Samuel RA Jzman Dead at 77

Samuel Rojzman, one of the leaders of the Treblinka concentration camp uprising, died recently here at the age of 77. Born in Wengrow, Poland, he lived with his wife and daughter in Warsaw where he was employed in an export-import firm, On Sept. 21, 1942, he and his family were deported to Treblinka, where his wife and daughter perished. Altogether, 70 members of Rajzman’s family were killed in the Holocaust.

In 1943, Rajzman and 12 other leaders of the uprising destroyed the death camp before leading 600 inmates into the surrounding woods. Of the entire group, only 40 survived. In 1944, he wrote one of the first reports about Treblinka, which was published in the Lublin literary magazine, Odrodzenie.

In that report, Rajzman wrote: “I was taken to Treblinka in 1942. I had been living in Warsaw. They took me out on Yom Kippur in the middle of praying they took us away to Treblinka. We had a minyan in the courtyard. We were reciting our prayers in the courtyard: there were no more synagogues open at that time. We were working in Toebbens’ shop, a factory that produced buttons for the Germans…. In the shop where I worked there were 125 to 130 people. They took every body away. A couple of us they killed right on the spot, the rest were taken to Treblinka.”

After the war, which Rajzman spent in hiding, he lived in Munich where he was personnel director for the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Germany. Later, he moved to Paris. In 1950 he emigrated to Canada and settled in Montreal where he was in the lumber business and was an active member in two synagogues.

During the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46. Rajzman was the only witness to testify about Treblinka and was the chief witness at the Treblinka trial at Dusseldorf in the early 1950s. In 1965, he was a leading witness at the trial of Franz Stangl. commandant of Treblinka.