January 18: Escape from Chelmno

Yakov Grojanowski (Szlamek Bailer) escaped from the Chelmno extermination camp in Poland on this date in 1942, after helping to bury 1,600 Jews who had been gassed in a van at the camp in the course of about two weeks. Bailer, whose parents and siblings were among the victims, managed to make his way to the Warsaw Ghetto and gave detailed information about his death camp experience to the Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbat group. The group helped him write his testimony in Polish and German, under his pseudonym. He described the entire extermination procedure, as well as his escape from the camp and the brutality of the guards. The Polish text was sent to underground representatives of the Polish government-in-exile. (The German edition, it was hoped, would help stir the hearts of Germany’s citizenry.) Bailer later fled to Zamosc, and wrote to Ringelblum’s group about the existence of a death camp in Belzec — where he was ultimately killed in April, after being caught in a round-up. A second escapee from Chelmno, Mordechaï Podchlebnik, lived to give testimony at the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. To read excerpts from the Grojanowski report, click here.

“My friend Getzel Chrzastowski screamed terribly for a moment when he recognized his 14 year-old son, who had just been thrown into the ditch. We had to stop him, too, from begging the Germans to shoot him. We argued it was necessary to survive this suffering, so we might revenge ourselves later and pay the Germans back.” —Yakov Grojanowski