Calek Perechodnik was a member of the Jewish Ghetto police in Otwock, Poland when his wife, Anka, and two-year-old daughter, Aluśka, were deported to their deaths at Treblinka. Filled with shock, grief, and guilt, he spent the next year writing to memorialize his murdered family. The result, finished on the one-year anniversary of their deportation, is a gut-wrenching and deeply moving account of a man — and community — who lost everything. Available in a new English translation by translator Jarosław Garliński and editor David Engel, Perechodnik’s Confession: The Story of a Jewish Family During the Nazi Occupation of Poland will captivate and challenge readers.
Part of the emotional impact comes from Perechodnick’s habit of addressing his late wife directly. In fact, much of the book reads like a letter to the wife he knows he will never see again: “But believe me, Anka, I never imagined that you would perish and I would remain alive.” In his grief, he obsesses over every decision, every movement, he made in the time leading up to their deportation, second-guessing what he could have done to save them.
Perechodnik also writes directly to his imagined future readers: “I ask you, good people…where is the opinion of the civilized world? Where are the intellectuals, the writers, the professors? How can the world stay silent?” By asking these questions, he brings the reader into the narrative and challenges his audience to sit in the discomfort of his story.
As Engel details in his introduction, the diary’s publication history is not without scandal. The first Polish edition, released in 1993, became a literary sensation, but was later found to have been selectively altered, with passages softened or changed to reduce criticism of non-Jewish Poles. For instance, versions in a host of different languages included the line: “the Germans sensed very well that among the Poles not everyone is against the extermination of the Jews.” Perechodnick’s original line, however, is more of a condemnation. He writes, “The Germans had a good sense that the Poles will not object to the extermination of the Jews.” These revisions demonstrate how editorial intervention can shape not only an individual text, but the entire trajectory of how the Holocaust is understood.
Sadly, Perechodnick did not survive the Holocaust, dying during or shortly after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. “Today, Anka, I do not fear death,” he wrote in the final chapter of his memoir, “and in a month, I won’t fear anything at all.” After years of being stunned at what the Nazis were able to get away with, he now saw death as the inevitable outcome. The only consolation, if there was one, was that his family’s memory could live on through his writing. “I believe that millions of people will read these memoirs, that everyone will grieve for you…I brought you down, but I shall avenge you,” he wrote to his late wife.
Thanks to Garliński, Engel, and Yad Vashem Publications, Perechodnick’s promise is finally complete. Now, millions really can read his words as he wrote them — without the dishonest changes of earlier editions — and, for a time, get an inside look at one family’s destruction during the Holocaust.
