Features
Memoir of Hungarian Holocaust survivor who worked in Auschwitz camp hospital recently translated into English
Review by JULIE KIRSH (former Sun Media News Research Director)
In order to avoid a death march, my weak, ailing, Hungarian Jewish father dug a hole on the grounds of Buchenwald. He pulled a dead man’s body over his own. The unfortunate man had died of typhus, which my father also caught.
On April 11, 1945, the US army entered Buchenwald and rescued my father. He spent three weeks in a Red Cross camp recovering from typhus and starvation before making his way back home. Once he reached home in Hungary, he spent eight months in a sanatorium before being restored back to health.
With that as preamble, I had a particular interest in reading the memoir of another Holocaust survivor, József Debreczeni: “Cold Crematorium: Reflections from the Land of Auschwitz.”
The reader learns that the “Cold Crematorium” of József Debreczeni’s memoir was the Dornhau “camp hospital”. Dornhau was the headquarters of a vast network of concentration and slave labour camps in World War II. In April 1944, Debreczeni was deported to Auschwitz from his home in Serbia. He was a slave labourer in three subcamps that were satellites of Gross-Rosen, which Debreczeni refers to as the “Land of Auschwitz.”
With his journalist’s eye for detail, Debreczeni makes the inexplicable horrors of his experience come alive for the reader. The terrible suffering of hunger, the back breaking labour for slaves who were once doctors, lawyers, and businessmen before the war, are all described in the book. Even an addiction to tobacco becomes for some as important as food. The reader feels the frost and cold of winter in 1944 for the inmates – who were without shoes and underwear – and only rags for clothing.
Debreczeni’s description of the Dornhau hospital forces the reader to confront a madhouse: “We’ve wound up among raving maniacs. A dizzing cacophony of moaning, whimpering, shrieking, whining and delirious snarling. The underworld is seething”.
Some of Debreczeni’s writing is sardonic. He tells of a hierarchy of “nobility” in the hospital. Once honourable physicians in Hungary are forced to become part of the Nazi killing machine. However, the newly arrived doctors and medical students remain “stuck outside of Eden.”
Similar to my father, Debreczeni, burning with fever, pulls a dead man’s lice-ridden blanket over his emaciated body. He is “burning in the cold crematorium.”
Night in Dornhau is described in a heart rending fashion. Six hundred men are pressed close together. Every third person is dying.
At “Appell” next morning, the dead are counted. The black humour continues with the inmates coming up with a variation: “Report if you are dead”.
In December,1944, Dornhau had become a hub, a repository for prisoners who were close to death. Debreczeni remarks that the Nazis were “in the grips of the psychosis of anxiety that comes with sensing the end.” Still the death machine grinds onward with the few survivors dying even as liberation draws near. In the last days of the horror, the food rations drop even further.
Debreczeni pays honour and shows compassion to his fellow prisoners: Bergman, Herz, Gleiwitz, Nébel and others, by describing their origins and final fates.
In the last days, typhus breaks out in Dornhau. Diarrhea, edema and high fever are raging. With suitable nourishment and draining of the body’s water, my father survived typhus. Most did not.
Reading the final pages of Cold Crematorium was among the most anxious readings of my life. Despite a vision of liberation and the Russian army only seven kilometers away, the SS guards still lock the exit gates each evening. Finally, liberation arrives. Debreczeni is nursed back to health by Russian nurses. Reporters and journalists pour into Dornhau and are described as “Martians of the universe beyond the barbed wire.”
Cold Crematorium was first published in Hungarian in 1950, as a haunting memoir, sparing no harsh words for the SS and their collaborators, but also a telling reminder of how the world forgets.
More than seventy years later, Cold Crematorium is reaching a wider audience with its translation into English and several other languages. The book has helped me understand the last days leading up to liberation and gives me further insight into my father’s remarkable survival.
“Cold Crematorium: Reflections from the Land of Auschwitz”
By József Debreczeni
Translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchváry (St. Martin’s Press, 2023)
Features
100-year-old Lil Duboff still taking life one day at a time
By MYRON LOVE Last march, Lil Duboff celebrated her 100th birthday in a low key manner.
“I have always been a laid back kind of person,” says the Shaftesbury retirement home resident. “I just celebrated with my family.”
Lil Duboff’s life journey began in Russia in 1925. “I was six months old when we came to Winnipeg,” she says. “Most of my extended family had come before. We were supposed to leave Russia at the same time, but my mother was pregnant with me and my parents waited until after I was born.”
The former Lil Portnoy, the daughter of Hy and Pessie, grew up the youngest of five siblings in a large and loving family in the old north end Jewish community. Upon his arrival in Winnipeg, her father, Hy, joined his father, Jack, and his brothers, Nathan and Percy, in the family business, Perth’s Cleaners, which was established in 1914.
Following the education path of most Jewish Winnipeggers in the period between the wars and into the 1950s, Duboff started her schooling at Peretz School – although she attended William Whyte School for most of her elementary schooling, supplemented by evening classes at Peretz School – followed by Aberdeen School and St. John’s Tech for high school.
The family, she recalls, belonged to the Beth Jacob Synagogue on Selkirk Avenue.
After completing high school, Duboff took a business course and joined the workforce. She first worked at Perth’s, then Stall’s, and lastly, Silpit Industries – which was owned by Harry Silverberg. (Harry Silverberg was one of the wealthier individuals in our community and a community leader who contributed generously to our communal institutions.)
It was while working at Silpit Industries that Lil Portnoy met Nathan Duboff. “Nathan worked in the shipping department,” she recalls. “We dated for three or four years before getting married.”
They wed in 1953 at the Hebrew Sick Hall on Selkirk Avenue. The bride was pregnant soon after and quit work to look after her family. The couple had three children: Chuck, Neil and Cynthia.
The family lived in the Garden City area. While Nathan continued to work for Harry Silverberg for a time – at his Brown and Rutherford lumber business, he later moved to Portage Lumber as sales manager, and then Dominion Lumber, finally retiring as sales manager for McDermot Lumber in 1995.
During those years Lil did what many married Jewish women did and put her time in as a volunteer with different Jewish organizations. She served as president of the Chevra Mishnayes Congregation sisterhood and the ORT chapter to which she belonged. She also volunteered with B’nai B’rith Women and Jewish Child and Family Service.
Her leisure activities included playing mahjong with friends and enjoying – with Nathan – the ballet and the symphony. There were also all the holiday gatherings with the extended family and summers spent at the family cottage in Gimli.
In the mid-1980s, Lil and Nathan sold their Garden City home and moved to a condo on Cambridge in the south end. After Nathan’s sudden passing in 2003, Lil continued living at Cambridge Towers until three years ago when her declining physical health required her to move into assisted living at the Shaftesbury.
While Lil Duboff suffers from many of the complaints of old age, such as limited eyesight and hearing, and other health issues, she retains a clear and positive frame of mind. She appreciates that her children all still live in Winnipeg and visit frequently. She happily reports that she also has five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
“It’s different living here (at the Shaftesbury),” she observes. “I don’t see as many people as I used to. But I am accepting my limitations and take life one day at a time. You never know what tomorrow might bring.”
Features
The First Time: A Memoir
By DAVID R. TOPPER Nearly every life has a series of “first times,” no matter how long or short one lives. The first day of school, or the first bicycle – these quickly come to mind. Probably because of the deep and wide reading I’ve been doing for a story I wrote, I recalled another “first” in my life. It came to me with the same chill up my spine as on the day it happened. And that was long ago.
I’m now into my early 80s and this event is from the late 1960s when I was finishing my PhD, which required that I pass a second language test. It was the last essential test, since I was finishing up my dissertation. In the early 1960s, as an undergraduate, I had taken German for the language requirement and naturally I opted for German for the graduate requirement too. Relevant here is the fact that of all the undergraduate courses I took, the only subject for which I had poor grades was – you guessed it? – German, where I got less than As and Bs.
On the day appointed, I walked across campus to the German department and took the test. The task was to translate a page of text. I can’t recall the content or anything about it. But the result was sent to me and – I suppose not surprisingly – I didn’t pass. I was informed that I could make an appointment with a member of the department to go over the test and to get some tutoring to help me prepare for another try.
But where is the “first in my life” that this memoir is all about? As said above, I only recently recalled this “first.” The trigger was a newscast that Yale University professor Timothy Snyder was moving to the University of Toronto because of the recent presidential elections in the USA. This caught my attention because his monumental book, Black Earth, on the Holocaust in the shtetls of Eastern Europe during World War II, was so crucial to that story I wrote. Thus, my subconscious kicked in and that newscast led me back to when I met the tutor.
Frankly, I don’t remember much about that day. Not the time of year, or the weather. Except that I again walked across campus, this time to meet my German tutor. Even so, I only remember three things about the tutor – beyond the fact that it was woman. She was much older than me and she spoke with a thick accent.
We sat at a table, she to my left, and in front of us on the table was my translation sheet covered with corrections in red; the original German text was beside it, to the right. Slowly she went over my translation, pointing out my mistakes. I sat, focusing on what I did wrong and listening to her suggestions for what I should have done – when, for a brief moment, she reached across my sheet to point to a German word in the original text. With her left hand and her bare arm right in front of me – I saw something on the underside of that arm.
At the time, I knew about this. I had read about it. But back in the late 1960s I had never seen it for real – in the flesh. Really. Yes, “in the flesh” isn’t a metaphor. Indeed, I’m getting the same chill now just thinking about it, as I did when I saw it – for the first time.
On the inside of that arm, she had a tattoo – a very simple tattoo – just a five-digit number. Nothing else.
I was so rattled by this that I couldn’t focus on what she was saying anymore. The tattoo blurred out much of everything else for the rest of the day.
Fortunately, this happened near the end of our meeting, and I apparently absorbed enough of her help so that when I did take the test the second time – I passed. And here I am: a retired professor after many years of teaching.
Even today, that first tattoo is still seared in my mind. Oh, and that’s the third thing I’ll always remember about the tutor who helped me pass that key test on the road to my PhD.
Features
Japanese Straightening/Hair Rebonding at SETS on Corydon
Japanese Straightening is a hair straightening process invented in Japan that has swept America.
