The House of Dolls
Encyclopedia
The House of Dolls is a 1955 novella by Ka-tzetnik 135633
Yehiel De-Nur
Yehiel De-Nur or Dinur, , born Yehiel Feiner was a Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, whose books were inspired by his time as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp....

. The novella describes "Joy Divisions", which were allegedly groups of Jewish women in the concentration camps during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 who were kept for the sexual pleasure of Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

 soldiers.

Origins

The origin of Ka-tzetnik's story is not clear. Some say it is based on a diary
Diary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...

 kept by a young Jewish girl who was captured in Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 when she was fourteen years old and forced into sexual slavery
Sexual slavery
Sexual slavery is when unwilling people are coerced into slavery for sexual exploitation. The incidence of sexual slavery by country has been studied and tabulated by UNESCO, with the cooperation of various international agencies...

 in a Nazi labour camp. However, the diary itself has not been located or verified to exist. Others claim, and the author suggests as much in his later book Shivitti, that it is based on the actual history of Ka-Tzetnik's younger sister (The House of Dolls is about the sister of Ka-Tzetnik's protagonist, Harry Preleshnik). However, Ka-Tzetnik didn't have a sister in real life.

Between 1942 and 1945, Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...

 and nine other Nazi concentration camps
Nazi concentration camps
Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps set up in Germany were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime...

 contained brothels (Freudenabteilung "Joy Division"), mainly used to reward cooperative non-Jewish inmates. Not only prostitutes were forced to work there.
In the documentary film, Memory of the Camps, a project supervised by the British Ministry of Information
Minister of Information
The Ministry of Information , headed by the Minister of Information, was a United Kingdom government department created briefly at the end of World War I and again during World War II...

 and the American Office of War Information
United States Office of War Information
The United States Office of War Information was a U.S. government agency created during World War II to consolidate government information services. It operated from June 1942 until September 1945...

 during the summer of 1945, camera crews filmed women who had been forced into sexual slavery for the use of guards and favored prisoners. The film makers stated that as the women died they were replaced by women from the concentration camp Ravensbrück.

The book Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler's Germany, a biography of Stella Goldschlag, says she was threatened with being forced into sexual slavery unless she cooperated with the Nazis.

Literature and scholarly references

In his essay "Narrative Perspectives on Holocaust Literature", Leon Yudkin uses The House of Dolls as one of his key examples of the ways in which authors have approached the Holocaust, using the work as an example of "diaries (testimonies) that look like novels" due to its reliance on its author's own experiences.

Ronit Lenten discusses The House of Dolls in her work Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah. In her book, Lenten interviews a child of Holocaust survivors who recalls The House of Dolls as one of her first exposures to the Holocaust. Lenten notes that the "explicit, painful" story made a huge impact when published and states that "many children of holocaust survivors who write would agree . . . that House of Dolls represents violence and sexuality in a manner which borders on the pornographic."

Na'ama Shik, researching at Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....

, the principal Jewish organisation for the remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust, considers the book as fiction. Nonetheless, it is part of the Israeli high school curriculum.

The success of the book showed there was a market for Nazi exploitation
Nazi exploitation
Nazi exploitation is a subgenre of exploitation film and sexploitation film that involves villainous Nazis committing criminal acts of a sexual nature often as camp or prison overseers in World War II settings...

 popular literature, known in Israel as Stalags
Stalag fiction
Stalag fiction was a short-lived genre of Israeli fiction Nazi exploitation that flourished in the early 1960s, at the time of the Eichmann Trial.-Premise:...

. However Yechiel Szeintuch from the Hebrew University rejects links between the smutty Stalags and K. Tzetnik's works which he insists were based on reality.

Popular culture

  • Joy Division
    Joy Division
    Joy Division were an English rock band formed in 1976 in Salford, Greater Manchester. Originally named Warsaw, the band primarily consisted of Ian Curtis , Bernard Sumner , Peter Hook and Stephen Morris .Joy Division rapidly evolved from their initial punk rock influences...

     was a British post-punk
    Post-punk
    Post-punk is a rock music movement with its roots in the late 1970s, following on the heels of the initial punk rock explosion of the mid-1970s. The genre retains its roots in the punk movement but is more introverted, complex and experimental...

     band from 1976 to 1980, who took their name from the reference in this book. An early song, "No Love Lost," contains a short excerpt from the novella.

  • Love Camp 7
    Love Camp 7
    Love Camp 7 is a 1969 U.S. women-in-prison B-movie directed by Lee Frost and written by Wes Bishop and Bob Cresse, the latter of whom also acts as a sadistic camp commandant.-Plot:...

    (1968), considered to be the first Nazi exploitation
    Nazi exploitation
    Nazi exploitation is a subgenre of exploitation film and sexploitation film that involves villainous Nazis committing criminal acts of a sexual nature often as camp or prison overseers in World War II settings...

     film, is set in a concentration camp "Joy Division."

Further reading

  • Ka-tzetnik 135633
    Yehiel De-Nur
    Yehiel De-Nur or Dinur, , born Yehiel Feiner was a Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, whose books were inspired by his time as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp....

    . The House of Dolls. ISBN 1-85958-506-X.
  • Wyden, Peter. Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler's Germany. ISBN 0-385-47179-3.

See also

  • German military brothels in World War II
    German military brothels in World War II
    In World War II, the German military brothels were set up by the Third Reich throughout most of occupied Europe, for the use by their soldiers in the Wehrmacht and for the SS officers. These establishments were sometimes set up via existing brothels which they took over in the West, but generally...

  • German camp brothels in World War II
    German camp brothels in World War II
    In World War II Nazi Germany established brothels in the concentration camps to create an incentive for prisoners to collaborate, although these institutions were used mostly by Kapos, "prisoner functionaries" and criminal element, because real inmates, penniless and emaciated, were usually too...

  • Comfort women
    Comfort women
    The term "comfort women" was a euphemism used to describe women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 from some Japanese scholars to as high as 410,000 from some Chinese...

  • Sexual slavery
    Sexual slavery
    Sexual slavery is when unwilling people are coerced into slavery for sexual exploitation. The incidence of sexual slavery by country has been studied and tabulated by UNESCO, with the cooperation of various international agencies...

  • Recreation and Amusement Association
    Recreation and Amusement Association
    The , or more literally Special Comfort Facility Association, was the official euphemism for the prostitution centers arranged for occupying U.S...

  • German war crimes
    German war crimes
    The government of Germany ordered, organized and condoned several war crimes in both World War I and World War II. The most notable of these is the Holocaust in which millions of people were murdered or died from abuse and neglect, 60% of them Jews...

  • Japanese war crimes
    Japanese war crimes
    Japanese war crimes occurred during the period of Japanese imperialism, primarily during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. Some of the incidents have also been described as an Asian Holocaust and Japanese war atrocities...

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