Surviving Treblinka

Plot

From Publishers Weekly
This memoir takes the reader inside infamous Treblinka, a camp in Poland where, between 1942 and 1943, approximately 900,000 Jews were incarcerated by the Nazis. One of the few survivors, Willenberg escaped and subsequently fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising; he now lives in Israel. Describing grisly jobs (e.g., sorting and examining the clothing of the dead for secreted valuables) to which he was assigned in what was ostensibly a labor camp, Willenberg sketches maps and offers a detailed account of his life in the camp and his harrowing escape from it. This intensely personal contribution to the literature of the Holocaust indicts Poles and Ukrainians, among others, for complicity, as it praises the heroism of those who made possible the author's survival. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Very few prisoners survived the killing camp Treblinka, and those few who did had no words for the netherworld they saw there. Five years ago, on a sunny April day in Jerusalem, Willenberg, survivor of Treblinka and Israeli citizen, was stopped in his tracks by the sirens that proclaimed the start of Holocaust Day 1984. Immobilized on a crowded road, he was transported by the sirens back in time and place and images and pain long buried were brought back. By the time the wailing stopped Willenberg had decided to write his memoirs. The result is this well-written and deftly translated account enriched by Bartoszewski's informed introduction and a 28-page commentary on the war in Poland, the concentration camps in general, and Treblinka in particular. An important book.