Chaim Sztajer

[1][2] Sztajer was detained as a Sonderkommando in the Treblinka extermination camp for ten months, from early October 1942 until 2 August 1943, when he managed to escape during the uprising.

Sztajer was among many survivors who volunteered to give evidence in the trial of John Demanjuk, a Ukrainian-American man accused of being the notorious Treblinka guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

[10] The liquidation of the ghetto began on 22 September 1942 and Sztajer was deported with his wife and daughter to the Treblinka extermination camp on 3 October 1942.

[3] The 'shower' was deemed full right after his wife stepped in, however, the notorious Treblinka officer Ivan the Terrible also grabbed Blima from Sztajer's arms and threw her into the chamber as the doors were closing.

A few weeks later, he was sent to Treblinka II, where he was forced to carry the bodies of the murdered victims from the gas chambers and bury them in mass graves.

Later in his imprisonment, Sztajer and other prisoners were made to exhume the buried bodies and burn them, in order to destroy the evidence of the crimes at the camp.

[13] Sztajer was forced to remove the heads from the decaying bodies and hand them over to the Nazi guards, who wanted to count the skulls and find out how many people they had actually killed.

[13] After his escape from Treblinka, Sztajer hid in the forest in Poland for almost twelve months until being liberated by the Soviet Red Army 1st Belorussian Front during the Lublin-Brest Offensive in July 1944.

In 1987, Sztajer travelled back to Israel to give evidence in the trial of John Demanjuk who was accused of being the notorious Treblinka Guard known as 'Ivan the Terrible'.