Rudolf Reder

Rudolf Reder a.k.a. Roman Robak (April 4, 1881 – October 6, 1977)

The postwar testimony of Reder was of special significance. This is because Chaim Hirszman, the only other survivor of Bełżec,

Life Reder ran his own soap factory in Lemberg (then in the Austrian Partition, now Lviv in Ukraine) until 1910, according to the Bełżec Museum website. At the ramp he claimed to have been a machinist, and for the next three months performed maintenance on the engine for the gas chambers among other tasks. He and his second wife, Joanna, are buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, in Toronto. It was previously believed that he had died in 1968, rather than 1977.

Reder's book Soon after the Soviet takeover, whilst still in Poland, Reder testified in January 1946 in Kraków before the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes (known as the Institute of National Remembrance at present). In the book, Reder wrote about what he saw as the motor-maintenance worker, and what he learned afterwards:

A dozen or so SS men drove the women along with whips and fixed bayonets all the way to the building and from there up three steps to a hall. There the askers counted 750 people for each gas chamber.

Reder changed his name to Roman Robak in 1949 and left Poland for Israel in 1950. In 1960, he submitted a deposition at the prosecutor’s office in Munich as part of the German preparations for the Belzec trial against eight former SS members of Bełżec extermination camp personnel. Further information on Reder is scant. His second daughter married Leonard Shenker (Szenker) and settled in the United Kingdom. His account of the Belzec camp imprisonment, published in 1946, was reprinted in 1999 by Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum with Fundacja Judaica in bilingual edition featuring an English translation by Margaret M. Rubel,