Sobibor survivor: 'I polished SS boots as dying people screamed'

Thomas Blatt (above) will give evidence at the trial of John Demjanjuk this week

Thomas Blatt testifies this week at the trial of John Demjanjuk. Here, he tells Tony Paterson of his life in the camp and an extraordinary escape

He is a small, energetic looking man with thick spectacles and white hair. He speaks English with a thick, slightly American accent. As he stands in the queue outside Munich's criminal court in his beige zip-up jacket, he looks like any ordinary pensioner with time on his hands. He might have come to watch justice being done merely as an impartial observer.

Yet Thomas "Toivi" Blatt is no ordinary senior citizen. Aged 82, he is one of the last people alive to have survived the hell of the Nazi extermination camps in which millions were systematically slaughtered by brutal German and Ukrainian SS henchmen during the Second World War.

Only 82 people survived the death factory camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thomas Blatt is one of them. He still has a bullet lodged in his jaw to show for it. He got it when he was shot in the face and had to "play dead" after a miraculous escape from Sobibor in October 1943.

This Tuesday, having travelled from his home in California, he will enter the witness box in the clinical surroundings of Munich's modern neon-lit criminal court and recall the horror he endured as a 15-year-old Jewish prisoner in Sobibor, where 250,00 people including his parents and his 10-year-old brother were murdered.

Mr Blatt's testimony is expected to be crucial in deciding the outcome of what has been called the world's last Holocaust trial. The alleged former Nazi SS guard John Demjanjuk, a former Ukrainian citizen, who was extradited to Germany from Cleveland, Ohio last year, is accused of complicity in the murder of 27,900 mainly Dutch Jews who were gassed or beaten to death at Sobibor in the spring and summer of 1943.

Demjanjuk, who is 89 and suffering from numerous ailments, is refusing to speak at his trial, and follows the proceedings in court lying on a hospital stretcher with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. He has denied complicity in mass murder.

Mr Blatt has not been able to identify Demjanjuk as having been one of the 100 Ukrainian guards at the camp, although he believes he was certainly there at the time he was a Sobibor prisoner. His testimony will nevertheless make it chillingly clear that anyone employed as a Sobibor guard was a vital cog in the machinery of genocide. "We were terrified of the Ukrainian guards at Sobibor. They were worse than the Germans – and I was there at the same time as Demjanjuk," he said.

Mr Blatt was born in Izbica, only 43 miles from the Sobibor death camp. A Nazi SS squad picked him up with his father, mother and young brother during a routine "Jew round-up" in April 1943. They were bundled into a truck. "The camp gate opened to reveal what looked like a beautiful village," he said. "We had heard what went on in there, but we refused to believe it. But I knew better, I was 15 and I realised that I was going to die," he added.

He remembers a man standing next to him peering through a hole in the truck's side at a group of Ukrainian guards equipped with bull whips. The man said, in Yiddish, how the place was "black" with them in reference to their black SS uniforms. Within a matter of seconds the Jewish prisoners were herded out of the truck and set upon by the screaming, whip-wielding guards who drove them up a path known as the "Himmelfahrtstrasse" or "road to heaven" towards the gas chambers.

"They mistreated us, they shot the old and the sick new arrivals who couldn't walk anymore. And they were the ones who drove the naked people into the gas chambers with their bayonets. They would come back with splashes of blood on their boots," Mr Blatt told The Independent on Sunday. "I often had to work a few feet away. If they refused to go on, they hit them and fired shots. I can still remember their shout of 'Idi siuda', which means 'come here'," he added.

Young Thomas saw his father being beaten with a club."Then I lost sight of him. I 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 brother stayed at my mother's side. They were all murdered in the gas chambers within the hour." A few weeks later, Thomas Blatt was forced to watch his best friend, Leon, being slowly beaten to death.

Middle-class Dutch Jews started being sent to Sobibor shortly after his arrival and the SS changed their tactics to trick them. "When a Dutch transport arrived, usually an SS man would hold a speech. He would apologise for the arduous journey, and said that for hygienic reasons, everyone needed to shower first. Then later they would be given jobs. Some of the new arrivals applauded. They had no idea what was in store," he recalled.

He survived only because the SS had executed a number of so-called "work Jews" at Sobibor the day before he arrived. The camp commandant was looking for replacements and 15-year-old Thomas pushed himself forward, pleading "Take me, take me!".

His jobs included polishing SS men's boots, sorting the clothes and shaving the hair off naked women prisoners before they were driven into gas chambers pumped full of exhaust fumes. It took up to 40 minutes for those inside to die. "We heard the whine of the generator that started the submarine engine which made the gas that killed them. I remember standing and listening to the muffled screams and knowing that men, women and children were dying in agony as I sorted their clothes. This is what I live with," he said.

He survived by supplying his Ukrainian tormentors with the gold coins he found in the victims' clothing after they were gassed. The guards used the money to pay for prostitutes. He tried to look healthy, strong and useful to avoid being murdered in the routine executions of the "work Jews". "I knew the Germans like it when you were clean and healthy looking," he said. "I watched out that my pants didn't get wrinkled and that they kept their creases and I always went around looking for possibilities to escape," he added. The chance came in October 1943 soon after a group of Jewish Red Army soldiers arrived at the camp. Within two weeks they had planned an uprising, which later became the subject of a book by Blatt The Forgotten Revolt, and an award-winning television film Escape from Sobibor. Thomas Blatt helped to kill 12 SS officers by tricking each one separately into believing that a fine leather coat had been saved for them from one of the Jewish transports. Prisoners armed with axes and knives killed the SS men as they arrived to collect their booty.

A breakout ensued. Jewish prisoners scaled the perimeter fence under a hail of gunfire from the camp watchtowers, which were still manned. The ones who got over the fence were blown up by mines that surrounded the camp. Mr Blatt escaped this fate because his jacket caught on the fence. He eventually got through the minefield by jumping through the pits in the ground caused by the explosions.

He and a friend bribed a Polish farmer to hide them under the floor of a barn in return for loot they took from the camp. But after stripping off some of their clothes and hiding them in a pit, the farmer decided it would be safer to kill them. The farmer shot at them and Thomas was hit in the face. He pretended to be dead and then managed to escape, spending the rest of the war hiding in woods or abandoned buildings and scavenging for food.

Mr Blatt says he is not seeking vengeance. "I don't care if he [Demjanjuk] goes to prison or not – the trial is what matters to me," he said.

"The world should find out how it was at Sobibor. As the camp's last living perpetrator, Demjanjuk should confess, he knows so much."

IoS

Auschwitz asks Britain for help to preserve decaying death camp

'There is only one thing worse than Auschwitz itself...and that is if the world forgets there was such a place.'

Henry Appel, Auschwitz survivor

The guard towers of Auschwitz are splintering, the barracks are waterlogged: the concentration camp where one million Jews were slaughtered is decaying so fast that conservationists have called on Britain to help to save it. The theft last month of its distinctive, sinister sign, Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free) has underlined the vulnerability of the Nazi death camp, stretching over 20 hectares (50 acres) of southern Poland.

“Nobody could have imagined such a horrific act of vandalism,” Jacek Kastelaniec, director-general of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, said. “Now try to imagine the public outcry if one of the barracks started to fall down, impossible to restore.”

Auschwitz was built on boggy ground between two rivers; as a result the high groundwater and bad drainage has rotted the foundations. Walls are blistering and starting to lean, roof frames are buckling, plasterwork and wall-paintings are flaking.

Mr Kastelaniec will go to the Cabinet Office tomorrow to press the Government on Gordon Brown’s promise to contribute to a €120million (£110million) endowment fund that will guarantee the preservation of one of the main sites of the Holocaust. Mr Brown visited the camp last April, and, plainly upset by what he had seen, declared: “We will join with other countries in supporting the maintenance and retention of the memorial at Auschwitz.” No figure has been suggested publicly for Britain’s possible contribution, but Polish sources say that the conservationists are hoping for about €10million.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has said that her country would put up half of the costs, but the managers of the Auschwitz museum need other commitments. Mr Kastelaniec will also visit France, Belgium and the United States. The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, has sent an appeal to 40 heads of government.

“The conservationists say we need to start work in the next two years if we are to avert irreparable decay,” Mr Kastelaniec told The Times, “and that will only be possible if the money is paid into the fund now.”

The decay of the camp is politically sensitive. The current trial in Munich of the alleged Sobibor camp guard John Demjanjuk is being seen by the public as the last for Nazi war crimes — the 89-year-old defendant is wheeled into court on a hospital bed. Holocaust survivors are dwindling. “In ten years there will be no witnesses,” Mr Kastelaniec said, “and it will be easier for the crazy people who say nothing happened in the camps.” Only the buildings will remain.

Auschwitz cannot simply have a makeover because that would undermine its claims to authenticity, and open the way for those on the far Right who try to deny or trivialise the Holocaust. The strategic point of the restoration is to use its almost over-powering sense of menace as a clinching counter-argument against anti-Semitism and racism.

The portfolio to be presented to the British Government underlines the vast scale of the camp. The priority is being set on 45 brick barracks. The managers estimate that it will cost up to €890,000 to restore a single barracks building. On top of that come 22 wooden barrack rooms — where inmates were crowded into bunks up to the ceiling. Each will cost €310,000.

Then there are the remains of 210 barrack buildings. Some sheds have collapsed, but there are concrete outlines where floors and chimneys stood. Without some strengthening, these foundation markings will disappear. Cost: €78,000 per barrack room. The 27 wooden guard towers need to be reinforced at an annual cost, for the next 14 years, of €62,000.

Work is under way on conserving the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoriums, but the managers want to extend this to include a provisional gas chamber-bunker, two other crematoriums and the unloading ramp.

Property taken from prisoners before they were gassed, now exhibited in small piles in the museum, is also showing signs of age: 460 artifical limbs, 40kg (90lb) of discarded spectacles, 260 prayer garments and 3,800 suitcases that belonged to people who ended their journey in Auschwitz.

The sluggish response worldwide to the restoration had been down, in part, to the feeling that the main burden should be on Germany. Mr Kastelaniec said: “The breakthrough came when we convinced not only Germany but also other contributors that this was not a project about guilt, but about the future.”

Times Online

Auschwitz

Donations to Auschwitz

I'll bring Nazi to justice

The ID card for hell: This document allowed John
Demjanjuk into his training camp in Trawniki in Poland

Kurt Gutmann was only a boy when he was spirited away from the horrors of Sobibor to seek refuge among kind strangers in Scotland. His mother and brother were among those left behind, soon to become victims of an atrocity that would claim tens of thousands of lives.

But more than seven decades after his escape aboard the Kindertransport, Mr Gutmann is to realise his life's ambition by testifying in one of the last Nazi war criminal trials.

The German Jew, who went on to fight alongside the Black Watch in his occupied homeland, has been chosen as one of eight co-plaintiffs who will take the stand against John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor extermination camp. There, it is alleged, Demjanjuk helped to preside over the murders of 27,900 people.

The 89-year-old was extradited from the US earlier this year after a legal battle that lasted decades. He continues to deny the charges, claiming he spent much of the war as a PoW. Prosecutors in Munich, however, say they will present a wealth of evidence at October's trial, placing Ukraine-born Demjanjuk at the camp in occupied Poland.

For Mr Gutmann, the trial presents a final opportunity to find justice for those loved ones he parted from long ago.

"It is the last thing I wish for," said the 82-year-old, who has had three heart bypass operations. "Perhaps I don't have much more time. But I still want to experience one more thing – just punishment for John Demjanjuk. He and his cohorts killed my family. I despise the man because he was a willing accomplice to murder and later dreamed up all sorts of excuses about what he did. I want to look into those eyes and tell him what he took from me."

The former translator was not yet a teenager when he stood on the platform of Mühlheim railway station in Germany's industrial Ruhr on 23 June, 1939. It was the scene of his last farewell to mother, Jeanette, and elder brother Hans, 21. His father had died when he was just one.

Mr Gutmann said: "I remember my mother kissing me, wrapping me in her arms and then saying, 'Look after yourself, my son, and please try to get us over there'. They were the last words I ever heard from her. She got me away because I was under 16. The Nazis wouldn't let Hans go."

With no choice, the 12-year-old embarked on a journey made by about 10,000 Jewish children between 1938 and 1939. His other brother, Fritz, had travelled the same route and was by then at the Getrude Jacobson Orphanage in Scotland's largest city.

He recalls: "The Scottish people were so lovely to me. I had come from a country where I was a fifth-class citizen, kicked out of grammar school because I was a Jew, unable to sit on park benches, spat at in the street. These strangers took me to their hearts. I will forever be in their debt."

The teenager spent a year at the orphanage before moving to Annan in Dumfriesshire and then on to Skelmorlie in Ayrshire, where he lived for two years at a Jewish hostel, before returning to Glasgow. Around the same time, in 1942, it later emerged, Jeanette and Hans were transported from Germany to a labour camp called Izbica, near Lublin, Poland. Some time before the end of the year, both were murdered there.

Back in Scotland, Mr Gutmann, now 17, had volunteered as an infantryman with the Black Watch. He was based in Lockerbie, before going to Germany in 1945 as a member of the British forces. He later settled in Berlin.

Mr Gutmann, who this week visits Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen on holiday, acknowledges that this autumn's trial will be a test.

"It won't be easy," he said. "My wife thinks it might be too much. But I have to do this. I am doing it for my mother and brother. I want to see the last great criminal of that war get what he deserves."

Scotsman

Bid to deport alleged Nazi guard stalls

An attempt to deport an 89-year-old alleged former Nazi death camp guard from the United States was last night blocked by an appeal court.

US immigration agents removed John Demjanjuk from his home in Ohio to take him to Germany. Demjanjuk was carried out of the house in a wheelchair and placed in a waiting van. His son, John Demjanjuk Jr, had filed motions earlier in the day asking the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay of deportation. The government objected.

German prosecutors claim Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, was an accessory to some 29,000 deaths during the war at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Once in Germany, he could be formally charged in court.

In 1988, Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in Israel for crimes against humanity after Holocaust survivors identified him as the notorious "Ivan the Terrible", a guard at the Treblinka death camp. Israel's highest court later overturned his sentence and freed him, after new evidence showed "Ivan the Terrible" was a different man.

Yorkshire Post

Spain court urged to study Nazi guards case

State prosecutors have urged Spain's National Court to investigate four alleged former Nazi concentration camp guards and decide whether to seek their extradition from the United States over the deaths of Spanish citizens in the camps, news reports said Monday.

The Europa Press news agency said the prosecutors office at the court announced it was backing a case petition brought last month by Brussels-based rights organization Equipo Nizkor on behalf of victims' relatives. The suspects are John Demjanjuk - an 88-year-old retired auto worker in Ohio - Anton Tittjung, Josias Kumpf and Johann Leprich.

Equipo Nizkor has said the U.S. has been trying for years to deport all four for lying about their Nazi pasts on their immigration papers, but that no country had been willing to take them.

The prosecutors' petition is a nonbinding recommendation. The court's judges will now decide whether to accept the case for study and consider filing charges. A decision could take months. No one was available at the prosecutors' office for comment late Monday.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, which worked with Equipo Nizkor to prepare the suit, has called the petition hugely important. Demjanjuk, tied up in legal battles over his wartime past for more than three decades, is No. 2 on the center's 'most wanted' list of Nazi war criminals - below only the brutal SS doctor Aribert Heim.

Europa Press quoted unidentified court officials as saying they hoped the case could be expanded to include Heim.

Demjanjuk's son, John. Jr., told The Associated Press last month that his father was innocent of 'the same old desperate charges.'

The suit was presented under Spain's principle of universal jurisdiction. This states that war crimes, crimes against humanity, terrorism, torture and other heinous offenses can be prosecuted in Spain, even if they have been committed abroad. Spanish judges have used the legal principle to go after the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and figures from the Argentine 'dirty war' of the 1970s and 80s, among others, albeit with very limited success.

Equipo Nizkor said the fact that thousands of Spanish citizens died in Nazi camps where the four suspects allegedly worked is another reason for Spain's National Court to charge them. The group's complaint says the suspects served as guards in the concentration camps at Flossenberg and Sachsenhausen in Germany, and Mauthausen in Nazi-occupied Austria.

Guardian