Chil Rajchman

Chil (Enrique) Meyer Rajchman a.k.a. Henryk Reichman, nom de guerre Henryk Ruminowski (June 14, 1914 – May 7, 2004) was one of about 70 Jewish prisoners who survived the Holocaust after participating in the August 2, 1943 revolt at the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. He reached Warsaw, where he participated in the resistance in the city, before it was captured by the Soviet Union.

After the war, in which he lost all his family but one brother, Rajchman married. The couple and his brother soon emigrated from Poland, first to France and then to Montevideo, Uruguay, where they later became citizens. There he was active in the Jewish community and helped establish the Museum of the Holocaust and the Holocaust Memorial, both in Montevideo. They struggled to make enough money to live. As tensions increased in Europe, he said good-bye to his brother Moniek in 1939, encouraging him to flee to the Soviet Union. All Pruszków Jews were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto. With the work-permit issued by the Judenrat on German orders, Rajchman was sent to live and work in Ostrów Lubelski, in eastern Poland. He was rounded up on October 10, 1942, along with other ghetto inmates, loaded onto a Holocaust train, and sent to Treblinka extermination camp.

Upon his arrival there the following day, Rajchman was separated from his sister Anna (she died at the camp), and put to work with the Jewish Sonderkommando. He was ordered to cut the hair of disrobed women before they were gassed. Later he extracted gold teeth from dead victims at the Totenlager and disposed of thousands of their bodies, mostly by burning.

On August 2, 1943, Rajchman was among 700 Sonderkommandos who revolted against the guards. He was with some one hundred prisoners who escaped during this attack. The death camp was closed in October 1943. Rajchman had reached Warsaw, where he joined the resistance. He was among the 70 men from the revolt to survive through the end of the war. During his time in Warsaw, he joined the Polish Socialist Party and the underground resistance.

On January 17, 1945, he was liberated by the advancing Soviets. He was stripped of U.S. citizenship. and later extradited to Germany. There he was charged with other crimes related to his documented service at the death camp Sobibor.

Lila Rajchman died in an accident in 1991. Rajchman died in 2004 in Montevideo, Uruguay, survived by their three children and eleven grandchildren,

Legacy and honors The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir While in Warsaw in 1944–1945, Rajchman wrote a memoir in Yiddish: Zichroines foen Jechiël Meir Rajchman (Henryk Romanowski). He later said that his original manuscript had been edited and proofread in 1946 by poet Nachum Bomze (Bumse).

Documentary Chil (Enrique) Rajchman was featured late in life in the Uruguayan documentary film Despite Treblinka (2002), along with fellow survivors of the revolt, Kalman Taigman and Samuel (Schmuel) Willenberg, then living in Jerusalem. The film premiered at the 24th International Film Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, Cuba.