The CODOH Revisionist Forum

I'll dig. Welcome change from the stuff I've been looking at. Much better to find some signs of life, and be able to build a temporal cross reference than to be researching the Nazi Doctors.

Thanks Archie, this is much appreciated!

The Ringelblum Archive has a whole volume on Letters from the Shoah, translated into English.

This one is from Hersz/Hersh Lepak - ARG II 383 (Ring II/273/2). It's Document 110 (strona 218) in the Letters volume, although I'm grabbing a slightly different translation.

Treblinka, October 5, 1942

Dear wife!

I have been in Treblinka since August 31, 1942 and am healthy. I am employed in the camp workshop as a carpenter. How is your health? Write me also on whether the parents are healthy as well.

Affectionate regards and kisses to you all.

The fact that he didn't mention the mountains of corpses or the homicidal chlorine chambers is taken as proof that they existed but were simply too horrific for him to acknowledge.

Yes, that is seriously the argument on this letter.

It's only once people escape from Treblinka and make it back to the Ringelblum group that they start to remember "the Doll," Bary the dog, the steam chambers, etc.

I know this stays from topic a little, I'm curious though, are there any other 'forest jews' that gave accounts to the red army? Surely that one fellow wasn't the only one.

For Treblinka, Jakub Dab/Domb also said in his Red Army interrogation, "I remained in the camp until August 1943, and during the camp uprising on August 2, 1944 [a typo in the transcript of his interrogation], I escaped with other Jews and hid in the forest for 11 months until the arrival of the Red Army."

Several others said they escaped into the forest, then found a local Pole to live with.

Dab remembers Wiernik, but gets confused during his book report on YIT.