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. But as Soviet and Allied troops closed in on the camps, local Nazi commanders-anxious about the possible consequences of outright murder-decided to leave the remaining prisoners to die in droves rather than sending them directly to the gas chambers.