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A review by vlodko62
The Last Jew of Treblinka by Chil Rajchman
5.0
Warning: this book is not for the faint of heart, nor for those disturbed by descriptions of horrific violence and mass murder.
The Last Jew of Treblinka earns its five stars out of respect for the millions killed, those that survived, and for the miracle that the author, Chil Rajchman, survived to tell it. This is a very difficult book, emotionally painful to read. It is only uplifting only in that Rajchman survived. The experience of reading this book is much darker than reading Elie Wiesel's Night.
Treblinka, together with Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor were Nazi extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) or death camps (Todeslager). Two others - Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau - were extermination camps within a larger complex of concentration camps.
These were distinct from from concentration camps (Konzentrationslager) located in Germany proper, such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen, which were prison labor camps for people defined as “undesirable,” the largest group of which were Jews. In the concentration camps, prisoners were selected for slave labor first; they were kept alive on starvation rations and made available to work as required. Those who were not selected were exterminated.
The extermination camps by contrast, were built exclusively for the rapid and systematic extermination of entire communities of people (primarily Jews) within hours of their arrival, delivered en masse by the Holocaust trains. This was death on an industrial scale.
The prisoners sent to extermination camps were murdered within a few hours of arrival. A very small number of men were chosen as slave laborers - preparing arrivals for the gas chambers and disposing of the bodies afterwards). Many of these men were killed as they worked; others committed suicide in despair of their situation. Chil Rajchman was one of these individuals, and his story, no matter how bleak is one we cannot forget.
The Last Jew of Treblinka earns its five stars out of respect for the millions killed, those that survived, and for the miracle that the author, Chil Rajchman, survived to tell it. This is a very difficult book, emotionally painful to read. It is only uplifting only in that Rajchman survived. The experience of reading this book is much darker than reading Elie Wiesel's Night.
Treblinka, together with Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor were Nazi extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) or death camps (Todeslager). Two others - Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau - were extermination camps within a larger complex of concentration camps.
These were distinct from from concentration camps (Konzentrationslager) located in Germany proper, such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen, which were prison labor camps for people defined as “undesirable,” the largest group of which were Jews. In the concentration camps, prisoners were selected for slave labor first; they were kept alive on starvation rations and made available to work as required. Those who were not selected were exterminated.
The extermination camps by contrast, were built exclusively for the rapid and systematic extermination of entire communities of people (primarily Jews) within hours of their arrival, delivered en masse by the Holocaust trains. This was death on an industrial scale.
The prisoners sent to extermination camps were murdered within a few hours of arrival. A very small number of men were chosen as slave laborers - preparing arrivals for the gas chambers and disposing of the bodies afterwards). Many of these men were killed as they worked; others committed suicide in despair of their situation. Chil Rajchman was one of these individuals, and his story, no matter how bleak is one we cannot forget.