Treblinka by Chil Rajchman

Chil Rajchman’s memoir of mass extermination in the Nazi death camp of Treblinka is unhysterical in tone, but harrowing in effect. Its spare, unsensational prose underlines just how inhuman humans can be. Thirst, hunger, exhaustion and the stench of death saturate the book's pages. Throughout there is cruelty, from the petty to the barbaric.

Small wonder that Rajchman's first waking thought each day was to envy the dead. Yet it’s a measure of the scale of misery that he can be considered one of the lucky ones. He escaped the gas chambers through slave labour, shaving the heads of those destined for death and extracting the gold teeth from their corpses. Rajchman endured this nightmare existence for ten months before breaking free, an escape story as tense as any thriller. Accompanying Rajchman’s story is an essay by Russian writer Vasily Grossman.

His reflections on Treblinka, just weeks after the camp was closed, include a question some readers themselves might ask: why the need to rake over the ashes of the past? His answer is as valid now as then: the writer’s duty is to tell the truth; the reader’s duty is to learn from it. [James Carson]