Treblinka: A Survivor's Memory, 1942-1943

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In mid-April 1945, American G.I.s liberated Buchenwald, while British soldiers marched, horrified, into Bergen-Belsen. There they found scenes of unimaginable suffering, men of bones and skin standing somehow on spindly legs amidst piles of emaciated corpses. Celebrated journalists documented what must have seemed the nether pole of human depravity, the worst an inhuman regime could achieve. Even as thousands of typhus-stricken survivors died, witnesses to a liberation that came too late for them, Margaret Bourke-White took chilling photographs that captured the consequences of the Nazi designs. A picture of evil was set, but Treblinka was absent from it.

Chil Rajchman’s memoir of that place lay in Yiddish manuscript for decades, and the very name “Treblinka” became widely known only many years after the war’s end. Yet Rajchman was witness to a very different reality, at a site the Nazis had wanted desperately to wipe from the map. It was further east, in the territories liberated by the Red Army, where far more pitiless dynamics of killing were unleashed than those that came to light at Belsen and Buchenwald. The Nazi project of extermination reached its most terrible extremity in Treblinka, and at other industrial killing centres whose names were similarly unknown.

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