Escape from Sobibor

514 Pages·2014·5.8 MB·English

by  Rashke

Escape From Sobibor
Richard Rashke
Updated Edition
ALSO BY RICHARD RASHKE
The Killing of Karen Silkwood
Capitol Hill in Black and White/with Robert Parker
Dear Esther
Pius
Useful Enemies (January 2013)
Contents
Introduction
Sobibor, Poland
The Prisoners
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
The Escape
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
The Forest
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
The Remnant: A Personal Epilogue
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Image Gallery
Afterword
Acknowledgements, Sources, Notes
for
the more than two hundred and fifty thousand who did not escape from Sobibor
to
Guy
Introduction
ALMOST EVERYONE KNOWS OF Auschwitz and Dachau. But few people have ever
heard about Sobibor, although the biggest prisoner escape of World War II took
place there, on October 14, 1943. Why history has been so silent is no mystery.
In 1945, the Allies captured a mountain of German documents, bequeathing
to historians an incomparable war library. Among those millions of pages,
however, were only three short documents about Sobibor, part of Heinrich
Himmler's Operation Reinhard, the code name for three top secret death camps
in eastern Poland.
The death camps — Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka — were quite different
from Dachau, a prison, and Auschwitz, a concentration camp with gas chambers
for those too weak to work. They were giant death machines. Every Jew sent
there was to be gassed within twenty-four hours, with the exception of between a
hundred and six hundred Jews chosen to maintain the camp. They, too, were
destined to be killed when Operation Reinhard was completed, if they lasted that
long.
The Polish Central Commission for German War Crimes estimated that the
Nazis gassed a minimum of 1.65 million Jews — about one quarter of all those
killed in the Holocaust — in these three death camps. Sobibor, where more than
two hundred and fifty thousand died, was the smallest, and Himmler's best-kept
secret.
If the Germans did not leave enough documents about Sobibor to satisfy
historians, they did leave living records — some thirty survivors scattered
around the world. I interviewed eighteen of them in the United States, the Soviet
Union, Brazil, Poland, and Israel. On one level, most were reluctant to talk about
Sobibor because of the pain that comes from reliving a personal hell. But on
another, most were eager to have a professional writer tell their story "for their
grandchildren." I was somewhat surprised, for I am not Jewish, and I thought
that fact might create an atmosphere of distrust, discouraging openness and
honesty. On the contrary, I got the distinct impression that I was welcomed as a
writer precisely because I was not a Jew.
Most of the survivors I interviewed vividly remembered aspects of the
Sobibor story, almost as if they could still see, hear, and feel it. Although they all
contributed something to this book, three emerged as extremely important.
Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky was co-leader of the escape from Sobibor. He
wrote a short account of the revolt soon after the war. I found and interviewed
him in the Soviet Union. Stanislaw (Shlomo) Szmajzner, a key planner in the
escape, lived in Sobibor almost from the day it opened to the day of the escape.
He wrote a book in Portuguese about his experiences in the camp. I found and
interviewed him in Goiania, Brazil. Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, who spent six months
in Sobibor, made it a point to know everything he could about the camp while he
was a prisoner and after he escaped. He wrote a diary, parts of which have been
published as articles. I found and interviewed him in Santa Barbara.
The research and writing of Escape From Sobibor presented two
predictable problems. As everyone knows, eyewitness accounts of almost
anything vary. Some are even contradictory. Sobibor was no exception. The
basic story of the camp, the uprising, and the escape emerged with a great deal
of freshness. But there were some contradictions because survivors either
embellished details over the years, and then accepted the exaggerations as facts,
or confused rumors with reality. As a researcher, I sifted through the stories,
discarding what I felt were embellishments, and I analyzed the differing versions
of an incident, deciding for myself which was more or most accurate. I explain
my important choices in the notes at the end of the book.
Dialogue posed the second problem. The reader will note that some
portions of the book are rich in dialogue and others are not. The reason for the
unevenness is that for some sections I was able to draw on books, articles,
diaries, and interviews with people who had excellent memories; for others,
either I was unable to find eyewitnesses to the events I was describing, or those I
found had poor recall. The end notes list my sources by chapter.
It stands to reason that much of this book and its dialogue is a memoir —a
compilation of recollections of incidents and conversations as people
remembered them happening almost forty years before. The dialogue, therefore,
is as accurate as their memories. Furthermore, all of the dialogue came to me
through the filter of translation. Eyewitnesses heard or spoke the original in one
language and gave it to me in another, often through an interpreter. Most of the
time, the oral translations were rough and grammatically incorrect, as
interpreters arbitrarily switched from direct to indirect quotations. I handled
these problems as best I could, using my judgment and rendering the dialogue
into colloquial English.
In sum, I am certain that the dialogue in this book accurately describes who
said what to whom, and that it is reasonably faithful to the words that were
spoken.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Blatt, the first survivor I contacted
when I began to work on Escape From Sobibor. He did more than break the ice
for me. During the sixteen months I researched and wrote the book, I
interviewed him for more than ten days. He shared his diary with me, served as
my Yiddish interpreter in Brazil, Russian interpreter in the Soviet Union, and
Polish interpreter in Poland. He guided me through the Sobibor campsite, and
reviewed for accuracy the first draft of this book. I can only imagine the
emotional pain and fatigue he suffered as I dug and picked and probed, not
always with gentleness and sensitivity.
Mr. Blatt is one of a handful of Jewish survivors from Izbica, Poland, which
once had a thriving Jewish shtetl of four thousand. He dedicates his work on
Escape From Sobibor to his mother, father, and brother, who were murdered
there, and to the Jews of Izbica who, unlike him, did not escape.
Washington, D.C.
March 1982