Jankiel Wiernik was a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor who was an influential figure in the Treblinka extermination camp uprising of August 1943. Following his escape during the uprising, he published "A Year in Treblinka", his eyewitness testimony to the tragic loss of anywhere from 700,000 to 1,400,000 innocent lives. Wiernik also testified in the Ludwig Fischer's trial in 1947, and in Eichmann's trial in 1961.Wiernik published the book in 1944 as a clandestine booklet printed through the efforts of the Jewish National Committee, Bund (underground organisations of the remnants of Polish Jews) and Polish Council to Aid Jews Zegota. The original circulation is estimated by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski at 2000 copies.Wiernik was transported to Treblinka on August 23, 1942 from the Warsaw ghetto. On his arrival, he was selected to work rather than being immediately killed. His first job required him to drag corpses from the gas chambers to mass graves. Wiernik was deeply traumatized by this experience: "It often happened that an arm or a leg fell off when we tied straps around them in order to drag the bodies away."The present edition of the book is the exact reprint of the wartime publication, with the addition of a preface by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a Polish politician and historian, two-time Minister of Foreign Affairs in Polish government, and former Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner (source: amazon.uk)
