From the Ashes of Sobibor

Thomas Toivi Blatt's memoir opens on April 28, 1943, as 15-year-old Blatt arrived at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland with his family. The camp's entrance was deceptively beautiful, lined with flower beds and carved signposts. A guard of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force, ordered men to the right and women and children to the left. Blatt's 10-year-old brother, Hersz, joined their mother. When a heavyset German asked the men what trades they knew, Blatt pushed forward and silently willed the man to choose him. The German pointed and said, "Come out, little one." About 40 men were selected for labor; the remaining 200, including Blatt's father, were led to the gas chambers. Blatt suppressed all emotion, recognizing that grief would destroy him. The narrative then flashes back to his childhood.

Blatt was born in 1927 in Izbica, a predominantly Jewish shtetl, or small town, near Lublin in southeastern Poland. His childhood was religiously conflicted: His freethinking father, nicknamed "Leibele goy" for eating ham and socializing with Christians, clashed with Orthodox relatives. After his Aunt Miriam warned him he would go to Hell for eating pork, the boy fell ill with fever, recovering only when she promised his sins would be forgiven at his bar mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the family briefly fled to a forest village. The Soviets occupied the area under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union. Some Jews fled east, but Blatt's father stubbornly refused to leave, sealing the family's fate. After the Soviets withdrew, the Germans imposed escalating restrictions: curfews, mandatory Star of David armbands, and bans on trade, all punishable by death. Conditions worsened when the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, established a permanent command in Izbica. Officer Kurt Engels shot Jews for sport. One night the Gestapo raided the Blatt home and took Blatt's father, who survived by showing his World War I invalid card.

Mass deportations began in 1942. On March 24, the first major Akcja (deportation action) struck Izbica; about 2,200 Jews were deported to the Bełżec extermination camp. Blatt's friend Jozek Bresler confirmed through railway contacts that Jews were being gassed at Bełżec. Subsequent Akcjas decimated the population. New transports of foreign Jews from across Europe refilled Izbica, which functioned as a transit ghetto for Jews awaiting deportation.

By October 1942, complete liquidation appeared imminent. Heniek Królikowski, Engels's mechanic, whispered to Blatt in Yiddish to follow him and hid Blatt in his attic while about 300 Jews were killed at the train station. Blatt's family survived only because the boxcars were full. The family decided to separate, and Blatt received forged papers identifying him as a deceased Catholic youth.

Blatt joined a group traveling under false papers toward the Hungarian border but was caught when a Ukrainian policeman ordered him to pull down his pants, revealing his circumcision. Imprisoned in the city of Stryj, Blatt was aided by a fellow prisoner named Zelinger, a Jewish photographer who bribed guards to improve conditions. Transferred to the Jewish hospital as a feigned typhus patient, Blatt contracted the disease for real. When patients were taken to be executed, Blatt instinctively turned back and hid. Twenty patients were shot, but the count still reached 20 because a delirious patient wandered into the group and died in Blatt's place.

After months of imprisonment, Blatt was freed and escorted back to Izbica by a Volksdeutscher (an ethnic German living outside Germany). He reunited with his family, but Izbica had changed drastically. The Jewish population had shrunk to about 200. Blatt's father had been forced to parade through the streets wearing barbed wire and a sign reading "I am King of the Jews" to lure hiding Jews back to the ghetto.

On April 28, 1943, the final Akcja struck. Blatt escaped the initial roundup but was betrayed by his schoolmate Janek Knapczyk. After a brief flight through a mill, he was recaptured and loaded onto trucks with his family. They were driven to Sobibor.

At Sobibor, Blatt learned the camp's layout from Jozek, who had arrived months earlier and told Blatt his family had been gassed upon arrival. The camp's three main sections housed prisoner barracks, sorting warehouses, and gas chambers. Blatt sorted victims' clothing and cut women's hair steps from the gas chambers. An SS man known as "the Preacher" delivered speeches about hygiene and showers, drawing applause from the deceived even as screams from the gas chambers could be faintly heard. Blatt befriended Dutch twin sisters named Inge who asked him to find their father and brother. When he told them the truth, they clasped hands and stared at the crematorium flames without tears.

Escape attempts provoked brutal reprisals. After two prisoners fled, SS officer Frenzel selected two Jews from every work group for execution. Security was tightened with mines and a water-filled moat. An underground resistance organization formed, led by Leon Feldhendler, a former Judenrat (Jewish Council) head. When a September 1943 transport brought Soviet Jewish prisoners of war, including Red Army Lieutenant Alexander "Sasha" Pechersky, the Underground recruited trained military leaders. They devised a plan: Lure individual SS officers into workshops for "fittings" of leather goods, kill them with axes and knives, seize weapons, and lead all prisoners in a mass breakout.

On October 14, 1943, the uprising began at 4:00 P.M. Assassination squads killed about 11 SS officers in the first hour. Blatt lured one to his death. Sasha addressed the assembled prisoners, urging them forward. The crowd erupted in a cry of "Forward! Hurrah!" and surged toward the fences. Blatt became trapped under collapsing barbed wire as mines exploded around him, slid out of his leather coat snagged on the wire, and sprinted through gaps blown by detonations. Approximately 320 of the camp's 550 prisoners initially escaped, though only 48 would survive the war.

After the escape, Blatt joined a group of survivors led by Sasha, but Sasha took all the armed men and never returned. Blatt formed a small group with Szmul Wajcen and Fredek Kostman. They found shelter with farmer Bojarski near Izbica in exchange for gold and diamonds, confined for five months to a cramped space in a barn. In April 1944, Bojarski attempted to murder them, shooting and killing Fredek. Blatt was shot in the jaw but feigned death. Szmul also survived by playing dead, and the two escaped into the night.

Blatt and Szmul hid near Izbica, relying on sympathetic Poles for food. Blatt was captured by partisans of the A.K. (Armia Krajowa), the main Polish resistance, but was released by a leader who told him the A.K. would not kill an unarmed Jew. In June 1944, the two were ambushed and permanently separated. Blatt found work as a cowhand in the village of Mchy and became a courier for the B.Ch. (peasant battalions), a branch of the Polish Underground.

In the summer of 1944, Soviet forces arrived. The moment of liberation was anticlimactic. Instead of the ecstasy Blatt had imagined, he felt overwhelming sadness and emptiness. The survival instincts that had suppressed his emotions released the full weight of his losses. He returned to Izbica but found that surviving Jews were hunted by Poles who had seized Jewish property. In desperation, Blatt threw himself in front of a Soviet military truck, refusing to move until the officer agreed to take him. He climbed aboard, grasped the handles of an anti-aircraft gun, and watched the figures of his pursuers shrink into the distance as the truck carried him away from Izbica.