Arkady Wajspapir was born on 23 December 1921 in the Ukranian village of Bobrovy Kut. All the residents of the village were Jews and their occupation was agriculture.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France stood by their guarantee of Poland's border and declared war on Germany 2 days later. However, Poland found itself fighting a two front war when the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east on the 17th of September. The Polish government fled the country that same day and after heavy shelling and bombing, Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on the 28th of September 1939. In accordance with the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland on the 29th of September and the last resistance of Polish units ended on the 6th of October.
Less than 2 years later on the 22nd of June, 1941, Nazi Germany, under the codename Operation Barbarossa, invades the Soviet Union, its ally in the war against Poland.
Three army groups counting more than 3 million German soldiers attacked the Soviet Union across a broad front stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. The soldiers were supported by additional 650,000 troops from Germany’s allies.
In the first six weeks after the German attack the Soviet Union saw catastrophic military losses and the German armies eventually captured some 5,7 million Soviet Red Army troops during the Second World War.
Among them was Arkady Wajspapir, who before the start of the Second World War, had worked as an engineer.
In September 1941 twenty-year old Arkadij Wajspapir was severely injured during combat with the German army, and shortly after that he was taken prisoner by the Germans. Until March 1942 he was looked after in a hospital for prisoners of war in Kiev. After being discharged from the hospital, he was transported to the Minsk ghetto.
One night in September 1943, everyone in the camp was taken by train to Lublin, at what would be the Majdanek concentration camp. However, after waiting for a day at the camp gates, they were told that there was no room and they would be taken to Sobibor.
When a Polish train worker told them they were to be gassed and cremated there, no one believed him. The occupants of Wajspapir’s railcar had even opened a hole in the bottom of the car to use as a toilet, and they could have escaped through it, yet nobody did because they could not believe that they would all going to be killed. When they arrived at the camp labeled Sobibor, it was too late.
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