A book written in 1950 is published about the chilling “cold crematoria” of the Nazis

Photo Credit To Agencia EFE

József Debreczeni was first in Auschwitz and then in the Dörnhau camp. His chronicle “Cold Crematorium” is only now being translated from Hungarian, and reveals horrors

József Debreczeni’s work Cold Crematorium, published in Hungarian in Yugoslavia in 1950 and now translated into other languages, continues to have the power to shock and enlighten us. Debreczeni, a poet and journalist who lived in the Yugoslav region of Vojvodina, was one of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, after Hitler invaded the country and sent Adolf Eichmann to Budapest.

At the time of his deportation, Debreczeni, unlike many other authors of survivor testimonies, was already an experienced journalist, almost 40 years old. Therefore, he was not only able to describe his personal experience in great detail, but also shed a detached and analytical light on it. In this sense, he can be compared to Levi, who, although younger than him by more than a decade, used his scientific training as a chemist to similar effect.

Debreczeni recounts his imprisonment in three different camps around Auschwitz over the course of approximately a year, each one more horrible than the last. Dörnhau, the last camp where he was interned, from November 1944 to May 1945, gives the book its title. Dörnhau was a hospital camp where sick and dying prisoners were sent in the final months of the war, after the Nazis dismantled the gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz. Aware of the proximity of the Soviet army, the Nazis wanted to hide evidence of their crimes. Although I have read and written a lot about the Holocaust, I had never heard of Dörnhau before reading this book. Many men died there from starvation and disease, including a typhus epidemic towards the end, but they were not gassed or burned. That’s why some inmates called the field a “cold crematorium.”

Debreczeni’s writing style often coincides with that coldness, and is all the more effective for it. This is what he writes about the arrival of a new prisoner who briefly shared his bunk in Dörnhau: