17 Days in Treblinka: Daring to Resist, and Refusing to Die (formerly called:Quenched Steel: The Story of an escape from Treblinka) by Edi Weinstein.

My name is Eddie (Idl) Weinstein (born: Yehuda Jakob Wajnsztajn) from Łosice. I escaped from Treblinka on September 10, 1942. Yad Vashem published my story in Hebrew in 2001 under the name “Plada Rotahat” פלדה רותחת and in English in 2002 under the title of “Quenched Steel – The Story of an Escape from Treblinka”. I feel that my brother along with five Jewish boys played major roles in my survival.

From Jerusalem Post.com by ANNE WOLLENBERG:

'Every night, I was surprised to find myself alive," says Edi Weinstein, his Polish accent softened by 58 years spent living in New York. The 83-year-old is the last living survivor of the Treblinka II extermination camp. The exact death toll is not known, but some 870,000 people are estimated to have died there between July 1942 and October 1943. Fewer than 100 survived.

Treblinka I, a forced labor camp, was established in 1941. Treblinka II opened on July 24, 1942, one mile away. It was founded as part of Operation Reinhard, the Nazis' plan for wiping out Polish Jewry, and it had one purpose only: to kill.

"They didn't have a count," Weinstein recalls. "There were no numbers like they had in Auschwitz. They would kill you for anything, so they didn't bother to count us." Most victims died within a few hours of reaching the camp.

Treblinka II, or what remains of it, is buried in deep forest, a deceptively still and peaceful setting for a mass graveyard. When the camp was operational, nothing could be seen from the outside other than smoke curling into the air.

Today, the barbed wire that once surrounded the camp is gone. Walk from the old station to the Treblinka II site and you will see a row of standing stones marking where the fence used to be, while the train tracks have been replaced with commemorative stone blocks. Beside the ramp where cattle cars packed with people once pulled in, the ground is uneven, still bearing the scars from the ditches that housed the dead.

Inside, the camp is filled with memorial stones bearing the names of communities that were destroyed there. Only one is dedicated to a person, the educator Janusz Korczak. These stones surround a much larger memorial, with a great crack in it to represent the evil that was perpetrated in Treblinka. There is a mass grave nearby, while another stone simply reads: "Never again" in five languages.

Weinstein says that people need to know what happened in this terrible place. His account of his experiences has been published by Yad Vashem, first in Hebrew under the name Plada Rotahat and then in English with the title Quenched Steel: The Story of an Escape from Treblinka. And recently, he accompanied a party of young people from the educational organization Aish Hatorah back to the site. "This is the last generation to be able to hear about what happened firsthand from a survivor," he says. "That won't be possible in 10 years."

Paperback
174pp
Published Date:2008
ISBN: 978-975-308-321-9