| The Holocaust |
|---|
|
Part of: Jewish history
|
|
|
|
Camps
|
|
Remembrance
|
Jankiel (or Yankel)-Yaakov Wiernik (in Hebrew: יעקב ויירניק; born 1889, Biala Podlaska, Poland - died 1972, Rishon Lezion, Israel)[1] was a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor who was an influential figure in the Treblinka extermination camp uprising of August 1943. Following his escape during the uprising, he published his account of his time in the camp titled: ‘A Year in Treblinka', of his experiences and eyewitness testimony of that death camp where he witnessed the tragic loss of anywhere from 700,000 to 1,400,000[2] innocent lives. Wiernik also testified in the Eichmann Trial in 1961 and was present at the opening of the Treblinka Memorial in 1964. After World War II, Wiernik immigrated to Sweden and later moved to Israel where he died in 1972 at the age of 83.
Contents |
Jankiel Wiernik was a carpenter living in Warsaw, Poland before his time in Treblinka. When World War II began, he was 50 years old.
Jankiel Wiernik published A Year in Treblinka in 1945. The book recounts his experiences in the Treblinka concentration camp between 1942 and 1943.
Wiernik arrived in Warsaw in 1942 after being captured and taken to Treblinka by train. On his arrival, Wiernik was selected to work rather than be immediately killed. Wiernik's first job required him to drag corpses from the gas chambers to mass graves. Wienik was traumatized by his experiences, writing 'It often happened that an arm or a leg fell off when we tied straps around them in order to drag the bodies away.'[3] However, he was also encouraged by the occasional scenes of brave resistance to his captors.[4] In chapter 8, he describes seeing a naked woman escape the clutches of the guards and leap over a ten foot high barbed wire fence unscathed. When accosted by a Ukrainian guard on the other side, she wrestled his machine gun out of his grasp and shot several guards before being killed herself.
When Wiernik's profession as a carpenter was discovered, he was put to work constructing various camp structures including additional gas chambers. Given his skills, Wiernik was not subjected to the same treatment others were and he no longer had to handle dead bodies. Wiernik attributes his survival to his work building structures needed in the camp. Given the shortage of skilled construction workers, Wiernik moved between the two divisions of the camp frequently. As a result, Wiernik became an important figure, communicating between the camps when the revolt was being planned.
After escaping Treblinka, Wiernik hid in Warsaw where he wrote A Year in Treblinka. After the end of World War II, Wiernik immigrated to Sweden and then to the newly founded state of Israel. It was during this period after the war that Wiernik experienced the after-effects of his experience. His feeling of guilt can be seen in chapter one of A Year in Treblinka. "I sacrificed all those nearest and dearest to me. I myself took them to the place of execution. I built their death chambers for them." He stated that he had nightmares and had trouble sleeping. Apparently, the horrors he had experienced in Treblinka had caused him to suffer from survivor syndrome, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. In the 1950s, Wiernik built a model of the Treblinka camp which is displayed in the Ghetto Fighters' House museum in Israel. In 1961 Wiernik testified in the Eichmann trial in Israel.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||