Cold Crematorium
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  • Published: 23 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784878887
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Cold Crematorium

Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

Formats & editions
Paperback
23 Apr 2025
Hardback
16 Jan 2024
EBook
18 Jan 2024
Audiobook
18 Jan 2024
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A lost classic of Holocaust literature translated for the first time - from journalist, poet and survivor József Debreczeni

This lost classic, a crystal clear eyewitness account of the Holocaust, has been translated into English for the first time, 70 years after it was first published.

'A literary diamond... A holocaust memoir worthy of Primo Levi' The Times

'A masterpiece' New Statesman

**SELECTED AS ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES**

For many years this powerful classic of Holocaust literature was forgotten. József Debreczeni was a journalist and poet who arrived in Auschwitz in 1944. He survived the initial selection and endured twelve months of incarceration and slave labour in a series of camps. He ended up 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. This is his story, written in haunting, lyrical prose, compelling us to imagine the unimaginable.

Although published in Hungarian in 1950, the book was then lost for the next seventy years. Now, finally, this important eyewitness account takes its place among the great works of Holocaust literature.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JONATHAN FREEDLAND
  • Published: 23 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784878887
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

József Debreczeni

József Debreczeni was a Hungarian-language novelist, poet and journalist who spent most of his life in the former Yugoslavia. He was an editor of the Hungarian daily newspaper Ünnep in Budapest, from which he was dismissed due to anti-Jewish legislation. He was later a contributor to the Hungarian media, including the newspaper Napló, in the Yugoslav region of Vojvodina, as well as leading Belgrade newspapers. He was awarded the Híd Prize, the highest distinction in Hungarian literature in the former Yugoslavia.

Praise for Cold Crematorium

An indispensable work of literature and a historical document of unsurpassed importance. It should be required reading

Jonathan Safran Foer, author of EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

József Debreczeni was a journalist and a poet and he brings the skills of both to this remarkable work. Cold Crematorium will awe you with the acuity of its observations and the precision and beauty of its language. It should be read by everyone wishing to understand the cruelty and barbarism of the Shoah, but also the indomitable spirit of its survivors

Ehud Barak, Former Prime Minister of Israel

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

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

Jung Chang, author of WILD SWANS

An extraordinary memoir... An unforgettable testimonial to the terror of the Holocaust and the will to endure

Kirkus, *Starred Review*

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

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

The Times

Cold Crematorium offers a cleareyed view of the Nazi death machine with shades of gallows humor, tragedy and anthropological insight

New York Times

Meticulous and intelligent translation... A masterpiece

New Statesman

Published in Hungarian in 1950 and won him prizes, but has only now been translated, elegantly and precisely, by Paul Olchváry. What is remarkable is that this vivid, painful memoir has remained so long unknown

Literary Review

As immediate a confrontation of the horrors of the camps as I’ve ever encountered. It’s also a subtle if startling meditation on what it is to attempt to confront those horrors with words… Debreczeni has preserved a panoptic depiction of hell, at once personal, communal and atmospheric

New York Times

Astonishing… Debreczeni captures detail after harrowing detail

Guardian

A masterpiece of clinical, mordant observation... Look elsewhere for platitudes — Debreczeni witnessed, and reported, the best and worst of mankind and showed it to us to use as we will

New York Times

An instant classic

Jewish Chronicle, *Books of the Year*
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