The "cold crematorium" of the title is the barracks for the dying where the author was confined for a time, in which inmates dwelled amid filth and degradation.
The Birkenau gas chamber crematorium's chimney belched out smoke from burning corpses day and night and "there is no escaping the spectacle.
"[9] After a brief, unspecified period of time in Auschwitz, Debreczeni was then transported by boxcar with other prisoners to Arbeitslager Riese, a group of thirteen forced labor subcamps of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, located in the Owl Mountains in Lower Silesia.
[10] Debreczeni was set to work building underground fortifications, laboring fourteen hours a day, as the camp became more crowded with prisoners sent from Poland.
[16] In the glossary (p. 243) of the English translation, under Gross-Rosen, it is stated that “Debreczeni was imprisoned in the Mülhausen [sic] camp in the province of Eule, and in the Fürstenstein and Dörnhau camps.” However, Mühlhausen was a subcamp of Buchenwald.
All three camps – AL Falkenberg (aka Eule, in Sowina), AL Fürstenstein (Książ Castle, in Wałbrzych), and AL Dörnhau (in Kolce) – were part of the proximate (in both geography and purpose) cluster of thirteen labor camps known as Arbeitslager Riese,[18][19] which supplied forced labor (mostly Jews from Hungary, Poland and Greece) for Project Riese (English: giant), the code name for a giant underground construction project of Nazi Germany between 1943 and 1945, located in the Owl Mountains (German: Eulengebirge; Polish: Góry Sowie) in Lower Silesia (then Province of Lower Silesia; now Lower Silesian Voivodeship).
At the time of the deportation, Debreczeni was already an experienced journalist, which enabled him "not only to describe his personal experience in gripping detail but also to cast a detached, analytic light on it.
This "aristocratic hierarchy" of kapos, elders, and clerks reflected the Nazi interpretation of the concept of "divide and conquer", Debreczeni writes.
[13] Debreczeni refers to the Gross-Rosen camp as being part of the "Land of Auschwitz", in which hunger is constant, the "instinct of disgust" vanishes and prisoners are plagued by starvation and thirst.
[12] After he is transported to a room for typhus patients, his fellow prisoners include a dying man known as "the anteater", who "sticks out his cracked, white tongue and licks up the squirming lice underneath.
'"[4] He describes them as "truncheon-thrashing murderers, the gold traffickers, those who'd stomp on bellies with bull-pizzle whips in their hands,"[28] who before confinement were the dregs of society, "schnorrers, nebbishes, schlemiels, freeloaders, rogues, swindlers, idlers, slackers.
The bed-ridden are now even more abandoned and the dying are dropping dead even more pitifully than yesterday" despite large stocks of "sugar, potatoes and canned goods."
When one liberated prisoner "presses a burning cigar into the corner of the mouth of a fresh corpse," Debreczeni writes that if he had a weapon "I'd shoot the vile stripling without a second thought.
[30] The Times Literary Supplement called it "a raw and unceasingly grim account of ratcheting horror and total degradation.
"[31] Writing in The New York Times, author Menachem Kaiser praised the book's "nuance, sensitivity and texture," which he said "cuts through the tropes, unblurs the horrors."
[1] The Washington Post called the book "unforgettable" and described Debreczeni as an older counterpart to Primo Levi, who "used his scientific training as a chemist to similar effect."
"[4] In a review in The Guardian, University of Oxford professor Joe Moshenska praised the book's "harrowing detail" and wrote that "here are in this coruscating bolt of truth none of the implausibilities and glib moral take-homes that have plagued and devalued Holocaust fictions, from Life Is Beautiful to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
"[26] Author Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote in New Statesman that like Levi, "his writing is distinguished by a patient, forensic, measured attentiveness to the complex and innovative horror of the Nazi camps.
"[6] In The Jewish Chronicle, reviewer David Herman wrote that Debreczeni "has a journalist's eye for the telling human detail, how quickly people are dehumanized.
"[13] Following its original publication in Hungarian, a translation of the book into Serbo-Croatian by Bogdan Čiplić [sr] titled Hladni krematorijum was released in 1951.
[32][33] The book was reprinted twice in Serbia after its initial publication there, but was not published in Hungary until 2024 despite strong interest in the Holocaust, which was taboo during the years of Communist rule.
"[34] The New York Times review reported that "the book remained obscure for decades, squeezed by Cold War politics — too Soviet-philic for the West, too Jew-centric for the East.