Ka-Tzetnik 135633

Yechiel Feiner (Ka-Tzetnik 135633), writer: born Sosnowiec, Poland 1917; married (one son, one daughter); died Tel Aviv 17 July 2001.

He was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, supposedly in 1917, although his daughter reckons he was several years older. From a Hasidic family, he completed precocious studies in a Lublin yeshiva and became a rabbi in his teens. Slowly abandoning Jewish orthodoxy, he began publishing his first poems in Yiddish. Feiner was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943 and escaped during the death march of February 1945.

He settled in Palestine after the Second World War and, after first adopting the name Yechiel Denur, wrote his books as "Ka-Tzetnik 135633": his main subject was Auschwitz. Millions of copies of his second book, Bet ha-bubot (1953, translated as House of Dolls, 1956), have been sold across the world. There was a time when you could find it, with a lurid cover, on every station bookstall in Britain. His books have been translated into 20 languages; they are taught and read in all schools in Israel.

Feiner's identity was revealed to the world in 1961 when he made a powerful and widely reported speech at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, before collapsing in court. His books are fictionalised chronicles rather than novels as such. Based on or derived from real events, many of them are accounts of the terror and cruelty experienced or witnessed by the author and other Jews during the Second World War, both inside and outside camps and ghettos.

The books leave the reader reeling. Ka-Tzetnik's obsessional and stylised descriptions of cruelty recollected in emotion have the ring of truth not only because he was there, but because he shapes his material through a mythic and poetic imagination. His sometimes frenzied prose, bypassing intellectual rationalisation, is often mesmerising.

His populist shock-horror over-the-top tendencies have meant that not only has he not received the critical acclaim of a Levi or an Appelfeld, he is almost completely ignored by scholars and critics outside Israel, with the exemplary exception of his admirer Omer Bartov, who nevertheless wrote of the author's "kitsch, sadism and what initially appears as outright pornography". Ka-Tzetnik embarrasses the experts.

In recent years Ka-Tzetnik had been writing an ongoing and endless work, his noble and hopeless ambition being to convey in words the look in the eyes of those on "Planet Auschwitz" who knew they had been selected for the gas chambers by the man they themselves called the angel of death, Dr Joseph Mengele. Ka-Tzetnik himself survived several selections.

He would write all night, he told me a few years ago, but would destroy most of his work next morning. Perhaps he feared that the dead would say that even he could not know what they knew, for somehow he had cheated death.

Ka-Tzetnik 135633 is one of the most significant writers, certainly the strangest, to have emerged from the camps and ghettos. His pen name is, in its ineffable anonymity, the ultimate disguise imaginable, for it embraces, in mocking and savage irony, the abstract imposition of an enemy whose aim was to destroy individuality before killing the individual.

At the heart of his work are the famous descriptions of perpetrators' cruelty and victims' pain, and yet the hard-won lesson the author eventually brought to the world from Auschwitz was neither hate nor cynicism but a positive and universal one concerning tolerance for the stranger in a strange land, in this instance a passionate belief in the need to work for mutual understanding between Jew and Arab in the shared homeland. Practising what he preached, he and his late wife Nina pioneered attempts to bring Jews and Arabs together in "dialogue groups".

Ka-Tzetnik's alter ego is the character Harry Preleshnik. Preleshnik survives – whether by luck or by judgement – to become a witness. House of Dolls, based on the tragic life of the author's own sister, recounts the experiences of Harry's sister, young Daniella Preleshnik, in a German army officers' brothel. The book's descriptions of cruelty, degradation and hopelessness – neither euphemistic nor voyeuristic – are exceeded in camp literature by only one other book, namely Ka-Tzetnik's Kar'u Lo Piepel (1961, translated as Piepel the same year), which is the story of Daniella's fictional younger brother Moni.

Ka-Tzetnik is the most obsessive of the major Holocaust writers. Certain themes and images, leitmotifs, occur time and again, such as the "darting tongues" of the skeletal figures, caught up in the daily cycle of murder and fear. He conveys powerfully the hopeless bravado of a man's cunning theft of a turnip, unseen, or so the man imagines. It is the desperate man's last action before, inevitably, he is discovered and murdered.

Ka-Tzetnik 135633's only explicitly autobiographical book is Shivitti (1987, translated as Shivitti: a vision, 1989). This is a remarkable account of the controversial treatment by a Dutch psychiatrist, Professor Bastiaans, which involves the use of the drug LSD: drugged, the patient relives the past in the company of the therapist, in order to cure what Bastiaans has called the Concentration Camp Syndrome, in this instance Ka-Tzetnik's nightly dreams of Auschwitz. The book is a telling reminder of the high price paid by all survivors of traumatic cruelty, active remembrancers or not.

In Ka'Hol mi-Efer (1966, House of Love, 1971) Harry, a broken vessel, is put together by the love of Galilea, a Sabra woman who awaits him having spent all night reading his anonymous first book about the camps (referring to Ka-Tzetnik's own first book, Salamandra, 1946, translated as Sunrise over Hell, 1977). Ka-Tzetnik's only prose book written in Yiddish rather than Hebrew, it was composed in Italy after his escape from the death march. Harry and Galilea marry. A Hebrew prayer for the dead is played at their wedding.

Galilea takes on Harry's suffering and attempts to exorcise his demons. They have two children, named for Moni and Daniella. As in real life, the couple will promote reconciliation between Jew and Arab. For Harry: love and writing; for Galilea: love and politics.

A direct line ran within her from the suffering of the Jews in Europe to the humiliation of these Arabs.

Suffering is no excuse for cruelty, and Jewish suffering in the diaspora, Ka-Tzetnik believed, is no excuse for improper behaviour towards Arabs in or by the Jewish state. He believed that writing should incarnate memory and truth, political action peace and justice:

Like drifting smoke, the lesson of Auschwitz will disappear if man does not learn from it. And, if Auschwitz is forgotten, man will not deserve to exist.

When he died, he weighed 30 kilos. In mind and body, he had returned to Auschwitz.

Anthony Rudolf