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Escape from Sobibor

By A. David Dahmer

 

“Shema” by Primo Levi

You who live secure

In your warm houses

Who return at evening to find

Hot food and friendly faces:

 

Consider whether this is a man,

Who labors in the mud

Who knows no peace

Who fights for a crust of bread

Who dies at a yes or a no.

Consider whether this is a woman,

Without hair or name

With no more strength to remember

Eyes empty and womb cold

As a frog in winter.

 

Consider that this has been:

I commend these words to you.

Engrave them on your hearts

When you are in your house, when    

you walk on your way,

When you go to bed, when you rise.

Repeat them to your children.

Or may your house crumble,

Disease renders you powerless,

Your offspring avert their faces from you.

“Most people only dream their nightmares. However, I and my fellow survivors actually lived this experience,” said Philip Bialowitz, one of only seven remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination camp, Sobibor, where an estimated 250,000 Jews, including most of his family, were murdered. “We fought hard for our dignity and our lives. The inhumanity of the Nazis knew no limits.”

Bialowitz was the keynote speaker at the Madison Jewish Community Council’s Holocaust Remembrance Service and Program at a Yom Hashoah event at the Temple Beth El May 4.

“Tonight we mourn the deaths of six million men, women, and children — all of them victims of mass murder,” Bialowitz said. “As I look around the room, I am so glad to see the faces of so many young people. You will carry the torch of remembrance long after me and my fellow survivors are gone.”

Bialowitz said that the events he would tell the crowd as a witness to the Holocaust were so horrifying that they would seem to be “a fiction of the mind.”

Built in March 1942 as a part of Aktion Reinhard in the General Government in Poland, Sobibor operated from May 1942 until October 1943 with only one purpose in mind: to kill as many Jews — including children — as quickly as possible. No selections were made for work or death — victims were brought to the camp in cattle cars and all but a handful were gassed immediately after arrival. Bialowitz said that 99 percent of the Jews that were sent to Sobibor were sent to the gas chamber immediately.

In October 1943, Bialowitz participated in a mass prisoner uprising that freed about half of the camp’s 600 slave laborers. The revolt at Sobibor, which represented one of the most incredible examples of resistance to persecution seen anywhere at any time, was the largest and most successful prisoner uprising of World War II. Subsequently, the Nazis discontinued all killing operations at the camp. Of the 600 prisoners at Sobibor, 300 were murdered and the rest managed to escape. Of the escapees, 48 survived the war.

“In no camp did we fight more successfully than in Sobibor,” he said. “The mass prisoner uprising at Sobibor was a unique and humiliating defeat the Nazis suffered at the hands of untrained, ill-fed, and unarmed Jews.”

Bialowitz was born in the small town of Izbica, Poland in 1929. His mother was killed by a German firing squad, and Bialowitz himself had escaped certain deaths many times.  

Both prior to and after his imprisonment in Sobibor, Bialowitz survived the Nazi occupation through a series of decisions and actions that can only be described as miraculous. One particular day as a child, he was arrested and ordered to stand with his back to a wall with a number of other Jews to be shot and killed. Bialowitz managed to stay alive by falling to the ground the moment the shooting began. He laid for a long while under a pile of dead bodies and covered with the blood of the victims around him, but fortunately managed to survive. “Dying people fell on top of me. I found a space to breathe and I pretended to be dead,” Bialowitz said.

It was very late and dark, so the soldiers chose to look for valuables in the morning. “Several hours later I climbed out of this grave to safety and returned to my family,” he said.

But Bialowitz’s good fortune soon came to an end and the Nazis caught up with him again and sent him to Sobibor. However, once more, luck was on his side. He was not sent to the gas chambers but was instead assigned to a group of inmates who sorted out the personal possessions of the Jews who were being murdered by the Nazis in this camp. His brother, a pharmacist, gave him a chance at life in Sobibor, convincing the Germans to allow him to stay alive by claiming Bialowitz was his assistant.

One of Bialowitz’s assignments was to help the newcomers with their heavy baggage as they got off the train and, Bialowitz said, being greeted by a healthy Jewish boy like himself aroused little suspicion. “The Jewish passengers would offer me a tip for my services,” Bialowitz recalled. “My hand was trembling because I knew that within a half hour they were going to be ashes.”

Why didn’t arriving Jews fight back? Bialowitz said that the Jews were thoroughly duped by the Nazis into thinking that everything was going to be all right. He described a typical transport of 2,500 prisoners who arrived on passenger trains with most of their belongings. “They arrived at a neat and colorful village in the middle of a deep forest,” he said. “But what they saw from the train windows — the flowers, the trees, the grass, and the nicely paved roads — only created an illusion.”

The Germans had the Jews convinced that nothing was going to happen to them, going so far as to give them postcards to write to their family. But soon they were packed into 12-by-12 cubicles to shower up. “Probably, then, they first felt something was wrong,” Bialowitz said. “But I am convinced that they didn’t realize the terrible truth until their first breath of poison gas.”

Bialowitz said that during the six months he was in Sobibor he often thought about revenge and escape, but felt like it was impossible. “Sobibor was a concentration camp surrounded by woods. If anyone managed to get past the barbed-wire fence and dodge machine-gun fire, they then had to run through a field of landmines that separated the camp from the forest,” said Bialowitz, who since emigrating to America after liberation, has testified at numerous war crimes trials. In 1987, Mr. Bialowitz served as a consultant for the highly acclaimed CBS television movie, “Escape from Sobibor.”

Despite these formidable odds, a sea of resistance grew in the camp. “From the very start, we decided that escape should not just be for a few prisoners, but for everybody in the camp,” Bialowitz said. “Anyone left behind would have suffered harsh reprisals.”

The workers in the group knew that their chances for survival were nil unless they took drastic action. The revolt of the Jewish prisoners on October 14, 1943, put an end to the Sobibor camp. After killing a few German guards, some of the prisoners broke open the main gate and escaped from there southwest toward the woods. Another group broke through the fences north of the gate. The first of this group who triggered the mines were wounded and killed, but the others who crossed the area where the mines had already exploded managed to flee, as they stepped over the bodies of their comrades.

The death camp was evacuated in the fall of 1943, the killing installations were destroyed, the terrain of the former extermination camp was ploughed up, trees were planted, and peaceful-looking farm steeds constructed. No traces whatsoever were to remain which might bear witness to the atrocities committed in Sobibor. Only a few — about 48 — managed to survive and give evidence of the existence of Sobibor.

“We must do everything in our power to remember what happened at Sobibor, and do everything in our power to prevent something like this from happening again,” Bialowitz said.