Sobibor Memorial Site

Sobibor was a Nazi death camp established in March 1942, mainly for the purpose of killing the Jews in the Lublin ghetto and surrounding area. It was located near the tiny village of Sobibor, on the eastern edge of German-occupied Poland, five kilometers from the Bug river which formed the border between Poland and the Ukraine. Deportations to the Sobibor killing center from Lublin, Czechoslovakia, and the Greater German Reich began in early May 1942. During the first phase of the extermination at Sobibor, which lasted until July 1942, around 100,000 Jews were gassed to death. Their bodies were buried in mass graves, then later dug up and burned. An estimated 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor.

Sobibor was one of the three Aktion Reinhard camps; the other two were Belzec and Treblinka, which were both near the Bug river that formed the eastern border of the General Government, as occupied Poland was called. The three Aktion Reinhard camps and also Chelmno, which was located in what is now western Poland, were strictly extermination centers, for the sole purpose of killing the Jews. Lublin was the headquarters of Aktion Reinhard; the clothing taken from the victims at the three camps was sent to the Majdanek camp in Lublin to be disinfected before it was shipped to Germany.

The old train station at Sobibor is shown on the right side of the photograph above; train service was discontinued in 1999. The tracks are barely visible on the left side of the photo. A railroad spur line was built in order to take the train cars inside the camp. The location of the former camp is to the left, across from the station, in the photo above.

The plaques on the wall at the entrance have the same message in different languages. The English version reads:

At this site, between the years 1942 and 1943, there existed a Nazi death camp where 250,000 Jews and approximately 1,000 Poles were murdered. On October 14, 1943, during the revolt by the Jewish prisoners the Nazis were overpowered and several hundred prisoners escaped to freedom. Following the revolt the death camp ceased to function. "Earth conceal not my blood" (Job)

 

Alan Collins, the photographer who took all of these photos, wrote the following about Sobibor:

This is one of the lesser known camps though there was a Hollywood film regarding the mass escape from it. It was a bit of a disappointment with 2 monuments next to each other and a third close by. The museum was small with not much of an exhibition. Whilst I was there a coach party arrived. It took them 5 minutes to walk to the monuments, 10 minutes to walk around them and take photographs, and 5 minutes to walk back to their coach. It took me just 10 minutes to walk slowly around the museum. Though the area is well tended I feel more of an effort could have been made considering tens of thousands of people were murdered there. The camp is open daily from 1st May to 14th October between 0900-1400.

The Sobibor killing center was divided into three camps and later a fourth camp was added. The photo below shows the spot in Camp III where the brick gas chamber building once stood. The victims were killed with carbon monoxide from the exhaust of engines taken from captured Russian tanks. Camp IV was used to store munitions.

The sculpture shown in the photo above represents a woman, looking up at the sky, holding a small child in her arms. In the background can be seen the huge mound of ashes that is located in the former Camp III.

The photo above shows the mound of ashes and bone fragments surrounded by a stone wall. In front of the wall is a glass display case which contains a small amount of ashes and bone.

The same procedure of first burying the bodies and then exhuming them for burning was also followed at Belzec, Treblinka and Chelmno. In an attempt to destroy all the evidence, the ashes of the victims at Chelmno were hauled away secretly during the night by the SS men and taken to another town where they were dumped into a river. At Sobibor, the ashes were left behind. There is a similar mound of ashes at the Memorial Site of the Majdanek death camp where, according to the most recent information, 78,000 people died including 59,000 Jews.

During the war and for years afterward, the Sobibor death camp was virtually unknown. William Shirer did not even mention it in his monumental 1147-page book entitled "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." It was not until the release of a 1987 TV movie, "Escape from Sobibor," based on a book with the same name, that the public knew of this remote spot where thousands of Jews lost their lives. The movie tells the story of the revolt during which around 300 prisoners escaped; only 47 of them survived to the end of the war.

One of the survivors of the escape from Sobibor was Esther Terner Raab, who made her home in New Jersey after the war. A theatrical production called "Dear Esther" is based on letters written to her by students who heard her speak at schools and colleges.

In a TV documentary, Esther told about a party that the SS had before her escape. The SS men told Esther that they were celebrating the fact that one million Jews had been killed at Sobibor. Unlike the other Nazi death camps, the SS barracks were located inside the Sobibor camp.

As of August 2008, Philip Bialowitz was the last survivor of the revolt at Sobibor in October 1943. By the time of his escape, an estimated 250,000 Jews, including most of Bialowitz's family, had been murdered at Sobibor. After the revolt, the killing stopped at Sobibor, according to Bialowitz, who emigrated to America after the war.

Bialowitz served as a consultant for the CBS movie "Escape From Sobibor." In 1989, Bialowitz was featured on the television special entitled "Hunt for Stolen War Treasures." In 2001 he lectured at screenings of Claude Lanzmann's documentary entitled "Sobibor, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 Heures."

Today, Bialowitz speaks at synagogues and schools throughout North America and Europe. His eyewitness account of the Holocaust has been preserved in numerous taped interviews. He is currently writing a book about his Holocaust experiences, which is scheduled to be published in Polish in the fall of 2008.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946, documents were introduced which showed an exchange of letters in 1943 between Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the camps, and Richard Gluecks, the Inspector of the Camps, in which Gluecks suggested that Sobibor be converted into a concentration camp. In a letter dated 5 July 1943, Himmler rejected this idea. This indicates that Sobibor was not a concentration camp, but rather a killing center that was not part of the Nazi concentration camp system. The Nazis referred to the three Aktion Reinhard camps and the Chelmno camp as "transit camps" and the deportation of the Jews to the Aktion Reinhard camps was called "transportation to the East," a Nazi euphemism for mass murder.

Old Photos of Sobibor - external link

Belzec

Treblinka

Chelmno

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This page was last updated on August 14, 2008