‘Cold crematorium’, a chronicler in hell of Auschwitz

Welcome to Hell. At the hell of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Furstenstein, Dornhau. 80 years after the liberation of the more sadly known extermination camp arrives in Italy, after being released in 15 countries and having become an international best seller (it was included by the New York Times among the ten best books of 2024) ‘Cold crematorium’ by Joseph Debreczeni. Published for the first time in 1950 in Hungarian, he was the first text on the Holocaust to emerge from the Eastern European, but was quickly forgotten due to political reasons and censorship. In Italy he arrives in the bookstore on January 15 for Bompiani translated by Dora Varnai (Overlook necklace, pp. 252 – price 18 euros) with the subtitle ‘chronicles from the land of Auschwitz‘. And it’s a punch in the stomach, something we had forgotten to be able to try.

Since this ‘if this is a man’, a book has not been written so powerful of denunciation of the most tragic, crazy and large black page of modern man. If Levi hit by telling and bringing the reader into Auschwitz hell, Jozsef Debraczeni – Pseudonym of Jozsef Bruner, Hungarian journalist and writer born in Budapest in 1905 And disappeared in Belgrade in 1978 – makes the reader make a painful and incredible journey into different infernal groups of the concentration camps of the Lower Silesia in Poland. Not only Auschwitz, where he arrived in May 1944, but also Furstestein until he arrived at the Lager-hospital in Dornhau. And this is the place of death that gives the title to the book, ‘cold crematorium’, where the sick prisoners arrived that the Nazis did not carve and that were thrown into the lime after death of hardships, disease and hunger. And where Debreczeni becomes “one of the many naked and screaming human skeletons”.

That told in the book is a degrading journey towards the abysses of humanity in which the systematic physical and mental annihilation of the prisoners is narrated with a simple and raw language, as a reporter who was the author. The reader lives together with the protagonist the descent to hell, through the forced labor that undermine health and turn off the will. The lack of food, the hygienic conditions almost incompatible with life, the daily struggle for a piece of bread or for a little fat in the broth passed off as a soup, the violence of the prisoners put at the head of the departments or dormitories. Debczeni as he had done in a perhaps less detailed first Levi way, tells the hierarchy of the concentration camps. Everyone is detained, but some are privileged and are chosen by the Nazis to represent the aristocracy of the lager, “the miserable gods of this miserable world”, writes Debraczeni: “Outside, deportees like everyone else, but only to external”.

They are the Kapos (of the field, company, with the stick, potato peeler) who command on prisoners (haftling); Above the Kapos there is the elite of the field: the blockaltese and still above the lageraltete and the writing of the field. The experience of Debraczeni, became all in the concentration camp only one number, the 3303, lasts one year, since May 1944 With the arrival in Auschwitz in May 1945 with the liberation of the Russians of the Lager-hospital in Dornhau. From the arrival on the armored trains to the first selection for those who are launched to the gas chambers and those who to the lager’s plan, from the struggle to survive trying to obtain as much food as possible (with “food” is meant bread, fat, margarine or any which vaguely edible) to daily life made of forced labor in extreme conditions, harassment of the Kapos and blockalteste up to the maximum degradation of finding themselves reduced to human larvae, to weigh just over 30 kilos, on beds of dirty shavings of excrement of dead companions , with lice and larvae on and on miserable covers (if there are).

Debraczeni’s story is A punctual, lucid, painful chronicle of an immense tragedyin which as it happened in Primo Levi the accusation to the executioners is in the record itself is ‘cold crematorium’, if possible even more than ‘if this is a man’, brings out that horror making reading difficult for the images and the power of the hell of narration. When the Primo Levi book came out in Italy, published in 1947 in a few thousand copies for a small publishing house, he was welcomed with a certain disinterest. The tragedy of the Second World War is too close and the wounds that everyone brought on, not only the Jews massacred by the Holocaust. It took ten years so that he returned to the bookstore and became a world literary case in the West. A similar reception had it ‘cold crematorium’ when it was published for the first time in 1950 in Hungarian. Unlike ‘if this is a man’, but ‘, It took 74 years to receive the right recognition as a testimony-act of unique, terrible and ferocious accusation of the crazy tragedy of the Holocaust and the Nazi -fascist barbarism. Now this text has been republished thanks to his nephew Alexander Bruner in fifteen languages, enjoying considerable success and a broad critical gratitude. “There are millions of stories that will never be told – writes the author’s grandson in the afterword – but for this I can make the difference” thus bringing back to light “this lost ‘masterpiece and make it available for tomorrow’s readers”. Even if today’s readers have urgently needed it.