'Cold Crematorium': An unusual account of the Holocaust - review

By the time the Soviet army reaches Dornhau – death’s waiting house – prisoner 33031 has survived starvation, edema and diarrhea, only to contract typhus. Dornhau is a “hospital camp,” both labor camp and depository for prisoners too ill or used up to work. Number 33031 – once journalist Jozsef Debreczeni – is in Block A, the broken-windows first floor of a former factory in German Silesia. Six hundred men, most of them naked, lie two and three to a wood-chip bunk.

Each day, about 200 die, replaced by new shipments of the helpless. Jozsef calls it a cold crematorium. 

“What readers might well remember most vividly from this book is its unflinching account of the sheer repulsiveness of camp life,” says Jonathan Freedland in his introduction to Cold Crematorium. “None of this is for the squeamish.” Indeed. In this first-person account, Debreczeni says that many Block A prisoners are too weak to walk to a latrine, urinating and defecating in their bunks or into growing mounds between the bunk rows.

Debreczeni wrote of descent to this warehouse of living dead in his native Hungarian. Published in Yugoslavia in 1950, Cold Crematorium disappeared in the Cold War. Recently out in a fluid translation by Paul Olchvary, it is as factual as a newspaper report, without overt attempts to play on readers’ emotions. That’s its power.

An unusual Holocaust book

It’s an unusual Holocaust book because it was written soon after the war by an adult journalist and focuses not on death camps but on the slave-labor camps in which he toiled, leading to near death. Despite the distressing contents, it’s so engaging that it’s hard to put down. 

“Debreczeni delivers something of singular value,” Freedland says. “It’s not only that his are the recollections of a fully conscious adult,” not memories from a childhood, “but that he writes as a professional, highly skilled observer...with a journalist’s eye for the telling, human detail.”

Debreczeni barely mentions four labor camps preceding shipment to Auschwitz with Jewish men, women, and children from a Hungarian area of Serbia in May 1944.

At Auschwitz, women and children are separated, and he’s warned by a kapo not to join the elderly and infirm accepting a truck ride; Debreczeni will never see them again. His group of prisoners, led to a bathhouse, “strip buck naked in the biting wind...commanded to remove the last memory of home: the clothes on our bodies.” It deprives millions “of their individuality, their names, their humanity. How can I someday prove so far from home that I was called this, not that?”

Head and body hair clipped off, he’s marched to a scalding mass shower, then through a gauntlet of striped clothing thrown at him. It’s “slave making on a conveyor belt.”

His group is packed into rail cars headed to Mülhausen, where he gets a new identity: “I’m no longer me, but 33031.” 

Exhausted and hungry, feet bleeding in wooden sandals, they’re marched uphill 12.5 miles to a camp being built at Eule, a Silesian town with coal mines and quarries. 

At Eule, the Lageralteste [head prisoner] is French Jew Max, “the all-powerful lord of the camp. A malicious, mercilessness, mercurial lord” whose cane “is just as fearsome as the whip and the revolver of the SS sergeant who is the camp commandant.” 

For a couple of marks each, German companies lease SS prisoners to build fortifications and prisoner barracks, lay rail lines, mine coal and dig tunnels. Debreczeni tells us company names. Mining and tunneling are the most miserable, deadly work.

He says calories just sufficient to sustain workers don’t reach them. Food is stolen by kapos – prisoners given power over others, who get more and better food. Hatred of kapos is well known; Debreczeni gives the reasons and hierarchy in unusual detail. They lord it over underlings, brutal for enjoyment or in fear of SS beatings. 

“The best slave driver is a slave accorded a privileged position,” he says. These came from “the bottom rungs of Jewish humanity.” 

Debreczeni carries and lays heavy rails from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a half hour noon break.

One evening, after a two-hour roll call, he’s in a two-day march to camp Fürstenberg III, where conditions are worse. Debreczeni works building caverns: “backbreaking, soul-crushing labor. The blasting, drilling and carrying out of rocks unfolds incessantly, 24 hours straight in two shifts. … Twenty to 30 [of society’s] outcasts a day drop dead while the enterprise pursues profit.” Some throw themselves beneath trucks for suicide.

A swollen leg gets Debreczeni transferred to rebuilding the nearby castle – heavy labor lacking death from falling rock. Dysentery returns, his whole body swells. In desperation, he volunteers for a transport of 400, expecting death at Birkenau.

But it’s Dornhau, where “the Grim Reaper has established an experimental laboratory” in Block A. Debreczeni calls it “death by contagion: You die because you’ve seen your neighbor’s death throes from start to finish. What’s left of your own life force is infected.”

Debreczeni develops diarrhea, saying it’s 95 percent fatal. Too weak to sit up, he’s not fed. Lucid moments are fewer. He estimates he’s shrunk below 80 pounds. A privileged prisoner who’d been delighted to find a fellow journalist is alerted and provides reviving deliveries of horse liver and horse fat. 

 The first day of spring he hears artillery, but the Soviet army delays. Typhus begins claiming 40 to 50 a day. His  vision distorts, his temperature passes 104. He feels “awestruck to realize that although I’m dying, for me it isn’t even so hard. There are more painful ways to go.”

Early on May 5, prisoners discover that the SS guards and the worst kapos have fled.

Two days later, Soviet nurses arrive. Eventually, we get this unique, fascinating book.■

Neal Gendler is a Minneapolis writer and editor.

• Cold Crematorium
• Jozsef Debreczeni
• St. Martin’s, 2024
• 245 pages; $28