'Cold Crematorium' by József Debreczeni was first published in 1950 and has only recently been translated into English. It describes the author's period of internment in Auschwitz by the Nazis. I am finding it hard to get to grips with writing about the book given the current world situation. I think (but what do I know) that understanding the depths of the Holocaust can't help but inform your understanding of current events. The Nazis tried to erase the Jewish people. The life that Debreczeni describes encapsulates absolutely Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil'. This article in the New Statesman describes how survivor testimony was not admitted at the Nuremberg Trials because they thought people would not be believed. As a young healthy man he was sent to a work camp, as were a constant stream of people, who were quite simply worked to death. He describes the day to day struggle for survival and how accustomed they become to death and suffering. Although the worst of the guards are talked about it is the life amongst the other prisoners that he gives in detail. The system undermined them still further from common or garden dehumanisation by setting them in a hierarchy, giving some privileges over others, control over food distribution and the allocation of sleeping space, designed presumably to create hatred amongst the inmates, to divide them from each other. It sometimes seems amazing that the people are alive at all. The cold and hunger and random violence. The book is very immediate, immersing the reader in the situation. It feels very detailed, and you wonder as his powers of recall, because how could he have possibly written anything down at the time. It is the individual incidents that make it so graphic.
"'Schon [Nice]. Who is your best worker?'
'46514!' the kapo exclaims without hesitation.
46514 is unarguably the group's best worker. Back home he'd been a logger. Twenty-six years old. Nothing of his round sunburnt peasant's face suggests Jewish ancestry. Not at all the spindly, bookish type more familiar back home. |That variation that even Jews themselves hardly recognise. In the Carpathian Mountains, there's a healthier degree of occupational diversity among the Jews. Those doing work do it for the sake of the work itself. It's obvious from the way they hold their tools.
46514 is a premium häftling. Premiums are rare; to be recognised as one is a big deal. A premium gets a weekly bonus with 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.'
Kitsch. Horror is always kitsch Even when it's real." (p.98-99)
They live for cigarettes and news of the war. They are moved to other camps, sometimes volunteering to do so since people reason that it can't possibly get worse. It is towards the end of the war so the Nazis are withdrawing the prisoners, food gets more scarce and typhoid runs rampant, until the point where they awake one day to find themselves free, the guards having abandoned them in the night fearing the advancing Soviet army.
Six hundred men are pressed tightly against each other. Every third one is writhing, whimpering, groaning, gurgling, raving. Every third person is dying.
Some are whining for doctors deliriously, stubbornly - more to themselves than to anyone else. The thin tailor above me thinks he is at home, talking to his little boy. By tomorrow, he won't be around, knitting caps in exchange for soup from well-heeled bigwigs.
Above me, under me, all around me, this army of people ready to depart are crying out for God and water. Eyes turning glassy are soaking in the darkness of Hades or the foolish pinkness of heaven. Death is stepping between the bunks like a learned, confident young professor feeling quite at home.
The wailing is contagious. Like dogs howling at the moon, all six hundred of us are aimlessly whining away. A choir of raving flagellants.
The icy granary with the broken windows resounds with eerie voices and shrieks of despair, horror, and fear.
This concert of outcasts lasts until the wee small hours of the morning, when the first grey filters in. Then, silence. Without warning, without reason, just as the uproar started earlier.
Two hundred die in one block that night.
As daybreak takes hold, the bunks fall silent. The dead and the living alike doze off." (p.161)
There are moments of humanity where people offer some care to others but you sense that mostly each person is alone in his own living hell. József himself lurches between fatalism and despair, and a burning desire to survive. Human beings are capable of such terrible things and you find yourself crushed by the soul destroying inhumanity and reminded of the urgency of the message that the Holocaust must not be forgotten.
Post script: Thinking more about what I was trying to articulate about my response to the book. The recent resurgence of far right political parties and ideology across Europe (including Germany) and coming out of the mouth of a US presidential candidate, is enough to make any normal person's blood run cold, but for Jewish people must evoke a very visceral level of threat. What is currently happening in Israel/Gaza/Lebanon is clearly not a solution to the security of the region, when all of the shooting is over the human beings still have to live alongside each other. I am left wondering what we can do. My heart cries out for the people dying on both sides, whose lives are being destroyed by ideologues.
