The lost-and-found literary masterpiece is that rarest of discoveries. All too often, unearthed books take the form of scrappy apprentice-work from the start of a career or unfinished manuscripts from the end of a life. There are also books that fell out of print because they fell out of fashion and out of favor. Some languish in obscurity for so long that they lose what cultural or historical significance they once had; others didn’t possess such significance to begin with. Most are best left in vaults, on hard drives or at the bottom of drawers.

But occasionally a salvaged book proves a valuable find. József Debreczeni’s “Cold Crematorium” is one such treasure. It was published in 1950 in the former Yugoslavia, where its author, a Hungarian-language novelist and journalist, lived and worked for much of his life. Debreczeni’s book charts the time he spent and the horrors he endured in a different land—what he calls “the Land of Auschwitz.” Only now, after more than 70 years, is this remarkable testimony available to Anglophone readers. Elegantly translated by Paul Olchváry, “Cold Crematorium” makes for sobering yet essential reading.

Debreczeni’s account opens in May 1944 with his grueling journey in an overloaded, tightly sealed “train of hell.” The writer is a 39-year-old newspaperman at the time he is crammed into a boxcar with his fellow deportees—60 “stinking, steaming human bodies.” Like them, he has no idea of his destination. After three days of travel, they arrive in Auschwitz. Those selected to go left are condemned for the gas chamber. Debreczeni is sent to the right. He is decreed fit to work—or more specifically, to be worked to death—with thousands of other häftlinge, or prisoners. His hair is shaved off; he is given a scalding shower and then issued a striped sackcloth uniform and mismatched wooden shoes. “Slave making on a conveyor belt,” he writes: “shove a human being in at one end, and on the other out comes—a häftling.”

So begins a year of back-breaking labor and soul-destroying conditions. During that time, Debreczeni toils away building industrial train tracks, crushing rocks, digging ditches and, most dangerously, constructing tunnels. Workers are given barely edible soup and bread containing the minimum amount of calories to stay alive. Not that longevity is likely. “They calculate the häftling’s capacity to work and his lifespan as a matter of months,” Debreczeni notes. “When he drops dead, the securely locked trains will spew out more well-fattened, fresh goods.”

Miraculously, Debreczeni survives the routine grinding ordeals—the hard work, cold, lice, starvation, disease and diarrhea—together with the forced marches, brutal punishments and arbitrary killings. The last site he is sent to is Dörnhau, a supposed hospital camp—in truth a “cold crematorium” full of “expended manpower” where the Nazis, now aware that the Red Army is closing in, leave ailing prisoners to die. Despite an outbreak of typhus and dwindling food rations, Debreczeni defies the odds and pulls through.

Like Primo Levi’s“If This Is a Man” (1947), Debreczeni’s memoir is a crucial contribution to Holocaust literature, a book that enlarges our understanding of “life” in Auschwitz. Debreczeni writes lucidly and vividly about its catalog of cruelties. The inmates face grim statistics, the “mathematical certainty that out of one hundred men at Dörnhau with diarrhea, ninety-five will die.” They devise tricks, such as propping a dead man up in his bunk so he looks alive and can receive his daily provisions. We learn that in Auschwitz “the first thing to wither away is the instinct of disgust” and see inmates becoming immune to the relentless suffering around them.

Particularly insightful is Debreczeni’s breakdown of the “aristocratic hierarchy” that was put in place in each camp to ensure it ran with brutal efficiency—or efficient brutality. Debreczeni’s daily antagonists are the kapos, the prisoners given special privileges in return for doing the Nazis’ dirty work, often with a whip or a truncheon. They are all “schnorrers, nebbishes, schlemiels, freeloaders, rogues, swindlers, idlers, slackers”—and he treats them with contempt. Debreczeni singles out one sadistic subordinate who can’t even write his name, yet who “blossomed in this swamp.” It is clear who wields absolute power in the camps, however, when one trigger-happy SS officer shoots a kapo’s hardest worker in the head, offering, he says, “an example of how even the best Jew must croak.”

As with all substantial books on the Holocaust, “Cold Crematorium” provides many more wrenching details of barbarity. All incite a range of emotions in the reader: despair, disbelief, revulsion, anger. Familiar images—prisoners resembling scarecrows and skeletons, prisoners being kicked to death or flogged to a pulp, chimneys spewing out “filthy brown smoke”—still shock as a result of Debreczeni’s candid descriptions. Less familiar snapshots and revelations challenge our preconceptions. While there is solidarity and camaraderie among the prisoners, there are also regular demonstrations of a brutal war of all against all, as prisoners steal belongings and fight over morsels of food. Often the will to live is lost, with inmates gripped instead by “the agonizing desire to die.” At his lowest ebb, Debreczeni becomes indifferent to his fate: “I do not wish for life, nor do I wish for death. Neither promises a thing.”

But in the end life mattered to Debreczeni. He shows it by fighting for it in this “factory of death,” defying the dehumanizing machine that reduced prisoners to numbers by telling their stories and giving them back their names. Above all, he insists on being not just a victim of the Nazis’ crimes but also a witness to them. His book fulfills that resolution.

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