Samuel Rajzman

Samuel Rajzman was a Polish Holocaust survivor. After the war he emigrated to France and then to Canada. He was one of the two Polish witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials. He was also a witness at the Treblinka trials and during the process of Fiodor Fedorenko.

Biography

Szmul Rajzman was born into a Jewish family and lived with his wife and children in Węgrów, where he was an accountant and translator. After the German invasion of Poland, together with his family he was resettled and imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto.
In September 1942 he was transferred to the Treblinka extermination camp. He was saved from immediate execution that befell most of those from his transport group by an acquaintance, Marceli Galewski and moved to work in the Sonderkommando; he was also enlisted in the resistance organization. The resistance organization eventually succeeded in organizing the Treblinka uprising on 2 August 1943. Rajzman was one of the few survivors from that incident; familiar with the nearby area, he was sheltered, together with another escapee, by local farmer Edward Gołoś, a pre-war acquaintance of Rajzman, and survived the war. Gołoś was later recognized as one of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations.
After the war he moved to France, and later to Canada, where he remarried.
On 27 February 1946, Rajzman testified about his experiences in Treblinka at the Nuremberg Trials as one of the three Jews and two Polish witnesses during the proceedings. He was also a witness in both of the Treblinka trials. In 1978 his testimony also contributed to the stripping of Fiodor Fedorenko’s American citizenship.
Rajzman died in Montreal in 1979.