Notes of an Auschwitz inmate "Death seems like a refreshing steam bath"

József Debreczeni is deported to Auschwitz concentration camp as a Jew in 1944. After his liberation, he writes a merciless account of his experiences. The book has only just been published in German.

As soon as I start reading "Kaltes Krematorium - Bericht aus dem Land namens Auschwitz", my throat tightens and I feel increasingly uncomfortable.

Shortly afterwards, I have to put the book down for the first time.

The Hungarian playwright and poet József Debreczeni does not miss a single detail in his work. He relentlessly captures the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps.

More than 70 years after the original in Hungarian, his reportage on the Nazi extermination camps has finally been published in German. The timing could not be better.

"Discouraged, we turn our attention back to the lice. We have the feeling that our last chance has vanished into thin air. The dying no longer want to live, let go of the straw of a clear mind and slip back into unconsciousness. Starvation, dropsy, typhus ..."

József Debreczeni was deported to Auschwitz as a Jew on April 1, 1944. Twelve nightmarish months followed in various concentration camps. His last stop was the "cold crematorium", the sick barracks of the Dörnhau forced labor camp near the southern Polish town of Kolce.

After the liberation of the camp, the author writes his report: a sharp and merciless indictment of high literary quality.

The TV series "Holocaust" was a shock for me

Reading "Cold Crematorium" brings back memories: 45 years ago, the TV series "Holocaust - the story of the Weiss family" made me really aware of what happened during the Second World War.

The four-part series was an emotional shock for me. I can still remember it well. Watching it made me cry again and again. The TV series shows dry, unbelievable facts on an emotional, personal level.

The content of the series "Holocaust" was school material. However, like many other young people in Switzerland in the 1970s, I had not been taught it in this way during my school years.

We are currently at a turning point in the remembrance of the Shoah, the genocide of over six million Jews during the Second World War, as the last witnesses and survivors will all have died in a few years' time.

"This makes it all the more important that a voice like József Debreczeni's is heard," writes journalist Caroline Emcke in the epilogue to "Cold Crematorium".

She continues: "For Debreczeni, nothing is secondary, nothing is too remote, nothing is taboo. Everything counts. Everything that can be seen, smelled, heard, tasted ... everything that people did to each other, all things, all objects that were needed to torture each other or to survive."

Debreczeni was lucky - that's the only reason he survived

Survive? Survival! After reading József Debreczeni's book, it is hard for me to imagine how he was able to survive the machinery of death in the Nazi extermination camps.

Or as the Hungarian writer, who died in Belgrade in 1978, writes in "Cold Crematorium - Report from the Land Called Auschwitz": "In the camp, death seems like a refreshing steam bath."

Debreczeni, who bore the prisoner number 33031, was always lucky - that was the only reason he survived.

Shortly after arriving in Auschwitz, he remained in his row after the selection, while other fellow prisoners boarded the nearby trucks. An apparently nice SS man offered to change beforehand.

A prisoner, who was simultaneously pulling a hearse past the new arrivals at the camp, quietly grumbled: "Stay here! Only on foot!" Debreczeni decides on impulse not to get in. A little later, he learns that the truck passengers have been driven straight into the gas.

"21825 is already lying on the ground after the third blow. At first he screams like an animal, unrestrained, but by the twentieth it's just a quiet whimper. The twenty-first, twenty-second and fiftieth hits a motionless mass. The camp elder gives a signal to the cleaners, three of them come and drag the victim away."

As I read the book, I kept getting the shivers. This also has to do with the fact that Debreczeni's report is also "an astonishingly confident literary reportage of horror", as Die Zeit calls it.

In the camps, "the Germans are mostly invisible"

However, it is not only the Nazi henchmen who oppress, beat, destroy and kill in the concentration camps. "The Germans are mostly invisible," says József Debreczeni, describing the daily routine.

Minority oppresses minority - even if it is only the fight for a dry piece of bread or a slightly less dirty pair of underpants. While reading the book, you learn about "slaves beating slaves".

Debreczeni's view of his fellow victims is unrelenting and wavers between compassion, anger and hatred. The author reveals the deadly deviousness of the Nazis, whose strategy included having prisoners control the regime within the camp barracks.

"Above all, Debreczeni seems to want to tell this truth, with almost sociological precision," commented Die Zeit.

"Who is your best man?" - "46514!"

On June 6, 1944, the day the Allies landed in Normandy, József Debreczeni witnessed a terrible crime: an SS-Hauptsturmführer visited the labor camp.

The one-armed Nazi asks a guard, also a prisoner: "Who is your best man?" - "46514!", he replies. The young man with the number 46514 immediately climbs out of the trench where he had been working, pulls his cap off his head and humbly reports in.

The SS man steps next to the man, holds a revolver to his head and pulls the trigger. "That was a little demonstration to show that even the best Jew has to die," says the SS-Hauptsturmführer with a smile on his face.

"Many of the bloodsuckers who left the camp pursued them and, as the fugitives were also armed, shot them down in a firefight . Almost everyone left the camps that were not used as hospitals. Where did they go? There is only one answer to this question: home!"

The Dörnhau forced labor camp, where József Debreczeni was last housed, was liberated by the Red Army on May 4, 1945.

The passages in italics are original quotes from the book "Cold Crematorium - Report from the Land Called Auschwitz" by József Debreczeni.

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