Surviving Treblinka

Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory

Chil Rajchman (translated by Solon Beinfeld)

Maclehose Press, £8.99;

Kindle: $10.89

Review: Billy O’Callaghan

Treblinka is a name that should be as burned into the general consciousness as Auschwitz, Birkenau and Dachau. While labour camps were widespread across the Nazi-held territories during the middle period of the war, Treblinka was something else, existing for no other reason than the efficient extermination of the Jewish race. In the 15 months of its existence, somewhere in the region of 850,000 people were murdered, in the most clinical and depraved fashion. Nine out of ten inmates, without discrimination of age or gender, died within two hours of arrival.

Sixty-seven people survived the death camp, a miraculous, horrendous number. Chil Rajchman, who escaped during a 1943 camp revolt, was one of those who lived to bear witness.

The prose is stark, vivid, and relentless. There is no need for hyperbole, for lyrical language, for any sort of literary pyrotechnics. Characters appear in passing, limited to a line or two but rarely more. Delivered in the present-tense to achieve a startling sense of immediacy, this is a cold, clear-eyed account of ten months in the deepest, darkest corner of a hell where men, women and children, guilty of no crime but their religion, are reduced to a level lower than meat. And focus never wavers from the horror.

Rajchman avoided the gas chambers by declaring himself a barber and was put to work clipping the hair of women in order to ready them for death. In the weeks and months that followed, starved, perished and subject to ferocious random beatings, his duties evolved to sorting the victims’ clothes, checking mouths for gold and false teeth, burying the dead and later exhuming them for cremation. To call him one of the lucky few would be to misinterpret the situation. Suicide was commonplace among the workers. The guards, summarily referred to throughout this short memoir as ‘murderers’ or ‘beasts’, are shown as sadists who shoot people for fun, plunder the belongings of the daily arrivals, strip naked the newly arrived women and make them stand in knee-deep snowdrifts for upwards of an hour before finally herding them into the gas chambers.

In this edition, Maclehose Press have also included a long essay by the Russian writer, Vassily Grossman. Written in 1944, it provided one of the first serious considerations of the death camps and ranks as one of the 20th century’s most important pieces of journalistic prose. Taken alongside Rajchman’s shocking story, it paints an undeniably full picture.

Treblinka is not an easy read, but it is an important one. The small details, both poignant and horrific, leave a mark, which is as it should be. These events, and others like them, must never be forgotten.