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  Interview with Sobibor Survivor Thomas Blatt: 'Demjanjuk Should Confess'

Interview with Sobibor Survivor Thomas Blatt 'Demjanjuk Should Confess'

Part 2: 'I Want the Truth'

SPIEGEL: What happened to your family?

Blatt: An SS man beat my father with a club, and then I lost sight of him. I'd said to my mother, "And yesterday I wasn't allowed to drink the rest of the milk, because you absolutely wanted to save some for today." That strange remark of mine still haunts me today -- it was the last thing I said to her. My 10-year-old brother stayed at my mother's side. They were all murdered in the gas chambers.

SPIEGEL: What was your survival strategy?

Blatt: I knew that the Germans liked it when you were clean and healthy. I tried to look strong when I walked, and to keep a smile on my face. I watched out that my pants didn't get wrinkled when I slept and that they kept their creases. And I was curious, I always went around and looked for possibilities to escape.

SPIEGEL: What were your tasks in the camp?

Blatt: I had to sort the victims' belongings, shirts with shirts and shoes with shoes. A few times I also had to cut the women's hair before they went into the gas chamber. They were already naked. Sobibor was a factory -- the time from arrival to the corpses being burnt was usually just a few hours.

SPIEGEL: Did people know what would happen to them?

Blatt: The Dutch especially were completely unsuspecting. When a transport arrived, usually an SS man would hold a speech. He apologized for the arduous journey and said that for hygienic reasons, everyone needed to shower first. Then later they would work somewhere. Some of the Jews applauded. They couldn't imagine what was in store for them.

SPIEGEL: You were among the organizers of the uprising in Sobibor on October 14, 1943. How did that happen?

Blatt: It was in particular the Jewish Red Army soldiers from Minsk, who had been brought to Sobibor as work prisoners, who helped. They needed only two weeks to plan the uprising.

DER SPIEGEL

Graphic: The Sobibor death camp

Blatt: We wanted to draw the SS people into an ambush individually and then kill them. To do it, we relied on the men's greed and their punctuality. And it worked. We told an officer named Josef Wolf that someone was keeping a nice leather coat for him. We told him to come at a certain time, and he did so, and the prisoners killed him. We killed a dozen SS men and an unknown number of guards. The Germans and the guards were slow in realizing what was happening.

SPIEGEL: And how did you escape afterward?

Blatt: I wanted to climb through a hole someone had made with an ax in the barbed wire fence. But when the guard in the tower started shooting at us, some of the others started to climb the fence. The fence toppled over and my coat got caught in the barbed wire. That saved my life. The ones who ran ahead of me were blown to pieces in the minefield on the other side of the fence. I slipped out of my coat and ran away. More than 300 prisoners escaped, of whom around 50 survived the war.

SPIEGEL: And how did you get through the remaining year and a half until the end of the war?

Blatt: Freedom was difficult. If I had been a Christian boy, I'd have had a better chance. People would have taken care of me. But where could I go? There was no Jewish community anymore in my hometown of Izbica, and the Polish farmers saw us mainly as Christ's murderers. A farmer hid me and some others at first, in exchange for money we'd taken with us from Sobibor. Later he tried to shoot us. I still have the bullet in my jaw. After that I hid in the woods or in abandoned buildings.

SPIEGEL: According to documents, Demjanjuk was no longer at Sobibor when the uprising took place -- he had already been sent back to the Trawniki training camp and then was assigned to the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria. His family and his lawyers argue that, at 89 years old, he's too old and sick to stand trial.

Blatt: Now people only see the old man. They don't see the man who forced people into the gas chambers.

SPIEGEL: Do you have concrete memories of Demjanjuk?

Blatt: No, after 66 years I can't even remember my father's face. But I'm certain that Demjanjuk was just like the other Ukrainian guards.

SPIEGEL: What would you consider a fair punishment?

Blatt: I don't care if he goes to prison or not -- the trial is what matters to me. I want the truth. The world should find out how it was at Sobibor. He should confess, because he knows so much. He's the last living perpetrator from Sobibor.

Interview conducted by Jan Friedmann, Klaus Wiegrefe

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