Kalman Taigman

Kalman Taigman also Teigman קלמן טייגמן (c. 24 December 1923 – c. 27 July 2012) was an Israeli citizen born in Warsaw, Poland, who testified at the 1961 Eichmann Trial held in Jerusalem as one of the remaining few Jewish inmates of the Sonderkommando who escaped from the Treblinka extermination camp during the prisoner uprising of 1943.

Taigman did not go back to Poland for over 60 years, he returned to Treblinka for the first time in 2010 (two years before his death), asked by the film director Tzipi Beider to take part in a documentary, along with another Treblinka survivor, and a friend of his, Samuel Willenberg. Taigman's second wife of 26 years, Lea Lipshitz, who went along with them, said that Kalman was happy to be in Poland once more and much to her surprise spoke Polish again with ease.

Biography


Kalman Teigman (Taigman) studied at a technical school in Warsaw before the Shoa in Poland occupied by Germany, taught by Adam Czerniaków among others. In 1935, his father emigrated to Mandate Palestine in the hope of bringing the family with him, but the war erupted and the planning failed. Kalman and his mother were trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest Jewish ghetto in all of Nazi Germany-occupied Europe with 500,000 inmates eventually. They worked for the ghetto branch of Germany's Chemnitzer Astrawerke AG factory. In 1942, both of them were deported to Treblinka during the Grossaktion Warsaw.

The camp in Treblinka, built as part of Operation Reinhard (the most deadly phase of the "Final Solution"), operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 officially. During this time, more than 800,000 Jews – men, women, and children – were murdered there upon arrival.

Kalman's mother was sent directly from the Holocaust train to the gas chambers disguised as showers. Kalman was put to work with the Sonderkommando in the Auffanglager sorting barracks. Of his experience at Treblinka, Taigman stated on film: "It was hell, absolutely hell. A normal man cannot imagine how a living person could have lived through it – killers, natural-born killers, who without a trace of remorse just murdered every little thing." He described the concealment of the camp's purpose in a following way:

"There were flowers planted on the ground, and of course people couldn't imagine where they were. They [the SS] painted the huts and put up all sorts of signs as if it was a real railway station. I remember that once one of them said these words – I'll never forget these words – he said it in German, "Come quickly because the water is getting cold!"  That's how far they went.  The manner in which it worked was macabre, and it was a horrible thing to see."

Taigman escaped during the uprising of 2 August 1943 by climbing over the barbed-wire fence under machine-gun fire. Soon after the war ended he married in Warsaw. A year later he joined his father in Israel, but only after arrest by the British and subsequent release from the Jewish refugee camp set up in Cyprus, according to the 2002 Uruguayan documentary Despite Treblinka. Taigman ran a successful import business in Israel. For a number of years, while in Israel, Taigman used to meet with other Holocaust survivors on the anniversary day of the Treblinka uprising. Among the guests at the home of Samuel (Szmuel) Willenberg and his wife Ada were also Pinhas (Pinchas) Epstein and Eliahu Rosenberg who testified along with him at the trial of Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann in 1961.

Both of his friends, Rosenberg and Epstein, were the star witnesses of Israeli prosecution at the 1986–88 trial of John Demjanjuk, identified as camp guard nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible" and accused of committing murder and acts of extraordinary violence at Treblinka against the Jewish prisoners in. When asked, Kalman refused to testify and asserted that this man was never in Treblinka. The controversy surrounding Rosenberg-Epstein testimony erupted in full force after it was discovered in the Soviet-held archives that Demjanjuk (identified by both of them from photographs) did not serve at Treblinka at all, but at the Sobibor SS death camp. To make matters worse, Rosenberg's testimony in his case from 1981 was shown to have been coached by the interrogators and wholly illegitimate.

Kalman Taigman died in 2012 of a brain tumor, survived by his second wife Lea, a son, and two grandchildren.