First of all, Wiernik’s pursuer did not fire a rifle, but a pistol, and he fired it from some distance away. It doesn’t take much familiarity with firearms to know that pistols are short-range weapons, ineffective at longer distances. For instance, the
Walther P38 pistol used by German armed forces in World War II had an effective range of about 50 meters. A weapon’s effective range is the
distance at which a weapon may be expected to fire accurately to inflict damage or casualties. So if Wiernik’s pursuer was carrying a Walther P38 and fired it from a distance of more than 50 meters, it is possible that, when it reached its target, the bullet no longer had sufficient force to go through all of Wiernik’s clothing (for understandable reasons, Wiernik may have been rather thickly clad on that day of his escape, and he mentions in the same chapter that «On that day, however, the men wore their clothes under their overalls. Before escaping, they would have to get rid of the overalls, which would have given them away at once.») and wound him seriously. The extent to which the bullet could still penetrate Wiernik’s body would also depend on what part of the shoulder it hit. If it was the shoulder blade – which is probable, as Wiernik had his back turned towards the shooter – the bullet was less likely to go any further beyond its effective range than it if had hit flesh.
Second, there was obviously something wrong with the gun, as it jammed after the shot that reached Wiernik. Whether the gun’s malfunction may have had an effect on the range or the accuracy of the shot fired I cannot tell, but I also see no reason to exclude this possibility.
Third, the bullet may have penetrated Wiernik’s clothing from a lateral angle, grazed his shoulder and then gone again through his clothing and away. The grazing impact would still have been painful, without however doing any damage, and Wiernik may incorrectly have assumed that the bullet had "stopped" at his shoulder. Actually that was not what Wiernik stated in the original text of A Year in Treblinka, which was written in Polish and which Andrew took the trouble of having a look at. The original Polish text of the passage in question is the following:
Kula mnie nie zraniła o, dziwo! Przebiła wszystko na mnie i odbiła się o łopatkę, pozostawiając znak.
This was translated as follows by our Polish reader Roman Werpachowski:
The bullet did not hurt me - very strange! It pierced everything on me and reflected from my shoulder blade, leaving a mark.
A bullet ricocheting from a shoulder blade is something different from a bullet "stopping" at the shoulder, and it has also happened on at least one other occasion, the one referred to
here.
In short, there are a number of possibilities that must be excluded before concluding on the physical impossibility of this part of Wiernik’s account. In bluntly proclaiming such impossibility, Bud is making things too easy for himself. And in omitting details that may call his verdict into question, Bud is again displaying his intellectual dishonesty.
