He was sixteen years old when the Nazi machinery of extermination claimed his parents and younger brother. He survived only because they needed hands to work in the camp’s workshop. Tomasz Blatt not only escaped Sobibor during the famous prisoner uprising, but devoted his entire adult life to making sure the world heard the voices of those who perished in the gas chambers.
The Boy from Izbica in the Hell of Sobibor
Tomasz Blatt was born on April 15, 1927, in Izbica near Zamość, a typical Jewish town in prewar Poland. His childhood was interrupted by the war and ultimately destroyed by deportation in April 1943. Together with his whole family, he was sent to the German extermination camp at Sobibor, a place designed for a single purpose: mass extermination.
Blatt’s parents and younger brother were murdered in the gas chamber almost immediately upon arrival. He himself, a sixteen-year-old boy, was selected for forced labor. The Germans needed prisoners to run the camp’s infrastructure, which paradoxically gave him a slim chance to survive another day.
At Sobibor, Blatt worked in the camp workshop and had one of the most macabre tasks: burning the documents of the murdered. Every day he witnessed evidence of the existence of thousands of people whose lives ended just dozens of meters away. This work, unimaginably traumatic, allowed him to survive long enough to see the moment that forever changed the camp’s history.
An Uprising That Should Not Have Succeeded
On October 14, 1943, a prisoner uprising broke out at Sobibor. It was an act of desperation as well as incredible courage and precise planning. The prisoners realized the camp would soon be liquidated and that they would be murdered as unwanted witnesses to the crime.
The plan was simple in concept but nearly impossible in execution: lure and kill SS-men one by one, seize their weapons, then break through the fence. Tomasz Blatt was among those who participated in this revolt. About three hundred prisoners managed to escape beyond the camp wires. What happened afterward, however, reveals the true scale of the Holocaust tragedy.
Out of the three hundred escapees, only about one in ten survived the war. The rest died in manhunts, were betrayed by informers, or could not endure the hardships of hiding in the forests and villages of occupied Poland. Blatt was one of those lucky few—although the word “lucky” here sounds almost cynical. He hid with Polish peasants and, towards the end of the occupation, joined the Polish underground resistance.
The Odyssey of a Survivor
The end of the war did not mark the end of Blatt’s wandering. His postwar biography reads like the script of a spy movie, full of sudden twists and desperate decisions. For some time, he worked in a locksmith’s shop in Lublin, and in April 1945, he moved to Silesia.
In Gliwice, he applied for a job in the Ministry of Public Security, and in documents he mentioned his previous cooperation with the NKVD in 1944. Who was the twenty-year-old Tomasz Blatt then? A survivor trying to find his place in the new communist reality? A man searching for any kind of stability after years of nightmare?
The answer came quickly. In December 1945, he deserted his job, taking his service weapon with him. With the help of smugglers, he escaped through Szczecin to Berlin, where he was arrested by the Soviets. After his release from custody, he began a trek through refugee camps, typical for hundreds of thousands seeking a place to belong in postwar Europe.
The Guardian of Memory
In 1957, Blatt emigrated to Israel and ultimately settled in the United States. He could have started a new life and forgotten the past. Instead, he chose a different path: he became a guardian of the memory of Sobibor.
For decades, he collected testimonies, wrote books, and served as a witness at trials of Nazi war criminals. His memoirs appeared in such publications as “From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival” and “Sobibor: The Forgotten Revolt.” Especially the latter title captures the essence of his mission, for the Sobibor uprising for a long time remained overshadowed by other Holocaust events.
In 1987, the feature film “Escape from Sobibor,” based on Blatt’s memories, introduced this story to millions of viewers worldwide. Blatt served as a consultant, ensuring that the Hollywood narrative did not distort the truth of those events.
On October 14, 2013, exactly seventy years after the uprising, Tomasz Blatt traveled to Poland for the last time. He received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. Two years later, on October 31, 2015, he died in Santa Barbara, California. He was eighty-eight years old and left behind a life story: from a boy in Izbica, to a death camp prisoner, escapee, wanderer, and émigré, to the man who refused to let the world forget the place from which no one was meant to emerge alive.
Autor
Rory Thornfield
Rory's grandfather left behind a wartime diary filled with accounts of a minor Burma skirmish that history books never mentioned. Reading it, Rory realized: behind every famous battle are dozens of forgotten struggles, each with its own human drama.
His preferred topics: The overlooked corners of military history – secondary campaigns, shadow battalions, local conflicts that never made headlines. From medieval sieges to twentieth-century expeditions, he focuses on the soldiers, not the generals. The people who faced impossible choices and carried those experiences forever.
Rory strips away the romanticism without losing respect for those who served. He combines tactical analysis with personal stories, examining human endurance and moral complexity rather than celebrating warfare. His writing is balanced, thoughtful, and deeply researched.
Outside work, Rory visits forgotten battlefields (now quiet farmland), photographs war memorials nobody tends anymore, and interviews veterans' families.