József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944; had he been selected to go left, his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the “lucky” ones, he was sent to the right, which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution. 

First published in Hungarian in 1950, it was never translated into a world language due to McCarthyism, Cold War hostilities and antisemitism.