“This is not a work of literature, for I have neither literary ability nor literary aspirations. This is not a history of the Jews of Poland; I lack data on that subject. This is not a memoir of a person or his family, because all personal elements that are of concern to me alone have been eliminated from it. This is a memoir of a Jew and his Jewish family. Actually, this is the confession of my life, sincere and true.”
These are the poignant words of Calel Perechodnik. He wrote them in 1943 while hiding in Warsaw after escaping the ghetto, knowing that he most likely would not survive the war.
Time would quickly prove him right.
Preserving testimony
Eighty-three years later, Yad Vashem is bringing his words back to life with a new – and more accurate – translation of Am I a Murderer?: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, which it published in English on April 1, 2026, in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The aim? To ensure that Perechodnik’s important testimony is preserved – and shared.
That goal is even more critical today as the number of Holocaust survivors still present to share their experiences dwindles.
This is not the first time that Perechodnik’s memoir has been made available to the public, noted David Engel, a professor of Holocaust history and Judaic studies at New York University, during a recent interview with The Jerusalem Report.
Engel, who edited the recent version of Perechodnik’s manuscript, described how in 1993, the Polish organization KARTA released a version of the text, which was significantly altered. Whole passages were omitted; the language, critical of the Polish government, was softened.
While that edition was corrected and re-released in 2004, the distortion reflects a broader and well-documented pattern of Polish institutional resistance to confronting the country’s wartime record, Engel explained.
The most obvious example was in 2018, when the Polish government passed legislation making it illegal to openly accuse the state of involvement in Nazi crimes, with fines and imprisonment as possible penalties.
The law was widely criticized, including by the US and Israel, as an attempt to shield a painful historical record from scrutiny, leading to Poland’s repealing the criminal provisions later that year.
Perechodnik’s firsthand account of widespread Polish complicity during the Holocaust was a direct challenge to the government’s campaign to defend the state’s long-suffering national reputation.
New confession
Engel said that Am I a Murderer?: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman is much more than a memoir; it is a genuine reckoning with conscience at a time of moral bankruptcy.
“Perechodnik mounted a general argument in favor of a moral position different from what he regarded as the flawed one he had held at the beginning of the German occupation,” Engel said. “That move is more consistent with the confessional genre than the apologetic one.”
Perechodnik describes in vivid detail the process by which Jews slowly began to lose their freedom and livelihoods: access to the bank, businesses, and homes.
He outlines the eventual move to the ghetto, the waves of deportations that followed, and the gruesome clearing of the compound on August 19, 1942 – the same day he escorted his own wife and two-year-old daughter to the boxcar that would take them to the Treblinka death camp.
What follows is equally disturbing and includes his own internment in a labor camp and his escape to a hiding place in Warsaw, where he eventually wrote his diary.
Perechodnik provides a balanced analysis of the Polish and Jewish roles throughout his narrative, and his personal experience leads him to slowly shift his beliefs based on the decisions and actions he witnessed.
He describes the change in the Polish mentality regarding the Jewish people, from “a single brotherly bond” to a “brotherhood” that had “disappeared completely.”
However, he refuses to generalize about the Polish people as a whole, providing anecdotes that both support a more cunning and malicious Polish narrative while recognizing that not all Polish people took advantage of their Jewish neighbors.
He criticizes the naivety of the Jewish people, including himself, yet at the same time attempts to justify their submissiveness.
“It is the faith of the Jews in the cultural achievements of the 20th century, inability to understand the Huns’ mentality and their lust for blood despite all the laws of humanity and Christianity. All this blinds the Jews and renders them completely stupid. Moreover, it is hardly surprising, because one would have had to have something of the devil within him to foresee such a sequence of events,” he writes in one section.
It is precisely this layered, self-aware voice, at once accusing and forgiving, that makes Perechodnik’s manuscript so striking to those who study it today.
Rare find
Orit Noiman, head of private sector document collection at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, told the Report that to find such a well-documented account is quite rare.
“We can know from Perechodnik’s will, and what he wrote in his diary, that it was important for the next generation to know his story,” Noiman said.
“What we are doing now is what he asked us to do: to take those documents, keep them in a safe place, and publish them to the public.
“In the last few years, new documents have been brought to Yad Vashem,” she continued.
“This is very unique for us, to know and see the whole picture around Perechodnik. We can see the human being behind the diary.”
Perechodnik never claimed to be a hero, nor even a writer. Yet his confession has outlasted the war, the editions that distorted it, and every attempt to soften its edges.■