A rediscovered masterpiece assumes a place in the canon of Holocaust literature - Selected by the NY Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2024

By Albert Stern / BJV Editor

Maybe the most wrenching feeling evoked by Jozsef Debreczeni' s Cold Crematorium: Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz is one’s realization that the author survived. Truly, the ordeal that Debreczeni describes in this memoir of his 14-month odyssey through an archipelago of German work camps and death camps seems unendurable – as it was engineered to be. By the end of the story, one is left groping for some kind of explanation of how he could have possibly lived through all he experienced. The only reason Debreczeni can give us for why he lived is that he did not die.

Jozsef Debreczeni (1905-1978) was a Hungarian-language journalist and poet who worked and lived in Yugoslavia after World War II. After enduring three years of forced labor in Hungary, in 1944 he was transported to Auschwitz, where he passed the intake process. As he recounts:

Right or left. To a life of slavery or to death in the gas chamber.
Those who’ve made it home know what it meant if someone went left. But, then, we didn’t know yet. The decisive moment slunk away, unnoticed, amid others. [p. 35]

Permitted to live in order to be worked to death, Debreczeni was moved among three subcamps, where slave labor was employed for the benefit of large German corporations. At one level, the system operated as perversion of a modern industrial state – in one withering observation at being forced to work in a mine with “not a trace of safety precautions,” Debreczeni writes: “Tunneling is hard work…All over the world, laborers battling underground with homicidal rocks are well paid and provided with special care. Here the guiding principle is the opposite of that. [p. 120]” He recognizes that the purpose of the system is ultimately not to exploit cheap labor – it is “the result of experimentation through scientific barbarism. Hundreds of thousands made to stand on all fours will no longer strive to vanquish the beast within themselves. [p. 127]”

Almost all of Cold Crematorium is a chronicle of decisive moments slinking away into a further morass of horrors, all told with pitiless clarity. Debreczeni describes his body being wrecked from within by malnutrition and disease and assailed from without by violence, the elements, and what he terms a “primeval forest of filth and lice. [p. 202]” He observes: “In the Land of Auschwitz, the first thing to wither away is the instinct of disgust. [p. 71]”

His interpersonal struggles are among his fellow prisoners also fighting to survive – his German overlords seem to appear periodically only to brutally enforce, “with systematic resourcefulness…a subtle hierarchy of the pariahs” [p. 40] created in the death camps. Toward the end of the book, Debreczeni, wracked by typhus and in the grip of veritable death throes, thinks:

It’s not bad, lying there like this. To see nothing with open eyes, to feel my immaterial lightness, to lazily vanish behind the canopy of immortal indifference. And—oh, bliss!—to need nothing, not even cigarettes, to need nothing… [p.204]

But Debreczeni lives. It is not until you get to page 234 of this 237-page book that he is liberated by the Red Army. And until page 234, things have getting progressively worse for him in ways that even those of us steeped in Holocaust stories will find unimaginable. You keep hoping it will stop, but it doesn’t. You keep wondering how it can continue, but it does. And the effect is shattering.

Over the past summer, I was driving with an older friend who shared that she was in the midst of reading Cold Crematorium. “Oh, my God,” I said, and she exclaimed: “I know!” I told her that I had tried to explain the power of this book to people who had not read it, but ended up sputtering and inarticulate. My friend is originally from Eastern Europe and grew up among Holocaust survivors. She’d heard many, many stories and read many, many books – “but never anything like this!”

We spent several minutes discussing the profound affect Cold Crematorium had on us, and I asserted that this book is going to stand as one of the most important testimonies of a Holocaust survivor, worthy of a place on the same shelf as Elie Weisel’s Night and Viktor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (aka Survival in Auschwitz). But Cold Crematorium is different, she insisted. There is no philosophy, no psychology, no quarrels with God or the Universe, no trying to fit this catastrophe into some larger theorical framework – nothing like that at all. Just the process of a human being ground down toward oblivion.

Indeed, Debreczeni’s only speculation that could be called remotely esoteric occurs toward the end of the book, where he considers his desire for retribution against his oppressors and says to his friend, Dr. Farkas, who has helped keep him alive:

“Maybe it’s all just curiosity,” I continue, musingly. “What would they be like in this situation, after all? Would they like the taste of beets and potato skins? Would they be slurping down bunker soup so greedily? I’d like to see that smug, narrow-minded police constable here as he is picking lice off himself—that addlebrained, puffed-up cretin who added a lame pun to every name he read aloud from the list before departure in Topola. Like I say, curiosity, that’s all.”
Farkas responds to my outburst with just an indulgent wave.
He presses a little package into my hand.
“Multivitamins. Three times a day.”

It’s an amazing exchange – muse all you like, but the pills are all that will (possibly) help you in this world.

Cold Crematorium was only published in English in 2023, and translated into 15 other languages, as well. How did this vital work of literature remain virtually unknown for so long? Reviewers speculate that the West might have been unreceptive to it because Debreczeni explicitly names the German companies that exploited slave labor, substantial industrial firms that remained substantial players in the postwar German Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). Others suggest that Western publishers in the Cold War era might have chafed at the author’s full-throated praise of his Red Army liberators, as well as his status as a journalist working in a Communist country. Behind the Iron Curtain, the commissars may have objected to Debreczeni’s portrayal of the Holocaust as a crime that specifically targeted the Jews – postwar Communist authorities tried to fix Jews into a more general category of “Victims of Fascism.” Certainly, neither the Western or Communist governments and cultures seeking to assimilate Germans into their spheres of control would wish to be reminded of the grotesque behavior of the German populace during the war, which Debreczeni describes unforgivingly.

But an additional, more unsettling, possibility is that Jewish historians and audiences may not have wanted to confront the reality Debreczeni portrayed. Nazi oppressors hover in the background over the ghastly crimes the author describes, but the cruelties were, as the Nazis intended, in large part inflicted by Jewish kapos and prisoners trying to survive. 

Uniquely, such towering figures of the Auschwitz hierarchy were recruited from among those who, back home, had stood on the bottom rungs of Jewish society. Those who’d made nothing of themselves—schnorrers, nebbishes, schlemiels, freeloaders, rogues, swindlers, idlers, slackers—all blossomed in this swamp… If that biblical saying “The last shall be first and the first last” was realized anywhere, it certainly was here…[p.90]

Schnorrers, nebbishes, and schlemiels – that cast of comic shtetl rogues sentimentalized in the pages of Sholem Aleichem stories or The Joys of Yiddish, here fighting each other for a morsel of food or to see who might extract a gold tooth from a corpse to please their superiors. Hapless as they are merciless, they are human archetypes who would probably lived normal kinds of lives in normal kinds of times. In the Land of Auschwitz, their distinct, immutable human characteristics found different, otherwise unimaginable, expressions.

The book is hard going. I hope the brief excerpts I’ve shared convey something of the masterful job Paul Olchvary did with the translation. I knew Paul a little and, when you read his friend Jenny Gitlitz's sidebar about him, you’ll understand why my experience of Cold Crematorium was overcast with an even greater sadness. His translation will be definitive for as long as this book is read in English – Debreczeni’s writing, and the voice and humanity Paul found in it, will be, for the world, an expression of the experience of being an enslaved person that transcends cultures and history – the numberless people stripped of hope and humanity, people who had no chance of expressing their pain or the injustices done to them. 

But perhaps the most difficult thing about reading this book was trying to jibe this historical account with current events. Debreczeni’s ordeal transpired over 14 months or so, his suffering and physical decline over that time period described in unsparing detail. I first read Cold Crematorium in June 2023, when Israeli hostages in Gaza had already been held in captivity for 8 months. As I read, I couldn’t help mapping Debreczeni’s time as slave of the Nazis against the time our hostages have been imprisoned in tunnels by Hamas, knowing that our kinsmen are today being abused by the same kind of vile people to whom their humanity means nothing – and for the same reasons. They are Jews.

As I write this in late November, about 14 months after Oct. 7 2023, our hostages remain in captivity. As much as it is a history book, Cold Crematorium is also a window into what these cherished people may be living through, the kinds of things they may be thinking, at this moment.

As William Faulkner put it: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Cold Crematorium, then, may be a read you will want to save for the future. It will endure.