Auschwitz and its satellite camps, as described by a survivor
COLD CREMATORIUM Reporting from the land of Auschwitz
JÓZSEF DEBRECZENI Translated by Paul Olchváry 245pp. Cape. £16.99.
THE CONTINUING BOOM in Holocaust literature has, at least in part, been built in recent years on some of the more valiant narratives from this grimmest chapter in human history. The Volunteer (2019) by Jack Fairweather concerned the Polish partisan Witold Pilecki, who broke into – and out of – Auschwitz with the aim of reporting on its horrors and fomenting an insurrection. Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist (2022) focused on Rudolf Vrba, another unlikely Auschwitz escapee, whose account of the Final Solution pressured Hungary’s Admiral Horthy into halting his country’s murderous deportation of Jews. Both books received various prizes and have become bestsellers. Other, more recent entries in this category that one hesitates to call “uplifting” include The Forgers (2023) by Roger Moorhouse, concerning a group of diplomats and activists who smuggled fake identity documents into Nazi Europe; Lovers in Auschwitz (2024) by Keren Blankfeld, featuring an extraordinary, and enduring, romance between two Jewish inmates in the camp; and The Counterfeit Countess (2024) by Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, a biography of Janina Spinner Mehlberg, a Jewish mathematician who posed as a Catholic aristocrat and managed to negotiate the release of thousands of Catholic Poles from Majdanek (see page 9).
All of these stories are valuable, and one understands the impulse to ferret out and celebrate instances of courage. But the Holocaust was not, by and large, a time of heroes. A newly republished memoir – available for the first time in English – reminds us of this. Originally published in Hungarian in 1950, József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium is a raw and unceasingly grim account of ratcheting horror and total degradation. It reports, with a cold eye, on life, on death, in what the author calls “The Land of Auschwitz”: not just the main camp and its sister death factory, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, but its orbiting subcamps and workcamps and barracks, the mines and fields and industrial facilities that processed human material into a delicately balanced output of toil and death. This balance, Debreczeni demonstrates, is crucial. Kill too many too quickly and productivity dips; kill too few too slowly and the camps risk being overwhelmed by new arrivals. Starvation is one useful tool for maintaining equilibrium: “Calorie calculations at death camps are the work of diligent and untalented German scientists”.
The Land of Auschwitz, Debreczeni shows, is also a state of being: it is built on fear, of course, and anguish, but also division,
