Cold Crematorium

Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

De: József Debreczeni, Paul Olchvary - translator, Paul Olchvary, Jonathan Freedland

Narrado por: Laurence Dobiesz, Roy McMillan

Duración: 8 h y 24 m

Resumen del Editor

Brought to you by Penguin.

The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps

József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944; had he been selected to go 'left', his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the 'lucky' ones, he was sent to the 'right', which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labour in a series of camps, ending in the 'Cold Crematorium' - the so-called hospital of the forced labour camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work were left to die.

Debreczeni beat the odds and survived. Very soon he committed his experiences to paper in Cold Crematorium, one of the harshest and powerful indictments of Nazism ever written. This haunting memoir, rendered in the precise and unsentimental prose of an accomplished journalist, compels the reader to imagine human beings in circumstances impossible to comprehend intellectually.

First published in Hungarian in 1950, it was never translated due to the rise of McCarthyism, Cold War hostilities and antisemitism. More than 70 years later, this important eyewitness account that was nearly lost to time will be available in 15 languages, finally taking its rightful place among the great works of Holocaust literature.

©2024 József Debreczeni (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

An extraordinary memoir ... an unforgettable testimonial to the terror of the Holocaust and the will to endure

A timely reminder of man's inhumanity to man, especially for the young generation (Jung Chang, author of WILD SWANS)

An immensely powerful and deeply humane eyewitness account of the horror of the camps. Through vivid descriptions of what he saw and experienced there, Debreczeni confronts the reader with the hell that the Holocaust was; not as something general belonging to history, but as a particular, concrete and devastating reality (Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of MY STRUGGLE)