An Evening Honoring Paul Olchváry

Note: Due to the author’s recent passing, Jenny Gitlitz, a close friend of the author, will be presenting a PowerPoint that was prepared for this event.

Original Event: Join us for an evening with Paul Olchváry for a reading and discussion of his translation, Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz, at The Williams Bookstore. 

When veteran journalist, poet, and novelist József Debreczeni arrived in Auschwitz, he was “lucky” to be sent to a life of slave labor rather than directly to the gas chambers. He survived, and after the war wrote Cold Crematorium, which one reviewer called “the harshest, most merciless indictment of Nazism ever written.” 

The work was first published in Hungarian in 1950 but was never translated into a world language due to McCarthyism, Cold War hostilities, and antisemitism. Until now. In January 2024 it will be available in English, and within a year, in 15 languages around the world. 

Paul Olchváry has translated many books for leading publishers, including György Dragomán’s The White King, András Forgách’s No Live Files Remain, Ádám Bodor’s The Sinistra Zone, Vilmos Kondor’s Budapest Noir, and Károly Pap’s Azarel. He has received translation awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, and Hungary’s Milán Füst Foundation. His shorter translations have appeared in the Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, Tablet, AGNI, and Guernica. The publisher of New Europe Books and a full-time substitute teacher at Pine Cobble School, he lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.