Treblinka: Chil Rajchman's story

After recently rediscovering the Finnish libraries' vast book collections, I used particular search words to find books to read. Chil Rajchman's name came up, the title of the book liberally translated is ”The last Jew of Treblinka”.

I have to admit, I didn't know where Treblinka is. A lot of Ukrainian guards are mentioned, so I would have guessed somewhere there. But according to Google Maps, it is located somewhat East of Warsaw, Poland. A remote, forgotten piece of unfruitful land that Himmler decided to turn into a factory of death. The earth there was literally spitting up blood, as it could not absorb all the bodies buried in mass graves.

This map screenshot is courtesy of Google Maps.

Chil Rajchman's memoirs from this extermination camp is another book written in blunt, honest, straight-to-the-point way. Chil was born in 1914 in Poland. His mother died just before the war, and the only one of his family, in addition to himself, to survive the war was his brother, who managed to escape to the Soviet side of Poland. What happened to his father or youngest sister will never be known. Another sister was dead after 24 hours of her arriving together with Chil at Treblinka in 1942.

Like Shlomo Venezia (whom I wrote about previously), Chil was chosen out of thousands of men arriving at the camp and put to work. Again, to strip and dispose of the bodies. First, he sorted out the luggage and clothes left behind by those who were gassed to immediate death. He found among the mountains of clothes his sister's dress, and cut off a piece of it to keep with him until it all was over. Then he was a barber, cutting off women's hair before they entered the chambers. Then he was moved to carrying bodies once the doors of a gas chamber were opened and a mass of human corpses melted together rolled out. Afterwards, he worked as a dentist, pulling out golden teeth out of the corpses' mouths. Bodies needed to be burnt in open bonfires, so no evidence would be left behind.

This was the routine at the Treblinka camp. It was purely for the purpose of killing. No one transported there came there to stay, but were marched off to death immediately. The guards were called murderers, and at its worst, the trains carried 15 000 Jews there daily. Estimates between killed people at this site range from 700 000 to 900 000. An incomprehensible number. It is like sweeping out the whole capital region of Finland in a matter of a couple of years.

How did Chil manage to escape? Inspired by the riots in Warsaw, the men at Treblinka arranged their own riot. Most were killed during this brave attempt, but a handful survived – Chil among them.

After the war, Chil moved to Uruguay, married and had three sons. Until his death his memoirs were not published but only read by family members. His wish was to let the world know what was done to Jews during those horrendous, dark years in European history. That's why I wanted to write about the book here, too.