About the Author

József Debreczeni was a Hungarian-language novelist, poet, and journalist who spent most of his life in Yugoslavia. He was an editor of the Hungarian daily Napló and of Űnnep in Budapest, from which he was dismissed due to anti-Jewish legislation. On May 1, 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz after three years as a forced laborer. He was later a contributor to the Hungarian media 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 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, The New York Times Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Tablet, AGNI, and Guernica. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Reviews

"[Debreczeni's] powers of observation are extraordinary. Everything he encounters in what he calls the Land of Auschwitz--the work sites, the barracks, the bodies, the corpses, the hunger, the roll call, the labor, the insanity, the fear, the despair, the strangeness, the hope, the cruelty--is captured in terrifyingly sharp detail...Debreczeni has preserved a panoptic depiction of hell, at once personal, communal and atmospheric."
--New York Times (10 Best Books of 2024) "A treasure...Debreczeni's memoir is a crucial contribution to Holocaust literature, a book that enlarges our understanding of 'life' in Auschwitz."
--Wall Street Journal "A literary diamond...A holocaust memoir worthy of Primo Levi."
--The Times of London

"Superb...an unforgettable testimonial to the terror of the Holocaust and the will to endure."
--Kirkus (starred) "So engaging that it's hard to put down...a unique, fascinating book."
--Jerusalem Post "Politically, morally, historically, this is necessary writing."
--The New Statesman

"Debreczeni's book makes spectacularly clear the difficult but necessary double demand of the Holocaust and its memorialization...To do its memory any kind of justice must mean to proclaim never again, for anyone: to decry and oppose all acts of mass violence. But the urgency of deriving this general imperative must not mean rushing too quickly past the particulars of what the Nazis and their enablers perpetrated; past its industrialized scale and mechanisms, its bureaucratized intricacies, its sheer massiveness and the massiveness of each life flayed, reduced, and destroyed."
--The Guardian "Has the power to shock and enlighten us...gripping."
--Washington Post "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

"Cold Crematorium is 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

"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 Knausgård, author of My Struggle

"Brilliantly written, meticulously translated, Cold Crematorium offers us access into the dark world of the Holocaust that is distinct in its power and poignancy. As one who has explored that world for some half a century, I came away tutored and moved. Debreczeni has much to say, more to teach!"
--Michael Berenbaum, former United States Holocaust Museum Project Director

"Toward the end of the book, Debreczeni described the beginning of 'Holocaust amnesia, ' foreshadowing the many ways in which this unique crime could be trivialized, denied, and, even, appropriated. Cold Crematorium could not be more relevant to the current discourse about intolerance, racism, and antisemitism."
--Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League National Director, 1987-2015

"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

"A timely reminder of man's inhumanity to man--especially for the young generation."
--Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans

"Cold Crematorium is a shaft with arrows pointing in two directions. One points back, placing Debreczeni on an important shelf alongside our embrace of Keretesz, Borowski, Wiesel, Levi. But the other points directly at our own tenuous moment of a growing new fascism, a new fear. This book is a necessary document to remind us how easily past can become prologue."
--Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West

"Cold Crematorium is a fearless and absorbing memoir that combines the tragic vision of the poet with the dispassionate eye of the ethnographer. Debreczeni's unforgettable account describes a cruel and barbarous system of exploitation designed to achieve its murderous goals."
--James Van Horn Melton, Professor Emeritus of European History, Emory University

"With searing honesty and razor-sharp prose, József Debreczeni shows how the Nazis robbed millions of people of their humanity before robbing them of life. Anyone who seeks to understand the effect of the concentration camp inferno on the human soul must read this book."
--Derek Penslar, Harvard University

"A valuable, measured, authoritative work. The author doesn't gush; he can see and make seen, he dramatizes adroitly, he knows his way around literary devices to enhance the overall effect, and he weaves a series of fine, psychological observations into his story."
--Gábor Tüskés, Director of the Institute for Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

"Devastating in the simplicity of its language, Debreczeni's book is of immense eyewitness historical value and one of the greatest pieces of lost Holocaust literature from behind the newly descending Iron Curtain."
--Steven L. Ossad, award-winning author of Omar Nelson Bradley: America's GI General

"With the exception of the work of Primo Levi, I do not know of a nonfiction book on the Holocaust as powerful as this."
--Géza Röhrig, writer, lead actor in the Oscar-winning film Son of Saul

"An important book! Debreczeni writes precisely, rich in detail, vividly, and suggestively...At times I had to interrupt my reading, as I was so shaken."
--Ilma Rakusa, author and translator, Swiss Book Award winner

"A holocaust memoir worthy of Primo Levi."
--Adam LeBor, The Times of London

"Debreczeni writes with a cinematic clarity, a determination to make detail triumph over mass dehumanization."
--Julian Evans, The Telegraph

"An incredibly well-written book telling a horrific story in prose both graceful and dynamic."
--Eliza Childs, freelance copy editor, Yale University Press. "Debreczeni's book is not only an epic of a human Golgotha, nor only an illustration of all forms of depravity and debasement. It is certainly that and more, but also a painful cry and dark warning to all humankind."
--Ivan Ivanji, Daily Paper (Novi Sad) "Always present in this book--even behind the most mundane descriptions--are living beings, which, once visualized, even if illuminated for only a second, cannot be forgotten."
--Új Könyvek (Budapest)