Am I a Murderer?: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman

Hoping his uniform would provide a shield for his family, Perechodnik, a 27-year-old engineer of agronomy, joined the ghetto police in the Polish town of Otwock during WWII only to find himself participating in the Germans' August 1941 extermination of Jews, including his wife and two-year-old daughter. The author watched helplessly as they were forced aboard a train bound for the Treblinka death camp. In this stunning memoir, written in hiding in Warsaw after he left the police, he expresses his anguish and astonishment at the savagery of the Poles who turned against the Jews. It was, he writes, ``the greatest disillusionment that I have endured in my life.'' Perechodnik committed suicide by taking cyanide in 1944, shortly after the abortive Warsaw Uprising against the Germans, leaving this blistering record of the implementation of the Final Solution by a witness, victim and collaborator. Before his death, he entrusted his diary to a friend, and it eventually found its way to the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem. Fox, who edited this testament, teaches history in Britain. Illustrated. (Feb.)