Survivor of Death Camp Lives to ‘Bear Witness’

Minutes before the Jewish prisoners revolted against the Nazi guards at the Sobibor death camp, the leader of the uprising announced: “Our day has come. . . . Remember, if anyone survives, he must tell the world what has happened here. . . . He must bear witness.”

Thomas Blatt has been bearing witness for more than 40 years.

His family was killed in Sobibor’s gas chambers, but Blatt escaped during the uprising. He has testified at numerous Nazi war crimes trials, and he regularly speaks about his experience in the death camp to students throughout Southern California. He acted as technical adviser to a television movie about the escape, has made two documentary films himself about Sobibor and is finishing his autobiography, “Blood and Ashes.”

Blatt, 60, is now trying to preserve the memory of Sobibor by preserving the camp itself. As a warning to future generations, he wants to turn the campsite in Poland into a monument to the 250,000 Jews who were killed there. And the camp has great historical significance, Blatt said, because, on Oct. 14, 1943, it was the site of the only mass escape by Jews from a death camp during World War II. Ten Nazis and 13 Ukrainian guards were killed and more than 300 Jews escaped.

Founded Preservation Group

Blatt recently founded the Holocaust Sites Preservation Committee to call attention to the deteriorating condition of Sobibor and other death camps in Eastern Europe. He estimates that he needs about $1.5 million to preserve Sobibor. Blatt, who lives in Santa Barbara, said he and other survivors are outraged at what Polish officials have done with the site.

Near the entrance they placed a small plaque: “From May 1942 to October 1943 there was a Nazi Death Camp. In this camp 250,000 Russian POWs, Jews, Poles, Gypsies were killed.” But historians, survivors and former Nazi officials contend that only Jews were killed at the camp.

Polish officials created the inaccurate plaque, Blatt said, in an attempt to prove they also were victims of the Nazis and because Sobibor “is on the Russian border and they want to show their commitment to the Russians.”

“They are falsifying history,” Blatt said, suddenly standing and pacing the room. “Jews, Jews and only Jews were killed there.”

Many who visit the camp now from nearby cities, Blatt said, are under the false impression that most of those killed were Polish schoolchildren. Blatt visits Sobibor every year and spends hours at the site, talking to the visitors, correcting their misconceptions, explaining who died at the camp, telling them how his own family was killed.

The Roman Catholic Church, Blatt said, has shown great insensitivity by building a church on the site and by displaying next to it a large wooden carving depicting the Virgin Mary holding Jesus behind barbed wire at Sobibor.

“This is absurd because if you were a Christian, you wouldn’t have died at Sobibor; you would have been free.” Blatt shook his head and then shouted: “The SOBs know it’s a lie, but they’re using the Holocaust for their own means. This makes me so hurt and angry.”

Better Care Promised

And, Blatt said, in the area where Jews were once unloaded from boxcars, unaware that they were about to be marched to their deaths by gassing, there is a kindergarten. Children play on grounds where people died 45 years ago. Every year when Blatt returns to Sobibor he combs the grounds, finds numerous bones in the tall grass and weeds, and buries them.

He hopes to raise enough money and win Polish government approval to move the kindergarten, pave over the area so people don’t trample the remains and build a museum on the site. Blatt would like to build a fence, so the church is separated from the camp.

Whether the Polish government would permit this remains uncertain. However, Blatt said that last year during a conference in Poland, the head of the Polish Institute of National Memory, which investigates Nazi war crimes, assured him that the plaque would be changed so that only Jews would be listed as victims. The official, Blatt said, also promised to provide better care for the site and was receptive to the proposed museum.

Blatt is a small, nervous man who often appears distracted and distant. But when asked about the Holocaust, he addresses the subject with an almost violent intensity and his concentration is complete. He paces the room, cigarette dangling from his lips, jabbing a forefinger to emphasize a point, crawling on his hands and knees in search of a document or book to buttress an idea, tirelessly talking, in a thick Polish accent, about Sobibor.

“I still dream about it, I still feel the same terror,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I’m working so hard to create the memorial. I need to see it. In many ways I’ve never really made it out, and this is the way to convince myself that I’ve finally escaped.”

Blatt is selling his Santa Barbara stereo store so he can spend more time raising funds for the project and supervising the site in Poland. He wants to devote the remainder of his life to Sobibor.

“This is my life’s work; this is what I want to accomplish. . . .

“Some people today are saying the Holocaust never happened. If I don’t do anything, another generation who visits Sobibor might be convinced no Jews were killed. Not that Jewish deaths are more important than Christian deaths. But this was a crime against a people and that should not be forgotten.”

Cost Him His Marriage

Blatt’s obsession, he said, has cost him his marriage. He talked about Sobibor constantly, he said, dreamed about it and, occasionally, on a whim, left his job, packed and flew to Poland because he “had to be in Sobibor.” Before Blatt’s wife, Dena, left two years ago, she told him: “I don’t want to live in Sobibor any more. . . . I’ve lived there for 30 years.”

Blatt lives on a mesa in an exclusive neighborhood in Santa Barbara and he finds it disorienting to talk about the horrors of Sobibor and a moment later turn toward the window of his den and the sweeping ocean view. On a crystalline day, Blatt can see sailboats bobbing in the harbor and beyond, the Channel Islands, silhouetted against the faded blue horizon.

“I remember waking up at 4 in the morning at Sobibor and seeing the fire and smoke in the distance, smelling burning flesh,” he said softly. “I wondered how could this be true, how they could burn people in the 20th Century. . . .

“Then I look out the window,” he said, tugging at the blinds in his study, overflowing with books about World War II and the Holocaust. “From the pit of hell to paradise. Sometimes I wonder if this is a dream and I’ll wake up and be back in Sobibor again.”

Blatt was 15 when he and his family and the other Jews in the small Polish town where they lived were rounded up by the Germans and taken by train to Sobibor.

Blatt’s family was under the impression that they were being taken to a labor camp. Even after they arrived at Sobibor, they did not realize they would soon be killed. The prisoners lined up, Blatt said, and the Germans picked about 30 craftsmen to perform menial work at the camp. Blatt was picked as a putzer (errand boy). The others, including Blatt’s mother, father and brother, were taken to the edge of the camp, told to disrobe by the Nazis and enter the “showers” to prevent the spread of diseases such as typhus. It was not until they were locked inside, Blatt said, that they realized they were to be gassed.

“As long as you have hope you don’t fight. We had hope we were being taken to labor camps; we had hope that we would live. When many lost hope, it was too late to do anything.”

About an hour after Blatt’s family was taken away, he was assigned to haul piles of clothes to sorting rooms. He immediately spotted a dress that had been worn by a woman who had been on the train. Blatt realized that his family and everyone else on the train had been killed.

“I didn’t cry,” he said softly. “The shock was so overwhelming; it was almost incomprehensible. I think that instinctively I blocked out all feeling so I could survive.”

Blatt spent six months at Sobibor along with about 600 other prisoners who were being held as camp workers. They endured the horrific ordeal of watching thousands of prisoners arrive each day and then unknowingly march to their death. All the survivors of Sobibor, Blatt said, bear a terrible burden today.

“I have this feeling of, how do you say it?” Blatt asked, pausing and extending an arm, as if reaching out for the right word. “In Polish it is dluj (debt). I owe. So I always must work to keep the memory alive.”

After the escape, Blatt slipped through the countryside with two friends until they reached their home village, but only Gentile neighbors lived there and they refused to hide them. Blatt and the others had some gold and jewelry they had taken from the camp and they bribed a farmer into hiding them in his barn. For more than five months they hid in a tiny 32-square-foot compartment, until the farmer and some friends shot them and robbed them. One of the friends was killed and Blatt was left for dead with a bullet in his jaw, which he still carries. He survived another three months in the forest, then, suddenly, the war was over.

“Survival no longer my priority, I could afford now to stop and reflect,” Blatt wrote in his unpublished manuscript. “The great moment for which I had been waiting all those terrible years, of which I had dreamt in the extermination camp, in the barn, in the woods, was here. And, according to the way I had always pictured it, I should have been in ecstasy. I should have danced for joy. Instead, I felt empty and sad and alone.”

Blatt was 16 years old.

Immigrated to Israel

He returned to school after the war and worked in Poland at various jobs until 1957, when he immigrated to Israel. He met Dena, an American who was visiting Israel, and they married. When they first moved to the United States two years later, the only work Blatt could get was as a janitor. He later worked as an electronics technician and eventually bought his own stereo store. The store was extremely successful and Blatt bought two more. He and Dena had two children, his business prospered and he bought a home on a hill overlooking the ocean. But, Dena said, Blatt had difficulty taking pleasure in his new life.

“He doesn’t have much passion for his work at the store or for most other things,” she said. “The only thing he seems to have passion about is Sobibor.”

Blatt has worked his whole life to make the story of Sobibor known. He helped author Richard Rashke find survivors of the camp for Rashke’s book, “Escape From Sobibor,” and he translated during the interviews in Russian, Yiddish and Polish. When Blatt sells his business, he will return to Poland. And if the schoolchildren at Sobibor can be transferred to another site, Blatt plans to turn the kindergarten on the camp’s grounds into a temporary home, live there and watch the renovation process every day.