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97
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
98/100Critics
95/100Scholars
Author:
József Debreczeni, Paul Olchváry, Jonathan Freedland
Publisher:
St. Martin's Press
Date:
January 23, 2024
The first English language edition of a lost memoir by a Holocaust survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps.
What The Reviewers Say
The details are so precise that any critical distance collapses—nothing’s expected, nothing’s dulled by cliché. It is 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. What Debreczeni experiences is so cartoonishly cruel that it defies not description but moral comprehension. ‘Horror is always kitsch,’ he writes after an ad hoc execution, ‘even when it’s real’.
Debreczeni chronicles the steady, relentless, carefully planned dehumanization of the prisoners and everyday life inside the camps in powerful, stomach-churning detail.
Occasionally a salvaged book proves a valuable find. József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium is one such treasure.
Debreczeni’s writing style, rendered in Paul Olchváry’s excellent translation, often matches that coldness, and is all the more effective for it.
