List of survivors of Sobibor

This list is as complete as current records allow. There were 58 known Sobibor survivors: 48 male and 10 female. Except where noted, the survivors were Arbeitshäftlinge, inmates who performed slave-labour for the daily operation of the camp, who escaped during the camp-wide revolt on October 14, 1943.

The vast majority of the people taken to Sobibor did not survive but were shot or gassed immediately upon arrival. Of the Arbeitshäftlinge forced to work as Sonderkommando in Lager III, the camp's extermination area where the gas chambers and most of the mass graves were located, no one survived.

Selections sometimes took place at the point of departure, often well before people were forced to board the trains, but there are also reports of selections from trains already en route to the camps. In his June 20, 1942 report, Revier-Leutnant der Schutzpolizei Josef Frischmann, in charge of the guard unit on the train, wrote that "51 Jews capable of work" were removed from the transport at Lublin station. The train had departed Vienna on June 14, 1942, ostensibly for Izbica, but the remaining 949 people on board were delivered to their final destination in Sobibor.[34][lower-alpha 2]

The precise number of those spared upon arrival in the Sobibor extermination camp is unknown, but there were occasional selections there, for forced labour in other camps and factories, amounting to a total of several thousand people. Many of those selected subsequently perished due to harsh conditions in the slave-labour details. A number of them were murdered after internal selections following transfers to Majdanek and Auschwitz, where people were also routinely murdered by hanging or shooting for arbitrary offences. Thousands of Jews initially selected for slave-labour were among those killed in the Lublin district during Aktion Erntefest and many were shot or succumbed on the death marches in the closing stages of the Nazi regime. However, some of the people selected at Sobibor ultimately survived beyond the total defeat and unconditional surrender of the Nazis in May 1945.[34]

On August 17, 1943, a survivor from Sabinov in Slovakia, who has remained anonymous, wrote a report in which he described his selection in Sobibor, together with approximately 100 men and 50 women, upon arrival. For slave-labour in the drainage works in the vicinity of Sobibor they were taken to Krychów. He had arrived following the violent clearance, of deported Slovakian Jews and the few remaining Polish Jews, from the Rejowiec ghetto on August 9, 1942. He described that a few additional skilled workers, technicians, blacksmiths and watchmakers were separated upon arrival in Sobibor, as well. He further wrote that fire was visible in the night sky in the vicinity of Sobibor, and that the stench of burning hair permeated the air.[34][lower-alpha 3]

Approximately 1,000 people were selected from the 34,313 named deportees who had been deported from the Netherlands via Westerbork to Sobibor between March 2 and July 20, 1943. Only 16 of them, 13 women and three men, survived.[lower-alpha 4] From the group of approximately 30 women selected from the train which left Westerbork with 1,015 people on March 10, 1943, 13 survived the various camps.[lower-alpha 5] Although they were split up after arrival in Lublin and returned to the Netherlands via different camps and routes, this was the largest single group of survivors from any one of the 19 trains which departed the Netherlands. Upon arrival they were separated from the other deportees and shortly afterwards taken by train to Lublin, where they spent the next months in various work details divided over Majdanek and the Alter Flugplatz camp, on the site of an airfield. Eventually Eleven of the women were transferred to Milejów where they worked for a brief period in a Wehrmacht operated provisions factory, but were soon taken to Trawniki, with a larger group of men and women of mixed nationality, in the immediate aftermath of Aktion Erntefest in November 1943. Here their first assignment was assisting in body disposal and sorting the looted possessions of those murdered at the Trawniki camp. After body disposal had nearly been completed the remaining men were murdered, as well. Elias Isak Alex Cohen was the only survivor of the March 17, 1943 transport. He was taken to Majdanek with a group of approximately 35 people selected based on profession. His experiences include a period operating machinery in the ammunition factory in Skarżysko-Kamienna where the poisonous materials and lack of protections decimated the forced-labourers. Jozef Wins was the only one to return to the Netherlands from the May 11 transport. He was among a group of 80 men taken to Dorohucza. Jules Schelvis was the sole survivor of the 3,006 people on the deportation train of June 1, 1943, He too was taken to Dorohucza, with a group of 80 other men. From the remaining 14 trains people were also selected but no one survived the Holocaust.[55][34][37][56][57][58][59][60][61][62]

With few exceptions the survivors lost immediate family and relatives who were murdered in the camp. They returned to their native towns and countries to find little comfort.[63][64][65] Several of the survivors almost immediately gave statements about their experiences. They have written about their personal experiences and published researched monographs on the history of the camp. These statements and publications continue to be used in historical research and were used in court cases against perpetrators. The survivors themselves also testified at trials such as the Sobibor Trial in Hagen, and participated in the prosecution in the capacity of Nebenkläger, a co-claimant, under the German criminal law system. This was a right of which descendants of people murdered in Sobibor also availed themselves in the 2009 trial of Trawniki Wachmann Ivan Demjanjuk.[66]

In contrast to these short lists of survivors, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that at least 167,000 people were murdered in the Sobibor extermination camp. The Dutch Sobibor Foundation lists a calculated total of 170,165 people, and cites the Höfle Telegram among its sources, while noting that other estimates range up to 300,000. For practical reasons it is not possible to list all the thousands of people murdered at the camp. The operatives of the Nazi regime not only robbed Jews of their earthly possessions and their lives, but attempted to eradicate all traces of their existence as they engaged in the genocidal policies of the Final Solution.[67][55]