The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir

by Chil Rajchman

I put my arm around my sister and try to get out of the car as quickly as possible. I leave everything behind. My poor sister asks me why I am leaving our baggage. I reply—It is not necessary … I don’t manage to say even a few more words to her before we hear a murderous shout—Men to the right, women to the left. I barely have time to kiss her and we are torn apart forever.

I tear off a piece of the dress and hide it in my pocket. (I had that piece of the dress with me for ten months, the whole time I was in Treblinka.)

An elderly woman sits down in front of me. I cut her hair and she begs me to grant her a last wish before her death: to cut her hair a bit more slowly, because after her, next to my friend, stands her young daughter, and she wants them to go to their deaths together. I try to oblige the woman and at the same time I ask my friend to speed up his cutting. I want to fulfill the last request of the elderly woman. But unfortunately the murderer screams at me and whips my head. I have to hurry and cannot help the woman any more. She has to run without her daughter …

Before me sits a young woman. I cut her hair and she grabs my hand and begs me to remember that I too am a Jew. She knows that she is lost. But remember, she says, you see what is being done to us. That’s why my wish for you is that you will survive and take revenge for our innocent blood, which will never rest …

We finally begin to understand the whole catastrophe that takes place here, that this is a factory that swallows victims without stopping: yesterday twelve thousand, today fifteen thousand, and so on without end …

I fall asleep and dream of my honest, faithful mother, who died fifteen years ago. I was fifteen years old at the time. My mother weeps along with me over our fate. She died young. She was thirty-eight when she was torn from us and left us behind. To await such a death? Would it not have been better if the rest of us had not survived? How good it is that my mother did not live to be tortured, to experience a ghetto, poverty, hunger and at the end, Treblinka: to have her hair torn away, to be gassed, then tossed into a pit like tens of thousands of other dead people. I am happy that she did not live to experience that.

I notice that opposite me is dangling a man who has hanged himself. I point this out to my neighbor, but he waves dismissively and shows me that further along there are two more people hanging—That is nothing new here. Actually today there are fewer hanging than usual. He tells me that every day several bodies of hanged men are thrown out and nobody pays attention to such details. I look at the hanging bodies and envy them for being at rest.

Some of them are assigned to carry corpses and the rest are sent to the sand piles. I notice that the workers who have been here for several days try to avoid the work of carrying sand, because the Scharführer (platoon leader) of the sand workers, nicknamed “The White Man,” is a specialist in shooting. At roll call he often shows up by himself because he has shot his workers down to the last man.

From time to time it happens that carriers throw down their litters and jump into the deep well that stands near the death chambers and in that way end their accursed lives.

The “dentists” used to sit at their work under the direction of Dr. Zimmermann, who was a very decent human being. Germans used to come to him when they had some special business.

On days when the gentlemen would learn by telephone from the extermination headquarters in Lublin that no new transports would be arriving the next day, the murderers, out of sadism, would let the people stand stuffed into the gas chambers so that they would be asphyxiated. Once they stood like that for forty-eight hours and when the exterior doors were opened, a few people were still struggling and showing signs of life.

The blood of tens of thousands of victims, unable to rest, thrust itself upwards to the surface.

Treblinka is guarded by 144 Ukrainians and about a hundred SS men. They keep an eye on us like precious jewels. We are counted three times a day. But although every one of us is bruised and battered and every part of our bodies ache, not one of us dares to report himself sick. It often happens that the newly arrived workers don’t know that you must not be sick and must never report during roll call that you are ill. They are ordered to step out of line and undress on the spot. The murderers force them to do punishment exercises while naked, and then they are shot.

In Treblinka you must not be sick. Many of us cannot endure it and commit suicide. That is an ordinary event here. Every morning we notice that there are people hanging in the barracks.

I recall a father and son who had been in this hell for two days. They decided to commit suicide. Having only one strap between them, they agreed that the father would hang himself first and after that the son would take him down and use the same strap to hang himself, and that was exactly how it happened. In the morning both were dead and...