Adolf Eichmann’s last words before his hanging included a statement to the people around him that they would soon meet again, as is the fate of all men.
The poet testified for the prosecution at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, speaking in metaphor and fainting to the floor soon after he began his testimony, so that he had to be taken out of the courtroom on a stretcher. He said years later that it was because in the moment he had recognized a terrible kinship with Eichmann, that the Holocaust was the work of men and if circumstances had been different he might have been capable of the same actions.
Nina was the name of the poet’s wife. She translated several of his novels into English.
Ka-Tzetnik, or Ka-Tzetnik 135633, is the name under which Yehiel Dinur, formerly Yehiel Fayner, wrote after the Holocaust. This was first publicly revealed during in his testimony at the Eichmann trial in 1961. He was born in Sosnowiec, Poland in 1909 and died in Tel Aviv in 2001. His most famous works are the six volumes that make up his chronicle of the "planet" Auschwitz. Most of his work, though first written in Yiddish, was first (and oftentimes only) published in Hebrew.
The name Dinur is Aramaic for "of fire." This theme of being reborn through fire manifests itself in a variety of forms in his work, such as the mythical salamander, the phoenix, and the three-time burning of his pre-war book of poetry, Tsveyuntsvanstik: Lider.
