Obit of the Day: The Man Who Escaped Sobibor On October 14, 1943, more than 600 prisoners of the Sob

Obit of the Day: The Man Who Escaped Sobibor On October 14, 1943, more than 600 prisoners of the Sobibor extermination camp attempted to escape. Led by Alexander Petsjerski, a Ukrainian lieutenant, the plan was to kill all the SS officers and guards at the camp, take over the armory and walk the camp populace out the front gate. But things went awry. Eleven SS guards were killed and the armory was captured but the revolt was discovered and the prisoners fled for their lives. Only 300 managed to escape, with the other half captured or killed. Of the escapees most of them were hunted down and killed in the Polish countryside. But 16-year-old Thomas Blatt and a friend bribed a farmer who hid them for months. For reasons that remain unexplained, things took a turn for the worse and the farmer betrayed the men and shot Mr. Blatt in the jaw. The teenager survived the shooting, living with the bullet lodged in his face for the rest of his life. He fled and hid himself as a Polish Christian until the area was liberated by Soviet troops.Mr. Blatt was only fifteen when his mother, father, and ten-year-old brother were brought to Sobibor. While he was selected at random as a camp worker, the rest of his family was murdered immediately, three of the approximately 250,000 victims of the gas chambers during the camp’s sixteen-month existence.(After the uprising, Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp closed, demolished, and attempted to erase the site from existence by burying and covering the gas chambers with asphalt and planting trees in the area. The rest of the prisoners were sent to labor camps.)When the war ended, Mr. Blatt lived in Israel and Santa Barbara, California. But Sobibor was forever on his mind and he worked to raise funds to restore the site as a memorial for the Jews killed there. He also wrote two books about the camp: Sobibor: The Forgotten Revolt  (1996) and From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival (1997). In 1987, he was hired as a consultant for the television movie Escape from Sobibor starring Rutger Hauer and Alan Arkin.In 2011, Mr. Blatt was the lead witness against John Demjanjuk, a 90-year-old Ohio autoworker, who was charged with murder in his role as a guard at the Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek camps. Although Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted at trial, Mr. Blatt could not specifically remember him from Sobibor, and Mr. Demjanjuk died while awaiting his appeal, forcing the courts to declare him “presumed innocent.”Thomas Blatt died on October 31, 2015 at the age of 88.Sources: NY Times, LA Times, Sobibor Interviews, and Wikipedia(Images of Thomas Blatt, circa 1945, dressed as a Soviet officer while hiding in Polad, courtesy of sobiborinterviews.nl and undated and uncredited photo of Mr. Blatt standing in front of Sobibor courtesy of prescottnews.com)More Obit of the Day posts on the Holocaust:http://www.obitoftheday.com/holocaustAnd also of relevant interest:Irving Milchberg - Teenage cigarette seller who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto UprisingBoruch Spiegel - The man who started the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- source link

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