Jankiel Wiernik (1889–1972)

Jankiel, also Yankel or Jacob, Wiernik was born to a Jewish family in Kobryń, Poland (present-day Belarus). Some sources give Biała Podlaska as his birthplace. He followed his father in becoming a master cabinetmaker.
From 1904, Wiernik was a member of the Bund, a Jewish workers' movement. He lived in Warsaw and worked as a property manager.

In 1939, after the start of World War II and Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, Wiernik was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. During the liquidation of the Ghetto in August 1942, he was deported to the concentration camp at Treblinka. There he was put to work as a one of the Sonderkommando, slave workers who had to dispose of the bodies of those murdered by the Nazis. A year later, during a prisoner revolt at the camp, he escaped and was rescued by the Krzywoszewski family. He reached Warsaw and joined the resistance. He was asked to write an eyewitness account of his experiences, despite his initial reluctance, and it was published clandestinely in 1944 as A Year in Treblinka. It was one of the first books published on the camps. Wiernik took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, fighting in the Armia Ludowa (People's Army). After the end of the war, Wiernik remained in Poland for a time -- in 1947 he testified in the trial of war criminal Ludwig Fischer -- but emigrated first to Sweden and then to the newly-created state of Israel.

In the 1950s, Wiernik built a model of the Treblinka camp that is now displayed in the Ghetto Fighters' House museum in Israel. In 1961, he testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Wiernik contined to suffer the traumatic after-effects of his time in the concentration camp for the rest of his life. He was a guest of honor at the unveiling ceremony of the Monument to the Victims of the Death Camp in Treblinka on May 10, 1964.