Rajgrodzki, Jerzy

Jerzy Rajgrodzki was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 12 September 1942, and escaped during the prisoner uprising on 2 August 1943. On an unspecified date, he wrote a lengthy report on his stay at the camp, which was published in 1958. He described the alleged Treblinka gas chambers, presumably operated with engine-exhaust gas, similar, but less detailed, to the way Jankiel Wiernik had described them in his 1944 booklet. Wiernik’s booklet, whose tale was plagiarized by various authors and witnesses (such as Abraham Goldfarb), may also have been known to Rajgrodzki. He added some unique features to it which are not part of the common lore accepted by the orthodoxy, such as peepholes in the gas-chamber doors, an execution time of one hour, showers at the ceiling, and the conversion of Treblinka’s first three-gas-chamber execution building into a workshop.

He claimed to have worked at removing corpses from the gas chambers a few times. He asserted that the victims lay dead in the chamber piled up to a height of five feet. Let’s assume that on average seven people can lie on a surface of four square meters (six side-by-side, and one crosswise). The height of a human body lying down is on average at most 20 cm. To reach a stacking height of five feet (ca. 160 cm), this requires roughly eight layers. Hence, 56 people would be lying stacked up in this cubicle on four square meters. Standing up, this would result in a packing density of 14 people per square meter, which is not realistic, to say the least.

Rajgrodzki moreover told the tale of a young Jew helping to operate the gas-chamber engine. However, it is rather unlikely that a Jew was an accomplice of the mass murder of his fellow Jews. Supposedly, this Jew was later married — evidently to a deported Jewess while in the camp, for else, how would he know? And why would he mention it, if it hadn’t been a memorable camp event? This may be an echo of the tall tale told by SS judge Konrad Morgen in his testimony at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal of Jews won over by the SS to exterminate their brethren, and of a lavish Jewish wedding inside one of the Aktion Reinhardt Camps (of which Treblinka was one).

(For more details, see Mattogno 2021e, pp. 191f.)