It is unpleasant to think about the Holocaust, so I don’t think about it very often. But the anti-Israel response of much of the world to Hamas’s murderous aggression on October 7, 2023, suggests that Holocaust deniers have gained considerable ground, even at prestigious U.S. universities. So it may be worthwhile to occasionally remind ourselves of the evidence of what happened.
(p. 10) “Cold Crematorium,” a memoir by József Debreczeni, an accomplished journalist and poet from Hungary, was originally published in Hungarian in Yugoslavia in 1950. The book remained obscure for decades, squeezed by Cold War politics — too Soviet-philic for the West, too Jew-centric for the East. It’s only now, more than 70 years later, that the book has been translated into more than a dozen languages and become accessible to the wider world.
Debreczeni recounts his deportation to Auschwitz, and from there to a series of camps. This isn’t the sort of book you can get a sense of from a plot outline. Debreczeni suffers; he survives (or, more accurately, he does not die); he observes. His powers of observation are extraordinary. Everything he encounters in what he calls the Land of Auschwitz — the work sites, the barracks, the bodies, the corpses, the hunger, the roll call, the labor, the insanity, the fear, the despair, the strangeness, the hope, the cruelty — is captured in terrifyingly sharp detail.
In Paul Olchváry’s exquisite translation, scene after scene, image after image — it is wrenching. Prisoners propping up a dead bedmate, extending his arm, so that they might receive an extra piece of bread. A prisoner expiring midsentence. The lice, “silvery-glistening colonies of larvae,” that torment, endlessly.
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.
. . .
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.
For the full review, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 23, 2024, and has the title “How to Talk About Auschwitz.”)
The book under review is:
Debreczeni, József. Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2024.
