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.

Debreczeni delivers something of singular value. It’s not only that his are the recollections of a fully conscious adult—when so many accounts are, necessarily, confined to the memories of a child—but that he writes as a professional, highly skilled observer. He is a good noticer, with a journalist’s eye for the telling, human detail.

Shoah

Another term for the Holocaust.

Much of what is laid bare in Cold Crematorium will come as a shock even to those who consider themselves broadly familiar with the facts of the Holocaust. For what does the average twenty-first-century citizen know of Auschwitz? Perhaps that Jews arrived in cattle cars and were led into what they thought were showers, where they were gassed to death, their bodies turned to ash in ovens. This account, like others published in recent years, shows how incomplete that picture is.

It is a “diabolically imaginative Nazi system” that understands and exploits human nature, including that “old supposition—proven true on countless occasions—that the best slave driver is a slave accorded a privileged position.”

the pattern that prevails among the Jewish members of the enforcer class: “Such towering figures of the Auschwitz hierarchy were recruited from among those who, back home, had stood on the bottom rungs of Jewish society. Those who’d made nothing of themselves—schnorrers, nebbishes, schlemiels, freeloaders, rogues, swindlers, idlers, slackers—all blossomed in this swamp.”

“The ‘pot’ is a dented tin bucket into which those who can’t get up relieve themselves—assuming it reaches them in time. Those who carry the pots are usually deaf to the wailing cries urging them to come. The bucket nearly always arrives late, and the bedridden person either soils himself or, more often, does his business on the floor. Everyone has diarrhea. Hence the horrid yellow streams along the rows of beds.”

On arrival in the Auschwitz main camp, just after they have had all their body hair shaved off, a guard shrieks an order: “‘Open your snouts!’ We understood all too well: not mouths, but snouts.” Debreczeni is a writer so, naturally, he notices that the first step toward dehumanization is taken through language.

I first glimpse our train along one of the platforms at the station. The cars with their “DR” emblem—Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railway)—speak a German even more German than that of the German camp guards accompanying us. We’re being deported, after all. The best-case scenario: gas chambers. The worst-case: slave labor until death.

With systematic resourcefulness the Nazis created in their death camps a subtle hierarchy of the pariahs. The Germans themselves remained mostly invisible behind the barbed wire. The allocation of food, the discipline, the direct supervision of work, and the first degree of terror—in sum, executive power—were in fact entrusted to slave drivers chosen randomly from among the deportees.

The first to be sent to the capital of the Great Land of Auschwitz were Polish deportees, most of them not Jews. As at all camps, here too most of the aristocracy comprised the first settlers.

not even if they wanted to could they return the items to their owners. Its very barbarity makes it a remarkably simple method: to deprive millions by this means of their individuality, their names, their humanity. How can I someday prove so far from home that I was called this, not that? How will I prove that I am I?

In one of the windows is an aging woman with thickly colored straw-yellow hair, leaning on her elbow. This barrack houses women—the only women residents in this city of men. Here lives a whole contingent of the undoubtedly most abject prostitutes of all time: the whores of Auschwitz. This is a brothel. Nazi thoroughness once again, of course. The women are from the most varied ethnicities, and naturally they are here not for the pleasure of ordinary Jewish häftlinge but are at the disposal of SS soldiers, and perhaps even veteran slave drivers among those Aryans of dubious origin who’d won civil rights in the camp.

Birkenau’s chimneys spew that filthy brown smoke ceaselessly above this nightmarish camp of pariahs. Breaks in operations are unknown in this crematorium city. The toxic gas has been belching out day and night for years. The furnaces, fired up until they’re glowing white, are trembling; mountains of burning flesh send sooty sparks into the air. There is no escaping the spectacle, which must be watched all day long.

“Stinking Jew, from ten to twelve thirty you played hooky from work. Where were you? What do you imagine? That we’re filling you up with free food?” We don’t hear the reply, only the swishing of the whip. This is warming up. 21825 has to stand on all fours. This is just a formality, actually, pure tradition, since most of the blows land on the head. “Fifty,” snaps the violinist. The Lagerälteste carries out the sentence.

After the third blow 21825 is wallowing full-length on the ground. At first he lets out unfettered, beastly screams, but by the twentieth blow the harrowing sound has subsided into whimpering. The twenty-first, twenty-second, and fiftieth shower down on a motionless mass. The Lagerälteste waves a hand, and three people step from the group of cleaners and drag away the victim.

The whip cracks on the bodies of three more victims, and then the Appell is over.

Two things are unheard of in a death camp: smiles and satiety.

Each company lays claim to a certain number of slave laborers.

Kemna is the most dreaded of the three companies. Not only on account of its vicious civilian slave drivers, whose acts of cruelty we’d heard hair-raising stories about yesterday, but also because this is the company that drills tunnels here. In our situation, tunnel work is the worst of the worst. For now, Urban AG is focusing on aboveground work: digging, rock crushing, the laying down of industrial sidetracks, but even with them, it would all lead to tunnel work. Those who got here earlier say that Baugesellschaft, the barracks construction firm, is the best—among other reasons, because its work site is the camp itself, so the daily labor is not made worse by an agonizing walk of several kilometers to a site far afield and back again to the camp.

For my labor the company pays Hitler’s state two marks a day to cover my “board” and my “apparel,”

Wake-up is at 4:00 AM, and by 5:00 we’re at work, which lasts until 6:00 PM, with a noon half-hour break.

Each portion—soup, bread, Zulage—has precisely enough calories, just enough nutrients, absolutely necessary to maintain life. To maintain it, not to protect it. The latter isn’t important at all. They calculate the häftling’s capacity to work and his lifespan as a matter of months. When he drops dead, the securely locked trains will spew out more well-fattened, fresh goods. Calorie calculations at death camps are the work of diligent and untalented German scientists, the product of methodical German experimentation and absurdly detailed digging and delving.

We’re well into June. We arrived six weeks ago, and the camp is rising before our eyes. The soldiers and civilian slave drivers of Baugesellschaft—the construction company—are working valiantly. Soon two large barracks comprising twenty-four rooms each stand ready at the foot of the hill, below our tents. Twenty other similarly huge barracks are being built. They look far more comfortable than our tents. The completed barracks are empty for now. Three-hundred-liter boilers have meanwhile arrived for the kitchens that are yet to be built. There are more sentries, and barracks similar to ours are arising lightning fast beyond the barbed wire for the soldiers and Todt’s people. By all indications, we’ll be a big camp.

Those of us who are the Urban Company’s slaves are for now doing mostly surface work. We’re building industrial train tracks; we’re digging; we’re crushing rocks; we’re pushing wagons; we’re digging drainage ditches.

That Hitler had materials and manpower in 1944, the fifth year of the war, for new Siegfried Lines wasn’t a particularly uplifting thought. Appearances weren’t at all in line with our only hope: the prospect of an imminent defeat.

This power-crazed, malicious wild beast was a purebred creation of the diabolically imaginative Nazi system, which was based on that old supposition—proven true on countless occasions—that the best slave driver is a slave accorded a privileged position. The bulk of the camp aristocracy was comprised of characters cut from the same cloth.

“Two häftlinge with the same family name, Weisz, have made the most successful “careers” in Eule. One of them—a squat, low-browed sales clerk from Upper Hungary—has become the Urban Company’s chief kapo.”

Uniquely, such towering figures of the Auschwitz hierarchy were recruited from among those who, back home, had stood on the bottom rungs of Jewish society.

all at once, body lice appear. Palm-size encampments of glittering larvae take shape in our rags and blankets. Like the turbulent images in a nightmare, these silvery splotches begin to stir, then squirm, and then frightfully, inextinguishably, disperse. Our nights of half sleep end, like that. Those hours allotted to rest now pass with curses and tormented scratching. Despite the risk of meeting with the slave drivers’ rubber truncheons and the sentry’s rifle butt, even during the day we have no choice: we repeatedly set down our tools to scratch ourselves all over, our faces contorted with rage.

at work sites it’s now a daily occurrence that some häftling drops dead. Special units of camp workers throw the corpses into giant lime pits dug outside the camp. Using pliers, the Polish head doctor first breaks loose the corpses’ gold teeth. After collecting a hefty toll on the amassed gold and dividing the bounty with the Lagerälteste, he “turns in” the remainder to the camp commandant. As a result, all parties get their hands on decent supplemental income. This is more or less the same practice at all camps.

46514 is a premium häftling. Premiums are rare; to be recognized as one is a big deal. A premium gets a weekly bonus worth two marks, which he can trade in for special jam and makhorka cigarettes. 46514 jumps out of the pit and snatches off his cap. Half Arm casts him a glance but asks him nothing, and then steps to the side. He reaches lazily for his holster, pulls out the revolver, and presses the barrel to 46514’s temple. A shot rings out. The man, who’d been standing straight as a flagpole, now teeters before crashing facedown into the pit. The lifeless body plops with a dull thud. The officer with the Leica puts the camera into a pocket, while Half Arm smiles silently, absentmindedly. “A little demonstration,” he says. “An example of how even the best Jew must croak.”

The kitchen stood ready but was not in operation, since necessary food supplies were still late in arriving. The trucks brought swill more wretched by the day. The quarter loaf of bread shrank to a fifth. The cost of tobacco shot up sky-high. There was nothing to smoke anymore. The Greeks, those swindling magicians, wrung out an entire daily ration of food for a single makhorka cigarette that sputtered out in seconds. Extra pay—supplemental rations—ceased, and with it the main source of currency with which to acquire other goods.

the camp commander makes his presence known with finely crafted brutalities. An SS sergeant, he is a gray-uniformed killer right off the assembly line, like his colleague at Eule, but more inventive at concocting tortures. No SS officer of higher rank is put in command of the lives and deaths of five or six thousand men.

The evening lineups last for hours, especially if it’s raining. Our sergeant-henchman makes us stand about in a downpour for up to two hundred minutes.

Getting drenched and cold while hungry, full of lice, and black with rock dust—in water and mud, after stumbling about for thirteen hours. It’s 11:00 PM by the time we’re back in our unheated tents and we can cast off and wring out our sweaty, sodden garments. And then the next morning, at dawn, shivering and cursing, we throw the soaked rags back on ourselves.

As for lice, they are—in the literal, physical sense of the word—a burning matter. Our blankets are swarming with silvery-glistening colonies of larvae. Protecting ourselves is impossible: we’ve seen neither soap nor louse powder since we’ve been here, but barbers at the ready, mostly Greeks, precisely cut the prescribed “prisoner’s band” across the thick layer of grime on our skulls once a week with dull, dirty clippers. Those in charge here do make sure of that, and only that.

I hang my rags on the nail above me. The pants and the tunic are literally moving from the thousands of squirming lice. Destroying them is hopeless to begin with, so lately we haven’t even been trying.

“Dörnhau, camp hospital.

“Pot! Pot!” The “pot” is a dented tin bucket into which those who can’t get up relieve themselves—assuming it reaches them in time. Those who carry the pots are usually deaf to the wailing cries urging them to come. The bucket nearly always arrives late, and the bedridden person either soils himself or, more often, does his business on the floor. Everyone has diarrhea. Hence the horrid yellow streams along the rows of beds.

Dörnhau has a labyrinthine and pathologically sprawling camp aristocracy. There must be five thousand people in the cold crematorium when we arrive. Of those, at least five hundred have some sort of office, and they play the tyrant accordingly.

Night in Dörnhau. Six hundred men are pressed tightly up against each other. Every third one is writhing, whimpering, groaning, gurgling, raving. Every third person is dying.

Every day, we await 11:00 AM and 8:00 PM with trembling. All eyes are anxiously anticipating the arrival of the decisive moment, and those still able to get up prepare themselves for the great ritual: eating. The skeleton-people greedily clutch the iron spoons they’ve pulled out from under the wood shavings. Soup is being delivered to the bunks. As the food carriers approach, excitement mounts: restlessly we observe their every motion through the sludge, and pick apart the news that flits from bunk to bunk: “Bunker soup,” comes a report from the end of the row. Apprehensively a question flits right back: “Thin?” “Hot water.”

Having a new neighbor isn’t a surprise. So far I’ve had to report eight corpses in the mornings, which has meant—among other things—that I’ve passed eight nights pressed up against a cooling cadaver. You can get used to anything. Close quarters of this sort have meant being there as every dying man soils himself in his final moments, and sitting up a corpse to get extra food.

There’s nothing rabbi-like about him anymore, nothing human. No longer does he think of God, whom he’d once committed to serving with dedication; nor of the grandiose folio books of the seminary; nor of the Arc of the Covenant with its spidery gold Hebrew letters; nor of his mother’s face.… He is thinking of the slice of bread from which he awaits life.

He too is unsteady on his feet. I know he hardly eats. He spends all he has on tobacco.

Izrael was a wholesaler. Back home he commanded prestige and power; here he is a nobody among nobodies. For days on end he doesn’t eat. For his rations he buys tobacco; indeed, he even acquired a cheap tin box to keep it in. He tumbles along the pinnacle of nicotine madness toward imminent, certain death by starvation.

Dörnhau has become a hub. It is here that the land of camps had poured its expended manpower. Pariahs drained of their strength and whom the Nazis, in the grips of the psychosis of anxiety that comes with sensing the end, did not dare or did not want to put to death on the spot, according to their time-tested method.

Death reaps an even bigger harvest. Bergman opens the new wave. He departs before New Year’s, in a strangely easy exit meriting mention in a medical journal: He felt the same as always. He was talking. His chin dropped mid-sentence.

Uncleanliness takes on unimaginable proportions. The infected squalor envelops everything and everyone. Aside from the human waste that has not been cleared away, the penetrating stench of cadavers renders the air virulent.

Thoughts about women mean nothing to the skeletons of Auschwitz. Desire fades away amid the shackles of animal instincts, the red-hot coals of hunger. The body can have only one desire: to eat.