich will assuredly be riveted by this Work. It awakened in me a new pathos-fascination with the insane, yet consistent logic of Sado-Masochistic mentality that hideously ‘evolved,’ untrammeled by any moral restraint whatsoever. The new morality was to evince no morality. In this dark theatre, everything in the universe became inverted.

Through the medium of fiction, Lurie allows himself to be unrelenting in his exposition of the psychic damage that his incarceration, during an impressionable adolescence, wrought on a highly intellectual, creative personality.

He was mostly a painter, but there is no doubt that he had a hard time flourishing in his Artistry. The art world of Manhattan rejected his subject matter, his soul: the Jew escaped from the Nazis, but the world just wanted to escape from the Jew. So was he beset by another species of demon, his ‘liberators,’ who ignored him. But that couldn’t matter, he was anyhow determined to speak his truth.

In the first pages, the “House” may be taken in as a sort of apartment-brothel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Anita is joined by three Mistresses, each horrific in her own way; the narrator Bobby is joined by three other slaves.

Was Lurie a client of a Sado-Masochist’s dungeon? However few and far between in the 1950s such ‘cultural establishments’ were, it seems he may have been. Might there have been one, which catered to Jews… with Aryan Mistresses? Set in that Manhattan underground, of which there is very little record, within the precincts of a real, or imaginary ‘House of Domination,’ certain slaves live in as servants, other men make appointments for their punishments, and women rule all. Mistress Anita is the owner-operator and resident Diva in her peculiar House.

The first inclination we may feel that this House is more than unusual: the author’s naming of one slave, Aldo, as a “Kapo.” Threaded throughout are these secret, coded entries for atrocity. Throughout we will find slight demarcations on certain words: an alert that something is off.

How do you live in peace – and is peace now a notion forever absurd – after having specimens of humanity lord it over you, kill you, and prosper as they did so? Knowing they have killed thousands, with impunity; and living through days, weeks, years, waiting for your turn?

Here is one way to survive such as experience:

During a game of Blind Man’s Buff —

“If the face and body is repeatedly beaten… the servant routinely collapses. Kicked by booted feet, one ends up under dull deadening pain that lasts for hours.

“Of course some people might extract pleasure from that. If not at the time of pain, then later perhaps, as a recollection of a strong experience survived – and affirmation of one’s strong dedicated character, an example of endurance and accomplishment. Something to make body and mind stronger, for future tasks and services.” [6]

The worst ‘tell’ here — that is, sign of a break in the status quo — is a word that, as Editor, I nearly excised — until I recognized its aberrant power of truth: the word “routinely.”

In House of Anita, slaves may be routinely beaten; but in that fantasy game, “routinely” strikes one as redundant, an exaggeration. But recollecting Lurie’s true experience, “routinely” must stay put. For the ‘haftlings,’ prisoners who no longer had any claim on life, were routinely beaten until they died. It was neither fiction nor fantasy; it was not cinematic.

Boris Lurie escaped from Buchenwald just days before the Liberation of May 7, 1945. [7] His subsequent few years were unusual: he lived with American soldiers in a displaced person’s camp, and was pampered, petted, and fed well. He was given a job in counter-intelligence… This treatment, after years of torment, created in him a love and attraction for the Americans.

With his father who also survived the camps, Lurie emigrated to New York City at the age of twenty, and before long began to pursue the artist’s life. He developed into what you’d not exactly call a favored art-star. His eventual use of the images of dismembered women and swastikas were raw and disquieting. But more, it was their acknowledged source that created the discomfort… for didn’t de Kooning also paint violent, distorted, even dismembered images of the female?

In ‘House of Anita,’ admixed with the Nazi metaphors, we discover many disparaging, ironical images of the New York City art world of the late Fifties-early Sixties. The crazed female artist-dealer, ‘Polanitzer,’ and the depraved art-historian ‘Geldpayer’ both embody Lurie’s distaste and contempt for the fashionable art world of Manhattan. He takes scathing aim, turning both into degraded slaves; at least one of whom is a recognizable ‘roman a clef’ character, both being art world personalities of great influence. [8]

Mistress Anita is interested in showing off artefacts of human hair, flesh, and bone, ‘genuine Auschwitz gravel,’ to the artist-dealer Polanitzer. Lurie makes a point of calling this character an ‘artist-dealer,’ versus the more common ‘art-dealer,’ evidence that he feels such people trade in human beings, not just their works.

Why would Lurie NOT paint dismembered bodies? The fact is that the teenage Lurie viewed corpses every day. Why would he NOT write of such arcane ecstasies as being buried in sand, and slowly bled to death through his penis? I don’t think I have ever studied the photographs from that era so closely as I have — after my long bouts with the scribbles of love-slave Lurie.

I was a child in the 1950s when I saw for the first time such a photo. I turned my eyes away in shame. But I kept going back to the book: a big pile of dead, naked bodies. All those people, naked! But was that… sexual?

The answer is: yes. Because in our culture the sexual has become admixed, confused, and deeply embedded in ideas of mayhem and violence. Sexuality congeals with torment; blood is a newly sexualized excretion, a flow from the body mutually enjoyed by bleeder, as well as elicitor. And “House of Anita” gives us a clue as to how, if not why.

When I first began to research Sado-Masochism in the early 1970s, I read both intellectual works, such as De Sade and his commentaries, and straight-off-the-rack pornography, with its second-rate arty photography, depicting half-naked sexy dames stepping on lowly ‘slaves.’ The photos’ narrative descriptions taught me reams about BDSM; and despite their provenance, the images transmitted a specific insight into the mentality of those who bought into their sexual power.

You don’t see such images anymore purveyed. During that era of pornography, dangerously near to the 1940s, you could find at least one photo-spread with a Nazi-inspired fantasy. Jewish-looking men with beards, even yarmulkes, knelt before tall blondes with swastika arm-bands, who grimaced over them and denied them every pleasure…

… yet we understand that is the pleasure.

In such decompensated fantasy the subject willingly re-creates, verbally at least, usually in great detail, some form of permanent enslavement. The fantasy of a life-imprisonment. The inhuman conditions of the concentration camp become material, a paradigm “worst possible thing.” Masochists often invoke this inverted Ideal, “the worst possible…” while in states of excited exaltation. The word “anything” also serves as a code for the erotic thrill of the total relinquishment of self. But these sexed-up ideations have no concept of what it can really mean for “anything” to be possible.

And so back to the theory: It was my feeling at first reading, and it now is assuredly concretized in this deeper re-reading, that the Nazi regime might be vehemently to blame for the modern crystallizations, the proliferation of Sado-Masochistic complexes. It manifests voluptuously, in print media and film, in social media, in fashion. It bursts out hideously in sex-related crime. Ethnic cleansing is still going on in countries all over the world. Meanwhile, at the fetish-themed parties of our turn-of-the-twentieth-century population of inverts… calling Sado-Masochism a parapathy is laughed at, considered antiquated.

But in a deeply entrenched practice, can one remain inured to the bizarre reality of, let’s call it, a paraphilia — becoming a lifestyle? Throughout the 1990s more exacerbated titillation was provided by the fashion industry, as it embellished the ‘metaphor;’ it erected an eidolon of the Dominant Woman for the delectation of our modern culture. Cruelty had somehow evolved to become glamourous.

The Nazi paradigm has not faded. It is still active, as an inverted Ideal, as the most twisted, most terrible, and finally Satanic Ideal. Reichian euphemisms lend vocabulary to the Sado-Masochist. Reichian images are entrenched in the culture, have hardened to cliches. Details from Lurie’s Buchenwald ring harsh and determining, as images of the medical experimentations force their way into our consciousness.

So can we really role-play this stuff away?

The mysterium conjunctium of suffering with pleasurable excitement is again made manifest. In order to better endure the no doubt constant replay of horrible imagery of his consciousness, through his artistry, Lurie imbued that horrible with the wonderful, and herein, his torments may be offered up as exquisite works of art, manifest with irony in his vividly incisive writings.

Art cannot simply justify the acts, though it might appear to be so; it is a hard-wrought catharsis, through the active, enlivened conscience, of the Killing-Field forced into mutation, into something better — an art work, a writing, a play, or a sexual fantasy enacted – a place transfigured, out of Horror, that may perhaps be lived with.

TERENCE SELLERS

MAY 2010 – MAY 2015

Read Chapters One through Six of “House of Anita”

Read Chapter 38, The Artist-Dealer’s Visit

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FOOTNOTES & COMMENTARY

[1] The editor will persist in using the classical spelling ‘Sado-Masochism’ to remind the reader (perhaps unnecessarily) of the two men whose names created the anomaly: The Marquis Alphonse Louis De Sade, infamous lover of cruelty, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a renowned slave.

Freud pointed out in his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Papers on Sexual Theory) that the two proclivities often work in tandem. But the first appearance of the compound term Sado-Masochism (German “Sado-Masochismus”) was in Über den sado-masochistischen Komplex (Regarding the Sadomasochistic Complex) in 1913, by the psychoanalyst Isidor Isaak Sadger.

Ironically awful twist of fate: Sadger died in 1942 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

[2] House of Anita, from Chapter One, A Modern Educational Avant-Garde Slave Establishment.

[3] Sado-Masochistic proclivities. While the author Ron Rosenbaum does not agree with many of the theories behind Hitler’s parapathy, apparently not believing that sexual perversity can lead to bloodshed and mayhem, he cites Norman Bromberg and Vera Volz Small’s “Hitler’s Psychopathology” — wherein the psychoanalysts “specifically link Hitler’s sexual perversion (as related by a number of embittered ex-Nazi defectors from Hitler’s inner circle) to the “crystallization of the exterminationist version of his anti-Semitism.”

“It was not so much the specifics of the perversion that made it decisive, as it was… only in the freedom of his intimacy with (his half-niece) Geli Raubal was Hitler able to fulfill his parapathic desires fully. They contend it was this fulfillment which led to a profound shift in the gravitational center of his pathology … the displacement of his fear of women to [fear of, hatred of] Jews.”

According to the disaffected inner circle, in particular one Hermann Rachning, Adolf Hitler was a submissive who favoured urolagnia. The writer Rosenbaum does not seem conversant with the inner psychic workings of Sado-Masochism, that it is a two-sided coin with unpredictable reversals.

Ref.: “Explaining Hitler” by Ron Rosenbaum (Chapter 5, “The Dark Matter.” Faber & Faber, London, 2011.

Ref.: in re Hitler’s specific parapathy, according to Hermann Rauschning {footnote in progress} from “The Spear of Destiny,” by Trevor Ravenscroft.

[4] Three men. Dietrich Eckart, poet and writer, but more saliently the main personality behind the satanic Thule Gesellschaft group; along with Karl Haushofer, Professor of Geo-Politics (a specious discipline which promoted racist ideology, and came to be was taught in every German university of the era), and Albert Rosenberg, the probable author of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a doctrine of racial superiority, purporting to be the minutes of a meeting of wicked Jews, intent upon world domination.

The Thule Gesellschaft Group was an occult society into which Hitler allegedly was initiated, into a form of Western magical working. He was styled by the Group as the Germanic Messiah, for which the Aryan race had long awaited. This shamanistic empowerment had a deliberately black cast.

To believe this theory, for which there is some anecdotal evidence, one must believe in the objective reality of evil.

“…at the Nuremberg Trials, at the end of a world war costing 25,000,000 lives and exposing the horrors of the Concentration Camps, there were only embarrassed titters of laughter when formers members of the Ahnenerbe (Himmler’s Occult Bureau) stood in the dock, and gave evidence which included mention of Agarthi and Shamballah. The representatives of the Western world simply refused to admit what their defeated enemies were really like. Their strange beliefs, inhuman practices, and horrible crimes could only be explained [by them] in psycho-analytical terms of mental aberration; Western science… denied the very existence of evil, and spoke in terms of behavioralism and a relativity of morals.”

Ref.: “The Spear of Destiny,” by Trevor Ravenscroft, pp. 257-258

[5] Buchenwald records. From a letter from the Buchenwald Memorial Archives: they state Boris Lurie had been at Riga-Lenta camp, a sub-camp of Kaiserwald concentration camp, from October 25, 1943, until an unknown point of time, and was transferred to Stutthof concentration camp on October 1, 1944. He was transferred from Stutthof to the Buchenwald sub-camp Magdeburg (Polte-Werke) on November 3, 1944, where he remained until its liberation on May 7, 1945.

“Thank you very much for your inquiry made to the Buchenwald Memorial archives. After checking all available documents I can give you the following information about Boris Lurie’s incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp.

” *Boris Lurje* or Lurge (as he is registered in the documents of Buchenwald concentration camp), born in Leningrad on July 18, 1924. He was transferred from Stutthof concentration camp to the Buchenwald sub-camp Magdeburg (Polte-Werke) on November 3, 1944. On November 19, 1944, he was assigned the prisoner number 95966 and was registered with the prisoner categories “Political”, “Latvian” and “Jewish” (“Politischer Lette Jude”). He had been at Riga-Lenta camp, a sub-camp of Kaiserwald concentration camp, from October 25, 1943, until an unknown point of time, and had been transferred to Stutthof on October 1, 1944. His prisoner number in Stutthof was 96146.

“In the records he gives his profession as a carpenter and 1922 as his year of birth; the reason for the latter is possibly his wish to increase his chance of survival by claiming that he was two years older and therefore fitter to work. Unfortunately, we do not have any documents which could provide insight as to what happened to Boris Lurje after he arrived in Magdeburg. For your information I enclose a short article about the sub-camp Magdeburg-Polte. It is taken from the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 – 1945.

“If you wish to continue your search for information about Boris Lurie’s incarceration in Kaiserwald, Stutthof and Buchenwald, or if you wish to obtain scans of the documents on him, please contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Nearly 90 percent of all original documents concerning former inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp can be found at the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The USHMM has got a copy of those documents.”

[6] House of Anita, from Chapter 40, Our Education.

[7] Escaped. Lurie and a friend were able to flee from Buchenwald on April 27, 1945 when all Reichian personnel suddenly left. (This was common in many camps; as the Nazis understood the war was lost, they abandoned them.) He was fortunate in this, as the Nazis did return to Buchenwald, probably under orders, and instigated a forced march of all remaining prisoners, which was the death of most of them.

[8] The originals for these two art-mavens? Henry Geldzhaler has been confirmed to have been Doctor Geldpayer. Who the lady might be is still open to speculation by this Editor.

Read Chapters One through Six of “House of Anita”

Read Chapter 38, The Artist-Dealer’s Visit

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