Publisher's Synopsis
Dan Stone, author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History says:
'Those who were there and made it back home know that this was possible in but one way: by fleeing into unconsciousness.’ Cold Crematorium is reminiscent of de Wind’s Last Stop Auschwitz in several ways: it was published in Hungarian (in Yugoslavia) in 1950 but has never been published in English before now; and it grapples with searing honesty with what it meant to endure the Nazi camps and – somehow – to survive. Deported with the other Jews of Hungarian-occupied Vojvodina (Serbia) in the spring of 1944, Debreczeni was sent from Auschwitz to a series of Gross-Rosen sub-camps, ending at Dörnhau, one of the so-called ‘Riese’ (‘Giant’) camps, at which inmates laboured building vast underground tunnel networks. Debreczeni explains the system of slave labour and, in accord with the postwar eastern European zeitgeist, explicitly names the German firms that were involved. His indictment of the civilian overseers, the system of prisoner functionaries established as a divide-and-rule strategy by the Nazis, and the brutal individualism of the men’s camps, nevertheless leaves space for what Primo Levi called ‘moments of reprieve’. But be in no doubt: this is an unblinkingly bleak assessment of the Nazi crimes and their effects on their victims.
A lost classic of Holocaust literature translated for the first time - from journalist, poet and survivor József Debreczeni
When József Debreczeni arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, had he been selected to go 'left', his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the 'lucky' ones, he was sent to the 'right', which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labour in a series of camps, ending in the 'Cold Crematorium' - the so-called hospital of the forced labour camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work were left to die.
Debreczeni beat the odds and survived. Very soon he committed his experiences to paper in Cold Crematorium, one of the harshest and powerful indictments of Nazism ever written. This haunting memoir, rendered in the precise and unsentimental prose of an accomplished journalist, compels the reader to imagine human beings in circumstances impossible to comprehend intellectually.
First published in Hungarian in 1950, it was never translated due to the rise of McCarthyism, Cold War hostilities and antisemitism. This important eyewitness account that was nearly lost to time will be available in fifteen languages, finally taking its rightful place among the great works of Holocaust literature more than seventy years after it was first published.
