Chil Rajchman

Chil Rajchman
Chil Rajchman in Poland
Born	Henryk Reichman June 14, 1914 Łódź, Poland
Died	c. May 7, 2004 (aged 89) Montevideo
Known for	Treblinka survivor, author of Treblinka memoir

Chil Meyer Rajchman a.k.a. Henryk Reichman nom de guerre Henryk Ruminowski (June 14, 1914 – May 7, 2004) was a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor; former prisoner of the Treblinka extermination camp which took the lives of 800,000 Jews during the genocidal Operation Reinhard in World War II. Rajchman belonged to a group of inmates who escaped successfully during the perilous Treblinka revolt which resulted in the camp's closure in October 1943. His Treblinka memoir titled The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir originally in Yiddish, was published in 2009 for the very first time in German and French, without the English translation, which appeared in 2011 with the Preface by Elie Wiesel seven years after his death at the age of 89.

Rajchman was born on June 14, 1914 in Łódź. He was one of six children raised by his widowed father. After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, he and his sister joined the family in Pruszków, a small town in central Poland. The Jewish ghetto was created there in October 1940, and liquidated in February 1941. All Pruszków Jews were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto. With the work-permit issued by the Judenrat on German orders, Rajchman went to live and work in Ostrów Lubelski. He was rounded up on October 10, 1942 along with other ghetto inmates, loaded onto a Holocaust train, and sent to Treblinka extermination camp. Upon his arrival at the camp the following day, he was separated from his sister Anna, and put to work with the Jewish Sonderkommando. He was ordered to cut the hair of female victims before they were gassed, and later also to extract gold teeth at the Totenlager and dispose of the victims' bodies.

On August 2, 1943 along with some one hundred other commando prisoners, Rajchman managed to escape from Treblinka during the Jewish uprising. He returned to Warsaw and lived there until 1944 under false "Aryan" identification papers issued by the Polish underground. During this time he joined the Polish Socialist Party and the underground resistance. On January 17, 1945 he was liberated by the advancing Soviets, and 14 days later returned to his hometown of Łódź where most Jews have already been exterminated. He stayed there till late 1946, but soon emigrated to France with his new wife and then relocated to Uruguay. In 1980, he was contacted there by the American embassy and on March 12, 1980 interviewed by the Office of Special Investigations. He went to the United States to testify against John Demjanjuk who was later extradited to Jerusalem for a war trial in 1987–88. Rajchman misidentified Demjanjuk who apparently never served at Treblinka as the so-called Ivan the Terrible (Treblinka guard). Rajchman died in 2004 in Montevideo, Uruguay.