A postcard from hell

As this was happening the next train was arriving. And further down the track, the next. And they came from all over Europe. By the spring of 1942 virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland, Germany and Belorussia had been hunted into ghettoes. Once coralled they were easily rounded up for the trains. Rajchman was from northern Poland. A few cities and towns illustrate the scale of it — Warsaw, Radom, Czestochowa, Lublin, Bialystok, Grodno, and thousands of others. A vast network of trains around Europe focused in on the concentration camps — a ghastly airline map in reverse.

But Treblinka was a special place. As horrendous as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and the rest were, Treblinka was far, far worse. The former were concentration camps (konzentrationslager), designed to imprison, humiliate — and to starve and murder as many people as they pleased. Treblinka was a vernichtungslager — an extermination camp. It was built specifically to destroy human life, Jewish life, in its entirety. Had it gone on, longer than the 13 months it lasted, it would undoubtedly have achieved its aims.

Rajchman is initially arrested along with his 19-year-old sister. They aren’t sure where they are being taken. There are rumours of a resettlement camp in the Ukraine. When they are crammed into the carriages they get the first sense of horror. A dreadful journey is ended when the train clunks into Treblinka. It doesn’t look too bad. A little railway station, rows of buildings, trees.

Straight away SS officers scream at the men and women to divide. And his sister is torn from him. He barely has time to kiss her. She is dust within an hour. Then the men divide. The weak and the not so weak.

Rajchman did everything in his power to stay alive. The SS looked for volunteer barbers. He had never cut a hair in his life. He became a barber. He describes beautiful young women whose hair he had to shave off before they were sent to the gas chamber. The SS looked for dentists. He volunteered. They had to extract gold teeth from corpses. They filled buckets with them, often with bits of flesh attached.

All the while, trains arrived and people were gassed. A train of beautiful young Jews from Bulgaria arrived. All gassed or burned alive. Disease, beatings, were his daily diet. A crust of bread in the pocket of a murdered victim. A Hebrew prayer on a scrap of paper in another. These morsels of civilisation kept him alive.

Rajchman’s inner life survival mechanism included, unbelievably, humour. It was “another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation”, he says.

Finally, an uprising broke out. Around 200 SS, German and Ukrainians were killed. Only a few escaped. Rajchman was among them as his friends were machine-gunned to death. A group of 24 fled to the forest. They decided to split in two as the group was too large. In minutes the other group is found and wiped out. He suggests making a break for Warsaw — the surviving group dissents. He goes it alone. He hears gunfire from back along the road. all the second group murdered, presumably. He hides in a haystack for 36 hours. He gets to Warsaw and survives the siege which lasted four months. An amazing story in itself.

In an attempt to hold on to his mind Rajchman quotes the German philosopher Gotthold Lessing: “There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.” The mind dealt with the unfolding horror in its own way. Horror was the first stage. Apathy was the second stage. If you reached that stage you were certainly dead.

In the second part of Treblinka there is a lengthy piece of reportage by Vasily Grossman — The Hell of Treblinka. In it he exhorts humanity to bear witness to these events — still frighteningly close to our own lives. Not distant genocide a la Genghis Khan shrouded in the mists of time: “It is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one’s eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished. to learn it.”

We have many accounts of concentration camp survival, some from literary giants (Primo Levi’s If This is a Man); Romanian poet Paul Celan distorted his syntax as a metaphor for the inconceivable. The poet Sylvia Plath, regarded even the German language as a “barbed-wire language”. Ultimately, language must attempt to describe such events, however horrific. Reading too, must play a part.

Rajchman is dead, though he lived a long life, only passing away in Uruguay in 2004, where he had married and had three sons. This account, then, is posthumous. A postcard from hell. Treblinka was a harangue of logic. Morality eviscerated.