Summary Of The Last Jew Of Treblinka

In his memoir The Last Jew of Treblinka, Chil Rajchman provides the haunting account of his experience at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka from 1942 to 1943. Written in simple prose with a distinct lack of emotion that focuses exclusively on his time spent imprisoned, Rajchman provides a work that is masterful in its ability to portray the unbelievable brutality of Treblinka. Last Jew was originally written in Yiddish in 1945 with the expressed goal of telling others of what occurred at Treblinka at a time when much of the world was just beginning learn of the horrors that were committed by the Nazis during World War II, it remained unpublished until 2009. In The Last Jew of Treblinka Chil Rajchman provides in the only account of the Treblinka

In the building Rajchman, along with a hundred or so other young men, were pulled aside and put to work searching the belongings of prisoners for valuables. Rajchman then volunteered to become a barber to cut off the hair of the women before they entered the gas chamber; he was then transferred to Treblinka Camp Two where his job was to throw the victims’ bodies into a massive pit. The work was both mentally and physically exhausting and guards shot any prisoners they deemed were not working fast enough. After Germany came across a grave containing 10,000 Polish soldiers killed by the Soviets, Treblinka began to burn the bodies and bury the ashes to hide their actions in order to ensure that Germany was seen as superior to the USSR. Rajchman then became a dentist, a role that entailed prying open the deceased mouths to extract false teeth that contained precious metals. Treblinka is unique in not only its role as an extermination camp but also the semi successful rebellion that the prisoners began on August 2, 1943, an act that had been planned for several months. The prisoners blew up the camp by setting the gas chambers on fire and prisoners stole weapons to kill

There are mentions in passing of the overwhelming grief he suffered from, as he tells how he and his fellow prisoners wept in their barracks many nights. While Rajchman experienced deeps feeling of grief while imprisoned, he chose to not acknowledge them in retrospect. Rajchman wrote The Last Jew of Treblinka after he spent much time pondering why out of the hundreds of thousands of people who entered Treblinka, he was one the few to survive and ultimately came to the conclusion that he survived in order to tell the world of the horrors of Treblinka. While Rajchman focused on exposing what he saw at Treblinka, a message of resilience and the will to survive against all odds is shown clearly throughout the work. The simple and detached style of writing allows for this message to be portrayed; by highlighting the atrocities he witnessed in such a journalistic and descriptive way he is able to adequately convey the horror that occurred at the camp. Rajchman couples these descriptions with accounts of his attempts to do whatever he could to survive within the camp; by volunteering to work as both a barber and dentist, as well as pushing beyond his physical capabilities in his work allowed Rajchman to avoid the death that came to the