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  The

  LAST JEW

  of

  TREBLINKA

  A Survivor’s Memory

  1942–1943

  CHIL RAJCHMAN

  Translated from the Yiddish by

  Solon Beinfeld

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  For all those to whom it was not possible to tell this tale.

  Andrés, Daniel, José Rajchman

  “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 have perished.”

  VASILY GROSSMAN

  The time had passed when each new day was bright,

  precious and unique: the future stood before us,

  grey amd shapeless, like an impenetrable barrier.

  For us, history had stopped.

  PRIMO LEVI

  MAP DRAWN BY VASILY GROSSMAN IN SEPTEMBER 1944 WHILE WRITING “THE HELL OF TREBLINKA”

  RAILWAY LINE “BATH HOUSE”

  BRANCH LINE CONSTRUCTED BY GERMANS GRILL

  BARBED-WIRE FENCE 6 METRES HIGH BARRACKS FOR 300 JEWISH WORKERS

  ROLL CALL SQUARE GRAVE PITS

  UNDRESSING ROAD

  WOMEN’S “HAIRDRESSERS” ARSENAL

  “ROAD OF NO RETURN” BARRACKS FOR GERMAN STORES

  LATRINE GUARD HOUSE. 1 GERMAN, 5 UKRAINIANS

  BARRACKS FOR JEWISH WORKERS, 700 MEN ADMINISTRATION BUILDING

  RECEPTION CAMP (LOWER CAMP) “UKRAINIANS’” BARRACKS

  CLOTHES STORE BAKERY, DOCTOR, DENTIST, BARBER FOR GERMANS

  SHOE STORE ZOO

  “DOCTOR’S HUT” BARBED-WIRE FENCE 3 METRES HIGH

  “LAZARET” BARBED WIRE, PINE BRANCHES, BLANKETS, 3 METRES HIGH

  LATRINE WATCH TOWER, GUARD WITH MACHINE GUN

  DEATH CAMP (UPPER CAMP) ANTI-TANK BARRIER

  THE BLACK ARROWS INDICATE THE PATH FOLLOWED BY A NEW TRANSPORT OF JEWS FROM ARRIVAL AT THE “STATION,” THROUGH

  THE UNDRESSING AREAS AND DOWN “THE ROAD OF NO RETURN” TO THE GAS CHAMBERS –

  AND THEN THE GRILLS ON WHICH THE CORPSES WERE BURNED.

  Preface

  BY SAMUEL MOYN

  IN MID-APRIL 1945, AMERICAN GIS LIBERATED Buchenwald, while British soldiers marched, horrified, into Bergen-Belsen. There they found scenes of unimaginable suffering, men of bones and skin somehow standing 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, and a picture of evil was set. And yet, Treblinka was absent from this picture.

  Chil Rajchman’s memoir of that place lay in Yiddish manuscript for decades, and the very name “Treblinka” became widely known only decades after war’s end. Yet Rajchman was witness to a very different reality, at a site that—unlike the concentration camps—Nazis had long since tried to wipe from the map. It was further east, in the territories the Red Army liberated, and where far more pitiless dynamics of killing were unleashed than the global audience of Belsen and Buchenwald could have imagined. The Nazi project of extermination reached its most terrible extremity in Treblinka and at the other industrial killing centers whose names were at first equally unfamiliar.

  These were places very different than the Western concentration camps, which became lethal only in the last months of a 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, after it chose the final solution of extermination. Unlike in the West, the victims in the east were dealt immediate extinction on arrival, and died as Jews targeted as Jews by the regime. Next to no one survived: compared to the scores of memoirs testifying to the concentration camps, which though terrible were generally not intended to kill, a paltry number could write of any experiences in the death camps. Only those few who, like Rajchman, were selected to operate the machinery of extinction in the Sonderkommando of the killing center, and not put to death themselves along the way or at the end, could tell what happened.

  Along with a handful of other documents, 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 best descriptions of the Nazi project of extermination at its most spare and deadly. Indeed, the era can be known in its true horror only thanks to texts like this one.

  IN CONTRAST TO THE WESTERN CONCENTRATION CAMPS, which originated before World War II for a variety of Adolf Hitler’s internal enemies—communists and criminals were their main residents until the war and indeed during much of it—the extermination camps of the east arose in the heat of conflict on the eastern front. In the second half of 1941 the process of exterminating the Jews slowly shifted. Dominated immediately after the German 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 the triumphs of the invasion of the east in Operation Barbarossa slowed and a lightning victory came to seem out of reach.

  Following Heinrich Himmler’s orders, the SS began by setting up Chełmno, in the Wartheland district of Greater Germany, and then Bełżec 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 fifty miles northeast of the city, on the Bug River, Treblinka was complete in June 1942. It became the centerpiece of “Operation Reinhard,” as the project of exterminating the Jews of the General Government came to be known, in honor of Reinhard Heydrich, a lieutenant of Himmler’s who was assassinated that spring. In the end, 1.3 million Jews were killed as part of this policy, nearly 800,000 of them at Treblinka, in not much more than a year.

  As if his destiny of living through so much death cuts him off from his prior existence, Rajchman tells nothing of his life before the “grim railway cars” 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 the USC Shoah Foundation Institute in 1994. Born Yechiel Meyer Rajchman—Chil for short—on June 14, 1914, in Łódź, he fled east with a sister as the Germans invaded in 1939. Two years later, when with the Soviet campaign the final solution began in earnest, Rajchman found himself in the vicinity of Lublin, from where he was deported to Treblinka in the roundups that were intended erase a millennial Jewish presence from the area.

  Arrival there means the immediate loss of his sister, along with all other
women and children: 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, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were shot, 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 SS, some more Ukrainian assistants, and the Jews themselves. Rajchman refers his killers, indiscriminately, as “murderers,” with only a few singled out by name or nickname, notably Kurt Franz, “the doll,” famous for his dog, his vanity, and his cruelty. Rajchman knows the cremation specialist summoned for his expertise, almost certainly Herbert Floss, 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, 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 and refined the process as time went on. As a worker, he moves from Treblinka 1 to Treblinka 2, sections of the killing center compartmentalized from each other by the gas chambers, to which arriving Jews are led along the Schlauch or corridor that the Germans euphemistically dubbed the “road to heaven.” Rajchman avoids that route somehow, and observes how man-made mass death is put into motion. If he knows on arrival what this place is—poignantly telling his sister not to bother with their bags on 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 labor, 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 the women he encounters clearly foresee, in one of the most affecting scenes Rajchman portrays in the narrative. Transferred to the secretive other zone of the camp, he carries bodies, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide generated from a diesel motor, often transformed beyond recognition, intertwined with one another, and repulsively swollen. Later, and for most of his time, Rajchman is made a so-called “dentist,” part of the crew 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 sought 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 over the tombs carefully, but—as if in a sickening act of posthumous resistance—the blood of the Jews is “unable to rest,” and “thrusts itself upwards to the surface.” After an era of crude and unsuccessful bonfires is initiated, the “artist” arrives and teaches them how to do it. The task is massive, as the formerly interred corpses have to be set aflame along with newly killed bodies, for a time in the hundreds of thousands per month. Women, Floss instructs, burn better; placed at the base, they are the torches that will consume the rest. But there are still fragments of bones that the Nazis make the Jews painstakingly collect, often thwarting their hopes of leaving some trace—anything—to be discovered by future generations 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 and, eventually, the extraordinary insurrection of August 2, 1943 germinate. From the day Rajchman arrives 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 as dangerous for their potential consequences. A cut face means certain death: the SS kill those with such visible wounds. Injury that interferes with helping the Nazis kill other Jews—the only reason Rajchman and others at Treblinka are allowed to live—is repaid by execution. He is fortunate that a fellow inmate can treat his suppurating gash with impromptu surgery before the guards see its severity. Throughout The Last Jew, the prose is factual, made 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 right away? 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 not many noticed. 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 labor and extermination, survived long enough to by liberated by the Soviets, who publicized their findings as assaults on humanity. Vasily Grossman, the brilliant Soviet Jewish writer, visited Treblinka after the Red Army arrived in summer 1944, and on the basis of few sources, drafted and published an exceptionally powerful description that fall. A number of survivors, including Rajchman, testified before a postwar Polish historical commission, and Rachel Auerbach synthesized what was known in Yiddish soon after (she later became a leading figure at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial).

  Yet even though it was easier to grasp them there compared to the West, the true purposes of the death camps were not helpful information in the Soviet Union, or in the lands of Eastern Europe where the Red Army finally put Hitler down. Even for Grossman, in 1944, the Jewish identity of Treblinka’s victims is clearly registered, but not emphasized. And by a year later, when in collaboration with Ilya Ehrenburg Grossman finished a Black Book detailing Nazi crimes against Jews, and sought to reincorporate his Treblinka essay, the Soviets could not accept the realities of predominantly Jewish victimhood. Though Grossman’s essay had circulated on its own (and had been translated into French), the plates of the Black Book were destroyed. Whether in the west, where Belsen and Buchenwald were so prominent, or the east, where it was “humanity” not Jewry above all that suffered, no one else could allow themselves to see what Rajchman and his fellow survivors of the Treblinka revolt did. What the Nazis did to Jews as Jews at these killing centers—exterminate them in millions on arrival—did not easily serve existing agendas at the time.

  Having been constructed as a concentration camp in 1940, Auschwitz, west of the General Government, surged as a death facility as Treblinka had done its work. It killed mainly Jews and others from beyond Poland, including Hungarian Jewry in a paroxysm in 1944; but because its main components interned many sorts of people, and many Jews as workers, its survivors were by an enormous measure witnesses to a western-style concentration experience rather than an eastern-style death factory. By many of its more than 100,000 survivors (many of whom were not Jews), in immediate Soviet publicity, and even at the Nuremberg trials, Auschwitz was presented as a concentration camp. Its Birkenau site, a Treblinka but one confusingly embedded in a universe of internment and labor, was given shorter shrift 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, including a moving portrait of flight in the countryside, in which the human kindness and unconscionable collaboration of local Polish peasants are both on display. He barely mentions it, but Rajchman lived through the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis, and ultimately—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. After some obvious additions after wartime to this crucial documentation (certainly the final few paragraphs), and possible revisions, a friend of Rajchman’s family 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 and that his memoir has bel
atedly appeared is a gift, but it is a bleak and discomfiting testament, not a redemptive and uplifting one. 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 did not offer lessons: the memoir’s insights seem to be for a posterity that still does not know where they should lead.

  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, its list of abominations seems to offer too many faces of evil to decide easily what was most atrocious in this place and time.

  But 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 the 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.

  The

  LAST JEW

  of

  TREBLINKA

  Chapter One

  In sealed railway cars to

  an unknown destination.

  THE GRIM RAILWAY CARS CARRY ME THERE, TO THAT place. They transport 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.