There are still Treblinka survivors living. One tells his tale

Amanda Borschel-Dan

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Treblinka survivor Poldek (Leon) Rytz, 89, dances with wife Ester Dyna Rytz, 86, in 2007 in Sweden. (courtesy)

A healthy 89-year-old living in the southern Swedish city of Borås, Pejsach Leon “Poldek” Rytz is no stranger to escaping death. Through a combination of miracles and help from fellow prisoners, as a teen he twice escaped the Nazis, including once from the death camp Treblinka.

This weekend, when international news agencies announced the death of Samuel Willenberg, many reports referred to him as the last survivor of Treblinka. On Monday, as Willenberg was buried in Israel, world news reports again referred to him as Treblinka’s last survivor. But Willenberg was, in fact, the final survivor of the August 1943 Treblinka prisoners’ revolt.

Seeing this misunderstanding in print, Rytz’s daughter Louise contacted The Times of Israel by email, notifying the paper, “My father Poldek Rytz is also a survivor from Treblinka, and is also still alive… He is still very active in telling his survival story in schools and public meetings and in 2015 he was named ‘Ambassador’ of the city of Borås.”

Because survivors are becoming older and less able to tell their own stories, Rytz’s daughter Louise felt compelled to reach out.

“It is very important to keep the history alive with witnesses and survivors from the Holocaust, specially in Sweden, a country that has turned so anti-Semitic due to our aid to Palestine and as we have taken more than 1.5 million Muslims to Sweden just in the last 10 years. Hate is growing very fast, we feel safe, but what will be for our children?” she asks in an email.

But Rytz, like many Holocaust survivors, was imprisoned in several different Nazi camps, including Majdanek,Treblinka, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen. So is calling him a Treblinka survivor factually correct?

According to Yad Vashem’s head of public inquiries Ehud Amir, there is no binding definition of how a Holocaust survivor is labeled. However, “a person who was in several camps can be considered a survivor from each camp he attended,” says Amir.

And so, in addition to a phone conversation during a vacation she was taking in Thailand, Louise, seeking to spread her father’s tale of miraculous survival, provided an ad hoc English translation of his testimony, which he wrote in Swedish. With this testimony as a jumping-off point, plus a brief conversation with Rytz and his wife, and lengthy follow-up email correspondence, The Times of Israel recounts a selection of Rytz’s harrowing experiences during the Holocaust.

From small town Poland to the gates of hell

Pejsach Leon “Poldek” Rytz was born in 1927 in the small Polish town of Warka. When he was still a baby, the seven-member Ryczwol family — Rytz changed his name later — relocated to Warsaw, where father Szlomo co-owned and managed a tea import company. However, by 1939, his father, pressed into service to the Polish Cavalry, was killed, leaving mother Lea alone to raise their five children just as the Nazis occupied Warsaw.

The family struggled to survive on a stock of tea his father and sister had hidden — “a small and limited life insurance,” as Rytz remembers it. Tea was exchanged with a Polish family for food through his brother and sisters.

It was perilous to be seen on Warsaw’s streets and as part of the Nazis’ Operation Reinhard — code name for the systematic plan to exterminate Poland’s Jews — Rytz was eventually among the many Jews captured and taken in autumn 1942 to the Warsaw Umschlagsplatz, a square located near the Jewish Ghetto. There, he says, “I found myself together with a lot of other horror-filled children.”

The Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 (Photo credit: CC-BY-SA Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-270-0298-10 / Amthor

Read more: There are still Treblinka…

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