Mordechaï Podchlebnik
- Birth Date:
- 00.00.1907
- Death date:
- 00.00.1985
- Extra names:
- Mordechaï Podchlebnik, Mordechaj Podchlebnik
- Categories:
- Victim of nazism
- Nationality:
- jew
- Cemetery:
- Set cemetery
Mordechaï Podchlebnik or Michał Podchlebnik (1907 – 1985) was a Polish Jew who managed to survive the Holocaust. He was a member of the Sonderkommando work detail for nearly two weeks at the Chełmno extermination camp in occupied Poland. Podchlebnik was one of three (or more) prisoners who escaped into the surrounding forest from the mass burial zone.
He was born to a family of Jacob Podchlebnik and Sosia (Zosia) née Widawska from Koło, known also by the Polish equivalent of his first name, Michał. He witnessed the deportation of his father, mother, sister with her five children, and brother with his own wife and three children. Podchlebnik became a key witnesses in 1945 at the Chełmno Trials of the former SS men from the SS Special Detachment Kulmhof. Decades later in 1961 he gave testimony at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Podchlebnik was also interviewed for the documentary film Shoah.
Source: wikipedia.org
No places
08.12.1941 | Created Chełmno extermination camp
Chełmno extermination camp (German: Vernichtungslager Kulmhof) built during World War II, was a Nazi German extermination camp situated 50 kilometres (31 mi) north of the metropolitan city of Łódź, near the Polish village of Chełmno nad Nerem (Kulmhof an der Nehr in German). Following the invasion of Poland in 1939 Germany annexed the area into the new territory of Reichsgau Wartheland aiming at its complete "Germanization"; the camp was set up specifically to carry out ethnic cleansing through mass killings. It operated from December 8, 1941 parallel to Operation Reinhard during the most deadly phase of the Holocaust, and again from June 23, 1944 to January 18, 1945 during the Soviet counter-offensive. Polish Jews of the Łódź Ghetto and the local inhabitants of Reichsgau Wartheland (Warthegau) were exterminated there. In 1943 modifications were made to the camp's killing methods because the reception building was already dismantled.