Jankiel Wiernik

Who was Jankiel Wiernik?

Jankiel Wiernik was a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor who was an influential figure in the Treblinka extermination camp uprising. After his escape during the uprising of 2 August 1943, Wiernik wrote a clandestine account of the camp's operation titled A Year in Treblinka consisting of his experiences and eyewitness testimony of a Sonderkommando slave worker at a Nazi secretive death camp responsible for the annihilation of anywhere from 700,000 to 900,000 innocent victims.

Following World War II Wiernik testified in the Ludwig Fischer's trial in 1947, the Eichmann Trial in 1961, and was present at the opening of the Treblinka Memorial in 1964. After the Soviet takeover, Wiernik emigrated to Sweden and later relocated to Israel where he died in 1972 at the age of 83.