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

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

Germany gets go-ahead to prosecute 'Ivan the Terrible' in last Nazi trial

Germany is preparing for what could be the last Nazi war criminal trial as the country's highest court ruled a former death camp guard known as 'Ivan the Terrible' can be tried in Munich

Ivan Demjanjuk, alleged to be Ivan the Terrible, moved to
America in 1952 and changed his first name to John Photo: AP

Ukrainian-born Ivan Demjanjuk, 88, is alleged to have been involved in the murder of over 29,000 Jews when he served as a guard in several Nazi prisons including the death camp Sobibor in Poland during World War II.

Demjanjuk moved to America in 1952 and changed his first name to John, and now lives as a retired car worker in Ohio.

Last month, a court in Munich ruled that Demjanjuk, who was dubbed Ivan the Terrible for his role in the mass murder, could not be charged in Germany. But Germany's Federal Court of Justice has overturned the verdict, making it possible for Demjanjuk to be indicted and tried in Munich, where he lived before emigrating to America.

The court ruling read: "Demjanjuk, who is accused of involvement in the killing of at least 29,000 Jews in the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland in 1943, lived for several months in 1951 in a camp in the current jurisdiction of the court."

The office of the German Federal Prosecutor indicated that new evidence that surfaced after Demjanjuk trial in Israel in 1986 would be sufficient to charge him with war crimes. Demjanjuk always denied having served in the Nazi army and claimed to have been fighting in the former Soviet armed forces.

German authorities are now expected to seek extradition and put Demjanjuk on trial, which is likely to be the last high-profile process of an alleged Nazi war criminal. Demjanjuk was already extradited to Israel once where he was sentenced to death in Israel in 1986, but a higher instance court overturned the verdict for lack of evidence and he was allowed to return to America.

Demjanjuk's relatives in America repeatedly said that he was too old to stand trial, but Charlotte Knobloch, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, urged authorities to "do everything legally possible to accelerate the process so that Demjanjuk can be held responsible for his crimes during his lifetime."

"Demjanjuk and all other Nazi criminals still alive should know that for them there is no mercy," Mrs Knobloch said.

Telegraph

Haunting Letters Recall Jewish Teen's Stay in Nazi Labor Camp

In 1997, a Dutch demolition expert found two bundles of long-hidden mail in the bathroom ceiling of a home in East Amsterdam.

There were 86 letters, one postcard and a telegram, all written over a five-month period in 1942 by the Jewish teen Philip ('Flip'') Slier to his parents in Amsterdam. He was sent, like many other healthy young men, to the forced labor camp Moolengoot in Nazi-occupied Holland.

Flip's missives are now published for the first time in a haunting new volume called 'Hidden Letters.' The book is extensively illustrated and annotated with over 300 photographs, maps and other historical material to provide full context for the experiences of Flip and his family.

Entrusted by the demolitions expert to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Flip's letters eventually made their way in 1999 to Flip's first cousin Deborah Slier. A New York-based children's book publisher, she grew up in South Africa and never knew Flip, who was 18 when he went to Moolengoot. Slier, now 76, was amazed when she got the call.

'I thought, "I need to do these letters in English, I need to publish them,"' Slier told me during an interview at Bloomberg's New York headquarters. 'And, as I read them, I realized that I knew virtually nothing about Holland during the war and so set about to find out what had happened.'

The book is annotated by Slier and her husband, Ian Shine, 75, a physician and author. It's translated from Dutch into English by Marion van Binsbergen-Pritchard.

Windbreaker, Clogs

Flip's first letter is dated Saturday, April 25, 1942: 'Have arrived in the camp. Fairly comfortable. Reasonable bed, 3 blankets. Clean. Good atmosphere, decent people. We have very little freedom.' As in many of the letters, he asks his family to send basic provisions: a windbreaker, clogs ('urgently needed') and a camp knife.'

About 80 percent of Holland's Jewish population, some 100,000 people, were killed during the Nazi occupation, Slier would learn in the course of her research.

Flip's character emerges little by little from the letters. 'He is a generous and kind and thoughtful person. I don't know many 18-year-olds who would write almost daily to their parents. He's concerned about them,' Slier said.

Frequently, he seeks to quell their fears about his health and safety: 'Please don't worry about me being here. I don't,' he writes at the end of his May 24th letter. But as the weeks and months go on, and the war shows no sign of ending, he writes of fellow inmates escaping and his own plans to do so if they close Moolengoot and ship the men off to the death camps. He worries, too, that the Germans will soon take his father.

'I am glad Pa has not left yet,' he writes on Aug. 2, 1942. 'As long as there is hope there's life.'

Helpful Farmers

Flip struggles to remain upbeat, even as conditions grow worse at the camp.

'I think it never occurred to Flip that he wouldn't survive,' said Slier. 'He talks about escaping to Switzerland. In fact, he runs away from the camp.'

After hiding out with one of the farm families, Flip sneaks back to Amsterdam with false papers and dyes his hair. He works surreptitiously in a restaurant, but he never makes it to Switzerland.
'He was arrested for not wearing his yellow star,' Slier said. 'We know that he must have fought when we was arrested because his arrest papers say he had a wound on his mouth.'

The letters, like a good novel, are hard to put down. I found myself secretly hoping, against all logic, that Flip and his family and friends would survive. Flip's last letter home is Sept. 14, 1942. 'Today I got work in another place. I now have to walk almost an hour in the morning and then cut sods of turf. Dirty rotten work. It is getting to me more and more.'

Flip's Arrest

After his arrest, Flip was sent to the death camp Sobibor in Poland, where he most likely perished. Most people were gassed within several hours of their arrival. Flip's circle of family and friends fared no better: At least 20 of them died in Auschwitz during September 1942. Flip's letters will invariably be compared with Anne Frank's diary. Yet they are very different, Slier noted.

'Anne Frank is essentially the story of one girl confined to an apartment and doesn't tell what's happening to the rest of Holland. What happened to Flip and his family and the documentation, I think, gives a picture of Holland during the war. Lots of Dutch people besides Jews died.'

Slier and Shine have dedicated the book to 'all victims of genocide.'

'Hidden Letters,' is published by Star Bright Books (193 pages, $35).

Bloomberg