Yehiel De-Nur

Yehiel De-Nur or Dinur, ('De-Nur' means 'of the fire' in Hebrew) was born Yehiel Feiner on May 16, 1909, in Sosnowiec (Poland), near the German border. He died of cancer in Tel Aviv 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 (sometimes listed as "K. Tzetnik"). Ka-Tzetnik means "Concentration Camper," 135633 was De-Nur's concentration camp number.

His work documented the history of Nazi atrocities. He wrote under a pseudonym for some time before his identity was revealed at the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Before giving testimony, De-Nur fainted.

Among his most famous works was The 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 suggests the subject of this book was his younger brother, who also died in a concentration camp. While De-Nur's books are still a part of the high-school curriculum, modern Israeli critics like Na'ama Shik consider The House of Dolls pornographic fiction, not least because sexual relations with Jews were strictly forbidden to all Aryan citizens of Nazi Germany. Its publication led the way to the success of the Nazi exploitation genre of popular literature, known in Israel as Stalags series of pornographic comic books that were producen by Ezra Narkis.

In 1976, because of recurring nightmares and depression, he subjected himself to a form of psychedelic psychotherapy from Dr. Jan Bastiaans that included the use of LSD; the visions experienced during this therapy became the basis for his book, Shivitti.