Cold Crematorium: Commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day

In a sobering Assembly, through the recently translated story of a Hungarian Jewish poet and journalist, History teacher Mr Wayman warned Senior pupils of how essential it is that we remember the events of the Holocaust.

Josef Debreczeni was a Hungarian Jew, the editor of Hungary’s daily newspaper, then of an illustrated weekly, before anti-Jewish laws cost him his job in 1938. The Nazis occupied Hungary in March 1944, and two months later he was deported by cattle truck to Auschwitz-Birkenau, along with his mother, father and wife. Debreczeni alone survived the war and later documented his experiences at Auschwitz. Cold Crematorium, his eyewitness account, was published in Hungarian in 1950, but only translated into English over seventy years later, being published just two weeks ago.

Before re-telling parts of Debreczeni’s account, Mr Wayman drew pupils’ attention to the shocking words, this Holocaust Memorial Day, of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis:

‘1/5 of people interviewed in a recent survey by the Anti-defamation League had not even heard of the Holocaust. 1/5 believed it was a myth or exaggerated. Fewer than half believed it happened as historians have recorded. The Hebrew word Zakar – to remember – is not passive. It implies action. Our societies are called upon to recall the horrors of the past to ensure that in the future we will protect the vulnerable and confront evil whenever it arises.’

To this end, Mr Wayman recounted parts of the book that had particularly struck him. In one camp, Debreczeni’s job is to help build tunnels; he highlights how commonplace death became, ‘Rockfalls are frequent, and rare is the day that does not see one or two crushed-to-death… Such images are to be expected. Neither slave drivers nor slaves so much as glance at the corpses.’ (p.121)

In another interesting insight, Mr Wayman highlighted how the Nazis used hierarchies to divert prisoners’ anger away from those truly in power at Auschwitz and towards their fellow prisoners: Jews who had been appointed as ‘Kapos’ (block or camp elders) who dealt out punishments. Mr Wayman read aloud one example of this, a prisoner forced to crouch down and receive fifty lashes: ‘the [Kapo] puts his all into the blows – even more so because if the camp gods suspect shenanigans it often happens that the blows continue on the head of the one meting out the sentence.’ (p.67)

The book’s title takes its name from a description of the “medical camp” where Debreczeni is sent in the last months before he’s finally liberated, a place no less grim than any of the other camps, and whose real purpose he suspects is to deliberately infect and kill the prisoners through the spreading of typhus. He catches the disease and barely escapes with his life.

In Cold Crematorium, Debreczeni quotes the words of a Parisian Jew who he meets when he first arrives in Auschwitz:

‘If one day someone writes about what is happening…they’ll be seen as either crazy or a perverse liar.’ (p.51)

With this prescient quote Mr Wayman finished the assembly, cautioning the pupils against being part of the awful stats, cautioning them against forgetting or disbelieving this unimaginable but true history.