A postcard from hell

Treblinka, Chil Rajchman, MacLehose, €19.95

His phrases don’t involve complicated concepts nor do his words elicit elaborate philosophies. He just described what happened to him and to his neighbours and strangers who often spoke different languages to him, but who were homogenised by a killing machine into one mass of Jewness. This was death on a calamitous scale. Engineered death. Rajchman somehow managed to survive to tell the story.

The evil was untrammeled — a description of a German one-eyed concentration camp guard called Svidersky killing a group of 15 children with a hammer in a few minutes, a guard laughing as he shoved elderly women into a gas chamber. That was the micro-evil. The macro-evil functioned like an efficient factory. Trains would arrive in to the small railway station at Treblinka, about 60km east of Warsaw, hidden in a pine forest. Passengers ‘disembarked’ and were immediately herded into the gas chambers, their bodies then flung into enormous pits.