I have watched this man’s interview, either Yad Vashem, or USC Shoah, it is so compelling. What a courageous young man he was, so glad he was able to overcome seeming insurmountable odds and escape and survive.

I feel sorry for anybody who had to live through the Holocaust

Good do0cumentary. Sobibor is changing so much now and having visited two years ago, it seems incredible that when I go back it will have changed beyond all recognition.

“Goodbye I will see you on a shelf at a soap store” the horror of the Holocaust. It makes me shudder the thought of a person saying this to another. We must never forget what happened.

This man just walked through and could pick up human bones on the surface, that’s unbelievable.

This is fascinating, I wish this documentary was longer... Part 1 and 2 very good

Rip to all innocent victims of sobibor concentration camp😥😥😥😥😥😥🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

😢when he talked about his mother i almost cryed

When it was in use, Sobibor had no road to it. It is miles from Sobibor village. Entrance to the camp was on a railway siding, shielded from the main railway line, so passing trains could see nothing. The original siding buffers remain.

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. matthew 10 28

Does anybody know the background music? His recounting of his time in Ww2 on a Shoah documentary was really moving. I didn't realize that was his book "escape from sobibor" I read that in 6th grade along with Weisels "night" These should be required reading in schools

Mr. Blatt carried a very heavy burden. As a Survivor he had to speak up on what happened, so that no one else will ever suffer the indignities and miseries of Sobibor. I have read that many Camp survivors carried really heavy Survivor Guilt. "Why was I spared?" They find meaning in bearing witness to their suffering. If we let Mr. Blatt's testimony fade into silence then we fail him.

This makes me completely ashamed to be Polish. That there were Polish people who knew, who collaborated, who actively desired their Jewish compatriots' destruction, it absolutely abhors me. Never again. Nigdy więcej.

You can’t believe what you’re seeing and hearing. The common ignorance and inhumanity shown by some Poles in this video clip shows that survival was doubly difficult for Jews. Even a beautiful young child lost her life at the hands of a low-life. Old attitudes still surface when ‘ peasants ‘ spoke on camera, betraying their envy perhaps. Thomas Blatt, rest his soul, walked away from it all. He survived possibly the worst of all fates and returned to his former home on film to find and confirm unchanged thinking by his fellow countrymen. A sad journey for him - but he continued valiantly to tell the awful truth about the Nazi invaders and what they did.

Unfortunately, in this film, a very complicated story is presented in black and white, and there are too many untruthful generalizations. Anti-Semitism was everywhere in the world in the 1920s and 1930s, before the war, there were always anti-Semites everywhere. But there are also good people everywhere. Poles have the most trees among the Righteous Among the Nations, which means that Poles saved the most Jews - that's a fact. And this is not at all obvious or comparable to helping Jews in other places of German-occupied Europe, because only in Poland, the punishment for helping Jews in any way, was the most draconian and brutal, such as unimaginable torture and death sentences, and not only for the person who helped directly, but for her/his entire family, friends, and often the entire village - this is documented. Personally, my great-grandfather experienced something like this. I am from the east of Poland, where the largest number of Jews lived before the war - most of the Polish Jewish diaspora lived in various cities and small towns in eastern Poland, and my great-grandfather was the mayor of one of such small eastern villages. During the occupation, my great-grandfather and several other people from the village were hiding Jews. The Germans discovered this one day and as punishment, they drove all the inhabitants to the church and burned them and the entire village alive. They tortured my great-grandfather terribly, four SS men came to his house every day, placed him on the dining room table, and beat him with whips and bullwhips in such a way that they knocked off all his internal organs, such as his lungs and kidneys. My grandmother - my great-grandfather's daughter - who was already 15 years old during the war, saw all this with her own eyes, because the Germans, every time, with each such torture 'session', made the whole family watch it, they herded the whole family to this dining room, where they beat my great-grandfather, and forced them to watch in agony. As a result of this torture, my great-grandfather, of course, died. And this is the kind of punishment that awaited every Pole who helped Jews in German-occupied Poland. My grandmother and her siblings were not killed along with my great-grandfather, only by a miracle. So the disgusting talk about Poles now, as if they were all anti-Semites, is simply not true, and it is unfair and hurtful. Yes, in Poland, as everywhere, there were anti-Semites, and unfortunately, they collaborated with the Germans, but this does not change the fact that the main perpetrators were always the Germans, because it was they who invented the Holocaust, the camps, and the gassing system in the chambers, they occupied Poland and had complete power over Poland, they chose Hitler and supported Hitler blindly for most of the war, and it was the Germans who introduced the entire apparatus of terror - a system of punishment - just like I described to you above, to force the local population to cooperate, and to intimidate Poles so that they wouldn't help Jews. Answer the question whether you would be able to hide strangers and help them, and thereby risk the lives of your entire family: children, mother, father, or friends, and whether you would be ready to endure cruel torture, or worse - to endure watching the Germans brutally torture your loved ones. family members, for helping to hide strangers. I'm sorry, but in such circumstances, none of you, none of us today, has the right to judge Poles living under German terror back then. The fact is that saving Jews in occupied Poland was an act of unimaginable heroism, and no one has the right to demand heroism or such sacrifice from another person. It must be an individual choice, which is why real heroism is rare, and a feature of individual people, not entire nations. Such heroism goes against the primary instinct of self-preservation, and the Germans, who introduced this apparatus of terror in the occupied Polish lands, understood this well. For these reasons, I also cannot stand when uneducated people who do not know the nuances and details of the German occupation in Poland rave about the fact that the Danes saved almost all of their Jews. Because it wasn't the same situation, and I even recently watched an interview with a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who said it himself. Saving a Jew in Poland during the war and saving a Jew in Denmark was not the same! First of all, Denmark had a much smaller Jewish diaspora than Poland, incomparably smaller - the Polish Jewish diaspora before the war was the largest in Europe, second only to the United States (btw, the American Jewish diaspora began in America, when America was just being founded, with the emigration of Polish Jews); In pre-war Poland, there were 3 million Jews, while in Denmark, the entire Jewish diaspora numbered only 6,000 people. It is a much easier task to help and save 6,000 than 3 million, taking into account all aspects: the degree of danger, money - to save one person you had to pay normally, for everything: food, shelter, clothes, medicines, etc. and most people under occupation were very poor, especially in Poland. But the danger aspect is the most important here: in Denmark, the punishment for helping Jews was 3 months in prison - yes, that's all, meanwhile in Poland, as I have already written, it was brutal torture and death of entire families and often friends and neighbors. The Germans in occupied Poland used criminal collective responsibility, because the Germans saw all Slavs, especially Poles, as the same subhumans as the Jews, and when you read in historical documents what plans the Germans had, you will learn that Poles were to be exterminated in the same way like the Jews, right after the Germans had finished with the Jews, and some small remnant was to be left alive to be slaves of the Germans. The Germans wanted to 'clean' the lands of Eastern Europe completely in order to have a new 'living space' for the Germans, which is described in detail in the preserved documents, there are books and studies on this subject. Thus it is obvious that the Danes saved almost most of their Jews: they were a handful compared to the number of Polish Jews, in Denmark there was no apparatus of terror and no serious penalties for hiding Jews as in Poland, and the Germans considered the Danes as their Germanic kin nation, they didn't look at the Danes as subhuman and didn't want to destroy them, as they wanted to do to the Poles. This all made a huge difference!

part II What this film describes here, these Polish anti-Semites, were unfortunately mostly people who had been very poor all their lives, neglected, uneducated, and susceptible to the influence of the very conservative Catholic Church in Poland, which unfortunately, especially in those times, spread lies and harmful stereotypes about Jews. The Church was often the only authority in small Polish villages, therefore these uneducated people were easily influenced by it and believed all the nonsense and lies about Jews, which incited anti-Semitism. People also don't understand how the entire complicated history of Poland, before and after World War II, influenced all this. Before World War II, Poland was free for only 20 years, because, before 1918, Poland did not exist for 123 years, was occupied and divided between three aggressors: Russia, Germany, and Austria. So, interwar Poland between 1918-1939 was a country that inherited a lot of problems from its occupiers: economic, political, ethnic, and social problems. Among others, the problem was the lack of education among the poorest people in the east, where the Russian partition was before 1918, and that's where the most anti-Semitism was. So Poland was still struggling, in 1939, with the consequences of the Partitions of Poland, with what the Russians, Germans, and Austrians had done on Polish lands. The same mechanism operated after the end of the war, in 1945. The Western Allies wickedly sold Poland to Stalin at Yalta, giving the Soviet communists power in Poland, so real Polish people never recognized this government, for every real Pole it was just another occupation, this time a Russian one. All educated people today know how the communists ruled and how they behaved - only the party and ideology mattered, the state was neglected and poor, and people were intimidated. The Soviet communists also carried out another attack on the remaining Jews in Poland in 1968. There was a depressing, gray atmosphere, and life was constantly under surveillance by the Soviet power apparatus. Hence, people lived in complete stagnation, drained after the brutal war, and so most of them, understandably didn't care about anything other than their own survival. And here, the issue of these unburied bones, still in 1987 - this is also part of this whole context. A gray, depressing image of the Soviet occupation. People were tired of centuries of fighting in Poland: the fight for independence, the fight against invaders and aggressors, suffering, poverty, so there was indifference, especially in such small villages. And Poland in 1987 - the year this film is made - was still before the change of regime, still communist, people still lived apathetically, just trying to rebuild their lives, and memorials to commemorate the Holocaust were only just beginning to be built everywhere where it directly happened. Hence these neglected bones - the Soviet communist government was not interested in this either. People from other parts of the world simply don't understand the terribly complicated history of Poland at all, they are not educated enough to understand it. Poland is the most attacked country in all of Europe in history, Poland has been torn apart and occupied for centuries. Such multigenerational conflicts destroy social structures, wealth, economics, culture - everything. And they incite hatred and misunderstandings. So the picture presented in this video is very simplified. Thank you all for reading this entire comment, if you made it to the end. My family saved Jews, I also have Jews in my family - my uncle is a Jew - and I know all this complicated reality in Poland, before and after the war, simply from the stories of my family, not only from school.

Mother of God! This has to rank as one of the most disturbing documentaries I have ever watched. How conveniently history is rewritten.

Może kiedyś wreszcie najdejdzie ten dzień, kiedy będzie się oficjalnie mówić w Polsce o niektórych Polakach, którzy z różnych powodów pomagali Niemcom w chwytaniu żydowskiej ludności!

I jumped the gun on that...I thought you had it uploaded and I missed it. Thank you for all these videos!

This is a universalist message. To all of us. To come to tolerate differences and embrace humanism.

Please make this documentary long 1&2

The Reinhard camps were sloppy affairs. They buried a lot of the bodies. Later they dug some of them up to burn them.

I was stationed in Washington DC in 1989. Being a large city foreign films were shown which was unique at the time. I saw a film, "Shoah", which had to be seen over TWO days because of its 4hour length. This reminds me of one survivor interviewed, Felix Steiner I think. He wasn't as stoic resiminenceing. Sobering. Actually thats too mild to describe it..

Is there a part 2

Sorr😢y for the massacre it feels alote of pain sorry for jews and also Palestinians facing the same pain

Yes and I have not uploaded it yet!

Where is the full documentary?

No problem!

I missed some of his comments near the end because of the mournful wailing.

The bones are still there 😢

get rid of the music!!!!

if it's feels pain for this horror they should have not do the same to other human being

It is a shame those jews were disarmed .Maybe if they had been armed like the Texans history would have been different.

Tradusir em português desde ja agradeço 👉🇧🇷

Y this had to happen

So 40 years later he just picks up bones on the surface of forest area...I mean, i dont want to question his suffering but that is just grotesque.

traduzi em português

Smh

Do you see our world today?...they think they got away with such horror?...if we remember such history, it's only then possible not to repeat it...💞🫂💞 Dearest fellow human beings...please don't ever forget 💫🙏💫 Live Life and Love Life ❣️ 🫂 ❣️ Wonderful & Beautiful day's ahead Y'all

What was the relationship between the Jews and Polish people before Poland was invaded? And now, what is the relationship. Were Polish ever apologetic for the evil happening in their country?

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/o7x1orCrvJPTnGQ.html

Derogatory, antipolish piece