The first English language edition of a lost memoir by a Holocaust survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps.
The details are so precise that any critical distance collapses—nothing’s expected, nothing’s dulled by cliché. It is as immediate a confrontation of the horrors of the camps as I’ve ever encountered. It’s also a subtle if startling meditation on what it is to attempt to confront those horrors with words. What Debreczeni experiences is so cartoonishly cruel that it defies not description but moral comprehension. ‘Horror is always kitsch,’ he writes after an ad hoc execution, ‘even when it’s real’ ... Debreczeni has preserved a panoptic depiction of hell, at once personal, communal and atmospheric. Occasionally shifting tenses or even assuming omniscience, he floats among the nearly dead and the newly dead, crafting a kind of in-progress collective obituary, sketching the human beings they once were, the human lives they once had, as their corpses are carried out and flung into a lime pit … The finest examples of Holocaust literature—and Cold Crematorium is so fine it transcends its category—aren’t merely bulwarks against obscurity; they do more than allow us to never forget. They offer a glimpse, one that is unyielding and unsoftened by sentimentality, one that is brutally, unbearably close.
Debreczeni chronicles the steady, relentless, carefully planned dehumanization of the prisoners and everyday life inside the camps in powerful, stomach-churning detail ... Debreczeni sharply dissects the hierarchies that emerge. His careful observations about the hated kapos, privileged inmates, bring fresh understanding of the power dynamics in a world of profound dehumanization ... it was largely forgotten for years, until Debreczeni’s nephew recently arranged for it to be translated. He chose well. Paul Olchváry, an award-winning and highly accomplished translator of Hungarian literature, has rendered Debreczeni’s prose into a literary diamond — sharp-edged and crystal clear. Like the works of Primo Levi and Vasily Grossman, this is a haunting chronicle of rare, unsettling power.
Occasionally a salvaged book proves a valuable find. József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium is one such treasure ... Elegantly translated...makes for sobering yet essential reading ... Debreczeni’s memoir is a crucial contribution to Holocaust literature, a book that enlarges our understanding of 'life' in Auschwitz.
