OVER THE NEXT MONTH, the trial moved from matters of general evidence to individual accounts as witnesses appeared to offer personal, firsthand testimony. One such witness was Samuel Rajzman, a Polish-speaking accountant, a lone survivor from Treblinka.
I found Rajzman’s account to be especially compelling and personal, because Treblinka was where Malke was murdered. Leon learned of the details only at the end of his life, when my mother showed him a book that contained a long list of the names of those detained at Theresienstadt. Among the thousands was the name of Malke Buchholz, with the detail that she was transported from Theresienstadt to Treblinka on September 23, 1942. Leon retired to the privacy of his room, along with the volume, where my mother heard him weep. The next day, he said nothing more about the book. Of Treblinka, he never spoke, not in my presence.
Samuel Rajzman appeared in the witness box on the morning of February 27, 1946, introduced to the judges as a man who had “returned from the other world.” He wore a dark suit and tie, peered through spectacles. His angular, lined face offered a sense of astonishment and bemusement, that he was alive, seated just a few feet from Frank, in whose territory Treblinka was located. To look at the man, one would not know the path he traveled or the horrors he witnessed.
He spoke in a measured and calm voice of the journey from the Warsaw ghetto in August 1942, transportation by rail in inhumane conditions, eight thousand people in overcrowded cattle cars. He was the only survivor. When the Russian prosecutor asked about the moment of arrival, Rajzman told him how they were made to undress and walk along Himmelfahrtstrasse, the “street to heaven,” a short walk to the gas chamber, when suddenly a friend from Warsaw singled him out and led him away. The Germans needed an interpreter, but before that he loaded the clothes of the dead onto empty trains that departed Treblinka. Two days passed, then a transport arrived from the small town of Vinegrova, bringing his mother, sister, and brothers. He watched them walk to the gas chambers, unable to intervene. Several days later, he was handed his wife’s papers, with a photograph of his wife and child.
“That is all I have left of my family,” he said in the courtroom, a public act of revelation. “A photograph.”
He offered a graphic account of killing on an industrial scale, individual acts of horror and inhumanity. A ten-year-old girl was brought to the Lazarett (infirmary) with her two-year-old sister, guarded by a German called Willi Mentz, a milkman with a small black mustache (Mentz later returned to the job, which he held until sentenced to life imprisonment at the Treblinka trial, held in Germany in 1965). The older girl threw herself onto Mentz as he removed his gun. Why did he want to kill the little girl? Rajzman described how he watched Mentz pick up the two-year-old, walk the short distance to a crematorium, and throw her into an oven. Then he killed the sister.
The defendants listened in silence, two rows of shamed faces. Did Frank seem to slump?
Rajzman continued in a flat monotone. An aged woman was brought to the Lazarett with her daughter, who was in labor, made to lie on a plot of grass. Guards watched her give birth. Mentz asked the grandmother which one she’d prefer to see killed first. The older woman begged to be the first.
“Of course, they did the opposite,” Rajzman told the courtroom, speaking very quietly. “The newborn baby was killed first, then the child’s mother, and finally the grandmother.”
Rajzman talked of conditions at the camp, of the fake railway station. The deputy commander, Kurt Franz, built a first-class railroad station with false signs. Later an imaginary restaurant was added, and schedules were listed with times of departures and arrivals. Grodno, Suwałki, Vienna, Berlin. It was like a film set. To calm people, Rajzman explained, “so there should not be any incidents.”
The purpose was psychological, to offer reassurance as the end approached?
“Yes.” Rajzman’s voice remained calm, flat.
How many were exterminated each day? Between ten and twelve thousand.
How was it done? Initially, by three gas chambers, then ten more.
Rajzman described how he was on the platform when Sigmund Freud’s three sisters arrived. It was September 23, 1942. He saw Commander Kurt Franz deal with one of the sisters’ request for special treatment.
After reading this transcript of the trial, with the details of the arrival of the Freud sisters from Theresienstadt, I searched for the details of the transport on which the Freud sisters arrived. When I found them, I looked at the other names on the list, a thousand of them, and eventually I found the name of Malke Buchholz. Rajzman must have been on the platform when she arrived.