Book Review: Last Jew of Treblinka

Reviewed by Billy Heller
New York Post
February 13, 2011

The Last Jew of Treblinka
by Chil Rajchman (Pegasus)

More than 800,000 Jews were murdered from June 1942 to August 1943 at Treblinka, a Nazi death camp in Poland, one of the few camps built solely for extermination, rather than for slave labor as well. The killing stopped after an inmate uprising and escape. But fewer than 100 people survived. Among them was Rajchman, sent to the camp with his 19-year-old sister, who was immediately taken from him on arrival. He later found her dress when sorting through clothing of the dead. He survived, in part, by “volunteering” to be a barber, shearing the hair of women about to be sent to the gas chambers. Rajchman, who died in 2004, wrote his account in 1945. It’s finally been translated to English from the original