Jankiel Wiernik

[pilgrimofdark]

Someone could almost write an article about "How Many Propagandists Does It Take to Write a Holocaust Eyewitness Account?" discussing the Wiernik/Krzepicki manuscripts.

If a third account shows up with multiple handwriting samples, the article will have to be written. "Two is coincidence, three is a pattern."

#3. Oskar Strawczynski

These are four pages from one of his several(?) memoirs, this one published in the book Escaping Hell in Treblinka, where his memoirs are included as "Ten Months in Treblinka."

The original is in Yiddish, and the book contains the page scans. I can't find this exact one online, but Yad Vashem has a few other memoirs attributed to him.

A footnote to the page scans says only a couple initial pages of the entire document were handwritten by Strawczynski, with the rest copied by a Hannah Fryszdorf. However, the handwriting on those early pages is different than these two other handwriting samples shown below, so at least three different hands?

Because it's in Yiddish, it reads right-to-left. Handwriting switches at the bottom of page 82 (bottom right page).



edit: the Center for Jewish History has the full scan of the Yiddish document. Document pages 83-85 (handwritten 81-83) are ones to look at for the clear difference in handwriting style.

These aren't very straight scans, just what I could grab quickly from the paperback book.

The biggest difference is in the slanting of characters and how neat one handwriting is compared to the other. On the actual pages, there's a more noticeable difference in lightness of the ink between writers.

One person writes chapter headings as Roman numerals (I, II, III...), the other as Arabic (5, 6, 7...).

The handwriting switches like this several times in the full 165-page document.

Strawczynski doesn't play a huge role in the Treblinka history, but what he lacks in quality he makes up for in sheer quantity of testimonies and memoirs.

He was at the 1944 Soviet "One Year in Treblinka" Book Club, so he has "memories" of the Ringelblum-Wiernik material. I wonder where he got the inspiration to title his book "Ten Months in Treblinka."

[Stubble]

Holy fucking shit!

How directly does this tie to the Warsaw dungeons and dragons quest writing guild? Is this from pandora's milk cans? If it is, I'm going to fall out of my chair!

[pilgrimofdark]

How directly does this tie to the Warsaw dungeons and dragons quest writing guild? Is this from pandora's milk cans? If it is, I'm going to fall out of my chair!

Not sure yet on the Strawczynski chronology.

• 1942 - Treblinka report (Ringelblum)
• 1944 June - Wiernik book
• 1944 August-October - Soviet Treblinka investigations (Strawczynski interrogated twice, Wiernik book present)
• 1945 - Polish investigation (Strawczynski, Wiernik, and Auerbach present)
• sometime after the war - Strawczynski memoirs given to YIVO in New York

The intro for Escaping Hell in Treblinka says Strawczynski's is "one of the first two eyewitness accounts" of the uprising, so has to be after August 1943 (so not directly in the Ringelblum metal tins/milk cartons).

It's said that after the Treblinka uprising, he joined a partisan group and spent the time in the forest writing his memoirs. He encountered a group of Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) fighters in the forest who had survived the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April/May 1943.

He writes that the memoirs were written in the "spring and summer of 1944." However, if he wrote these memoirs after his 1944 Soviet interrogations, then he'd already been exposed to Wiernik's book as early as August.

And the memoirs weren't handed over to YIVO in New York until after the war by Hannah Fryszdorf, the "copyist."

Still some chronology to work out, and I haven't even fully read Strawczynski's memoirs yet.

Strawczynski didn't draw a map.

[pilgrimofdark]

I finished Strawczynski's memoirs that are published as "Ten Months in Treblinka" in Escaping Hell in Treblinka. I expected it to be a straight plagiarism of Wiernik, but it's more than that.

In this version of his memoirs, Strawczynski says he only spent time in the lower camp of T-II, so not the death camp.

In that context, he is a laborer. That's all. There's a typhus outbreak, the usual German atrocities, Barry/Bari the dog is biting genitals, "Lalka" is shooting people in the butt, etc.

What's interesting is that Strawczynski begins confabulating memories that come from Wiernik's book: he confuses memories of the T-II lower camp with the upper "death" camp. The same exact things happen in both camps -- Wiernik describes them happening in the upper camp, Strawczynski in the lower camp.

So unless someone is familiar with Wiernik's narrative, Strawczynski's sounds coherent enough. But there are numerous things Strawczynski shouldn't know, because he wasn't in the upper camp. He just transposes them into his narrative.

In a few instances, he says he got information later from survivors of the upper camp, but he clearly marks those. In many other instances, the question "how does he know that?" can most easily be answered with "he got it from Wiernik's book at the 1944 Soviet investigations."

Either the camps were kept separate and Strawczynski is confabulating, or the camps were not kept as separate as is commonly accepted.

[pilgrimofdark]

The Yiddish version of A Year in Treblinka has a slightly earlier date for when the book was smuggled out of Warsaw.

Here is what we know about him from the underground report of the "Bund," which was sent out from Warsaw on May 24, 1944...

- p. 5

The previous earliest date was June 6, 1944 when it was mentioned by Henryk Wolinski.

The rest of the introduction to the Yiddish version contains some biographical information about Wiernik. Probably worth checking if it's new information or already known or mythological.

[pilgrimofdark]

Some corruption in the translation from Yiddish, but mostly coherent. Nothing new that I can discern.

Introduction to the Yiddish version of A Year in Treblinka

Spoiler

Introductory word from the publisher

Herewith, we bring to the American Jewish reader in book form the description of Yankel Wiernik – "A Year in Treblinka". These are images that can make the blood boil in the veins and, like evil ghosts of fear, which come from some terrible sources, haunt the reader day and night. This is the source of horror and fear. These are the experiences of a single person, but they give a certain idea about the cruel murders, in which the Nazis and their helpers killed millions of our brothers and sisters in the death factories, which were built especially for this purpose.

Treblinka is one of about a tenth of the extermination camps that the Nazis set up to exterminate the Jewish population from Europe.

The mass slaughter of Jews began in the fall of 1941. As early as October 1941, the Nazis gassed the Jewish population of a number of towns around Lodz. These were the first attempts of science. On the basis of the experience of the first gas wagons in the forests of Helmna Kuyavar), the Nazis later set up killing factories in Treblinka (near Malkin), Majdanek (near Lublin), Sabidur (near Chelm), Belzice, Birkenau (south-west Poland), in the vicinity of Vilnius, in Estonia and some others. In the death camps, the Jews of all of occupied Europe were rounded up and slaughtered. According to the latest figures, the total number of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis in Poland, in the occupied territories of Russia and deported from Western Europe – the grand total of about six million. The description of Yankel Wiernik is thus transformed to a certain extent into a document, which gives for the coming generations at least a partial picture of the horrible death convulsions of six million innocent Jewish men and women, old and young, old and helpless.

The murder work was shrouded in a thick mystery. No one, except the murderers, allowed a survivor to leave the killing camp. This helped the Nazis hide their horrible crime from the world for years. This also helped them to seduce the victims in the death camps for a long time, without encountering any resistance. The author of "A Year in Treblinka," is one from Warsaw.

Here is what we know about him from an underground report from “Bund,” which was sent out from Warsaw on May 24, 1944: the author of “A Year in Treblinka,” a certain Yankel Wiernik, who had been in that death camp for a full year – later organized an uprising, which ended with the destruction of the camp, the burning of all its facilities, and the killing of the German-Ukrainian guard. A large number of those tortured in the camp were liberated. I had the opportunity – writes the sender of our underground report – to have a conversation with Wiernik. He told me that he had completed his elementary school education, as he put it, in 1904 and in the following years in Bundish, and his secondary school education" in the Bund's self-defense schools; later he was a craftsman, belonged to the Craftsmen's Chamber, and did not engage in political work.

It is well known that Yankel Wiernik was an excellent craftsman, who had, as you say, "golden hands", and that he lived with his family on Wolynska Street in Warsaw during the entire years of the Hitler occupation, until he was caught along with others during the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto and taken to Treblinka.

Deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began on July 22, 1942. Every day six to ten thousand Jews were taken out and sent in an unknown direction. A few weeks after the beginning of the deportations, Yankel Wiernik was arrested. He then spent a year in Treblinka, where he belonged to the lucky group of Jews who were not killed immediately, but were forced to perform various tasks in the death camp, mainly burying or burning the dead. After a year of such a nightmarish life, he managed to escape with a group of workers. A part of what Yankel Wiernik saw through the nightmarish years before him is further described here. As the author tells, he had only one hope in his life – the hope of having a chance to reveal to the world the fears that he was given to be a witness to them. He has now achieved his goal.

As soon as he ran away, he took to the pen. The Jewish Coordination Committee in Warsaw (of the "Alliance" and the Jewish National Committee) illegally published the booklet in Polish under Hitler. Copies of the book were received by the deputies of the Polish National Council, Dr. Emanuel Scherer and Dr. Eigen Schwarzbart. Through them, the book came to New York, where the description was already published in various daily newspapers.

But this is a document that must be preserved in the form of a book, this is a description that everyone who is suffering with the pain of the slaughtered six million must always have with them. This moved us to publish it in book form.

With the simple words in which Yankel Wiernik describes his experiences, the author produced one of the strongest works in the human language. He brings us the most fantastic document, which is strong with its cruel truth and naked horror. This is the biggest indictment in history against the Nazi beast-man, the most difficult indictment, because he portrays the heaviest and most incredible crime of Nazism.

The Nazis burned the dead bodies of the united, poisoned and in other ways murdered by them millions of Jews and non-Jews. They spread the ashes of the victims, fertilized fields with it, and planted fodder plants there for themselves and their animals. They killed every casual witness of their murderous work, and believed that they would thus cover up all the traces of their unheard of crime.

But the crime cries out from the ground, over which the ashes were spread. His echo is brought on the wings of all four winds, which cannot cease to carry the last cries of millions of innocent – tortured throughout the world. The echo of the crime spans the world in the many thousands of children's shoes that remain after those who died in the Maidan, and all this became possible due to the testimony of some accidental survivors of the murder, and, among others, also for the reason that the crime is united in the next document, which will become a single monument of Nazi brutality and shame – an inexhaustible source of hatred and will to fight against fascism in all its forms.

December, 1944.