Mgla wiosenna by Stanisław Witkiewicz on Wikimedia Commons
I first became aware of Cold Crematorium, my uncle’s intimate Holocaust narrative, when I was a young child. I couldn’t help but notice the book that was often reverently taken from a bookshelf in our apartment in Belgrade, the capital of the former Yugoslavia. It was a slim volume — not much longer than two hundred pages — and was almost lost among the many heavy tomes of Marxist ideology that were considered mandatory for my father, who served as an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the then-socialist Yugoslavia.
Only later did I understand that the story in this “little” book had a profound influence on our family. It shaped my identity. I was barely aware that the author was Uncle Józsi, my father’s elder brother who had adopted the pen name Debreczeni. Both my uncle and my father were born in Budapest but fled to neighboring Yugoslavia following the anti-Jewish violence of post – World War I. Cold Crematorium was written in Hungarian, the language with which my uncle remained the most comfortable throughout his life.
By the time I was a teenager, my father often shared his frustration that he’d been unsuccessful in having the work accepted by American publishers in the 1950s, during his posting as a Yugoslav diplomat in Washington, DC. American publishers, influenced by the atmosphere of the Cold War and McCarthyism, had no interest in a work in which Soviet soldiers were shown as the liberators of Nazi camps. My father was particularly pained by the attitude of Jewish American publishers, who were petrified of inflaming antisemitism.
I would read the book and often needed to put it down because it had such an emotional impact. At times like that, I would vow to myself, The world must know. There are millions of stories that will never be told, but for this one, I can make a difference. Of course, trying to publish a Hungarian novel written by an unknown — and now deceased — author after more than seventy years was a daunting undertaking.
“Don’t people know about the Holocaust?” even well-meaning friends would ask. In fact, only the bare bones of the Holocaust are known by most Baby Boomers; younger generations are aware of even less. How many people know about the system of hundreds of concentration camps, the systematic use of slave labor where death was the only escape, and the role of major German companies who used these slaves — companies whose products we still use every day? How many people know about the complicity of the local populations throughout Europe in WWII, or the emergence of “Holocaust amnesia” that started even before the ashes of the crematoria had cooled?
It was apparent to me that the only way to get publishers interested was to demonstrate the extraordinary literary merit of the work. I was not disappointed with my choice of translator: as The Times of London noted, “Paul Olchváry, an award-winning and highly accomplished translator of Hungarian literature, has rendered Debreczeni’s prose into a literary diamond — sharp-edged and crystal clear. Like the works of Primo Levi and Vasily Grossman, this is a haunting chronicle of rare, unsettling power.”
Paul and I worked closely for almost a year, communicating weekly, often daily, and agonizing over individual words and phrases. Translating literary prose inevitably requires interpretation. A special challenge was to make the text sound fresh to an Anglophone audience without compromising its authenticity.
Written many decades ago, this book could not be more relevant to the present. My uncle was eerily prescient about the diabolical ways in which the Holocaust could be “normalized,” rather than recognized as a unique crime in which a modern industrial state attempted — and largely succeeded in Europe — to annihilate an entire people. He also would have been appalled, but likely not surprised, to hear white supremacists and neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust, or the president of the Palestinian Authority claim — in front of the German chancellor, no less — that Palestinians had suffered “fifty Holocausts.”
József Debreczeni wasn’t familiar with the sayings “Never forget” and “Never again,” but he would have surely said “Amen.” As I hold one of his pens, I can only try to imagine how pleased he would be to know that Cold Crematorium will be available in fifteen languages by January 2025, the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Alexander Bruner is the nephew of József Debreczeni and a former international management consultant and fundraiser. A child of Holocaust survivors from Yugoslavia, he lectures to educational, social, political and community groups on topics related to Israel, the Middle East, antisemitism, and the history of the Jewish people. He holds a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Maryland and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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