Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
First English translation of 1950 Hungarian Holocaust memoir
As I write this review on the eve of Chanukah, it seems clear to me that Holocaust survivor Jozsef Debreczeni, the author of Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz, possessed a strength of the soul we attribute to the valiant Maccabees. Surely, it was this inner steel that sustained him through unimaginable trials, enabling him to survive tyrannical suffering.
A trained journalist, editor, poet and novelist, Debreczeni possessed a disciplined mind and a phenomenal capacity to observe accurately and to retain information concerning his environment, the perpetrators of atrocities inflicted on Jews, the iniquities suffered by the slave labourers, including himself, the innumerable humiliations inflicted on them, and the Nazi’s organised hierarchy of control in the brutal places to which he was consigned. Remarkably, he was able to probe beneath the propaganda, to dispel for himself the fog of Nazi lies and deceits, and to analyse with his penetrating intelligence the evil that threw a dark shroud over the helpless and vulnerable masses of his fellow Jews. Most significant of all, powered by hope, he was able to envisage his personal release from this dehumanising bondage, and to nurture successfully the flickering flame of life, despite his degradation and the satanic conditions.
The recent emergence of this book has shone a new light on Holocaust scholarship. The book’s publication in 2024 represents the pinnacle of a remarkable tale of survival. Published in Hungarian in 1950, for the first time it has now been translated into English by Paul Olchvary, 75 years after this eye-witness account of the Shoa first saw the light of day. Since its release in English this year, it has been acclaimed as one of the great works of Holocaust literature. The New York Times praised it as one of this year’s ten most important books, describing it as ‘this transcendent Holocaust memoir’, and stating that the author renders the horrors so precisely ‘that any critical distance collapses’. In Jonathan Freedland’s foreword to the English translation, he states Debreczeni understood at the time that, in the future, there would be those whose response to the Holocaust would be to deny such horror ever happened. ‘This painful, absorbing book is an unanswerable reply,’ Freedland writes.
It is undeniably a painful book to read, as one horror piles on top of another and Debreczeni ratchets up the tension. At times I queried why I was reading this excruciating record of sadism, brutality and depravity. Surprisingly, the answer emerges with crystal clarity: to experience it vicariously, to see it, to taste it, to know it, to internalise it, and thereby to understand his eye-witness account, and to testify to its documented truths. The reader accompanies Debreczeni on his descent into hell, drawn into this demonic world by the power of his prose and the lucidity of his observations. He confronts irrational brutality and explores the Nazis’ delegation of power to the Kapos and their role as cruel minions of master tyrants. There are portraits of unmitigated evil, offset by portraits of the good, benevolent and compassionate, as exemplified in his sketch of Dr Farkas, a resident doctor in Dornhau, the hospital known as the cold crematorium, where Debreczeni lies amid filth and the dying. Dr Farkas gives him that most precious commodity, hope, and nourishes him, as best he can, with precious food scraps that keep him tenuously in the land of the living. In this world of selfish, grasping and base individuals, Farkas is a beacon of empathy and compassion. There is a poignant sketch of the friendship between Debreczeni and Erno Brull, who part prior to the Russian liberation of the camp. ‘We hug and kiss each other. With little conviction that it will do any good, we exchange addresses,’ he notes cryptically. In contrast, there are characters like Judovics, a 21-year-old despot, who back home constantly battled the justice system. ‘But now in the swamp of the death factory,’ Debreczeni notes, ‘he truly blossomed. Tyranny and cruelty were right up his alley.’ The book abounds in these vignettes and unforgettable personalities, good and evil.
In the final analysis, one has to consider the very real presence of evil in Debreceni’s world, which is ours, too. One witnesses vicariously the corruption of power and the human capacity for evil among the Nazis and their henchmen. As we light our Chanukah candles, we reflect on the overthrow of tyranny, the liberation of our people, the rebirth of justice, the re-instatement of values that sustain our spiritual lives and, importantly, the renewed autonomy of the individual. With this book, Debreczeni, according to his nephew, ‘gave a human voice to history’. He notes that, in the ensuing decades, his uncle foresaw ‘a tendency to negate the specificity and enormity of the genocide against the Jewish people’ and ‘he fought against the ever more insidious ways in which the memory of the Holocaust was exploited’.
Debreczeni is buried in Belgrade, his tombstone crowned with a bronze phoenix. With this book in English for the first time, the phoenix rises again from the ashes.
Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
Jozsef Debreczeni (Jozsef Bruner’s nom de plume)
Jonathan Cape, London
2024
