Four books on the Holocaust: ‘The first thing to wither away is the instinct of disgust’

Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

Author: József Debreczeni tr. Paul Olchvary

ISBN-13: 978-1787334649

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Guideline Price: £16.99

I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped them Escape the Holocaust

Author: Julian Borger

ISBN-13: 978-1399803304

Publisher: John Murray

Guideline Price: £20

Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story

Author: Keren Blankfeld

ISBN-13: 978-0753560808

Publisher: W.H. Allen

Guideline Price: £22

One Life: The True Story of Sir Nicholas Winton

Author: Barbara Winton

ISBN-13: 978-1472148667

Publisher: Robinson

Guideline Price: £10.99

József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium, belatedly translated into English 74 years after its first publication in Hungarian, is a rare Holocaust camp memoir in that its author was already a seasoned writer before he went into the death camps. Before the war Debreczeni was a journalist, poet and playwright in Hungary and Yugoslavia. His literary eye for detail and the crispness of his bleak prose are what make this book a masterpiece.

Spared death upon his arrival at Auschwitz in May 1944 on account of his physical robustness, Debreczeni spent the remainder of the war in slave labour camps in Silesia, in a vast complex of installations he called the “Land of Auschwitz”. He braved the cruelty and caprices of the Kapos and Blockälteren, the inmate line of command, invariably drawn from tough Jewish criminals, and came close to death as typhus, dysentery and oedema ran rampant in the camps. People in the camps, Debreczeni writes, got “death by contagion. You die because you’ve seen your neighbour’s death throes from start to finish.”

Cold Crematorium is a compelling if horrific insight into the economic function of the concentration camp system, where those given an initial reprieve were worked to death to service the Nazis’ war economy, fed enough calories to keep them alive but not enough to sustain life. And few were intended to survive: there was a near-inexhaustible supply of replacement labour.

Debreczeni excels in the squalid details of camp life, the sort of things that are often overlooked in the historic consciousness because the Final Solution, a crime so absolute, tends to obliterate and overshadow the manifold small offences that constituted the petty cruelty and indignities of existence under the Nazis. We see how quickly solidarity breaks down and sociality is eroded amid the lice-ridden filth (“the first thing to wither away is the instinct of disgust”). Inmates, some of whom the author knew from his peacetime life, introduce themselves by name using the past tense (“I was called…”).

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Local history: a Wicklow tea room, ambitious Kennedys, New Quay secrets and Cork curiosities

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Translated fiction: Memory, history and the question of ‘sampling’ from other novels

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The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain; Ireland 1970-2020; Car Bombs and Barrack Busters

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Liberated by the Soviets from Dörnhau in May 1945, Debreczeni published Cold Crematorium in Hungarian in Yugoslavia five years later. Though acclaimed upon publication, it soon faded from memory and efforts by Debreczeni’s nephew to have it translated into English came to nothing, until now. It’s tempting to blame the provincialism of English-language publishing for the oversight but Debreczeni is not much better known in his native Hungary, with few traces of him online in Magyar, possibly because he spent most of his life in Yugoslavia, dying in Belgrade in 1978.

Borger’s splendid narrative is as much that of a world now vanished – Hapsburg Vienna and the Jews of central and eastern Europe - as it is that of survivors and the terrible burden they carried

Julian Borger, a veteran foreign correspondent for the Guardian, grew up aware of his Jewish family’s escape from post-Anschluss Vienna but it was only in recent years that he investigated how it came about: via a classified ad placed in his own paper, or the Manchester Guardian, as it was known in 1938. His father, Robert, came to Britain aged 11, where he was raised by a kindly socialist family in Caernarfon who had answered the ad. In I Seek a Kind Person – the title drawn from the German-inflected ad – he tracks down eight other children, listed in the same column of ads, who also found refuge.

Robert Borger was more fortunate than most other Jewish children from the Continent who found safe passage to the UK via the Guardian ads or the later Kindertransport. Unlike them, most of his immediate family managed to get out, his mother arriving at the same time and his father several months later, having risked deportation to Dachau. This good fortune did little for his welfare, however, as Robert Borger took his own life in 1982 at the age of 55.

Though his family were grateful for the refuge the UK provided, Borger notes that the motives were not always altruistic. Many of the host families, Jews and gentiles alike, relished the opportunity to have cheap domestic servants, something normally beyond their lower-middle-class status. There was also widespread support for interning adult foreign-born Jews (such as Borger’s grandfather, Leo) as enemy aliens early in the war before Churchill shelved the practice.

Most of the other children in the ads made it to the UK, with some heading farther afield: the United States, Shanghai (where they again fell into the clutches of the Nazis and their Japanese allies but survived the ghetto) and, ultimately, Israel. One set, two young brothers, failed to get that far, ending up in the Netherlands, eventually being deported back to the Reich after the Nazi invasion. Both miraculously survived the camps. All but one of the survivors were dead by the time Borger researched the book but he spoke to their children and he was fortunate that some had left written testimonies.

Borger’s splendid narrative is as much that of a world now vanished – Habsburg Vienna and the Jews of central and eastern Europe – as it is that of survivors and the terrible burden they carried. He quotes the American historian Harry Zohn, who described the story of Vienna and the Jews as “the most tragically unrequited love in world history”. In reality, the conditions that allowed Jews to thrive in the Austrian capital were recent enough, dating only from the accession of Emperor Franz Joseph to the throne in 1848. The emperor lived for seven decades more and was the greatest protector of Jews in the known world. But, as the novelist Joseph Roth feared, the protection did not long outlast him or the Hapsburgs’ decline.

After winning the lottery of survival, there came a malediction – the guilt that accompanied being a survivor, of feeling, like Job, “escaped alone to tell thee”. It was a process that one of the survivors featured describes as “slow orphanhood”. The trauma could also be transmitted through the generations. Borger notes that one study has shown that children of Holocaust survivors produce less cortisol, this making them more prone to PTSD.

Though Lovers in Auschwitz is an accomplished account of camp life, there is a structural weakness at the heart of the book. Blankfeld never got to talk to Spitzer

Every story of good fortune from the Holocaust comes tinged with a much heavier shadow of regret and loss. One such story is recounted in Karen Blankfeld’s Lovers in Auschwitz. The book tells the story of a clandestine relationship that developed among two Jewish inmates of the camp, both of whom, like Debreczeni, were kept alive because of their utility for slave labour. The two also managed to live longer thanks to niche skills: Helen “Zippi” Spitzer, a Slovak who was a trained graphic artist, and the Pole David Wisnia, an aspiring opera singer before the war, who entertained the camp guards in the evenings.

Spitzer and Wisnia met in the “sauna”, the building at Birkenau camp where the confiscated clothes and belongings of murdered Jews were disinfected. They maintained a relationship unbeknown to the camp guards for almost two years, at great risk, as pregnancy would have meant certain death for Spitzer, if not both of them. Both survived, Wisnia largely thanks to Zippi’s intervention (she had enough influence with the SS guards to repeatedly dissuade them from placing him on lists for removal).

The two, however, were separated in the chaos ahead of the camp’s liberation. Spitzer went to Warsaw to try to find Wisnia but by now he was in Paris with the 101st US Airborne Division, having joined after they liberated him in Germany. She would later marry another survivor, Erwin Tichauer, and they would end up in New York, where he was an academic and she a human rights worker. Wisnia lived in Pennsylvania after the war, and despite occasional contact with Spitzer, he would not meet her again until they were both in their nineties, in 2016.

Though Lovers in Auschwitz is an accomplished account of camp life, there is a structural weakness at the heart of the book. Blankfeld never got to talk to Spitzer, who died in 2018, and Spitzer spoke little of her relationship with Wisnia in recorded conversations. Therefore, the author relies heavily on her conversations with Wisnia before his death in 2021. She also acknowledges that Spitzer, who “had a high bar for authenticity”, would probably have been sceptical of the book.

The writing is also somewhat jejune (do we really need to be told a hanging that inmates were forced to watch was “a sickening spectacle”?) and there is a sense it is aimed at a less historically aware readership. This gives rise to some unusual instances in the text: the Nazis are glossed as a “radical far-right” party and the Kristallnacht is explained in an endnote.

One of the figures who did much to help rescue Jewish children on the Kindertransport was Nicholas Winton. He is probably best known for an episode of the BBC show That’s Life! from 1988 in which the retired stockbroker was surprised to find himself surrounded in the audience by dozens of the people he had helped save.

Winton’s biography, originally published in 2014 as If It’s Not Impossible ... The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton, written by his daughter Barbara, has been reissued under a new title, One Life, to tie in with the film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter. Winton, himself of German Jewish descent, albeit from a family of Christian converts, was asked to contribute to the Kindertransport, his efforts saving 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939.

Because of the film based on it, One Life stands to be the book among the four reviewed here that sells the most copies. It is, however, by a long way the weakest of the four. It lacks the necessary distance for a fully rounded biography, and the prose is pedestrian at best. It also devotes only two chapters to the Kindertransport.

While the rest of Winton’s life was far from inconsequential – his activity as a young man in the interwar years, including a stint in Weimar-era Hamburg, is particularly interesting – it does pale in comparison to what he is most famous for. And though he gave the book his imprimatur before his death in 2015, it is hard to believe Winton, modest to a fault, would have thought his life merited all the fuss.