Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

Author: József Debreczeni

József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived at Auschwitz in 1944. Had he been selected to go “left,” his life expectancy would have been approximately 45 minutes. One of the “lucky” ones, he was sent to the “right,” which led to 12 horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “cold crematorium”―the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution. But as Soviet and Allied troops closed in on the camps, local Nazi commanders―anxious about the possible consequences of outright murder―decided to leave the remaining prisoners to die in droves rather than sending them directly to the gas chambers.

First published in Hungarian in 1950, it was never translated into a world language until now.

Hardback

256 pages