Nan J Bauer reviewed Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni
Haunting and Powerful; a perfect read in times where we are told to "move on"
5 stars
The details of Joseph Debreczeni’s journey into the hell of Auschwitz are excruciating. Yet Debreczeni, a poet and journalist prior to his enslavement by the Nazis, recreates his unimaginable year with a visceral, furious grace. “Horror is always kitsch. Even when it’s real,” he writes, one of the most starkly powerful lines I’ve seen in decades of reading. He writes of standing in the rain for hours, watching other prisoners beaten to death, of being sentenced underground prior to being transferred to the cold crematorium of the title. Once there, his joints swollen from starvation edema, he lies crammed into a filthy, louse-infested bunk in a freezing barracks. Somehow, he survives for months as liberation slowly works it way to the camp.
Knowing that Debreczeni obviously survived to write the memoir powered my reading with a kind of white-knuckled hope. His time in hell would end, I knew that, even …
The details of Joseph Debreczeni’s journey into the hell of Auschwitz are excruciating. Yet Debreczeni, a poet and journalist prior to his enslavement by the Nazis, recreates his unimaginable year with a visceral, furious grace. “Horror is always kitsch. Even when it’s real,” he writes, one of the most starkly powerful lines I’ve seen in decades of reading. He writes of standing in the rain for hours, watching other prisoners beaten to death, of being sentenced underground prior to being transferred to the cold crematorium of the title. Once there, his joints swollen from starvation edema, he lies crammed into a filthy, louse-infested bunk in a freezing barracks. Somehow, he survives for months as liberation slowly works it way to the camp.
Knowing that Debreczeni obviously survived to write the memoir powered my reading with a kind of white-knuckled hope. His time in hell would end, I knew that, even as I marveled that he could survive at all, that anyone could. And through it, he carefully observes small details and large, showing the glimmers of humanity that refused to extinguish even in the darkest of hours. Writing my own life at the moment, I have a special admiration for the courage and stubbornness it had to have taken him to relive and record his experiences. We are better for having them, and thanks to Paul Olchváry’s translation, to have such a powerful sense of Debreczeni’s poetic and journalistic voice, which fuse into a narrative that flows like molten metal, all the more remarkable given its grim subject matter.