Publishers Weekly
02/19/2024
Hungarian journalist and Holocaust survivor Debreczeni (1905–1978) recounts his experience of Auschwitz in this harrowing memoir, first published in Hungary in 1950. With a reporter’s keen eye for detail, Debreczeni recalls his 1944 arrival by train into the “broader archipelago of horror known as the land of Auschwitz,” a term he applies to the network of prison camps operated by Nazi forces in Poland and eastern Germany. Debreczeni was first assigned to work at a Gross-Rosen labor camp, where he found a subtle hierarchy—the “best” Jewish workers were camp clerks and junior prison functionaries, while “lazier” prisoners were their underlings. After making an error while blasting tunnels, Debreczeni was relocated several times before ending up at a hospital in Dörnhau, the eponymous “cold crematorium,” where his job was to compile daily reports on the number of dead and dying. Debreczeni describes in visceral language the quotidian details of life in a concentration camp (food arrives in “powder-grey, mud-heavy dollops”), and paints gutting portraits of his fellow prisoners, including a French lawyer who’s outlived his entire family. This sobering firsthand account of the Holocaust more than succeeds in its stated mission to “ the humanity of those forcibly deprived of it.” (Jan.)
From the Publisher
"[Debreczeni's] powers of observation are extraordinary. Everything he encounters in what he calls the Land of Auschwitz—the work sites, the barracks, the bodies, the corpses, the hunger, the roll call, the labor, the insanity, the fear, the despair, the strangeness, the hope, the cruelty—is captured in terrifyingly sharp detail...Debreczeni has preserved a panoptic depiction of hell, at once personal, communal and atmospheric."
—New York Times
"A treasure...Debreczeni’s memoir is a crucial contribution to Holocaust literature, a book that enlarges our understanding of 'life' in Auschwitz."
—Wall Street Journal
"A literary diamond...A holocaust memoir worthy of Primo Levi."
—The Times of London
"Superb...an unforgettable testimonial to the terror of the Holocaust and the will to endure."
—Kirkus (starred)
"József Debreczeni was a journalist and a poet and he brings the skills of both to this remarkable work. Cold Crematorium will awe you with the acuity of its observations and the precision and beauty of its language. It should be read by everyone wishing to understand the cruelty and barbarism of the Shoah, but also the indomitable spirit of its survivors."
—Ehud Barak, Former Prime Minister of Israel
"Cold Crematorium is an indispensable work of literature, and a historical document of unsurpassed importance. It should be required reading."
—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated
"An immensely powerful and deeply humane eyewitness account of the horror of the camps. Through vivid descriptions of what he saw and experienced there, Debreczeni confronts the reader with the hell that the Holocaust was; not as something general belonging to history, but as a particular, concrete and devastating reality."
—Karl Ove Knausgård, author of My Struggle
“Brilliantly written, meticulously translated, Cold Crematorium offers us access into the dark world of the Holocaust that is distinct in its power and poignancy. As one who has explored that world for some half a century, I came away tutored and moved. Debreczeni has much to say, more to teach!”
—Michael Berenbaum, former United States Holocaust Museum Project Director
“Toward the end of the book, Debreczeni described the beginning of ‘Holocaust amnesia,’ foreshadowing the many ways in which this unique crime could be trivialized, denied, and, even, appropriated. Cold Crematorium could not be more relevant to the current discourse about intolerance, racism, and antisemitism.”
—Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League National Director, 1987-2015
"Whatever I say about this amazing book feels inadequate. Cold Crematorium is a brilliant book, but the word brilliant does not encompass it. It evades words. I have seldom read a book that creates empathy while dealing with the most dehumanized and dehumanizing experience. I wish everyone would read it, especially in this time of sheer inhumanity and baffling complicity."
—Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
"A timely reminder of man's inhumanity to man—especially for the young generation."
—Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans
“Cold Crematorium is a shaft with arrows pointing in two directions. One points back, placing Debreczeni on an important shelf alongside our embrace of Keretesz, Borowski, Wiesel, Levi. But the other points directly at our own tenuous moment of a growing new fascism, a new fear. This book is a necessary document to remind us how easily past can become prologue.”
—Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West
“Cold Crematorium is a fearless and absorbing memoir that combines the tragic vision of the poet with the dispassionate eye of the ethnographer. Debreczeni’s unforgettable account describes a cruel and barbarous system of exploitation designed to achieve its murderous goals.”
—James Van Horn Melton, Professor Emeritus of European History, Emory University
“With searing honesty and razor-sharp prose, József Debreczeni shows how the Nazis robbed millions of people of their humanity before robbing them of life. Anyone who seeks to understand the effect of the concentration camp inferno on the human soul must read this book.”
—Derek Penslar, Harvard University
“A valuable, measured, authoritative work. The author doesn't gush; he can see and make seen, he dramatizes adroitly, he knows his way around literary devices to enhance the overall effect, and he weaves a series of fine, psychological observations into his story."
—Gábor Tüskés, Director of the Institute for Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
“Devastating in the simplicity of its language, Debreczeni’s book is of immense eyewitness historical value and one of the greatest pieces of lost Holocaust literature from behind the newly descending Iron Curtain.”
—Steven L. Ossad, award-winning author of Omar Nelson Bradley: America's GI General
“With the exception of the work of Primo Levi, I do not know of a nonfiction book on the Holocaust as powerful as this.”
—Géza Röhrig, writer, lead actor in the Oscar-winning film Son of Saul
"An important book! Debreczeni writes precisely, rich in detail, vividly, and suggestively...At times I had to interrupt my reading, as I was so shaken."
—Ilma Rakusa, author and translator, Swiss Book Award winner
"A holocaust memoir worthy of Primo Levi."
—Adam LeBor, The Times of London
"Debreczeni writes with a cinematic clarity, a determination to make detail triumph over mass dehumanization."
—Julian Evans, The Telegraph
“Debreczeni’s book is not only an epic of a human Golgotha, nor only an illustration of all forms of depravity and debasement. It is certainly that and more, but also a painful cry and dark warning to all humankind.”
—Ivan Ivanji, Daily Paper (Novi Sad)
“Always present in this book—even behind the most mundane descriptions—are living beings, which, once visualized, even if illuminated for only a second, cannot be forgotten.”
—Új Könyvek (Budapest)
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-10-21
An extraordinary memoir of the Holocaust by an unlikely survivor.
Budapest-born Debreczeni was working as a journalist when the “gray ones” arrived, abetted by homegrown fascists and the German police in their “grass-green” uniforms. As his memoir opens, Debreczeni is on his way to some outpost of “the Land of Auschwitz” in a crammed cattle car. Most who survived the train ride landed in labor camps, where one might have died because “his cigarettes had been taken away,” reason enough for the chain-smoker to give up on living. In a vivid rejoinder to Eugen Kogon’s Theory and Practice of Hell, Debreczeni places the Nazis in the backdrop, with sadistic cameos, as when an SS officer asks a kapo who his best worker is and then shoots the unfortunate nominee in the head, saying, “An example of how even the best Jew must croak.” Ever the intellectual, the author responds archly: “Kitsch. Horror is always kitsch. Even when it’s real.” The quotidian villains were the kapos, the Jews who, for a little extra bread and a few cigarettes, ran roughshod over the häftlings, or ordinary, prisoners. Whether merchants, doctors, or farmers, no class distinctions applied to a population meant to be erased once their usefulness as laborers had ended, even if the “camp aristocracy” assured that a chosen few favorites joined the kapos at “the footstools beside their thrones.” Few häftlings survived, and Debreczeni was sure he’d die of starvation as he worked digging tunnels and building dams, dreaming of the day when he could “run amok taking revenge, calling to account, meting out justice to those who [had] dragged” him there. His revenge, one supposes, came in the form of this superb book, first published in Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1950.
An unforgettable testimonial to the terror of the Holocaust and the will to endure.
