If the work evolves as Polish Jewry meets its end, it is because the Nazis seek a way to eliminate the evidence of their deeds. They order thousands of corpses dug up for burning after a policy change alters the method of disposal from burial to cremation. In the early days, the Jews are told to layer sand carefully over the tombs, but — as if in a sickening act of posthumous resistance — the blood of the Jews is “unable to rest”, and “thrust[s] itself upwards to the surface”. After an era of crude and unsuccessful bonfires, the “artist” arrives and teaches them how to do it. The task is massive, as the formerly interred corpses have to be aflame along with newly killed bodies, hundreds of thousands of them per month for a time. Women burn more easily; placed at the base, they are the torches that will consume the rest. But there are still fragments of bones that the Nazis force the Jews to collect, painstakingly, often thwarting their hopes of leaving some trace — anything — to be discovered of this infamy.
Inside the camp, a tenuous solidarity rules, even as the unbearable circumstances push many Sonderkommando members to suicide. For others, plans for escape germinate, leading eventually to the extraordinary insurrection of 2 August, 1943. From the day Rajchman arrives at Treblinka to the fateful day he revolts and escapes, physical depredations are omnipresent. Hunger is constant, and illness a frightening threat. The beatings and whippings Rajchman and others repeatedly suffer are understood to be dangerous on account of their potential consequences. A wounded face means certain death. Injury is repaid by execution, and Rajchman is fortunate that a fellow Jew can treat his suppurat-ing cut with impromptu surgery. Throughout, the prose of this memoir is factual, and all the more devastating for its exquisitely controlled rage at the crimes he is describing. By the end, his anger has already crystallized in resistance and flight for the sake of life and memory.
Would it have made a difference had Rajchman’s memories come to light immediately after the events they describe? Perhaps not.
Yankel Wiernik, whom Rajchman mentions, published his story of a year in Treblinka in Polish in 1944; it was translated into a number of other languages thereafter, but did not attract much attention. Other memoirists, notably Richard Glazar and Shmuel Willenberg, eventually published their testimonies. Their grim tasks mostly accomplished, the death camps — including Treblinka — were razed; only Majdanek, which like Auschwitz combined labour and extermination, survived long enough to be liberated by the Soviets, who publicized their findings as assaults on humanity. The brilliant Soviet-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman visited Treblinka after the arrival of the Red Army in summer 1944, and on the basis of few sources drafted and published that same autumn an exceptionally powerful description of the camp. Reproduced in this volume as a complement to Rajchman’s memoir, Grossman’s report is a masterpiece of investigation, a damning indictment of the inhumanity that he knew had occurred, no matter how fervently the Nazis had hoped they could suppress all evidence of it as they departed. Given the scattering of Treblinka’s tiny number of survivors, Grossman’s extraordinary reconstruction showed how difficult it would be to gain reliable information about the site — but also that it would be possible to grasp this nether pole of human evil.
The Soviets who conquered these lands were therefore better positioned than Westerners to grasp the true nature of the death camps. Yet the disproportionate victimhood of Jews was not ideologically useful from the perspective of Moscow, or in the other capitals of Eastern Europe where the Red Army finally defeated Hitler. From the perspective of official antifascism, “humanity” had suffered, not one group within it more than the rest. In 1944 Grossman clearly registered the Jewish identity of Treblinka’s victims, but he did not emphasize it. A number of survivors, including Rajchman, testified before a post-war Polish historical commission, and soon afterwards Rachel Auerbach synthesized in Yiddish what was known. (Auerbach later became a leading figure at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial.) Yet a year later, when Grossman, in collaboration with Ilya Ehrenburg, finished a Black Book detailing Nazi crimes against Jews and sought to rein-corporate his Treblinka essay, the Soviets could not accept that the victims had been predominantly Jewish. Though Grossman’s essay had already been circulated elsewhere (and had been translated into a number of languages), the plates of the Black Book were destroyed. Whether in the west, where Belsen and Buchenwald were so prominent, or in the east, no-one else could allow themselves to see what Rajchman and his fellow survivors of the Treblinka revolt did.
Having been constructed as a concentration camp in 1940, Auschwitz, to the west of the General Government, surged as a death facility after Treblinka had done its work. Those who were killed there were mainly Jews and others from beyond Poland, including Hungarian Jewry in a paroxysm in 1944, but because many sorts of people were interned there, and many Jews as workers, its survivors were by an enormous measure witness to a western-style internment rather than an eastern-style death factory. Many of its more than 100,000 survivors (a large number of whom were not Jews) presented Auschwitz as a concentration camp in immediate Soviet publicity, and even at the Nuremberg trials. The atrocities that took place at its Birkenau site — a death facility like Treblinka, but confusingly embedded in a universe of internment and labour — were neglected for a long time. The death camps became known only later, as the wheels of justice began to grind, and Holocaust memory coalesced decades after the fact.
Rajchman’s escape leads only to new travails. There is a moving portrait of flight through the countryside, in which human kind-ness and the unconscionable collaboration of local Polish peasants are both evident. He barely mentions it, but Rajchman lived through the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis, and ulti-mately — after the Soviet liberation of the city in January 1945 — migrated to Uruguay, where he lived a productive life in the business world and had three sons. It appears that some additions were made to this crucial documentation after the war (certainly the final few paragraphs), and some other revisions may have taken place. A friend of Rajchman’s family then agitated for its publication. As fate would have it, this work is posthumous: Rajchman died in 2004.
That Rajchman bore witness to Treblinka’s horrors, that his memoir has belatedly appeared, is a gift, but one which is bleak and discomfiting, not redemptive and uplifting. Even the Treblinka revolt, often treated as an uncomplicated triumph of the human spirit, is narrated by this participant in tones that are far from straightforwardly heroic. Rajchman bore witness, but he did not offer lessons: the memoir’s insights seem to be for a posterity that still does not know how to respond to this past.
Through the unprecedented landscape of his text, Rajchman’s proofs of how far beyond the boundaries of the imaginable humans can go in their treatment of one another are piled more obscenely than the mountains of corpses the Nazis put to the torch. In the end, the list of abominations seems to offer too many faces of evil for its readers to decide what was most atrocious in this place and time.
But my choice, I think, is Rajchman’s disturbing reflection — offered in passing, but all the more upsetting for that reason — that it was better for him to lose his mother when he was a child than for her to live long enough to descend into a hell she would never have escaped. It is a dismal testament to their destruction of the ordinary moral world that the Nazis could make one of the worst imaginable events of any life seem like it had been a fortunate event.