House of Dolls

Yehiel Dinur, born Feiner (Fajner), in Sosnowiec, Poland, was known as Ka-Tzetnik 135633, his prisoner name and number at Auschwitz. (Katzetnik was the term for an inmate of a concentration camp, after the German Konzentrationslager.) He was the first survivor-author in any language to place Auschwitz at the center of his writing. An undistinguished expressionist poet in Yiddish before the war, he rose to prominence in Mandatory Palestine after his arrival there in 1945 with his novels of atrocity, especially House of Dolls, which became an international best seller. Dinur revealed his identity in 1961 while testifying at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, where he collapsed upon confronting the “ordinary” visage of Eichmann. He is best known for Sunrise over Hell (originally: Salamandra; 1946), House of Dolls (1953), and They Called Him Piepel (1961), which formed a trilogy that he called The Chronicles of a Jewish Family in the Twentieth Century.