Gustavo Sierra told the little-known story of the Argentine who killed a Nazi at Treblinka at the Book Fair.

In the Treblinka Nazi concentration camp, 850,000 Jews died, but only one Nazi: the one killed by Meir Berliner, a young Polish-Argentine Jew who, even in hell, managed to ignite a spark of rebellion by taking justice into his own hands. “As the second-in-command Nazi, Max Bialas, was passing through the prisoners, using a whip to select those who would die that day, Meir Berliner stabbed him, and a few hours later, Bialas died,” recounted journalist and writer Gustavo Sierra on Friday at the Clarín/Ñ cultural space at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair. He concluded: “One in eight hundred and fifty thousand, and he was Argentine. I had to tell that story.”

This is how Berliner was born. The Avenger of Treblinka (Marea Editorial, 2024), Sierra's most recent book, which the author discussed at the Fair with fellow journalist and writer Gerardo "Tato" Young .

The novel follows the steps of this Polish-Argentine vigilante , from the 1920s in the Rosario neighborhood of Pichincha to the climax of the story, in the Polish city of Treblinka, when – in 1942 – Berliner deals the fatal blow to Max Bialas, the high-ranking SS official , going down in history as the hero of Treblinka.

The multi-award-winning author, with over 40 years of experience in international journalism, as a special envoy and war correspondent for the country's most important media outlets, including, and extensively, for Clarín , Gustavo Sierra, covered war conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, followed in the footsteps of Osama bin Laden on the Afghan-Pakistani border, and was also a reporter in the Mexican narco-war.

Among his most notable books, which combine journalism with literary narrative, are: Under the Bombs (2003): War Stories from the Field; Kabul, Baghdad, Tehran (2006): Chronicles of Conflicts in the Middle East; The Bagram Cartel (2012): Investigation into Drug Trafficking and War; Sinaloa–Medellín–Rosario (2014): Analysis of Drug Trafficking in Latin America; The ISIS Boys (2016): Stories of Young People Recruited by Extremism; The 68 (2018): Reflections on the Social Movements of 1968.

Berliner. The Avenger of Treblinka, published in 2024, is the result of some ten years of disciplined work , in which Sierra finds the hero capable of assassinating one of the highest and most feared SS officials, but also, of course, much more.

“I imagine you've been to a thousand and one places where you could find stories, but you found this one in Buenos Aires,” said the author's interviewer and friend, Gerardo “Tato” Young, another journalistic heavyweight. Renowned for his work in political and judicial investigations, Tato was editor-in-chief of this newspaper's investigative team until 2012 and a leading figure in radio . “That's what happens to story hunters like Gustavo: they appear when you least expect them,” he added.

“History crossed my path while I was traveling to the concentration camps in Poland,” Gustavo Sierra replied. “While I was there, in the Warsaw ghetto, I began to ask myself a common question in journalism: Where is the Argentine? There always had to be an Argentine in the middle of any story, which is absurd, but I can assure you there always is one, and I had him right there in front of me, somehow. Then, I came to Buenos Aires and met the historian Marcia Ras,” Sierra explained.

Marcia Ras is an associate researcher at the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum and a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. She has also held fellowships at international institutions such as Yad Vashem and the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris. “ I asked her about the Argentines of the Holocaust, and she mentioned Meir Berliner in passing . So I started reading a few things, and I discovered that he was a Polish immigrant who had come to our country in the 1920s, like so many other immigrants, and he was here for probably 15 or 18 years, so he had become just another Argentine,” Sierra said.

If the question is why Meir Berliner returned to Europe in the midst of the war, there is an answer: “Supposedly, he had gone to rescue his parents from Nazi persecution and found his wife and daughter confined in the Warsaw ghetto until they were eventually put on trains and sent to the Treblinka concentration camp,” the author argued.

Inside the concentration camp, Berliner learned that his wife and daughter had been murdered and decided to take justice into his own hands. “Eight hundred and fifty thousand victims and only one avenger, who turned out to be an Argentinian. The question you've probably asked yourself a thousand times is why him and not someone else,” Tato Young wanted to know.

“Yes, I wondered about it and tried to look into Meir Berliner’s background in Argentina,” Sierra replied.

Apparently, Berliner had military training; perhaps he had completed his military service in Argentina. The author searched and searched for more information about Berliner's story, and just when he was determined to write the novel like that, a piece of information appeared that changed everything.

In the midst of the investigation, Sierra came across information about a Jewish-Polish human trafficking network that had operated in Argentina from the late 19th century to the early 1930s. Initially known as the Jewish Mutual Aid Society of Warsaw, it adopted the name Zwi Migdal in 1927, in honor of one of its founders, Luis Zwi Migdal.

This organization recruited young women, mostly Eastern European Jews , under false promises of marriage or domestic employment in Argentina. Once in the country, they were forced into prostitution in brothels controlled by the network. Zwi Migdal grew to over a thousand members and operated with impunity thanks to the corruption of officials, judges, and police.

“There was a commissioner named Alsogaray, from the family we know, who, together with a judge, conducted an investigation to dismantle the network, an effort that cost them their jobs ,” the author recounted. He continued: “Commissioner Alsogaray wrote a book in which he bitterly complained about everything that was happening,” Sierra explained. “In the end, in an edition of that book, I happened to find a list of 450 members of the Zwi Migdal, and Berliner was among them. And that's when I understood the real reason why Meir Berliner decided to return to Poland,” Sierra concluded.

“Investigating someone you imagined was a hero, the only guy among 850,000 victims of an extermination camp who had dared to kill a Nazi leader, you suddenly discover that the guy was part of a criminal organization before that,” Young reflected, and asked, “How did you feel when you found out?”

"On the one hand, there was great joy at finally finding Berliner , and on the other, great confusion because this new information gave the story a huge twist," Sierra explained.

The investigation then turned to prostitution in Rosario, where the Zwi Migdal gang was very strong, and also in Buenos Aires. In both cities, "they had bought God and the Blessed Virgin Mary," the author says, because "they had an extraordinary amount of money and could buy any will," he said.

Finally, and although many bigwigs had time to flee, fortunately, things ended up falling apart : the brave denunciation of a woman named Raquel Liberman, who managed to escape the network, led to the arrest of more than one hundred members of the organization.

The Argentine soap opera Tierra de amor y venganza was based on this story, starring Eugenia “la China” Suárez.