"Vhat part of my story don't you believe?" [2]
Thomas Blatt is one of the most famous and most fanatical Holocaust™ propagandists.
He claims he helped lead the famous 1943 revolt at the "extermination camp" of Sobibor which led to 300 prisoners escaping.
Kosher Holocaust™ 'historians' claim that 250,000 jews were murdered at Sobibor.
Blatt was born in Poland in 1927. At the age of 15, he says the Nazis took him and his family to Sobibor.
According to Thomas, within an hour of arrival at the camp his parents and ten-year-old brother were shoved at bayonet point to the gas chambers.
Thomas survived the gas chambers on the whim of the SS commandant, who said to him, "Come, little one", as a selection was made of so-called "work Jews." Thomas was selected to be a shoeshine boy.
He says the Nazis later put him to work as a "fireman", burning the clothes and personal effects of those gassed upon arrival at the camp.
Thomas says the bodies of those murdered at the camp in the gas chambers were then burned on "roasts" -- huge outdoor fires on pyres of iron rails, fueled with diesel oil.
After six months at the camp, Blatt eventually escaped after an inmate uprising at Sobibor, surviving in the forest.
While hiding out in the forest, he claims he survived being shot in the face, and still has a bullet lodged in his jaw.
Blatt has written two books: "Sobibor: The Forgotten Revolt" and "From the Ashes of Sobibor."
Thomas says he tells his story so that "no one forgets the horrors of the Holocaust™."
He tirelessly travels all over the world on the Holocaust™ speaking tour, usually telling his tale to young school children.
Thomas Blatt holds up a
newspaper showing himself along with Karl August
Frenzel, a member of
the Nazi S.S. staff at the Sobibor extermination camp, where Blatt was part of a revolt that led to his escape from the camp in 1943. [1]
the Nazi S.S. staff at the Sobibor extermination camp, where Blatt was part of a revolt that led to his escape from the camp in 1943. [1]
Holocaust survivor, 82, tells of grim role as 'fireman' in Nazi death camp
20 January 2010
The Scotsman
By Allan Hall in Munich
THE lights dimmed in a Munich court yesterday as the survivor of a Nazi death camp where 250,000 people died described how he stayed alive amid the carnage.
Thomas Blatt, 82, using the tip of his ballpoint pen on a map of the camp projected on to the walls of the court, transported a generation far removed from the horrors of the Holocaust back 67 years to a place called Sobibor in Poland.
Metres away from him, lying on a specially constructed bed and apparently asleep for the whole of his testimony, was the man prosecutors allege may have driven Mr Blatt's parents at bayonet-point into the gas chamber at Sobibor in April 1943.
He does not remember John Demjanjuk from the murder factory hidden in a pine forest, and cannot say if he is guilty as charged of aiding in the murders of 27,900 Dutch Jews who were gassed during his alleged tenure there.
But Mr Blatt was the first witness at 89-year-old Demjanjuk's trial able to take the judge, lawyers and relatives of the dead back to those dark days.
As relatives of those killed in Sobibor during the six months Demjanjuk allegedly worked as a guard there wept in court, Mr Blatt said: "I survived the murder project of the Nazis, and the Ukrainians, like Demjanjuk, were the worst of the worst in the camp."
Shipped off to Sobibor from his home only 43 miles away, his mother, father and ten-year-old brother were gassed and burned within an hour of arrival.
He survived on the whim of the SS commandant, who said to him, "Come, little one", as a selection was made of so-called "work Jews" who were needed by the guards to keep the camp functioning.
He told of his various tasks. "I became what was known as the 'fireman'," he said.
After sorting through the clothes of arriving victims, he was left with piles of passports, love letters, birth certificates, bank account statements and greeting cards taken from those about to die. He burned them in a pit, as the people they once belonged to burned on the "roasts" – huge funeral pyres constructed on iron rails and fuelled with diesel oil that sat next to the gas chamber.
After the victims were undressed, they went along the "Road to Heaven" – a path lined with barbed wire fences interwoven with fir boughs that made it invisible to the rest of the camp.
Asked by Judge Ralph Alt if he could recognise Demjanjuk as a guard there, he said wistfully: "Was he there? More than 60 years have passed. I cannot even remember the faces of my parents.
"The court must decide if he was there. If he was there when I was there, then I can imagine he shoved Jews forward at bayonet point to the gas chambers. Without the 100 or so Ukrainians who were there, the Germans would never have managed to kill 250,000 Jews."
Demjanjuk claims he was a prisoner of the Germans for the whole of the war and questions the authenticity of a key piece of evidence – an SS identity card that prosecutors say features a photo of a young Demjanjuk and says he worked at Sobibor.
Arrested, tried and sentenced to death by an Israeli court nearly 20 years ago for being a guard in another camp, he was cleared after new evidence surfaced. He was extradited from the US to Germany last year to stand trial for being in Sobibor. He has not said a word since the trial began last month.
Source: http://news.scotsman.com/world/Holocaust-survivor-82-tells-of.5995937.jp
Article #1: "Holocaust survivor, 82, tells of grim role as 'fireman' in Nazi death camp"
Here is a 2009 interview with Blatt by Der Spiegel:
SPIEGEL: And how did you get through the remaining year and a half until the end of the war?Article #2: Interview with Sobibor Survivor Thomas Blatt
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.
Blatt speaking to
students [1]
Bonus article here, in which Blatt claims he survived in the forest after escaping from Sobibor, and survived being shot in the face:
Holocaust survivor forgives, doesn't forget
Holocaust survivor, death camp escapee, author of two books Thomas Blatt to speak tonight
The Daily Barometer
by Candice Ruud
4/30/08
Thomas "Toivi" Blatt, one of the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust extermination camps, is still living up to a promise he made 65 years ago.
As a member of the revolt at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland, Blatt made a pact to take revenge on his persecutors on a fateful day in October 1943.
Now, Blatt's goal is to spread word about the inhumane cruelty and genocide that an entire race of people was subjected to.
"'Whoever survives, his duty is to tell the world about what's going on here,'" Blatt recounted of the promise made between himself and the 300 or so other victims who launched the revolt.
Blatt is making a special visit to OSU today as part of Holocaust Memorial Week. He will be speaking tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the LaSells Stewart Center.
For Blatt, one of seven living survivors of the Sobibor death camp, the German occupation of Poland started innocently enough. The first few German soldiers who came to his small, peaceful hometown of Izbitza were reasonable and got along with the people. The Yiddish language of the community was so similar to German that it made communication easy, and the future of the German occupation didn't look so bleak at this time.
"It didn't look so bad at all, until another type of German arrived," Blatt said. "Tall fellows, with black coats and hats. And then everything changed."
The small town of Izbitza was turned into a prison-like ghetto. Blatt tried to escape from Poland to Hungary with a forged document during this occupation, but he was arrested. He managed to escape from jail and went back home to Izbitza, where his parents were still alive and working as leather tanners.
On April 28, 1943, the small Polish town was infiltrated by soldiers with orders to take all Jews away to concentration or death camps.
Blatt realized the grave nature of the situation and knew the German soldiers were lying when they told their captive victims they were going to labor camps to work with their families until the war was over.
Blatt, attempting to find a safe place to hide, was apprehended by soldiers who were rounding up Jews like cattle and forcing them into trucks. Ever the escape artist, Blatt slipped away from the officer when he turned away to light a cigarette.
In desperate search of a place to hide, Blatt saw one of his non-Jewish friends who had been watching the commotion. He asked him for a place to hide and was directed to a barn, which ended up being padlocked.
Shortly after, Nazi soldiers came rushing toward the barn, and Blatt heard his friend Yannich say, "Take him - he's a Jew!"
At around 2 p.m., trucks arrived to take the Jews to Sobibor by the thousands. Blatt can still recall the uncomfortable and anxious ride and the then-optimistic attitude of the captives, who didn't believe they were actually going to be exterminated when they reached the camp.
When they got to Sobibor, they reached a road called the "road to heaven."
"I thought, 'What will I see when they open the gates?' I heard about hell, places where they gassed people, and I imagine I will see people digging ditches, like a proper hell that a child would imagine."
Instead, when the gates opened up, they saw what looked like a quiet village.
The Nazis ordered the Jews out of the trucks and instructed them to line up with the men on one side and women and children on the other. Blatt, who was 15 at the time, remembers kissing his mom goodbye and leaving her to line up with the men.
"I thought that as a man, I had a better chance to survive."
The captives were greeted by an S.S. officer who told them they were in transit to a labor camp, but that they had to stop here to shower and disinfect their clothes. Men and women, who for the most part entirely believed the act and had no idea what was about to happen, clapped and cheered and were lined up and sent into the "showers" hundreds at a time.
Only after they were stripped of their clothes, belongings and even their hair - after they were locked into the sealed chambers where gas, and not water, poured through the shower heads - did they begin to realize their fate. The sound of screams deafened the sound of the engine until, gradually, the screams faded away.
Before the men were filed into the gas chamber, Blatt was selected by one of the Nazi soldiers to be a shoeshine boy, and it was this stroke of luck that saved him from the gas chambers and enabled his eventual escape.
After six months in Sobibor working as a shoeshine boy and as a "fireman," burning up the clothes, documents and belongings of those who went to the gas chamber, Blatt became a part of the Sobibor Uprising, the second largest and most succesful revolt that took place during the Holocaust.
"We revolted with several plans to lure the Nazis to different places to kill them with axes and knives."
They murdered as many Germans as possible, and by the time they were discovered, much damage had been done and the Nazis were ill-equipped to do anything but let them escape and capture the few they could.
Blatt spent the next months with the other survivors hiding in forests and paying people to stow them in their homes. On one occasion, a non-Jewish man agreed to hide Blatt and two others and then murdered two of them. He thought he had successfully killed Blatt as well, but the bullet that hit Blatt in the chin was not life-threatening, and Blatt managed to play dead until he could escape yet again.
Blatt continued to hide out in the woods until the war ended, which he recalls as a confusing and painful time. Blatt remembers the sudden feeling of joy at being liberated after so many years and the hard realization that he was completely alone. His family and friends had all been killed in Sobibor.
"It takes an extreme situation to find out who a person is," Blatt said. "You are a good person, or you're a bad person, but if you're in the middle, which way will you tilt under pressure?"
After the war, Blatt captured the heart of an American tourist, whom he married and moved to America to be with. He learned English working as a janitor in a hospital and eventually opened a business selling car stereos.
He has written two books on his experience in Sobibor: "Sobibor: The Forgotten Revolt" and "From the Ashes of Sobibor."
On the topic of forgiveness, Blatt says that forgiveness depends entirely on the individual survivor.
"We should forgive but not forget," Blatt said. "It's not like stepping on someone's toe and saying you're sorry. It's too soon. We must stop all innocent people from being killed. We must learn to live with each other. That's all."
Blatt has traveled all over the world giving talks about his trials during the Holocaust and his life afterward, keeping the promise that he made the day of the uprising.
"I never recovered. We survivors are still not free. We live in a cage, an invisible cage. We live with our memories and our feelings."
Article #3: "Holocaust survivor forgives, doesn't forget"
Another bonus article, where Thomas says the Nazis let rats gnaw at Jews as a form of torture...
Holocaust survivor shares account: Sobibor camp breakout freed 300
By Natalie Ragus/Staff Writer
Although they are at least three generations removed from the Holocaust, Nipomo and Arroyo Grande high school students
Monday got a rare first-hand account of the horrors of life in a Nazi death camp.
Santa Barbara resident Thomas “Toivi” Blatt, 82, had an instrumental role in the 1943 revolt that allowed some 300 prisoners to make a successful break from Sobibor, an extermination camp situated in the Lublin district of Poland.
Blatt shared his story with the students as a way of fulfilling his vow to do his part to ensure the world never forgets the horrors of the Holocaust.
“I feel I have something to pay back for my survival,” Blatt said.
Shortly before the inmates began the run for their lives, Blatt’s friend, the revolt’s instigator, Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, had instructed anyone who might survive the uprising to “bear witness, (and) let the world know what has happened here.”
Those words, Blatt said, have stayed with him ever since.
Born in Poland in 1927, Blatt was not quite 15 years old when Nazi soldiers captured him along with his entire family.
Upon their arrival at Sobibor, Blatt’s parents and only sibling got sent to the gas chambers, while the Nazis assigned Blatt to perform hard labor.
In the six months he spent at Sobibor, Blatt witnessed frequent atrocities, ranging from beatings to a prisoner tortured by rats eating away at his body.
Eventually, Blatt became friends with Pechersky and others who began to hatch a mass-escape plan, which involved killing every Nazi soldier stationed at the camp and walking out the main gate.
Blatt was to distract the soldiers.
Ultimately, about half of Sobibor’s 600 or so prisoners managed to fight their way out into the surrounding forest.
A 1987 British movie, “Escape from Sobibor,” depicted the events surrounding the revolt and an actor portrayed Blatt in the film.
When asked what gave him and other inmates the courage to go through with the uprising, Blatt simply responded, “People want to live. It was instinct.”
On Monday, Blatt stood on the stage in Nipomo’s Forum theater facing an audience of nearly 100 high school juniors who appeared dumb struck as Blatt recounted his experiences at Sobibor.
Several students remarked that they connected with Blatt partly because he was not much younger than themselves when the Nazis captured him.
“We’ve heard about (the Holocaust) before, but hearing about it from a first-person (account) ... just made it so much more real,” said Marisa Smith, 16. “It was a real eye opener.”
Social Studies Department Chairman Mark Houchin said that’s why he invited Blatt to speak.
“You can teach the Holocaust in class ... but when you actually meet a person who’s lived the history, it makes it come alive,” he said.
Michael Marquez, 17, said he learned an important lesson through Blatt’s presentation.
“Don’t let this ever happen again,” he said.
nragus@theadobepress.com
Source: http://www.theadobepress.com/articles/2009/03/28/news/news03.txt
Article #4: "Holocaust survivor shares account: Sobibor camp breakout freed 300"
Note: use http://www.archive.org/ to find articles if original links no longer work
HolocaustDenialVidoes.com has an excellent detailed breakdown of Blatt's fraudulent story here.
Hear Thomas Blatt tell his tale...
