First published in 1950 in Hungarian, this previously untranslated memoir, which surely should rank among the greatest in Holocaust literature, is Hungarian journalist and poet József Debreczeni's searing indictment of Nazi slave labor camps. Cold Crematorium, in its first English-language edition, translated by Paul Olchváry, chronicles Debreczeni's horrific 12-month experience in a series of brutal forced-labor camps that eventually led to the "cold crematorium" hospital in Dörnhau--where prisoners too weak to work were sent to die or await execution.
At his 1944 arrival in Auschwitz, newcomers were sorted to "left" or "right" sides; Debreczeni was sent to the right while those on the left were dead within 45 minutes. Debreczeni's survival of this Nazi "Scylla and Charybdis"--his descent into bone-deep exhaustion, exposure, disease, starvation, and psychological torment as a häftling (prisoner)--represents a profound reckoning with human depravity. He observes the minutiae of camp life, including its internal economics, and the "hierarchy of the pariahs" that Nazi officials created to pit prisoners against one another for food and work privileges. The camp "kapos" and "elders" are often as heartless as their enslavers, whom Debreczeni scathingly dissects as a product of the animalistic conditions of the camps.
Cold Crematorium is a guided tour through hell, and not for the squeamish: the layers of suffering Debreczeni documents will leave readers gutted on every page. Yet his incandescent and poetic prose soars above the agony to achieve nothing less than art itself. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver