Sobibor : The Forgotten Revolt - A Survivor's Report [Paperback]

Thomas Toivi Blatt (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 155 pages
• Publisher: H.E.P.; 1 edition (1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0964944200
• ISBN-13: 978-0964944206
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,264,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No one who reads it will ever be able to forget Sobibor, June 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Sobibor : The Forgotten Revolt - A Survivor's Report (Paperback)

Sobibor The Forgotten Revolt by Thomas Blatt. Revieved by Michael Nutkiewicz, Ph.D. Director. Chief Historian - Shoah A Steven Spielberg Foundation. Los Angeles.

Thomas Blatt has written a remarkable book that tells two stories. The first story is about a notorious Nazi death camp in Poland called Sobibor. This death camp achieved the awful task assigned by the Nazis: over a quarter of a million Jewish men, women and children were murdered there. The second story is about the revolt at Sobibor. In the fall of 1943, over 300 slave workers escaped after a short, violent and desperate revolt. In the history of Jewish resistance movement under the German occupation,the revolt in Sobibor ranks the second in magnitude after the Warsaw ghetto uprising. It was the biggest and most successful uprising in all of the Nazi camps, where Jews were able to escape en masse. An excerpt from Auschwitz Cammandant Hoes' memoirs concerning the revolt confirms the above. "...The Jews (of Sobibor) were able to achieve a major breakout, during which almost all of the German personnel were wiped out..." Blatt tells those two stories in mesaured tones:he neither exaggerates the heroism of the Jewish prisoners nor demonizes their cruel victimizers. This is a remarkable feat in itself, because Blatt was one of the prisoners who had a role in the revolt and who escaped from Sobibor. "I forced myself to be emotionally detached as a survivor," Blatt writes in the introduction "concerning myself only with recording history, while I sought interviews with the perpetrators themselves." He begins with a brief review of the Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to build death camps in Poland. He comes quickly to the story of Sobibor. The systematic killing was in full swing in May 1942. The victims came from Poland, the Netherlands,Slovakia, Austria, Germany, France and the former Soviet Union. The author witnessed the genocide and detailed the entire procedure in diary entries during and after the w! ar. Next he describes the revolt in greater detail, reconstructing the revolt step by step, describinbg his own escape trough the barbed wire and mine fields. The story of what occured after the escape is equally dramatic but painful."Most were murdered by hostile bands or individuals rangind from fascist, nationalistic, or anti-Semitic organizations, to common bandits. Only 58 survivors from Sobibor are known to have been liberated by the Allied armies." Blatt follows the story of Sobibor beyond the war, tracing the fate of both the victims and the perpetrators. One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is the author's first hand testimony and that of the former prisoners and other witnesses he personally interviewed. Most compelling however, are Blatt's interviews with Karl Frenzel, a Nazi officer at Sobibor. Blatt interviewed him in 1983 and reveals some portions of that transcript. Frenzel offers this explanation for his role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of people: "This was terrible, very terrible. I can only tell you with tears in my eyes; it isn't only now that it upset me so terribly. It upsed me then... You don't know what went on in us, and you don't understand the circumstances we found ourselves in." The interview encapsulates Hanna Arendt's famous phrase "The Banality of Evil." Blatt concludes his book with a short overview of the free world's reaction to the genocide of the European Jewry. He adds little that is not already known from secondary literature on the subject. But juxtaposed with the horrifying story of Sobibor, perhaps is right to remind us that the governments of the free world knew a great deal about the genocide by 1943 but did not engage in meaningful discutions about rescue. How one deals with what must have been enormous pain over long years needed to amass photographs, documents and interviews. And then incredibly, toward the end of the journey, Mr, Blatt had to confront a government who wanted to deny what happened. 'Sobibor! . The Forgotten Revolt' gives the reader a broader understanding of the complicated methods of mass genocide. It is a important book for anyone interested in the genocide of European Jewry. This book provides the reader with a glimpse into life and death in the 'belly of the beast.'

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing and crushing, December 21, 2005

By 

A. Ridgeway (Seattle) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sobibor : The Forgotten Revolt - A Survivor's Report (Paperback)

I had the honor of meeting Mr. Blatt when he spoke to my Holocaust literature class. He is one of the most quietly impressive men you could ever meet. His story is excrutiating and astounding. A must read for Holocaust studies. And really, this is the sort of story Everyone should read to know what sort of men exist - the evil & the brave.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book teaches a lesson we can't afford to forget, April 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sobibor : The Forgotten Revolt - A Survivor's Report (Paperback)

I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Blatt speak and interviewing him several years ago and I bought a copy of his book at that time. I am sorry to say it sat on my bookcase up until about a week ago - sorry because once I started to read it I couldn't put it down! I would recommend this book to everyone because it teaches one of the most important lessons there is about our history. It is a lesson I hope the world never forgets