"I felt like an executioner leading to death": Apology - even in the Holocaust

Tzalk Farhodnik, a policeman in the Otwock ghetto, led his wife and daughter to the deportation train to Treblinka because he believed the German promise that policemen's families would be released. When he realized they had lied to him, he escaped alone. In his diary, he described his heavy guilt: "I felt like an executioner leading to death" and wondered if he could ever atone.

Tzalk (Betzalel) Farhodnik was born in 1916 in Otwock, a spa town about 23 km from Warsaw where about 14,000 Jews lived before the war. He married Anna and they had a daughter, Atushka. With the German occupation of Poland in 1939, a ghetto was established in Otwock, the second largest in the Warsaw district. Farhodnik served as a ghetto policeman. On the day of the deportation, August 19, 1942, the policemen were promised that their families would be released. He led his wife and daughter to the train car, but when it became clear that the Germans had lied and the policemen's families were being deported with everyone else, he escaped alone. In his diary, quoted in a Yad Vashem podcast, he described his guilt: "I felt like an executioner leading to death." He also wrote that he could have financed forged documents for his family but refrained because he was sparing a suit and an English wool coat. About 7,000 to 8,000 of Otwock's Jews were sent to Treblinka and murdered. The article is based on his personal diary and a Yad Vashem podcast.