Book Review # 3

The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir by Chil Rajchman

This is a tiny book but important. As the years go by, more and more of those living voices that can attest to the holocaust die out. The only legacy they will leave will be the imprint left on the pages of books or on film. The horrors of the German camps of WWII are not as fresh in our memory as they might be. And though the records that are left to us can help, it is easy to feel that this will pass into the same dusty realm that is occupied by stories from WWI and the Civil War. This is not ancient history by any means, but the memory of man is so short and ever so ready to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

This is a memoir, a first person account, written by the author about his time in a death camp. If you are like me, you might have thought that all the camps in Germany were the same. They were not. There were two distinct types of camps: work camps which are better known as concentration camps that included Auschwitz and death camps which the subject of this book is one, Treblinka.   The distinction is fine but there. Work camps killed you because of the harsh conditions, lack of everything that can prolong life like food, clothing, medical care, and adequate shelter. Plus, the inmates were often subjected to extremely brutal treatment by the guards and could be murdered with impunity for sport. In these camps, death was an afterthought once they got what they wanted out of you and the camps themselves started life as regular detention facilities that were converted to the other purpose. In the death camps, death was the main event. They sent people there to die, they were built to kill you, and that was their only intention.  Let me say this again, the death camps were purpose built with the sole intention of killing as many men, women, and children as possible in the most efficient method possible, it was killing on an industrial scale. Really think about the horror of that and why it is so imperative that it never be forgotten.

Treblinka was complete in June of 1942 and by the time of its Liberation nearly 800,000 people had passed through its gates and taken the “road to heaven” never to be seen or heard from again. Chil managed to survive by being chosen at the time of his arrival to be a Sonderkommando, while he watched his entire family marched off to their doom. These were Jews whose services were needed by the Nazis to help them do the work of killing. Most didn’t last long; they died from physical abuse, starvation, or suicide. Their jobs consisted of sorting through the belongings of the dead, pulling teeth, shaving hair, pulling the corpses out of the gas chamber, only later being forced to disinter the rotting bodies so they could be burnt in a frantic and doomed effort to hide what they were doing as the war drew to a close and the Nazis faced the reality that defeat was inevitable.

The experiences related in this book are horrific, but they are written without emotion, as if what he lived through burned the emotion out of him. He can remember with perfect clarity what happened but is unable to really share how he was feeling. Sometimes his endless litany of death, beatings, and despair is like reading a laundry list but still retains the surely nightmarish quality of what was happening to him. If anyone has seen the wonderful movie Europa, Europa and the amazing story of Solomon Perel and found it almost unbelievable that so much could happen to one man, this story has the same feel. Not only was he chosen for labor when so many others weren’t, he managed to last for a year in the camp when most died within weeks, only to participate in one of the only documented Jewish uprisings when the camp worker’s revolted, managed to escape, live for a time with a compassionate family, before making it to safety in Warsaw against all the odds, where he is helped by friends until the end of the war.

This memoir is important because of its rarity. Unlike the concentration camps, where there is much more documentation due to the higher survival rate, the death camps were very effective in getting rid of anyone who could bear witness to what happened there. Mr. Rajchman’s is one of these lonely voices. He relates his experiences in a stark manner, it is not his words that make the impression, it is the story he is telling. The dichotomy of this tale and the world at this time are still very hard for me to comprehend. Even with the glittery sophistication of Germany and Berlin, in a world not that much different from our own, that these atrocities were happening is frightening. I also think that the Germans were vilified while we forget that during the war the Japanese were doing many of the same things and yet they don’t carry near the stigma nor have they ever really apologized, admitted wrong doing, or paid restitution. The Chinese especially were subject to brutality equal to that of their Aryan allies treatment of the Jews. This included systematic racial purging, mass rapes, and human experimentation. Beside the infamous Rape of Nanking, there is a pseudo-documentary that came up on Netflix called Unit 731. I had never heard of this, Google it, because these people deserve to be remembered too. I don’t think I’ll ever be brave enough to watch it though.

This book was published posthumously as the author died in 2004 after living a long and fulfilling life in Uruguay, running a successful business, and raising 3 sons. Although, he wrote this originally in Yiddish not long after the events, and he testified in several war criminal trials, his words were forgotten for many years except for a select few. Published now in this lovely little book, it should be required reading. As I said at the beginning, the book is small at only 138 pages and includes some pictures.   

By the end of the week I will comment on the final book. It is a new topic that I have kind of fallen into and cannot wait to learn more about. I end this post with a Happy Birthday wish to an absent and far away friend.