A review by histogrammarian
The Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz by József Debreczeni

dark sad tense fast-paced

4.0

József Debreczeni, a court reporter and playwright, was a survivor of the Holocaust and its most notorious death camp, Auschwitz. In this memoir, he details his experiences with literary prowess, detailing how he and others survived the genocide and how many others did not. Forgotten, for a time, because its political implications didn't suit the Cold War climate, this memoir has recently been translated and republished for a much wider audience than it received in 1950.

And deservedly so. As no two accounts of that genocide are exactly alike, this book offers new perspectives of the experiences of the häftling (camp prisoner) in some of the many camps that were like spoke to the Auschwitz hub. Debreczeni likewise captures the moments of humanity amongst the inhumanity: the heated commerce for bread and tobacco, the women who would surreptitiously drop cigarettes for male prisoners, the vain thief and dutiful doctor who looked out for him. Mostly, however, this is a standing repudiation of the Nazi regime, its genocidal atrocities, and those who enabled and profited from it.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Genocide, Racism, Antisemitism, Murder