Aladdin Library

"... Reading Chil Rajchman’s moving testimony is like being punched in the stomach. "
L’Humanité, 5 October 2009.

Chil RAJCHMAN was 28 years old when he was deported to Treblinka in October 1942. Separated from his companions upon arrival by train, he escaped from the gas chambers and became by turns clothes sorter, hairdresser, corpse carrier and "dentist".
He recorded the memories of his captivity in the death camp of Treblinka from October 1942 to August 1943 in a notebook: the blows and insults, the jamming of people into the gas chamber; the last horrified looks of victims before Zyklon B capsules were dropped; the burial of corpses in mass graves, after their gold teeth had been pulled out by the “dentists”...
Chil RAJCHMAN depicts prisoners’ uprising on August 2, 1943, his escape and his life on the run and in hiding in Warsaw where he wrote the first outline of his book.
He was one of the fifty-seven survivors out of the 750,000 victims that the Nazis gassed in Treblinka. Throughout his life, he kept his notes with him and referred to it whenever his memory failed him. Before his death, he asked his family to publish his story.