Book Reviews: ‘Lovers in Auschwitz,’ by Keren Blankfeld; ‘Cold Crematorium,’ by József Debreczeni

LOVERS IN AUSCHWITZ: A True Story, by Keren Blankfeld

COLD CREMATORIUM: Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz, by József Debreczeni | Translated by Paul Olchváry

“Lovers in Auschwitz” is, as the title portends, a nonfiction account of two Jews who became lovers in Auschwitz. The journalist Keren Blankfeld adapted it from her viral 2019 New York Times article and structured the book as a kind of braided biography; alternating chapters tell the story of David, a boy from Poland who dreams of becoming a singer, and of Zippi, a confident, talented girl from Slovakia.

Their story lines intersect in Auschwitz, where Zippi’s position as the camp’s graphic designer allows her to communicate with David, to arrange rendezvous and to save his life. After the war, the lines diverge; Zippi and David don’t see each other again for 72 years.

It’s a remarkable love story, for sure. The problem is that there’s very little of it in the book. Yes, Zippi and David met and fell in love and even slept with each other in Auschwitz, but nearly all of this is obliquely told. There is next to nothing about how they met or how the relationship developed; all we’re given are cringey markers of excitement. They “stole glances at each other”; he “swooned at the thought”; “their paths would cross, their whispers hot against the fabric of their uniforms.” The drama of their courtship is implied, which means it isn’t dramatic, which means it feels cheap, which, given the setting, is a little uncomfortable.

There are two or three feints toward something that might have given the relationship dimension — David’s concern that Zippi might be jealous when a young woman he once knew arrives at the camp; Zippi’s anxiety about getting pregnant — but they don’t go anywhere. What happens after the war — Zippi goes to Warsaw, as planned, but David never shows — is much more emotionally grounded, and the reunion is very moving. But you do not get much sense of what their romance must have meant: risk, sacrifice, guilt, longing, pleasure, love.

Blankfeld is working with incomplete information. David, especially later in life, was very forthcoming about his relationship with Zippi, but Zippi seemingly did her best to erase David from her history, omitting him entirely in the dozens of taped testimonies or formal interviews she gave to historians and scholars, as well as in her unpublished memoir.

And she died before Blankfeld could try to talk to her. (You get the sense that Zippi — who was meticulous and precise in her testimonies — would have hated this book; Blankfeld concedes that Zippi likely would have been “skeptical.”) “Lovers in Auschwitz” is on surer ground outside of Zippi and David’s romance — Zippi’s relationship with Erwin, another former Auschwitz internee she met after the war, is far more developed, for instance. But because the book insists it’s about a love story in Auschwitz — the promise of a sentimental through-line is what makes it so commercially appealing — it can be tough to get past the hole at its center.

Stories like this happened, and they can and should be told. (My grandparents, in fact, met in a concentration camp.) But without nuance or sensitivity or texture, it can feel superficial, even exploitative. Auschwitz becomes “Auschwitz,” a backdrop, a setting, a vaguely horrifying place where a vaguely uplifting story happened.

A Holocaust book with nuance, sensitivity and texture, though, cuts through the tropes, unblurs the horrors. “Cold Crematorium,” a memoir by József Debreczeni, an accomplished journalist and poet from Hungary, was originally published in Hungarian in Yugoslavia in 1950. The book remained obscure for decades, squeezed by Cold War politics — too Soviet-philic for the West, too Jew-centric for the East. It’s only now, more than 70 years later, that the book has been translated into more than a dozen languages and become accessible to the wider world.

Debreczeni recounts his deportation to Auschwitz, and from there to a series of camps. This isn’t the sort of book you can get a sense of from a plot outline. Debreczeni suffers; he survives (or, more accurately, he does not die); he observes. His powers of observation are extraordinary. Everything he encounters in what he calls the Land of Auschwitz — the work sites, the barracks, the bodies, the corpses, the hunger, the roll call, the labor, the insanity, the fear, the despair, the strangeness, the hope, the cruelty — is captured in terrifyingly sharp detail.

In Paul Olchváry’s exquisite translation, scene after scene, image after image — it is wrenching. Prisoners propping up a dead bedmate, extending his arm, so that they might receive an extra piece of bread. A prisoner expiring midsentence. The lice, “silvery-glistening colonies of larvae,” that torment, endlessly.

The details are so precise that any critical distance collapses — nothing’s expected, nothing’s dulled by cliché. It is as immediate a confrontation of the horrors of the camps as I’ve ever encountered. It’s also a subtle if startling meditation on what it is to attempt to confront those horrors with words. What Debreczeni experiences is so cartoonishly cruel that it defies not description but moral comprehension. “Horror is always kitsch,” he writes after an ad hoc execution, “even when it’s real.”

The book’s final third — in which Debreczeni has been assigned to the “cold crematorium,” a place where inmates too sick to work are left to die — is especially staggering. In research for my own book, I walked this site; the existence of a memoir by one of the people who ended up here seems impossible. Debreczeni has preserved a panoptic depiction of hell, at once personal, communal and atmospheric. Occasionally shifting tenses or even assuming omniscience, he floats among the nearly dead and the newly dead, crafting a kind of in-progress collective obituary, sketching the human beings they once were, the human lives they once had, as their corpses are carried out and flung into a lime pit. Ever-present is the stench, the river of human waste and human remains that runs through the room.

There are moments of profound humanity in the book — an SS private who would drop well-stuffed cigarettes right in front of the prisoners; a gift of clean underwear, an unimaginable luxury — but they are not marked as such, are not built up to, are not cathartic; this is not a story shaped around or powered by a moral.

The closest “Cold Crematorium” has to a theme is Debreczeni’s obsession with hierarchy. At each location Debreczeni meticulously maps out who oversees whom, who is at whose mercy, who has access to food, news, medicine, shoes.

The German guards are largely absent; instead it is the prisoners who rule over other prisoners who in turn rule over other prisoners, all the way down. It is a ruthlessly efficient system of power that pervades everything, delimiting the prisoners’ freedoms, calibrating their desires, defining their relationships. The relentless taxonomy of status is a window into the complex moral reality of the camps.

At one point in her book, Blankfeld suggests that Zippi could look attractive to David because she paid attention to the camp hierarchy; to survive and to appear healthy, she stuck close to the doctors interned at the camp who were treated slightly better and had more access to medical supplies. But Blankfeld does not linger over this complexity.

That’s what distinguishes Debreczeni’s Land of Auschwitz most starkly from the “Auschwitz” in “Lovers in Auschwitz,” where the moral reality is storybook, where love conquers fear and hope burns bright. In “Cold Crematorium,” Debreczeni dismisses love as “the luxury of that narrow stratum, the privileged,” as something impossibly distant. “There is no sexuality in the Land of Auschwitz,” Debreczeni insists. “Our twisted imaginations debase our earthly vessels, our own bodies and those of others, into nauseating cadavers.”

The finest examples of Holocaust literature — and “Cold Crematorium” is so fine it transcends its category — aren’t merely bulwarks against obscurity; they do more than allow us to never forget. They offer a glimpse, one that is unyielding and unsoftened by sentimentality, one that is brutally, unbearably close.

LOVERS IN AUSCHWITZ: A True Story | By Keren Blankfeld | Little, Brown | 388 pp. | $30