József Debreczeni (13 October 1905 – 26 April 1978) was a writer and translator, and a survivor and memoirist of the Hungarian Holocaust, with his book Cold Crematorium: Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz, first published in 1950.
[2] Debreczeni won the Híd Prize, a Hungarian literary award, for his Holocaust memoir in 1975.
[4] Cold Crematorium, which received highly favorable reviews upon its 2023 republication, 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.
[3] Alexander Bruner, son of Debreczeni's brother Mirko Bruner, writes in an Afterword to the book that Mirko "made numerous attempts to interest American publishers in translating and publishing the book in English" while he was stationed in Washington as a Yugoslavian diplomat in the 1950s, but that he was "rebuffed at every turn.
"[4] A 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.