Chil Rajchman - Treblinka

Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War , ed. and trans. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (London: Pimlico, 2005) Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon, 1985)

Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London: André Deutsch, 1974; reissued Pimlico, 1995) Yankel Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka: An Inmate Who Escaped Tells the Day-to-Day Facts of His Tortuous Experience (New York: American Representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland, 1945)

Samuel Willenberg, Surviving Treblinka , trans. Naftali Greenwood (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989)

Histories of the Final Solution and Operation Reinhard Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews , 2 vols (New York: HarperCollins, 1997, 2007)

Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews , third ed., 3 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 183

Chil Rajchman was born in Lodz in Poland, and was an active member of his Jewish community. After the Treblinka trials he emigrated to Uruguay, where he died in 2004. Solon Beinfeld taught Modern European and Jewish History at Washington University in St. Louis and he has written and consulted extensively on the Holocaust. He is currently editing a new Yiddish-English dictionary.

‘In its poignant simplicity, Rajchman’s account opens new horizons in our perception of evil… An important, heart-rending contribution to our the search for truth.’

‘Rajchman’s searing story… has a powerful authenticity and should not be forgotten. A Holocaust testament of heart-rending immediacy.’

‘An incomparable testimony of the Nazi extermination machine… written with extraordinary narrative power.’

‘His 96-page memoir, translated from the original Yiddish, has a powerful immediacy.’

‘Rajchman writes vigorously… this is an important book that deserves a prominent place in Holocaust literature.’

‘Written in the present tense it has a vivid immediacy and starkness about it that no historical book is able to achieve.’

‘His unadorned prose takes us to a place unlike any other in human history, at the extreme limits of human endurance and understanding.’

‘As tense as any thriller the writer’s duty is to tell the truth; the reader’s duty is to learn from it.’

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by MacLehose Press

an imprint of Quercus

21 Bloomsbury Square

London WC1A 2NS

Copyright © Les Arènes, Paris, 2009

English translation copyright © 2011 by Solon Beinfeld

Preface © 2011 by Samuel Moyn

“The Hell of Treblinka” by Vasily Grossman © Yekaterina Vasilyevna Korotkova-Grossman and Fyodor Borisovich Guber, 2010

English translation copyright © 2010 by Robert Chandler

Map of Treblinka on half-title sketched by Vasily Grossman in September 1944, reprinted by kind permission of Yekaterina Vasilyevna Korotkova-Grossman and Fyodor Borisovich Guber; map on p.115 redrawn and clarified by Emily Faccini, with a legend translated by Robert Chandler.

The moral right of Chil Rajchman and Vasily Grossman to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

The translators assert their moral right to be identified as the translators of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB) 978 1 906694 20 3

ISBN (TPB) 978 1 906694 21 0

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed and typeset in Quadraat by Libanus Press, Marlborough Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc For all those to whom it was not possible to tell this tale — Andrés, Daniel, José Rajchman.

Bełżec and Auschwitz: The Dictionnaire de la Shoah gives an estimate of 900,000 deaths. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. 408) gives a figure of 780,863 for the total number of Jews murdered at Treblinka. This is taken from a study by Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas [“A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhard’ 1942”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies , vol. 15, no. 3, 2001, pp. 468–86].

Hershl Polyanker, a lesser-known Soviet journalist, gives the same mistaken estimate of three million deaths in an article written, like Grossman’s, in September 1944. His “Treblinka — Hell on Earth”, probably originally written in Yiddish, was translated into Spanish and sent by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to newspapers in Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay [G.A.R.F., fond 8114 (Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee), opis’ 1, delo 346, pp. 162–72].