This translation is very well done and beautifully read, An incredibly powerful story of one man's experiences in the camps toward the end of the wars. I've read a number of memoirs from survivors, but something about this one makes it stand apart. Perhaps it is additional details, or more visceral, but it is a powerful and moving book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC of this book.

I’m so glad this book was translated into English, so I could read it. It’s real and raw and shows the horrors of the Holocaust. Listening to how everyone in the camps suffered and were treated as animals was awful, but necessary. Stories like this need to be heard.

József Debreczeni was a journalist; he wrote his memoir of surviving a year at Auschwitz and the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau. This was first published in Hungarian in 1950 and recently translated into multiple languages…the delay due to the Cold War.

The book makes you feel the raw emotions of fear, hope, and desperation. While a very tough subject and filled with hope to survive. The translation is beautiful. The narration was perfect for such a sad story.

Thank you, NetGalley and Macmillan Audio, for the chance to review this heartbreaking memoir.

An entirely new voice and new perspective on the Holocaust. This memoir is shocking, elegant, sardonic, humane, and meticulously told. The details of daily life. The pettiness. The competing like animals for a scrap of horse fat, the scrabbling to be the first to steal the underwear from a man who has just died. The occasional bright dazzle of kindness. The uselessness of kindness. The necessity of kindness. The many ways a man can face death. The many ways a man's physical body can fail. It's an upending experience to read this memoir and to realize there is so much more to be said about the death camps. Debreczeni is bearing witness to the same lived experience as Levi and Wiesel, who between them wrote the first, great, defining works about the Holocaust to be translated into English, published many decades ago. What Debreczeni noticed, who he was as a person and what he chose to record, is so different. I read this as audiobook: Laurence Dobiesz's narration is masterful.

I have read a lot of historical fiction about WWII and have read several first-hand memoirs from survivors. I jumped at the chance to read another written by a prolific Hungarian journalist. I find it interesting that this novel was originally published in 1950 and just now translated into English. I do not feel like the book lost anything in translation. The story was so detailed and was less personal than the other accounts I have read. The author spent a lot of time not only describing the terrors that were experienced in the concentration camps but also the hierarchy of the camps. I have a hard time describing these types of books as "good" but despite the heavy subject nature, but I highly recommend this read. We need to remember and teach the younger generations about it.

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.