Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

Cold Crematorium is József Debreczeni’s powerful memoir of surviving Auschwitz and a series of Nazi labor camps after narrowly escaping immediate death in 1944. He spent a year enduring brutal conditions, ending up in a so-called hospital where prisoners too weak to work were left to die. Written in sharp, unsentimental prose, his account stands as a searing condemnation of Nazism, blending tragedy with irony and dark humor. Originally published in Hungarian in 1950, the book is now being recognized globally as a lost classic of Holocaust literature.