Demjanjuk in Sobibor
The New York Times reports that retired American autowork John Demjanjuk has been convicted in Munich for being one of the Ukrainian guards who helped kill thousands of Jews at the Nazi death camp of Sobibor in Poland.
The case against Mr. Demjanjuk involved about 15 trains known to have arrived between April and July 1943 from the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, carrying 29,579 people. Prosecutors initially charged Mr. Demjanjuk with 27,900 counts based on the theory that some must have died in transit or been spared for a time to work at the camp. By the end of the trial on Thursday, that figure had been revised to 28,060 counts.
About 250,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor, most of them poisoned with exhaust fumes.
What was it like for the Dutch Jews who were shipped to Sobibor? As it happens, not long ago (after many years of procrastination) I read Escape from Sobibor by Richard Rashke. Since the book was first published in 1982 and may be a bit hard to find, I will quote at some length.
The passenger trains from the Netherlands began to back into Sobibor every Friday. On each transport, there were between one thousand and three thousand Jews, and by midsummer there would be nineteen trains full.
The Dutch had no idea of where they were or what lay ahead. Even though Sobibor was one year old, the British and American strategy not to publicize the death camps had worked, Jan Karski notwithstanding. The Dutch Jews never doubted that they were going to a work camp, as the Nazis had told them. Most had never seen a German kill a Jew, nor personally experienced real Nazi brutality. The Germans had simply rounded them up for Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland, and then onto eastbound trains. Westerbork wasn’t exactly home. But it was clean, there was food, families stayed together, and there were no daily whippings or “games” to cause suspicion and panic. It was all part of Himmler’s master plan to keep western Jews submissive and quiet until they were inside Camp III, naked and shorn. A few Dutch Jews had been in a concentration camp at Vught, a kindergarten compared to Sobibor.
The Dutch bounced off the trains in furs and silk dresses or woolen suits, carrying their valuables. Unlike the Polish Jews, they were, for the most part, middle to upper class, well educated, not Orthodox, and totally western—a soft bunch, unused to cutting hay and felling trees or to the stark terror of Nazi brutality.
With the arrival of the Dutch like the crocuses of spring, the Nazis expanded the work force to keep up with the sorting of clothes piling up in the sheds. The Dutch selected to sort, cook, wash and iron clothes, or to work in the vegetable garden were mostly young, naive, rosy-cheeked men and women. On their first day in camp, they would sing Dutch songs, the girls and women swaying their hips or dancing to the rhythm, as if they were on a picnic in the Polish forest, happy that the long, tiring train ride was finally over. The fire that brightened the night sky and the strange sweet smell that filled the air did not arouse their suspicions.
But once they learned the truth, few survived the shock. They gave up or grew weak and sick or made fatal mistakes through carelessness or indifference. The Nazis liked to pick on them, perhaps because of the traditional rivalry between Germany and the Netherlands, or perhaps because the Dutch were weak and educated. They had not been prepared for Sobibor by ghettos, typhus, starvation, fear and hatred, slow death, bullets, whips, gas chambers, the murder of mothers and fathers, sisters and lovers. Most of them died within two weeks of their selection, only to be replaced on the following Friday.
Rashke notes that throughout his book he uses “selection” to mean selected by the Nazis for work, rather than the more common meaning of selected for death.
