How Do Individuals Descend Into Brutal Savagery?: Part I

Last year, I read multiple books about World War II, a few of which I included in my Reverberations of World War II course during the fall. These included novels by Anna Seghers, Victor Serge, Magada Szabó, and more. Along with these, I also read some memoirs that detailed individuals’ experiences in the concentration camps in occupied territories during the war. These included Dr. Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account and József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz. Debreczeni’s account, which originally appeared in Yugoslovia in 1950, remained relatively unknown in the West, for various reasons, until 2023 when an English version appeared.

In Cold Crematorium, Debreczeni provides a detailed account of the year he spent imprisoned by the Nazis and his movement to three different concentration camps. Throughout, Debreczeni describes the internal workings of the camps, with the Nazi perpetrators of the atrocities on the periphery. Jonathan Freeland notes that in Cold Crematorium “the Germans are mostly out of view and off stage; they are the ultimate authorities, the masters of the camp, but their will is done by others.” Debreczeni focuses on the others, the kapos who served “as the Nazis’ enforcers, armed both with truncheons and, deployed no less cruely, the power to distribute the camp’s meager…