Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

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 “[restore] the humanity of those forcibly deprived of it.” (Jan.)