By Thomas “Toivy” Blatt, Special to JTNews
On October 14, a small group of Holocaust survivors celebrated the 60th anniversary of an unusual episode of the Second World War. Until the mid-1980s, this event was nearly forgotten by all but those directly involved, and it remains little known today. Its impact on the course of the war, and subsequent development was minimal, but those who survive to remember the anniversary would not be among the living if not for the largest prisoner revolt and mass escape from the Nazis.
On Oct. 14, 1943, when I was 13, a group of Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor death camp in Eastern Poland revolted. They set in motion a mass escape in which at least 10 SS staff members and some non-German guards were killed, and over 300 prisoners — more than half the prisoner population at that time — disappeared into the countryside. Fifty-two of them survived to the end of the war. The camp was shut down and dismantled by the Nazis within days, and the prisoners who did not escape were executed.
Here is the background of that historical event: in 1941, special mobile squads, the Einsatzgruppen, followed the German regular army and went into battle against unarmed civilians. They rounded up Jews, marched them to mass graves and shot them. Mass shooting was messy and inefficient, however, so the Wannsee Conference of 1942 was called to look for ways to speed up the so-called “Final Solution” to the Jewish question. Shortly afterward, in early 1942, under the code name “Operation Reinhard,” three death factories — Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka — were built in Poland.
The names of the new facilities are not as familiar as many of the Nazi camps, but more Jews were killed at the three Operation Reinhard camps combined than at Auschwitz. One reason they are lesser known is that there are fewer survivors: a handful of people from over the 1.5 million killed. These were death camps. They were built exclusively for mass murder, and it was the intent of the designers that no prisoner would survive.
The SS had acquired experience in gassing as a novel way to dispose of resource-draining institutionalized psychiatric patients. This became their method of choice in their “final solution.”
Although the incoming transports of Jews were told they were being “resettled in the East,” they would quickly be murdered before they could realize their fate. The façade was maintained with a first view of prisoners, women and men, dressed in fine clothing — taken from the gassed people. Foreign transports of Jews, especially from Holland, were greeted with a cordial speech, apologies for the difficult trip, and were then given directions to undress and prepare for a shower with promises of work and shelter until the end of the war. Immediately after being gassed, gold teeth would be pulled from the dead, and the remains cremated.
There is a common perception that the Jews of Europe who fell victim to the Holocaust did little to resist the slaughter. This view is one I have always found troubling.
The Sobibor event was, by far, the most successful prisoner uprising and escape from a Nazi extermination camp. Those who planned and carried out this heroic revolt deserve to be remembered.
The Sobibor prisoners had an intense hatred of the Nazis and longed for revenge. Almost all lost their families. What gave them the courage to revolt against their brutal masters? News of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April of 1943, and the German defeat at Stalingrad had reached the Sobibor prisoners and gave them the courage to fight back.
In September 1943, when the Nazis liquidated the Jewish ghettoes in the East, Russian Jews were sent to Sobibor along with Russian prisoners of war for liquidation. Because of new construction, about 70 of these trained soldiers were selected to work in the camp. At that time, an underground already existed. These soldiers were incorporated in the resistance organization, and with their military training, a definitive plan was quickly established. Lt. Sasha Abramowich Pecherski became the leader. The plan was simple but required careful preparation.
One hour before 5 p.m. on October 14, most of the key Nazis in charge would, under some pretext, be lured to prearranged places and silently killed with axes and knives. The weapons taken from those Nazis were not to be used until the open revolt.
Next, before the roll-call, the rest of the prisoners were to be quickly informed about the planned uprising and told to prepare to fight. Although their Ukrainian guards on the towers shot at us, we now had weapons to shoot back.
Killing most of the SS was crucial to the success of the plan.
That afternoon, Deputy Kommandant SS Understurfuhrer Johann Niemann stepped into the Sobibor tailor shop to be fitted for a new uniform. Suddenly, an ax split the man’s head. These scenes were repeated throughout other stores, so when Schwarz the electrician climbed the telephone pole to sever outgoing lines, no one paid attention.
As evening roll-call approached, a dead SS soldier was discovered by his comrade, who sounded the alarm, but it was too late to make a difference. Lt. Pecherski jumped onto a table and addressed the crowd: “The time of revenge and escape has come. Those of you who survive must tell that world what happened here. Death to the Nazis!”
The prisoners then rushed the barbed-wire fences and mines surrounding the camp. Many fell to machine gun fire in the surrounding fields, but over 300 escapees reached the forest.
When one takes into account the difficulty of any escape from a Nazi prison camp, it seems they were remarkably successful. So why haven’t we hard more about Sobibor? The 1987 made-for-TV movie about the revolt, Escape from Sobibor, reached a larger audience, but the accomplishment of the men and women had surprisingly little recognition. Maybe because the film was too realistic and portrayals unbelievable, but these were true scenes seen only by a few. Maybe because we liberated ourselves over a year before the end of the war and the Nazis had enough time to clean up the terrain, our story was not as easy to verify. Maybe because only a few of us survived, our story is not so widespread.
Either way, I am one of those survivors, and this was my story.
He lived to tell his story
Thomas “Toivi” Blatt wanted to grant himself three wishes after his escape, at age 15, from Sobibor.
The first — to make a movie documenting his experience as one of 52 survivors of the uprising and escape from the death camp that ended with its closure — was fulfilled in 1987, with the movie Escape from Sobibor.
The second was to write “a book or two.” He has since done that. Two books, including an autobiography, have been published. From the Ashes of Sobibor has been translated into German, French, Turkish, and Polish.
Blatt’s third wish was a bit more of a challenge: negotiating Polish bureaucracy to change a road sign. The sign outside of the Sobibor camp stated, “250,000 Russians were killed here.”
Knowing, from experience, the ancestry of the dead on that sign to be incorrect — within that quarter million were Blatt’s parents and brother — Blatt convinced the Polish authorities to change the sign. Now, according to Blatt, it says, “Here were killed 250,000 Jews, and 1,000 Poles.”
Blatt is also active in educating people about the death camps. The Washington State Holocaust Education and Research Center bestowed him with their 2003 Excellence in Education award for his work, and he has spoken to many tour groups at Sobibor itself.
“A lot of people unfamiliar with the times of 1943 and 1944 ask me the question, ‘Where do you go?’ he asks.
His answer makes sense: “To places you know.”
For him, that meant his home of Izbica, Poland.
“We were stupid boys,” he says of himself and his two fellow escapees, “because instead of hiding in the forest…we would go out to the main road and we walked.”
Nazi patrols had set up traps in the forests, so it was their naïveté that saved their lives. Yet they still had plenty to fear. A local farmer found and shot the three boys. The bullet is still lodged in Blatt’s jaw.
Blatt eventually found a man connected with his father who hid him until the war’s end.
Blatt has returned to the site of the escape every Oct. 14 for the past 20 years. That structures like guard towers have been moved around, disappoints him immensely. The former death camp is now a little town. On the same patch of land where people were systematically murdered during the Holocaust was, for some time, a kindergarten. The kommandant’s living quarters holds private homes.
And now, after attending the 60th anniversary, Blatt thinks he is done visiting Sobibor. He has spent much of his life educating people on what happened there. “Telling them is adding something to the meaning of my life, at least,” he says.
— Joel Magalnick