COLD CREMATORIUM

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.