Treblinka Read online

  Treblinka

  Chil Rajchman

  Chil Rajchman, a Polish Jew, was arrested with his younger sister in 1942 and sent to Treblinka, a death camp where more than 750,000 were murdered before it was abandoned by German soldiers. His sister was sent to the gas chambers, but Rajchman escaped execution, working for ten months under incessant threats and beatings as a barber, a clothes-sorter, a corpse-carrier, a puller of teeth from those same bodies. In August 1943, there was an uprising at the camp, and Rajchman was among the handful of men who managed to escape. In 1945, he set down this account, a plain, unembellished and exact record of the raw horror he endured every day. This unique testimony, which has remained in the sole possession of his family ever since, has never before been published in English. For its description of unspeakably cruelty, Treblinka is a memoir that will not be superseded.

  In addition to Rajchman’s account, this volume will include the complete text of Vasily Grossman’s “The Hell of Treblinka”, one of the first descriptions of a Nazi extermination camp; a powerful and harrowing piece of journalism written only weeks after the camp was dissolved.

  Chil Rajchman

  TREBLINKA

  A Survivor’s Memory

  1942–1943

  Translated from the Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld

  It is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one’s eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who perished.

  Vasily Grossman

  The time had passed when each new day was bright, precious and unique: the future stood before us, grey and shapeless, like an impenetrable barrier.

  For us, history had stopped.

  Primo Levi

  TREBLINKA

  PREFACE

  In mid-April 1945, American G.I.s liberated Buchenwald, while British soldiers marched, horrified, into Bergen-Belsen. There they found scenes of unimaginable suffering, men of bones and skin standing somehow on spindly legs amidst piles of emaciated corpses. Celebrated journalists documented what must have seemed the nether pole of human depravity, the worst an inhuman regime could achieve. Even as thousands of typhus-stricken survivors died, witnesses to a liberation that came too late for them, Margaret Bourke-White took chilling photographs that captured the consequences of the Nazi designs. A picture of evil was set, but Treblinka was absent from it.

  Chil Rajchman’s memoir of that place lay in Yiddish manuscript for decades, and the very name “Treblinka” became widely known only many years after the war’s end. Yet Rajchman was witness to a very different reality, at a site the Nazis had wanted desperately to wipe from the map. It was further east, in the territories liberated by the Red Army, where far more pitiless dynamics of killing were unleashed than those that came to light at Belsen and Buchenwald. The Nazi project of extermination reached its most terrible extremity in Treblinka, and at other industrial killing centres whose names were similarly unknown.

  These were places very different from the western concentration camps, which became lethal only in the last months of the war, as a failed regime lost its ability to feed its prisoners. In the eastern killing facilities, by contrast, the Nazi state did what it set out to do once it had chosen the final solution of gassing.

  Unlike in the west, in the east the victims were dealt immediate execution on arrival, and died as Jews targeted by the regime.

  Next to no-one survived: compared to the scores of memoirs testifying to the concentrations camps which, though terrible, were generally not intended to kill, only a paltry number could write of their experiences in the death camps. Just those few who, like Rajchman, were selected to operate the machinery of extermination in the Sonderkommando of the killing centre, and who were not put to death themselves along the way, could tell of what happened.

  Rajchman’s astonishing memoir — drafted mostly in hiding before the Soviets reached Warsaw, where he had fled after his unlikely survival and escape — is one of the most explicit descriptions of the Nazi project of extermination at its most spare and deadly. Indeed, the era can be known for its true horror thanks only to a handful of texts like this one.

  * * *

  In contrast to the western concentration camps, which were established before World War II for Adolf Hitler’s various internal enemies (communists and criminals were their main residents until the war, and indeed during much of it), the extermination camps of the east appeared in the heat of conflict on the eastern front. In the second half of 1941 the process of exterminating the Jews gradually shifted. Dominated immediately after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union by mass shootings beyond the Molotov–Ribbentrop line, it now turned into a policy of constructing death factories behind it, as incursions in the east in Operation Barbarossa slowed and a lightning victory came to seem out of reach.

  Following Heinrich Himmler’s orders, the S.S. began by setting up Che łmno, in the Wartheland district of Greater Germany, and then Bełz·ec and Sobibór across the border in the “General Government”, as the Nazis called their new colony made up of former Polish territories. Then Himmler ordered the erection of a new site, closer to Warsaw, also part of the General Government and its largest city. Situated some ninety kilometres northeast of the city on the Bug river, Treblinka was completed in June 1942. It became the centrepiece of “Operation Reinhard”, as the project of exterminating the Jews of the General Government came to be known (in honour of Reinhard Heydrich, a lieutenant of Himmler’s who had been assassinated that spring). In the end, 1.3 million Jews were killed as part of the operation — nearly 800,000 of them at Treblinka itself — in not much more than a year.

  As if his destiny of living through so much death cuts him off from his previous existence, Rajchman tells nothing of his life before the “grim freight waggons” bear him to this place in the memoir’s opening lines. But more information is available in testimonies he later recorded for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1988, and for the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation Institute in 1994. Born Yekhiel Meyer Rajchman — Chil for short — on 14 June, 1914, in L⁄ódź, he fled east with a sister as the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. When the final solution began in earnest with the Soviet campaign two years later, Rajchman found himself in the vicinity of Lublin, from where he was deported to Treblinka in the round-ups intended to erase a millennial Jewish presence from the area.

  Arrival at Treblinka meant the immediate loss of his sister, along with all the other women and children with whom he travelled there. The only work for which selection is possible at a death camp is for the handful of men needed to run the camp itself. Across the Molotov–Ribbentrop line, mobile killing units took on the job of extermination; at Treblinka, as at the other death facilities, the logistics of destruction called for only a few dozen S.S., some assistants (mostly Ukrainian) and the Jews themselves. Rajchman refers to his killers indiscriminately as “murderers”, with only a few singled out by name or nickname, notably Kurt Franz, “the doll”, notorious for his dog, his vanity and his cruelty. Rajchman knows the cremation specialist (almost certainly Herbert Floss) summoned for his expertise simply as “the artist”. And in passing he mentions Ivan, dubbed “the terrible”, a sadistic brute whom Rajchman later believed he recognized in Ivan Demjanjuk, and at whose American trial he testified.

  * * *

  Rajchman’s memoir is above all else an incisive depiction of how the Nazis organized the destruction of millions of human beings and, indeed, reorganized it as time went on. As a worker he moves from Treblinka 1 to Treblinka 2, sections of the killing centre compartmentalized from each other by the gas chambers, to which arriving Jews are led along the Schlauch, the corridor the Germans euphemistically dubbed the “road to heaven”. Rajchman avoids t
hat route somehow, and observes how man-made mass death is implemented. If he knows on arrival what this place is — poignantly telling his sister not to bother taking their bags from the train — he learns the details of its “professional” evil only through harsh experience.

  In brief, succeeding chapters, Rajchman tells of the infernal division of labour, through which the steps in the process of extermination are carefully apportioned, and whose shifting roles allow him to survive. He begins as a barber, shearing women’s hair prior to their gassing, a fate many of them clearly foresee in one of Rajchman’s most affecting passages. Transferred to the secretive, other zone of the camp, he carries bodies, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide generated from a diesel motor and often transformed beyond recognition, intertwined with one another, and repulsively swollen. Later, and for most of his time there, Rajchman is made a so-called “dentist”, part of a group of Jews charged with extracting gold from the teeth of corpses and searching the bodies for hidden valuables.

  If the work evolves as Polish Jewry meets its end, it is because the Nazis seek a way to eliminate the evidence of their deeds. They order thousands of corpses dug up for burning after a policy change alters the method of disposal from burial to cremation. In the early days, the Jews are told to layer sand carefully over the tombs, but — as if in a sickening act of posthumous resistance — the blood of the Jews is “unable to rest”, and “thrust[s] itself upwards to the surface”. After an era of crude and unsuccessful bonfires, the “artist” arrives and teaches them how to do it. The task is massive, as the formerly interred corpses have to be aflame along with newly killed bodies, hundreds of thousands of them per month for a time. Women burn more easily; placed at the base, they are the torches that will consume the rest. But there are still fragments of bones that the Nazis force the Jews to collect, painstakingly, often thwarting their hopes of leaving some trace — anything — to be discovered of this infamy.

  Inside the camp, a tenuous solidarity rules, even as the unbearable circumstances push many Sonderkommando members to suicide. For others, plans for escape germinate, leading eventually to the extraordinary insurrection of 2 August, 1943. From the day Rajchman arrives at Treblinka to the fateful day he revolts and escapes, physical depredations are omnipresent. Hunger is constant, and illness a frightening threat. The beatings and whippings Rajchman and others repeatedly suffer are understood to be dangerous on account of their potential consequences. A wounded face means certain death. Injury is repaid by execution, and Rajchman is fortunate that a fellow Jew can treat his suppurat-ing cut with impromptu surgery. Throughout, the prose of this memoir is factual, and all the more devastating for its exquisitely controlled rage at the crimes he is describing. By the end, his anger has already crystallized in resistance and flight for the sake of life and memory.

  * * *

  Would it have made a difference had Rajchman’s memories come to light immediately after the events they describe? Perhaps not.

  Yankel Wiernik, whom Rajchman mentions, published his story of a year in Treblinka in Polish in 1944; it was translated into a number of other languages thereafter, but did not attract much attention. Other memoirists, notably Richard Glazar and Shmuel Willenberg, eventually published their testimonies. Their grim tasks mostly accomplished, the death camps — including Treblinka — were razed; only Majdanek, which like Auschwitz combined labour and extermination, survived long enough to be liberated by the Soviets, who publicized their findings as assaults on humanity. The brilliant Soviet-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman visited Treblinka after the arrival of the Red Army in summer 1944, and on the basis of few sources drafted and published that same autumn an exceptionally powerful description of the camp. Reproduced in this volume as a complement to Rajchman’s memoir, Grossman’s report is a masterpiece of investigation, a damning indictment of the inhumanity that he knew had occurred, no matter how fervently the Nazis had hoped they could suppress all evidence of it as they departed. Given the scattering of Treblinka’s tiny number of survivors, Grossman’s extraordinary reconstruction showed how difficult it would be to gain reliable information about the site — but also that it would be possible to grasp this nether pole of human evil.

  The Soviets who conquered these lands were therefore better positioned than Westerners to grasp the true nature of the death camps. Yet the disproportionate victimhood of Jews was not ideologically useful from the perspective of Moscow, or in the other capitals of Eastern Europe where the Red Army finally defeated Hitler. From the perspective of official antifascism, “humanity” had suffered, not one group within it more than the rest. In 1944 Grossman clearly registered the Jewish identity of Treblinka’s victims, but he did not emphasize it. A number of survivors, including Rajchman, testified before a post-war Polish historical commission, and soon afterwards Rachel Auerbach synthesized in Yiddish what was known. (Auerbach later became a leading figure at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial.) Yet a year later, when Grossman, in collaboration with Ilya Ehrenburg, finished a Black Book detailing Nazi crimes against Jews and sought to rein-corporate his Treblinka essay, the Soviets could not accept that the victims had been predominantly Jewish. Though Grossman’s essay had already been circulated elsewhere (and had been translated into a number of languages), the plates of the Black Book were destroyed. Whether in the west, where Belsen and Buchenwald were so prominent, or in the east, no-one else could allow themselves to see what Rajchman and his fellow survivors of the Treblinka revolt did.

  Having been constructed as a concentration camp in 1940, Auschwitz, to the west of the General Government, surged as a death facility after Treblinka had done its work. Those who were killed there were mainly Jews and others from beyond Poland, including Hungarian Jewry in a paroxysm in 1944, but because many sorts of people were interned there, and many Jews as workers, its survivors were by an enormous measure witness to a western-style internment rather than an eastern-style death factory. Many of its more than 100,000 survivors (a large number of whom were not Jews) presented Auschwitz as a concentration camp in immediate Soviet publicity, and even at the Nuremberg trials. The atrocities that took place at its Birkenau site — a death facility like Treblinka, but confusingly embedded in a universe of internment and labour — were neglected for a long time. The death camps became known only later, as the wheels of justice began to grind, and Holocaust memory coalesced decades after the fact.

  * * *

  Rajchman’s escape leads only to new travails. There is a moving portrait of flight through the countryside, in which human kind-ness and the unconscionable collaboration of local Polish peasants are both evident. He barely mentions it, but Rajchman lived through the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis, and ulti-mately — after the Soviet liberation of the city in January 1945 — migrated to Uruguay, where he lived a productive life in the business world and had three sons. It appears that some additions were made to this crucial documentation after the war (certainly the final few paragraphs), and some other revisions may have taken place. A friend of Rajchman’s family then agitated for its publication. As fate would have it, this work is posthumous: Rajchman died in 2004.

  That Rajchman bore witness to Treblinka’s horrors, that his memoir has belatedly appeared, is a gift, but one which is bleak and discomfiting, not redemptive and uplifting. Even the Treblinka revolt, often treated as an uncomplicated triumph of the human spirit, is narrated by this participant in tones that are far from straightforwardly heroic. Rajchman bore witness, but he did not offer lessons: the memoir’s insights seem to be for a posterity that still does not know how to respond to this past.

  Through the unprecedented landscape of his text, Rajchman’s proofs of how far beyond the boundaries of the imaginable humans can go in their treatment of one another are piled more obscenely than the mountains of corpses the Nazis put to the torch. In the end, the list of abominations seems to offer too many faces of evil for its readers to decide what was most atrocious in this place and time.

  Bu
t my choice, I think, is Rajchman’s disturbing reflection — offered in passing, but all the more upsetting for that reason — that it was better for him to lose his mother when he was a child than for her to live long enough to descend into a hell she would never have escaped. It is a dismal testament to their destruction of the ordinary moral world that the Nazis could make one of the worst imaginable events of any life seem like it had been a fortunate event.

  Samuel Moyn

  1

  In sealed railway freight waggons to an unknown destination.

  The grim freight waggons transport me there, to that place. They are transporting from all directions: from east and west, from north and south. By day and by night. In all seasons of the year people are brought there: spring and summer, autumn and winter.

  The transports travel there without hindrance and without limit, and Treblinka grows richer in blood day by day. The more people who are brought there, the more Treblinka is able to receive them.

  I, like all the others, do not know where and for what reason we are travelling. Nevertheless we try, insofar as possible, to find out something about our journey. The Ukrainian robbers who guard us will not do us the favour of replying. The only thing we hear from them is: — Hand over gold, hand over money and valuables! These criminals visit us constantly. Almost every hour another one of them terrorizes us. They beat us mercilessly with their rifle butts, and each of us tries as best he can to shut the murderers up with a few zlotys in order to avoid their blows. That is what our journey is like.

  We travel from Lubartów station, some 20 kilometres from Lublin. I travel with my pretty young sister Rivka, nineteen years old, and a good friend of mine, Wolf Ber Rojzman, and his wife and two children. Almost all those in the freight waggon are my close acquaintances, from the same small town, Ostrów Lubelski.