Chil Rajchman (1914–2004)

Chil Rajchman, alias Henryk Ruminowski (his nom de guerre in the resistance), was born to a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland. After the invasion of Poland by Germany in World War II, he and his family were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, along with his younger sister, he was deported to the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka. There he was put to work with the Jewish Sonderkommando unit, which disposed of the bodies. On August 2, 1943, along with about 100 other such prisoners, he joined an uprising and escaped from Treblinka. After hiding in the countryside for some time, he returned to Warsaw, where he lived under false identity papers issued by the Polish underground. During this time, he joined the Polish Socialist Party and the underground resistance in the Ghetto. In 1945, he was liberated by the advancing Red Army and went back to his hometown to discover that nearly all the Jews had been murdered. In 1946, he emigrated with his new wife to France and then to Uruguay. He died in Montevideo in 2004. It was not until 2009, five years after his death, that his memoir of Treblinka, written in Yiddish in Warsaw in 1944-1945, was first published. It appeared in France under the title Je suis le dernier Juif (I Am the Last Jew). It was translated into English and published in 2011 under the title The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir, with a preface by Elie Wiesel.