Kalman Taigman

Kalman Taigman was born in 1923 in Warsaw

Kalman Taigman was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1923. He studied at a technical school there, where Adam Czerniaków was among his teachers. In 1935 his father moved to Mandate Palestine, but the war kept the rest of the family from joining him.

During the war he and his mother were held in the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942 both were deported to Treblinka, where his mother was killed in the gas chambers. He was put to work sorting the belongings of the victims.

On 2 August 1943 he took part in the Treblinka uprising and escaped by climbing the barbed-wire fence under fire. He then survived in the forests as a partisan and joined the Polish army in 1944. After the war he met his first wife, Rina, and the British caught them on the ship Moledet and sent them to Cyprus.

In Israel he joined his father and settled in Bat Yam. He served briefly in the Israel Police, then worked in a factory for carpentry and metal machines and later opened his own business. In 1961 he testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

His business suffered in the 1983 stock crisis, and he later married Lea Lipshitz. He then worked at the emergency stores of the Bat Yam municipality. In 2010 he returned to Treblinka for the first time for a documentary, and he died in 2012.