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Loading... The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir (edition 2011)by Chil Rajchman (Author), Elie Wiesel (Preface)
Work InformationThe Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir by Chil Rajchman (Author)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. To anyone who has read as many survivor's memoires of the Holocaust as I have, it is plainly obvious why this one was not as widely read as the others. Authors like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel made bestseller lists because they have an innate literary talent that Chil Rajchman is sorely missing, which does much to make their books accessible to a global audience. That being said, a way with words or lack-there-of should not detract from this book. Rajchman is one of the few survivors of Treblinka, so we must look past his brusque delivery to see the incredible story of survival within. Rajchman's straightforward narrative actually betrays much about his experience, thus doing the book a favour, by exposing the emotionally deadening caused by the attrocities of his experience. ( ) A shocking, horrifying portrait of the Treblinka death camp, written in starkly plain language by one of its few survivors. THE LAST JEW OF TREBLINKA was not published until 2011, several years after Rajchman had died, in Uruguay where he had emigrated and become a successful businessman. Rajchman only survived because he was one of a handful of prisoners to escape after an ill-fated revolt. Barely a hundred pages, you can read his account in a couple hours. This is not a book to "like." It is too filled with descriptions of horror, cruelty, suffering and inhumanity. Recommended only if you have a strong stomach. An important piece of Holocaust history. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER Short memoir of a survivor of the Treblinka death camp. Did not learn anything new, the brutality, humiliation of women by cutting all their hair off and making them remove their clothing in front of endless men, starvation, death, disease, mass burials, creamation....... Quite upsetting, I would not have survived an hour, how so many endured for so long is a mystery to me, but it was a living death. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesLe livre de poche (32387)
Why do some live while so many others perish? Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls; in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all are equal. The Nazis kept the fires of Treblinka burning night and day, a central cog in the wheel of the Final Solution. There was no pretense of work here like in Auschwitz or Birkenau, only a train platform and a road covered with sand. A road that led only to death. But not for the author, a young man who survived working as a "barber" and "dentist," heartsick with witnessing atrocity after atrocity. Yet he managed to survive so that somehow he could tell the world what he had seen. How he found the dress of his little sister abandoned in the woods. How he was forced to extract gold teeth from the corpses. How every night he had to cover the body pits with sand. How every morning the blood of thousands still rose to the surface. Many have courageously told their stories, and in the tradition of Elie Wiesel's "Night" and Primo Levi's "Survival at Auschwitz" and "The Drowned and the Saved," the author provides the only survivor's record of Treblinka. Originally written in Yiddish in 1945 without hope or agenda other than to bear witness, this tale shows that sometimes the bravest and most painful act of all is to remember. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.5318092History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- World War II Social, political, economic history; Holocaust Holocaust History, geographic treatment, biography Holocaust victims biographies and autobiographiesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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