Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

by József Debreczeni

Debreczeni’s testimony itself has reached us like a message from a distant planet, his words arriving decades after he set them down. First published in 1950, in the relative freedom of Tito’s Yugoslavia, where the Budapest-born Debreczeni lived after the war, they were lost for a while in the static of the cold war: the author’s praise for his Red Army liberators deemed too much for the anti-communist stomachs of the West, while his insistence that it was Jews, rather than the more nebulous category of “victims of fascism,” who had been singled out for annihilation proved unpalatable to the Stalinists of the East. In a Yugoslavia non-aligned between the two power blocs, Debreczeni found an audience initially receptive to his story—which was written in Hungarian, one of the country’s official minority languages, and produced by a state-owned publisher. But that did not last long. By the 1960s and 1970s, Yugoslavia had become a colder house for Jews.