Calgary Public Library

The last Jew of Treblinka, a survivor's memory 1942-1943, Chil Rajchman ; translated from the Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld

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The last Jew of Treblinka

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795138014

Chil Rajchman ; translated from the Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld

a survivor's memory 1942-1943

Why do some live while so many others perish? Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls; in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all are equal. The Nazis kept the fires of Treblinka burning night and day, a central cog in the wheel of the Final Solution. There was no pretense of work here like in Auschwitz or Birkenau, only a train platform and a road covered with sand. A road that led only to death. But not for the author, a young man who survived working as a "barber" and "dentist," heartsick with witnessing atrocity after atrocity. Yet he managed to survive so that somehow he could tell the world what he had seen. How he found the dress of his little sister abandoned in the woods. How he was forced to extract gold teeth from the corpses. How every night he had to cover the body pits with sand. How every morning the blood of thousands still rose to the surface. Many have courageously told their stories, and in the tradition of Elie Wiesel's "Night" and Primo Levi's "Survival at Auschwitz" and "The Drowned and the Saved," the author provides the only survivor's record of Treblinka. Originally written in Yiddish in 1945 without hope or agenda other than to bear witness, this tale shows that sometimes the bravest and most painful act of all is to remember