Cold crematorium Reporting from the land of Auschwitz

This is a truly unique first-hand account of the Holocaust. József Debreczeni was a Hungarian-language journalist, poet, and novelist who lived in Budapest and in Yugoslavia. He was deported to Auschwitz, where he used his keen powers of observation and his literary skills to create a vivid and intimate account of the cruelty and insanity of the Nazi's "Final Solution." First published in Hungarian in 1950, Cold Crematorium is now available in a beautiful translation by Paul Olchváry. This is a real-time eyewitness history rather than a memoir reconstructed years later. It is a powerful, important document, especially at a time when anti-Semitism is increasing all over the world.

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.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.