Cold Crematorium

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps

József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944; had he been selected to go 'left', his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the 'lucky' ones, he was sent to the 'right', which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labour in a series of camps, ending in the 'Cold Crematorium' - the so-called hospital of the forced labour camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work were left to die.

Debreczeni beat the odds and survived. Very soon he committed his experiences to paper in Cold Crematorium, one of the harshest and powerful indictments of Nazism ever written. This haunting memoir, rendered in the precise and unsentimental prose of an accomplished journalist, compels the reader to imagine human beings in circumstances impossible to comprehend intellectually.

First published in Hungarian in 1950, it was never translated due to the rise of McCarthyism, Cold War hostilities and antisemitism. More than 70 years later, this important eyewitness account that was nearly lost to time will be available in 15 languages, finally taking its rightful place among the great works of Holocaust literature.

©2023 József Debreczeni (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • A literary diamond – sharp-edged and crystal clear. A haunting chronicle of rare, unsettling power… A holocaust memoir worthy of Primo Levi

    The Times

  • In the timeliest possible way, it succeeds in restoring the Holocaust’s reality… Debreczeni writes with a cinematic clarity, a determination to make detail triumph over mass dehumanisation

    Telegraph

  • A timely reminder of man’s inhumanity to man, especially for the young generation

    Jung Chang, author of WILD SWANS

  • Whatever I say about this amazing book feels inadequate. Cold Crematorium is a brilliant book, but the word brilliant does not encompass it. It evades words. I have seldom read a book that creates empathy while dealing with the most dehumanized and dehumanizing experience. I wish everyone would read it, especially in this time of sheer inhumanity and baffling complicity

    Azar Nafisi, author of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN

  • An immensely powerful and deeply humane eyewitness account of the horror of the camps. Through vivid descriptions of what he saw and experienced there, Debreczeni confronts the reader with the hell that the Holocaust was; not as something general belonging to history, but as a particular, concrete and devastating reality

    Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of MY STRUGGLE

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