Yehiel De-Nur
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Yehiel De-Nur or Dinur, ('De-Nur' means 'of the fire' in Hebrew) was born Yehiel Finer in 1917, in Poland, near the German border. He died of cancer on July 17, 2001.
During World War II De-Nur spent two years as a prisoner in Auschwitz. In 1945, he moved to British-mandate Palestine (later Israel) and became a writer-historian survivor who wrote several works in Hebrew under the pen name Ka-Tzetnik 135633. Ka-Tzetnik means, roughly, "Concentration Camper" ("K-Z", pronounced "Ka-Tzet", was the abbreviation for Konzentrationslager, the German word for concentration camp; the Slavic ending "-nik" is akin to the English ending "-er"). 135633 was De-Nur's concentration camp number.
His work documented the history of Nazi atrocities. He wrote pseudonymously under this name for some time before his identity was revealed at the trial of Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann in 1961.
Among his most famous works was House of Dolls (1956), which described the Joy Division, a Nazi system that kept Jewish women as sex slaves in concentration camps. He suggests that the subject of the book was his younger sister, who did not survive the holocaust. In his book Piepel, about the Nazis sexual abuse of young boys, he also suggests the subject was his younger brother, who also did not survive the holocaust [1] (http://www.billwilliams.org/katz/ka-tzetnik.html).
In 1976 he underwent a form of psychedelic psychotherapy using LSD from Dr. Jan Bastiaans, due to recurring nightmares and depression, the visions experienced during this therapy became the basis for his book Shivitti [2] (http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v09n2/09203maa.html).
Works
- Atrocity (translated by Nina De-Nur)
- House of Dolls (translated from Hebrew by Moshe M. Kohn)
- Star Eternal (translated by Nina De-Nur)
- Shivitti: A Vision, ISBN 0062508709
- Piepel
External links
- Project Nizkor: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 68, evidence of Yehiel Dinur (http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-068-01.html)