Last Jew of Treblinka

Last Jew of Treblinka

Chil Rajchman

Chil Rajchman

From one of the lone survivors of the Treblinka concentration camp comes a devastating memoir of the Holocaust in the tradition of Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. Why did some live while so many others perished? Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls—in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all were equal. A central cog in the wheel of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution, the fires of Treblinka were kept burning night and day. Chil Rajchman was twenty-eight when he arrived at Treblinka in 1942. At the extermination camp, he was forced to work as a "barber," shaving the heads of victims, and a "dentist," pulling gold teeth from corpses. But he escaped eleven months later and survived to tell the shocking and heartbreaking tale of his experience—and of those who didn't make it out alive. Elie Wiesel calls The Last Jew of Treblinka "an important, heart-rending contribution to our search for...
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Treblinka

Treblinka

Chil Rajchman

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 For its description of unspeakably cruelty, Treblinka is a memoir that will not be superseded.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.
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