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Samuel Rajzman

Samuel Rajzman (1902–1979) was a Polish Holocaust survivor. After the war he emigrated to France and then to Canada. He was one of the two Polish witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials. He was also a witness at the Treblinka trials and during the process of Fiodor Fedorenko.

Biography

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Rajzman was born into a Jewish family and lived with his wife and children in Węgrów, where he was an accountant and translator.[1] After the German invasion of Poland, together with his family he was resettled and imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto.[2]

Burning perimeter of Treblinka camp during the prisoner uprising of 2 August 1943 in which Rajzman took part. A clandestine photograph taken by eyewitness Franciszek Ząbecki.

In September 1942 he was transferred to the Treblinka extermination camp.[1] He was saved from immediate execution that befell most of those from his transport group by an acquaintance, Marceli Galewski and moved to work in the Sonderkommando; he was also enlisted in the resistance organization.[1] The resistance organization eventually succeeded in organizing the Treblinka uprising on 2 August 1943. Rajzman was one of the few survivors from that incident; familiar with the nearby area, he was sheltered, together with another escapee, by local farmer Edward Gołoś, a pre-war acquaintance of Rajzman, and survived the war. Gołoś was later recognized as one of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations.[1][3][4][5][6]

After the war (which his family did not survive) he moved to France, and later to Canada, where he remarried.[1][4]

On 27 February 1946, Rajzman testified about his experiences in Treblinka at the Nuremberg Trials as one of the three Jews and two Polish witnesses during the proceedings (the other Polish witness being Seweryna Szmaglewska).[4][7][8] He was also a witness in both of the Treblinka trials (the first was the 1964–1965 trial of members of the German crew of Treblinka, and at second one, in 1969–1970, the trial of the commandant, Franz Stangl).[1] In 1978 his testimony also contributed to the stripping of Fiodor Fedorenko’s American citizenship[1] (Fedorenko was a Ukrainian guard at Treblinka; he was eventually deported to USSR and executed there).[1][9]

Rajzman died in Montreal in 1979.[1]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i "Rajzman Samuel – Muzeum Treblinka". Muzeum Treblinka. Retrieved 1 September 2023.
  2. ^ Rajzman, Samuel (1945). "Uprising in Treblinka". American House Committee on Foreign Affairs (courtesy of holocaust-history.org). Archived from the original on 3 June 2013.
  3. ^ Grabowski, Jan; Engelking, Barbara (6 September 2022). Night without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-06288-8.
  4. ^ a b c Finder, Gabriel N.; Prusin, Alexander V. (1 January 2018). Justice Behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland. University of Toronto Press. pp. 76–79. ISBN 978-1-4875-2268-1.
  5. ^ "SAMUEL RAJZMAN". The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names at Yad Vashem.
  6. ^ "Gołoś Edward". The Righteous Among the Nations Database at Yad Vashem.
  7. ^ Hirsch, Francine (2021). "Nuremberg at 75: Revisiting the International Military Tribunal and Its Lessons". Irish Studies in International Affairs. 32 (1): 171–181. doi:10.1353/isia.2021.0051. ISSN 2009-0072.
  8. ^ Sands, Philippe (2017). "East West Street: Personal Stories about Life and Law". Washington University Global Studies Law Review. 16 (3). ISSN 1546-6981. The Tribunal has just heard evidence from a lone survivor of the killings at Treblinka, (...). Samuel Rajzman explains that he was present on the platform for the arrival and despatch of Sigmund Freud's three elderly sisters.
  9. ^ "Fedorenko Deported to the USSR". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 20 March 2015. Retrieved 1 September 2023.

Further reading

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