Chil Rajchman

Chil Rajchman

Chil Rajchman (born June 14, 1914 in Łódź ; died May 7, 2004 in Uruguay ) was a Jewish survivor of the Treblinka extermination camp .

Life

Chil was the eldest of three brothers and he also had two sisters. His mother died in 1931. Due to the precarious financial situation of his father, Chil then contributed to the family's livelihood.

After the Wehrmacht attacked Poland , Rajchman fled with a sister to Pruszków , a small town southwest of Warsaw . He performed forced labor in a camp for railway workers . After the dissolution of forced labor brigades Rajchman was the Warsaw ghetto deported .

After a few months he moved to Lubartów and Ostrów Lubelski in the Lublin district . In October 1942 he was finally deported to Treblinka. He was not murdered immediately, but assigned to the so-called working Jews. His sister, however, was gassed immediately after arriving at the camp. He worked in Treblinka as a “hairdresser” and had to cut people's hair before entering the gas chambers . Later he was assigned to the “corpse bearers”, whose task was to transport the corpses to the mass graves. In addition, as a member of a "dentist commando", Rajchman checked and removed the teeth of the murdered and broke out gold teeth and bridges.

During the Treblinka uprising on August 2, 1943, he managed to escape from the extermination camp . Until Poland was conquered by the Red Army , Rajchman hid in various places. While still in Poland, he happened to meet his brother Moniek, who had also survived the Holocaust .

Chil Rajchman married in Poland and emigrated to Uruguay with his brother Moniek and settled in Montevideo . There he was one of the most active members of the Jewish community. He was committed to the Holocaust Museum ( Museo Recordatorio del Holocausto ) - the first of its kind in South America - and to the Holocaust memorial in Montevideo.

Immediately after his escape from Treblinka he began to write down his experiences, which he completed after the end of the war. Until Rajchman's death, these records were only available to his family members. In 2009 they were published in several languages, including German.

The Holocaust survivor Rajchman appeared as a witness in several Nazi trials, including the Treblinka trial against Kurt Franz , Franz Suchomel et al. (1965) and against John Demjanjuk (1981 and 1987).

Fonts

• I am the last jew. Treblinka 1942/43. Notes for posterity . Translated from the French by Ulrike Bokelmann. (Matched with the Yiddish original by Evita Wiecki), Piper, Munich, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-492-05335-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Chil Rajchman in the catalog of the German National Library
• Excerpt from the memoirs of Rajchman , in Jungle World No. 47, November 19, 2009, accessed January 23, 2013.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary (Spanish), accessed on January 23, 2013.
2. ^ Entry about Chil Meyer Rajchman in the Holocaust Encyclopedia on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , accessed on January 23, 2013.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Information about Rajchman in an English-Spanish educational project on Treblinka or the Holocaust ( memento of the original from June 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Accessed on January 23, 2013.  
4. ↑ Markus Roth: Review of: Chil Rajchman, I am the last Jew. Treblinka 1942/43. Notes for posterity , Munich [u. a.]: Piper, 2009, in: Journal for East Central Europe Research (ZfO), 59 (2010), 2, p. 281 f.
5. ↑ Information about the museum (Spanish, accessed March 25, 2014)
6. ↑ Information from Piper-Verlag about Rajchman  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .