Debreczeni knows how incredible, in the literal sense, all this is. In the Auschwitz main camp, a fellow prisoner from France points out the chimneys, spewing out the “filthy smoke” of mass murder. “If one day someone writes about what is happening over there, they’ll be seen as either crazy or as a perverse liar,” the man says. Like several of those trapped by the Nazi killing machine, Debreczeni understood at the time that, in the future, there would be those whose response to the Holocaust would be to deny such horror ever happened. This painful, absorbing book is an unanswerable reply.
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