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.