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.

Debreczeni’s writing style, rendered in Paul Olchváry’s excellent translation, often matches that coldness, and is all the more effective for it ... would have loved to know more about the author and his work, before and after the camps. But that too is a tribute to this important book.

...superbly human, harsh and uncompromising ... his personal redress is that of the writer, leaving to us this superbly human, harsh and uncompromising story of his survival. In the face of contemporary atrocities, such as Russia’s in Ukraine or Hamas’s in Israel, it surely teaches us what we need to learn to prevent them.

Thwarts any such comparisons by allowing the events that unfold to hover before the reader in the astonishing equipoise of his prose ... Debreczeni’s account manages to make something of this unthinkable jocularity, to report the dead and to report his own life-in-death. He captures detail after harrowing detail ... Only through the difficult act of keeping both the general imperative and the specific example in mind at once can we hope to answer Debreczeni’s anguished call into the void.

A raw and unceasingly grim account of ratcheting horror and total degradation ... This is his first appearance in English. One suspects it might not be his last.

An extraordinary memoir of the Holocaust by an unlikely survivor ... An unforgettable testimonial to the terror of the Holocaust and the will to endure.