Everyday Canvas

Latest Books and The Last Jew of Treblinka

Prompt: Write about the last book you read or the book you are currently reading.

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OMG! Me and book reading is a mixed-up and fast-paced affair. I just finished, last night, And So it Goes--Kurt Vonnegut: A life by Charles J. Shields. Also, yesterday, I finished The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir by Chil Rajchman; Solon Beinfeld, the translator. Then a fortnight ago, I finished The Gambler by Dostoyevsky, my second time reading it, since my teen years. This is because I usually read several books concurrently.

Then in Kindle Fire, I am reading a chapter each night from a book US History’s Greatest Hits by Hans Thayer because I don’t want to rush that one. I just finished a non-fiction book on Coffee by Schlomo Stern, on Kindle Fire also. It was very informative.

Another one I am not rushing to finish is the Outlander book 8: Written in My Own Heart's Blood by Diana Gabaldon, only because it is in 38 CDs, and CDs are hard to listen to, as I have to sit down and listen with ear phones or have them played out loud, which would annoy hubby for he has no love for fantasy, time-travel or anything not reality oriented. Still, during the last month or so, I made it to the 33rd CD.

I have two other books going on at this time in my two other Kindle E-Readers. After this upside down, right side up mishmash, I’d better talk about one specific book, The Last Jew of Treblinka. The book was written by its survivor Rajchman who managed to or was lucky enough to escape from the death camp after the Treblinka rebellion.

Inside the memoirs, he talks about how the camp operated, the cruelty of the Nazis, and how they put together a practice of transporting, confining, torturing, gassing, burying and incinerating the victims, but the shocking part for me was how they came up with the idea of the assembly-line practices and how they made the stronger men among the Jews work for them as laborers. These men had to cut the hair of women who were being led into the gas chambers, extract false teeth, gold, and other materials from an astounding number of corpses, unpack corpses from the gas chambers, convey them to be buried in pits, or load them into ovens. The corpses that were put in the pits were later dug up and incinerated in order to hide the crimes and get rid of their traces.

The Nazi attempt at hiding the crimes was probably what made the memoirist do everything in his power to stay alive, for Rajchman wanted desperately to be able to tell of the atrocities because all the evidence was so expertly erased. Most of the other laborers like him either killed themselves or did something to be killed. About twenty people managed to make it out of the camp with Rajchman during the rebellion, but most were picked up and shot.

I have read many other books about the Nazi death camps, but I don’t remember reading a book by anyone who the Nazis used for their such dirty work and to this degree or, if I read other survivors’ memoirs, those people didn’t mention the work they did in such horrid details.

This has been a horrifying read, but an important one, I think.