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Treblinka: A Survivor's Memory

Chil Rajchman,

Vasily Grossman (Contributor)

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Aug 22, 2012 Oana rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Like all Holocaust books, at one point the story becomes absurd, as if a surrealist wrote it. After all, how can a human being come up with tortures - so unimaginable to most good-hearted people - and then execute their perverse fantasies? How can anyone sane think up 10,000-15,000 murders in a day? Or grinding up 800,000 people's bones to hide all evidence?

This book especially sounds like de Sade's most notorious work - the Nazi obsession with numbers, the permission withheld for prisoners need Like all Holocaust books, at one point the story becomes absurd, as if a surrealist wrote it. After all, how can a human being come up with tortures - so unimaginable to most good-hearted people - and then execute their perverse fantasies? How can anyone sane think up 10,000-15,000 murders in a day? Or grinding up 800,000 people's bones to hide all evidence?

This book especially sounds like de Sade's most notorious work - the Nazi obsession with numbers, the permission withheld for prisoners needing to do number two, the grotesque tortures.

Raichman calls the Nazi camp masters for what they were: murderers, he never refers to them as Germans or Nazis. Thus this simply told book sounds like a fable, with stock figures acting out morals for us. The introduction mentions how Raichman starts his memoir with the train taking him and his sister to Treblinka, while others in the train try to delude themselves that they are going to the Ukraine for a life of mere farming. This abrupt start to the story eliminates all life before as this new hellish life takes over almost immediately when the train empties its poor inmates at the station.

Indeed the book is about grossly frustrated small favours, none of which are granted. An old woman begs to have her hair shorn more slowly so she can walk to the gas chamber with her daughter who has more hair and will take longer. In the winter, the pretty young women kept outside in freezing temperatures for the Nazis to gawk at, they beg to be allowed in the warmth of gas chamber sooner. At the end of a twelve-hour workday, the Nazis demand an hour of happy songs from their slaves before they can get some soup and rest.

One of the reasons I recommend this book and others like it, is to remember what happened and to remember the victims. It is also important to read these books in order to be constantly aware of human rights violations, to make oneself a better guard against one's own inclination to cruelty and racism. We Canadians and Americans think that this can't happen here, but we are exactly the same people as the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s. We are just as capable of this if we let ourselves be swept into a maelstrom of knee-jerk reactions. ...more

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