Chil rajchman biography examples

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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 truth.” Poignant and powerful, this memoir provides the only survivors’ record of the horrifying Polish extermination camp.

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. However, the narrative repetition reveals also that such stories were retold routinely. Rajchman misidentified Demjanjuk who apparently never served at Treblinka as the so-called Ivan the Terrible (Treblinka guard).

With the work-permit issued by the Judenrat on German orders, Rajchman went to live and work in Ostrów Lubelski. He went to the United States to testify against John Demjanjuk who was later extradited to Jerusalem for a war trial in 1987–88. When I first heard about this creature – supposedly human, supposedly born of a woman – I could not believe the unthinkable things I was told.

He stayed there till late 1946, but soon emigrated to France with his new wife and then relocated to Uruguay. This unique testimony, which has remained in the sole possession of his family ever since, has never before been published in English. After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, he and his sister joined the family in Pruszków, a small town in central Poland.

He returned to Warsaw and lived there until 1944 under false "Aryan" identification papers issued by the Polish underground. Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.

But when I heard these stories repeated by eyewitnesses, when I realized that these witnesses saw them as mere details, entirely in keeping with everything else about the hellish regime of Treblinka, then I came to believe that what I had heard was true".

Rajchman's description of a physically unlikely method of killing a living human through tearing-by-hand originated from the 1944 memoir of his friend and Treblinka revolt survivor Jankiel Wiernik, where the phrase to "tear the child in half" appeared for the first time.

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. During this time he joined the Polish Socialist Party and the underground resistance. For its description of unspeakably cruelty, Treblinka is a memoir that will not be superseded.

Rajchman died in 2004 in Montevideo, Uruguay.

It was not until 2009 that Rajchman's Treblinka memoir, written in Yiddish while in Warsaw in 1944–45, was first published in France by Les Arènes under the title Je suis le dernier Juif. Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls—in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all were equal.

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.