A lost classic of Holocaust literature translated for the first time - from journalist, poet and survivor József Debreczeni
'A literary diamond... A holocaust memoir worthy of Primo Levi' THE TIMES
'A masterpiece' NEW STATESMAN
When József Debreczeni 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. This important eyewitness account that was nearly lost to time will be available in fifteen languages, finally taking its rightful place among the great works of Holocaust literature more than seventy years after it was first published.

Portrait

József Debreczeni (Author)
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.
Paul Olchvary (Translator)
Paul Olchváry has translated many books for leading publishers, including György Dragomán's The White King, András Forgách's No Live Files Remain, Ádám Bodor's The Sinistra Zone, Vilmos Kondor's Budapest Noir and Károly Pap's Azarel. He has received translation awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, and Hungary's Milán Füst Foundation. His shorter translations have appeared in the Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, Tablet, AGNI and Guernica. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.