Throughout the book Cold Crematorium we learn how Jozeph Debreczeni survived years of hell in an internment camp the book from chapter 1 goes right in to the nightmare of an overcrowded train where everyone is standing up men women and children and their arrival not bringing any reprieve from their torment. For years they would want news as much as food they would eat potato soup with only potato rinds giving it the name potato soup. Men he knew that were dapper dressers were an old tattered clothes trading bread for a teaspoon of sugar and even others who would eat the lice off there mattress just to have something in their stomach. The Nazis who they called the grays would take everything from the food that was sent for them to the golden their mouth and thought nothing of it to kick beat and even kill at their own will. By the time they are freed he is even too ill to get off his cott. This is a heartbreaking first hand account of the hell that millions of people suffered thanks to Hitler and the Germans and others who called there self Nazis. There was only so much of this book I could read at a time it truly is heartbreaking and no matter how many books on World War II you have bred to know this was an account from someone who experienced it makes it even more heartbreaking . I definitely recommend this book to those who have an interest in history I want to thank the publisher and NetGalley for my free arc copy please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

I don't want to give this book 5 stars -because no one should have to experience this type of horror- but everyone should read this book. There is so much Holocaust literature out there but this book gives a fresh insight into Auschwitz and the experiences of the death camps. I learned so much about the layout, the forced labor, the intricate hierarchy, and the absolute struggle for survival. I didn't love this book, but I needed this book.

"I want to live; I want to go home... To run amok taking revenge, calling to account and meting out justice..."

Jozsef Debreczeni had to have been a strong-willed man to ever have survived the absolute heinous treatment he and other Jewish victims endured at the hands of their Nazi captors. The incredibly sad thing is the SS used weak minded and selfish prisoners to take part in the cruel and abusive slavery of those who were in internment camps. Debreczeni wrote a highly descriptive account of the enslavement and starvation of the men he was trying to survive with in the "Life in the Land of Auschwitz."
I received a copy of this book translation that is published in English by St. Martin's Press from NetGalley. This is my unsolicited opinion about this historical record by the Hungarian Journalist and poet. For decades I have read many true accounts and fictional titles based on the horrific Nazi Holocaust. This book written by a male survivor is one of the most intense I have read. He and his fellow captives were used as slaves and put through absolute inhumane treatment. This is not an easy read by any means. I had to read some 'fluff' material after each session with this book. The will and strength of mind of a human being is an incredible thing until the body can endure no more. The writer is not overly graphic but is quite matter of fact about what was done in the insane world so many had been thrust into. The inhumane treatment is beyond belief, yet I do believe. It sickens my heart to understand that a certain group could conjure up such acts to control other human beings. They were able to prompt the weak-minded, selfish, criminal and ignorant beings to watch over, torture, degrade and starve others to the point of no return.
Eule, Berkovits, Furstenstein and Dornhau were cruel and hopeless destinations this man survived. That anyone survived is a miracle.

Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz by Jozsef Debreczeni; Translated by Paul Olchváry

This was one of the hardest memoirs from the Holocaust period I have ever read. It was a merciless depiction of the horrors and atrocities the author experienced. As he was a journalist, his words packed a punch as he delivered fact after brutal fact.

Sometimes meaning can be lost when a book is translated. I did not think anything was lost during this translation. The descriptions of the inhumane treatment, revolting living conditions, incessant bugs, and horrible food will haunt me for a long time.

While I won’t assign a star rating [here on instagram] and I can’t recommend it to every reader due to the nature of the content, I will say it is an important story that the world should bear witness to.

Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni is one of the most excruciating Holocaust survivor memoirs I have ever read. and am likely to ever read. The vivid words are unflinching and raw, full of incomprehensible grim despair, deep heartache, humiliation, suffering and layer upon layer of anguish. It took me a long time to digest and process and I still struggle with the knowledge that human beings are capable of inflicting such demonic depravity on fellow human beings.

The author was a Hungarian journalist and poet who was forced to slave for other slaves in several killing camps during World War II. Along with millions of others, he enduring filthy death trains, extreme starvation, lice infestations, painful wooden clogs which didn't fit, scraps of rags to wear in all weather, torture, exhaustion, infected drinking water and seeing death on a daily basis. He became one of the "skeleton-people" and at his last death camp he was told if you can move, you work. The only way out was death. There was no such thing as survival. Waiting naked for liberation at the cold crematorium, conditions were so severe there were rivers of excrement between bunks people had to wade through. Fighting over a single carrot in the mud or potato peel treasure is heartbreaking as are bargaining details, a tiny cube of bread for a homemade cigarette.

Debreczeni describes hierarchy amongst the Nazis and prisoners alike, the concept of Appell, glittering silver lice larvae and utter desolation. Only much worse. It always got worse. It is impossible to wrap one's mind around even one of these situations for 24 hours. Debreczeni barely survived and thankfully wrote about his experiences. He was a true hero.

You will not enjoy reading this book. However, what you will learn will enrich your heart and mind in a very meaningful way that will crush you but also build you up. It was an honour to read Cold Crematorium, something I will never, ever forget.

My sincere thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of this phenomenal book, one which should be required reading for everyone. I am grateful that many survivors told their stories.

I actually enjoyed this book so much I asked and was approved for the audiobook. I am sure I will still cry and be emotional, but love it all the same.

I voluntarily reviewed a copy of this book provided by NetGalley. And cannot wait for the time for the audiobook.

I could not put this book down. Author József Debreczeni holds nothing back in his account of being a prisoner at various slave labor camps during WWII. He is a journalist, and I found his account riveting. His perspective of the hierarchy of the camps, the cruelty of their fellow prisoners put in positions of power, the starvation, the back breaking work, the cruelty, illnesses, death, as well as the friendships made, and the kindnesses of a few kept me turning pages.

"Soon we were to be suffering participants in what yesterday had been a foggy, distant horror."

"Right or left. To a life of slavery or to death in the gas chamber." "As for them, those on the left, no on saw them ever again."

"One thing is already clear: we won't ever again be seeing the bags we left by the boxcars."

"We've arrived in Auschwitz, in whose wooden buildings hundreds of thousands of deportees from every corner of Europe have been crammed by those running amok with racial madness."

"With systematic resourcefulness the Nazis created in their death camps a subtle hierarchy of the pariahs......the allocation of food, the discipline, the direct supervision of work, and the first degree of terror were in fact entrusted to slave drivers chosen randomly from among the deportees."

"Despair doesn't look through calendars, and it pays no heed to planning. Tomorrow is shrouded in a fog of distance so hopeless that it might as well be the next millennium, when people might be wandering about in skirts or tunics, when there won't be relocation camps and, perhaps, the guiltless need not be punished."

I googled him after reading his account, and couldn't find too much. His birth name is Josef Bruner. Josef Debreczeni is his professional pen name. I would love to know more about his life after survival. Did any of his friends or family survive?

I highly recommend this "first English language edition of a lost memoir by a Holocaust survivor". It is an eye opening perspective on the true horrors of slave labor and death camps during WWII.

I have been on a roll reading factual accounts about the Holocaust. This is probably the most brutal account from a Jewish male that I read and that he was a journalist and poet. I felt this gave him a unique perspective to detail the atrocities that he and other inmates had in his first camp in Hungary but to when it became a survival of the fittest at Auschwitz.

Thank heavens he survived and was able to share his experiences to educate the world. For ignorant people who do not believe this happened or doubt the severity.... here is your reading homework! This was written with such courage and honesty. I felt like I was there with Jozsef!

Highly recommended account of the Holocaust from a primary source.

Thanks to Netgalley, Jozsef Debreczeni and St Martin's Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Available: 1/23/2024

Reading a memoir written by a person who has lived through the Holocaust is truly heartbreaking. The author takes us along on his devastating journey through workcamps and deathcamps of Nazi Germany with the horrific details front and center as only an accomplished writer can do. As he tells the stories of himself and the men around him, how some survived and others didn't, how they were treated as less than animals, how the senseless brutality of their captors led them deeper and deeper in despair, the reader wonders how this could be? To what levels of depravity do people sink in order to try to prove their supposed superiority....and why?? These are the words that need to be repeated over and over again in the world we live in now --- when we need to be sure this part of history is never forgotten and is taught to all young people in order to show that this is something that DID happen and CAN happen again if we are not all aware of how it begins. The perseverance and the will to come out on the other side for the survivors of the camps, and be able to tell the stories, has added a priceless part of history. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the opportunity to read and review this advance reader copy. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. #NetGalley #ColdCrematorium

"Despair doesn't look through calendars, and it pays no heed to planning" -- so begins this memoir of a Holocaust survivor's experience in the camps of Auschwitz, Eule, and Dörnhau. Tragic in its depiction of brutality and callousness, this account is memorable for the poetic quality of its writing, as it details the ways in which the Nazis turned Jews against one another, selecting Jews to enforce the worse kind of tortures on other Jews.

The only reason I didn't give this excellent memoir five stars is that it lacks a foreword or afterword that provides context: how was this lost account found? What happened to the writer?

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

5 out of 5 stars.

A brutal and disturbing glimpse of six years of hell. The author writes as a journalist, a witness, not just as a man torn from his life and brought so low that all he could think about was food. When was the next bowl of soup and piece of bread coming? From Auschwitz to Dörnhau, we trudge along with the author from one place to the next, one hell to another even more hellish. We get glimpses of humanity, but for the most part, it is all despair. By the time freedom came, he had already accepted death.

A book that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
by József Debreczeni, narrated by Laurence Dobiesz

I'm thankful that I could both read and hear this memoir by József Debreczeni. Getting to hear Laurence Dobiesz's narration of the work made it more heartrending, which seems impossible since the written words could not be more tragic. But Dobiesz's matter of fact narration added to a heaviness that was already unbearable. My digital copy allowed me to look up places and names, which is especially useful when the names are unfamiliar to me. Plus, sometimes I just needed to stop the narration, not go on, just look at the words and try to absorb the most horrible things I heard.

Immediately we are dropped into József Debreczeni's new world, a world that is nothing like the old, more normal world he used to know. That world had persecution and violence but now he has bodily entered a world that is horror upon horror. Each time he thinks things can't get worse, they do. It can always get worse. We learn of how "lucky" Debreczeni was to be picked for a series of slave labor camps, whose final goal is to starve or work the slaves to death. That goal is easy to reach since the slaves are given almost no food or water, minimal clothing, probably no shoes, nothing to help them stay alive. And their cruelest, most brutal slave drivers are slaves like themselves. When a person is starving to death, they are reduced to one thing, survival above all else, and that means climbing on the living or dead bodies of others to survive. The camps bring out the worst in everyone. And lice, I've known about the lice in close quarters but Debreczeni's words will not be erased from my head...about the lice and the unthinkable treatment of humans by humans.

Unlike many books like this that I've read or heard, Debreczeni focuses on that which we would like to not see, not know, every last bit of sewerage of this life to death experience. He doesn't tell us about his homelife or his family, we are there in the pit with him as he's experiencing the worst experiences of his life. And his words, maybe with the help of the audiobook narrator, almost sounded like poetry to me. His words are so easy to understand even while my brain was trying to not let them in. This is a very difficult book to take in but I learned from Debreczeni much more than I could ever want to know.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and St. Martin's Press for this ARC.

This was hard to read. It was very eloquent and gave humanity to the worst of the worst. I thought the author for all the horrors he went through expressed some kindness in parts of the book. He could have destroyed the German people in his descriptions but instead he focused on his own experiences. Which his experiences were absolutely horrific. I had to put it down a few times because it physically made me sick at times. I personally don’t understand how humans can do that to each other but it happened so to get some insight into it was something interesting.

As the title suggests, this is not a quick easy read nor a feel-good story. But it is a true story of life during the Holocaust. A memoir that was well worth the read. Just when you think you have read enough WWII books you read one more that once again amazes you on the sacrifices and the atrocities that were done to the Jews and others during the war. The unrelenting torture dealt to the prisoners by the soldiers, still makes me feel anger and hatred toward Hitler and his officers.

You would think we would learn from the past, but as current events are unfolding, it isn’t so. There are still unjust people, teachers, administrators and leaders that instill hatred, discrimination and antisemitism, unfortunately some people are not strong enough nor willing to know what is right and just. They blindly follow, a very sad state. Our institutions, leaders and government should be teaching how the past has corrupted the future, not encouraging it to continue. If only they would let us learn from the past, not to ignore or pretend it didn't happen.

This is a very well written book, you can tell the author was a journalist, his telling was remarkable and gave details that were unsettling, but made you feel like you were there. If you are a WWII historical reader, this is a good one to pick.

I received an ARC from St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for my unbiased review – This one comes in with 5 stars.

This had been originally published in Hungary in 1950 and due to a number of factors, never translated into English until now. It joins a large body of WW2 non-fiction about the atrocities that affected the people subjected to some of the most brutal treatment known to man. József Debreczeni is a Hungarian Jew, he had been in a Hungary camp for Jewish people for 3 years, until in 1944 the Nazis liquidated it and sent everyone to camps. He was sent to Auschwitz, someplace where he and others had heard rumors of as a bad place to go. He made the right choice during the selection by going left and was sent to a work camp almost immediately after the section process. The work camp had very few amenities, the lived in tents, did their business outside and were worked for hours a day. At roll call, it was not uncommon for someone to be singled out and disciplined for minor offences, often caned/kicked to near death. The camp swelled with more prisoners and a number were selected to be sent to another camp, they all thought they were going to the gas chambers, but instead they were sent to what used to be a medieval castle that had been abandoned by the owner when the Germans advanced. There they were set to work mostly digging tunnels and again living in tents with many literally stuffed into a single one. Then once more he was sent to another camp, he again thought he was done for, he was in very bad shape by this point, gaunt, lice ridden, barely able to move, he eventually gets Typhus. The Germans are is disarray, food is near non existent, what they do get is barely edible. He discusses camp hierarchy, how other prisoners are put in charge of a group of prisoners, responsible for their discipline, some really took advantage of that. Amazing the author survives all that he was subject to, a very strong will to live. I would highly recommend especially if you have an interest in WW2 survivor stories. Thanks to #Netgalley and #St Martins Press for the ARC.

What a shocking first-hand account of Jozsef Debreczeni during the Holocaust. I was not sure what a cold crematorium was when I picked up this book, but that explanation has come - a "hospital" of the forced labor camp Dörnhau where prisoners basically wait for death to come. Debreczeni's experiences during his imprisonment are haunting and harsh.

everyone should read this book about the awful history of maltreatment of Nazi prisoners. it is painful to read how they walked in wooden shoes until they fell apart, how they survived with little to no food, survived with wearing rags and covered in lice. this should be recommended reading to all those still in school, to learn how to never repeat this history.

A memoir of the Holocaust, as dark as you would expect. It tells the tale of a man who was drug from one concentration camp to another and the horrible scenes he saw. It did get a little bit repetitive and wordy at times. Some things are explained more than once. Overall, a good read.

First we are in a train crammed full of people, the destination unknown to any of the passengers, though they have some guesses as to their location. So begins Hungarian journalist and poet Josef Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium, an account of his survival in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp system from May 1944 to liberation.

Debreczeni’s narration is divided into two sections, each of ten or 11 chapters. Many of these are short, reflecting time spent in a different camp or the day to day vagaries of differing assignments and casual cruelty of the Germans and camp life. His narration is clear and concise, not a diary, but instead a chronology of his experience centered on important and demonstrative anecdotes. There is the journey of the individual in their own clothes, to a sheered, numbered body in clothing scraps spoiled by visible paint splashes. The Killing of camp inmates reduced to numbers to serve as examples. The pilfering of food, further speeding up death by starvation. The fragility of a body to temperature, lack of food, hard work and the threat of disease and sickness.

But there is also the hope, the doctors doing all they can to save patients, sharing of tobacco and occasional updates of where the war fronts are and how close liberation might be. Those who share what food scraps they can find.

Initially published in 1950, this book was lost to the climate that received it, now newly translated in to English, Debreczeni’s account of his survival demonstrates a humanity resilient in the face of unfathomable hatred and cruelty. It was a system designed to dehumanize and kill, but Debreczeni’s writing unravels the process as he learned what was behind the first impressions.

A starkly clear eyed view of the concentration camp from human to haftling (prisoner). Recommended reading to those learning or researching the Holocaust.

We should all be obligated to read these books written by people who lived through the Nazi death camps. They are visceral and horrific, but worth remembering that these aren't just stories. These are actual events that happened to actual people. Horrific events. This gave a different impression and view with the explanation of the hierarchy within the camps. That those doling out abuse and punishment were also victims, but that they rose to power through this system where they wouldn't normally. How they profited from this system and the victimization and death of others. Very chilling, and not something I think I'd heard previously.