Have you seen the movie “Nuremberg” staring Rami Malek, and Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring?
It is a well-made movie, and worth seeing. To me, the most affecting scene comes late in the movie, when the prosecution shows actual film clips from liberated concentration camps. Piles of naked, emaciated, lifeless, bodies are shown being bulldozed into awaiting burial trenches. The incomprehensible enormity of the Holocaust is revealed.
And yet.
Even those images do not, cannot, depict all the depravity of the Holocaust. The very first blog I ever wrote, in September, 2015, quoted Joseph Stalin’s observation that “one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” I think the only way to truly grasp what happened in Europe from 1939 to 1945 is to remember that, behind every statistic is a unique human story, of love, loss, contentment, sadness, yearning, happiness, and serendipity.
Eighty years ago today, Samuel Rajzman testified at the afternoon session of the International Military Trial at Nuremberg, where he was questioned by a member of the Soviet prosecution team, Counsellor Smirnov. Rajzman explained how he was deported in August 1942 with his family and eight thousand other Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. According to author Wendy Lower, writing in The Ravine (Mariner Books, 2021), Rajzman provided one of the first detailed accounts of the gassing facility, including the bogus train station, replete with signs for the ticket and telegraph offices and a restaurant—all ruses to calm the Jews who were about to be gassed upon arrival.
Rather than summarize Rajzman’s testimony, what follows is a verbatim transcript of a portion of his testimony at trial:
“SMIRNOV: Please tell us, witness, why it was that you yourself remained alive in Treblinka?
RAJZMAN: I was already quite undressed, and had to pass through this Himmelfahrtstrasse [the Road to Heaven] to the gas chambers. Some 8,000 Jews had arrived with my transport from Warsaw. At the last minute before we moved toward the street an engineer, Galevski, an old friend of mine whom I had known in Warsaw for many years, caught sight of me. He was overseer of workers among the Jews. He told me I should turn back from the street; and as they needed an interpreter for Hebrew, French, Russian, Polish, and German, he managed to obtain permission to liberate me.
SMIRNOV: You were therefore a member of the labor unit of the camp?
RAJZMAN: At first my job was to load the clothes of the murdered persons on[to] the trains. When I had been in the camp two days, my mother, my sister, and two brothers were brought to the camp from the town of Vinegrova. I had to watch them led away to the gas chambers. Several days later, when I was loading clothes on the freight trains, my comrades found my wife’s documents and a photograph of my wife and child. That is all I have left of my family, only a photograph.
SMIRNOV: Tell us, witness, how many persons were brought daily to the Treblinka Camp?
RAJZMAN: Between July and December 1942 an average of three transports of 60 cars each arrived every day. In 1943 the transport arrived more rarely.
SMIRNOV: Tell us, witness, how many persons were exterminated in the camp, on average, daily.
RAJZMAN: On an average, I believe they killed in Treblinka from 10,000 to 12,000 persons daily.”
Ten to twelve thousand stories, daily, each like Samuel Rajzman’s, most of which will never be known.
That is the tragedy of the Holocaust.
