The House of Dolls

House of Dolls

First English-language edition
Author	Ka-tzetnik 135633
Translator	Moshe M. Kohn
Country	Israel
Language	English translation from the original Hebrew
Publisher	Simon & Schuster (first English edition)
Publication date	1955
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)

House of Dolls is a 1955 novella by Ka-tzetnik 135633. The novella describes "Joy Divisions", which were groups of Jewish women in the concentration camps during World War II who were kept for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers.

The origin of Ka-tzetnik's story is not clear. Some say it is based on a diary kept by a young Jewish girl who was captured in Poland when she was fourteen years old and forced into sexual slavery 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 (House of Dolls is about the sister of Ka-tzetnik's protagonist, Harry Preleshnik).

Between 1942 and 1945, Auschwitz and nine other Nazi concentration camps contained camp 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 and the American Office of War Information during the summer of 1945, camera crews filmed women who had been forced into sexual slavery for the use of guards and favoured prisoners. The film-makers stated that as the women died they were replaced by women from the concentration camp Ravensbrück.

In his essay "Narrative Perspectives on Holocaust Literature", Leon Yudkin uses 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.