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 did a number of videos with him, not just talking about the war but also on things that happened after it. I wish he were still alive today to show him your comment!
@@HistoryonRUclips One of the things that stood out to me from his interview, and a number of others on yad Vashem and USC Shoah (not sobibor escapees), is the significant number of Polish citizens who were eager to kill them and who supported what the Nazis were doing. It’s terribly disturbing, but it also is another part of the explanation as to how mass miurder on and industrial scale could go on in broad daylight. One surviving Jew explained how he didn’t look Jewish and could fit in, got fake papers, and worked a number of jobs in different places in Poland. At every job he found himself having to go along with his employer in vocally expressing hatred for the “Jew sons of bitches” . This same gentleman found himself trying to escape from Polish resistance fighters in the fiorest, because this particular arm of the resistance openly hunted escaped Jews to kill them. Apparently their view of a victorious Poland was death to all Nazis, Soviets, and Jews. Pretty disturbing.
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.
@@ssherrierable Quite a few but there are three places that stand out above all. First is here, Sobibór where bone fragments continue to be found, the second is Bełżec where until the building of the monument from 2003-2004 there were bones scattered all over the place but above all where a grinding machine was brought from Lwów in 1942 and the third is Chełmno nad Nerem where you can judge for yourself in various videos I made 15 years ago : ruclips.net/video/nxM9z7KaY3Y/видео.html
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
“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.
What is striking is that this was one of Mr. Blatt's young playmates who said this to him. A fellow Pole, and a child, talks this way? What sort of poison can warp a child's mind in such an awful way?
@@fkboyStalin "fascism." How many Phalangists and Peronists wanted to make soap out of Jews? To the best of my knowledge Peron never put anyone into a camp. Franco made a list of Spanish Jews, but not a single one was deported to camps. Franco met with Hitler in 1940. They could not resolve anything. Hitler left, disgusted at Franco's' ingratitude". Stalin was starting a pogrom against Jews in the 1953. This was called his "anti-Cosmopolitan campaign. A few Jews were murdered, like Stalin's doctors and the head of the Jewish anti-fascist committee, actor Solomon Mikhoels. Mikhoels was drugged then run over by a truck a few times.
Paul, you might want to see more films on this subject on my site Alan Heath - which has materials that I have produced which contains interviews with Tom and other survivors. You might also want to see my facebook site Alan Heath's History Page.
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
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.
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.
You do not see that the older man was being sarcastic? Clearly you do not know Poland. There are many alcoholics and townies that would do such things as digging up graves, steal headstones, and beat jews out of their ignorance. This is not what the majority of the town did. You have heard yourself that the lady serving as a witness was herself beat. God rest their souls.
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!
Dear NatDelfin, as you are fully and well aware Polish nationalism in the 2nd Polish Republic hit harshly all those minorities of non-Polish nationality - Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans AND Jews, the last extra heavy because of their religion. They were 2nd class citizens, object partly of segregation and discrimination (e.g. in universities with max. quotas and certain seats in lecture halls, forbidden to sit elsewhere), even a gvt. plan to deport them to Madagascar occurred. The refusal to take back 10th of thousands of Polish citizens, expelled by Germany in 1938 is another leaf of this tree of dishonor. Continued after the war by the treatment of those who survived and had the "chuzpe" to reclaim any of their property. Till 1949 a huge part of them escaped to Germany (!), partly travelling further to Israel. The next waves of expelling Jews out of public Polish life were seen in 1956 and 1968-70. And legions are the reports from Jews who received help and shelter by brave Poles that stated the most those Poles feared in AND after the war was that their comrade citizens might get to know about it. As a Pole you KNOW all this - and because of it you come up with the story of the no. of honoured Poles in Yad Vashem 'forgetting' the simple fact that Poland was by far the nation of the biggest population WITH the highest no. of Jews per capita at the same time. So, instead of counting and comparing the percentage of Poles hiding Jews or the percentage of Jewish Polish citizens rescued by Poles you as Poles today come either with the nonsense comparison of total numbers and/or (in fear this szwindl gets uncoverred) with the 'harsher punishment' argument ....as usual pointing out that the Poles were and are the most heroic&brave men on earth. Like at the end of your post with shaming the Danes. Maybe you haven't heard of it yet: the DANES hid and shipped out the entire Jewish population in Oct.1943; under occupation - while free PL in 1938 closed her borders to block entry of her own 'but Jewish' citizens. IF you are so against black-white painting history a wide field of engagement awaits you explaining your co-citizens that the Wolhynia massacre of up to 300,000 Poles is the ugly child of the Polish treatment of Ukrainians on their soil after the Great War in the 1920s by which 100-150,000 Ukrainians were brought to death and many more lost health and/or property. Poles are always ready to justify post-war German civilian atrocities by what Nazis did to Poles before but NEVER acknowledge that Ukrainians 'just' tried to prevent the 1920s repeating. Yes, it was a slaughter of innocent civilians - as done by Poles before. Get mature.
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.
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.
What lies did the Church spread? The Church gave many baptism certificates to Jewish kids. I'm sorry but this was more help than any English or American organisations at the time. When the Polish Gov In Exile presented the Holocaust the accusations were laughed out by Americans. Everything should be placed in the correct context.
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 understand what you're saying (thanks to Google translate 😂) but you must not blame them over the people who were in power at the time. This is one of the tricks that the enemy uses to escape punishment and keep us fighting ourselves. I see this all the time when I'm talking about the other Holocaust: the American slave trade. They always say: "hey! What about the Africans who sold other Africans into slavery!" But its a moot point because in both situations, those traitors were only doing what they thought needed to do to survive in the system. Also, the number of people who did things like that were much smaller than people make it seem. So i said all that to say: don't be misled, keep your eyes on ones who really hate you.
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 did nothing.... the people in the SS, and the hundreds of thousands of German bureaucrats and industrialists who helped, bear that burden of guilt and shame.
If it was me, I don’t know if I could go back to a place that held so much fear and pain. These people’s stories should be listened and paid attention to. This is what pure animals humans can be.
I never notice how different we are culturally in America until I watch footage from other countries. Here they would’ve embraced eachother and hugged and kissed goodbye. That handshake kinda made me sad. Those people saw so much and still maintain their composure. God bless the souls who had to witness those atrocities committed by the Nazis. .
I just finished reading Mr Blatt's incredible book.. the absolute inhumanity expressed throughout it still has me shocked, how human beings can behave. But wars still go on - you think there aren't atrocities going on with the 1 million+ casualties already in the Russian/Ukrainian war? Yet only 62K have seen this video... more views will be gotten with a popular a music video within a day. Mr Blatt spent the rest of his life trying to educate us, and he did a magnificent job for one man.
I was in Bucha the month after the Kremlin Nazis left and I interviewed witneses to crimes committed in Borydianka. I have travelled extensively in Ukraine during this war. 62k is quite good for this channel - most videos get far less views. I knew Toivi Blatt very well. He lived with me in Warsaw, and I with him in Santa Barbara. We spoke at least once a week when not in the same place.
@@HistoryonRUclips Oh wow.. thank you so much for your uploads, and how much also you must have seen and been through. And to have met Toivi, such an amazing human being!
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..
@@HistoryonRUclips Hello, HELLO. I just set up your notification for the next installment. After I sent my comment I remembered that the man's name was Mueller, not Steiner. I also was able to jog the memory of the man's testimony. He was assigned to 'help' as you are well aware young Jewish men were. He spoke about a contingent of French resistance arrestees and Jews who knowing their fate went stoically to their deaths and.. dramatically(!) sang the "Internationale" as they were gassed. ANYONE.. who watches.. WON'T forget that man speak about it..
@@HistoryonRUclips There must be thousands of ghosts still walking the grounds in dispare. Many likely do not even know they are dead and are living and reliving their experience.
@@HistoryonRUclips I believe that Mr. Mueller was part of the Sonderkommando, the body disposal group, at Auschwitz. He encountered a transport from Czechoslovakia. They were going to be gassed. He went in with them. He wanted to stand with them and join them. One of the women, said to him, "We are doomed. Someone must be out Witness, tell the world about us". In the moment he acquired a heavy burden, to be a Witness. He saved himself and told us that people like her once existed.
Please keep in mind that he saw/knew that his family was being gassed and suffering a horrific cruel death. Plus everyday deaths, starving, beaten, murdered, tortured, with plenty of bodies being burnt in the crematorium. Picking up the bones isn't gruesome just very sad that the bodies are buried in a respectful manner.
It's a known thing that one cannot pick up a handful of dirt that doesn't contain human bone fragments anywhere near the death camps. Hard to imagine that people live normal lives at the site of the world's largest murder scene.
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?
I think that there were a lot of ethnic tensions in Poland before the war, Polish Catholics made up around two thirds of the population but that left one third belonging to other groups - Ukrainian, Jewish, Belarussian, German and others. As the Catholic religion taught hatred of Jews, this had its negative consequences. However, in most places everyone got on together. I used to speak at conferences where I said that anti Semitism was a thing of the past but regretfully I was wrong. Anti Semitism has risen a great deal with the current government which has been in power since 2015. There is someone who regularly posts anti Semitic comments on this channel claiming to be Polish and one can find plenty of anti Jewish conspiracy theories on the internet in Poland.
@@HistoryonRUclips That's true that there's a noticeable anti-Jewish sentiment in PL and it has it's roots primarily in a fraudulent stereotype of Jew-Communist, to some degree it's also a continuation of a late 1930's anti-Jewish propaganda from the newspapers and, to some degree, also from Catholic Church. I wouldn't say there was a rise of it since 2015 though, rather opposite. Slowly but surely that stereotype is being exposed as a lie by Polish authorities, especially by Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, very much so in recent years. You may be mixing Polish-Israeli relations with the historical research taking place in post-communist Poland, those are two separate issues in my book.
What is antipolish here? The attitude presented by the people? As long as I know they are 100% polish, therefore it can't be "antipolish". You wouldn't call it like that if these people showed empathy.
@@evivalarte5172 twas 1987 people probably didnt wanna talk about that. However Toivi is right. Why his father sold vodka? Coz he fought for Poland in 1st Piłsudski Legion
The Socialist government was still in power when this was filmed. The State was more focused on the future than on the past. Finding bones at a Death Camp is not a novel thing. So many died there, you're not going to get all of their remains. Those two men? I can take you to any US small town, you'll hear the same comments about Jews. As for that woman Mr. Blatt ran into in the cemetery? She seemed like a sympathetic person. Good hearted.
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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 did a number of videos with him, not just talking about the war but also on things that happened after it. I wish he were still alive today to show him your comment!
@@HistoryonRUclips One of the things that stood out to me from his interview, and a number of others on yad Vashem and USC Shoah (not sobibor escapees), is the significant number of Polish citizens who were eager to kill them and who supported what the Nazis were doing. It’s terribly disturbing, but it also is another part of the explanation as to how mass miurder on and industrial scale could go on in broad daylight. One surviving Jew explained how he didn’t look Jewish and could fit in, got fake papers, and worked a number of jobs in different places in Poland. At every job he found himself having to go along with his employer in vocally expressing hatred for the “Jew sons of bitches” . This same gentleman found himself trying to escape from Polish resistance fighters in the fiorest, because this particular arm of the resistance openly hunted escaped Jews to kill them. Apparently their view of a victorious Poland was death to all Nazis, Soviets, and Jews. Pretty disturbing.
Check out Escape From Sobibor. One of the best WWII movies out there.
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.
I feel sorry for anybody who had to live through the Holocaust
This man just walked through and could pick up human bones on the surface, that’s unbelievable.
Steven I have seen this many times, bones littering places where mass murders took place.
@@HistoryonRUclips dam well how many mass murder sites have you actually seen? Many?
@@ssherrierable Quite a few but there are three places that stand out above all. First is here, Sobibór where bone fragments continue to be found, the second is Bełżec where until the building of the monument from 2003-2004 there were bones scattered all over the place but above all where a grinding machine was brought from Lwów in 1942 and the third is Chełmno nad Nerem where you can judge for yourself in various videos I made 15 years ago : ruclips.net/video/nxM9z7KaY3Y/видео.html
Wow
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
“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.
I hope the shit had his fair share of Karma after doing that to him.
What is striking is that this was one of Mr. Blatt's young playmates who said this to him.
A fellow Pole, and a child, talks this way? What sort of poison can warp a child's mind in such an awful way?
@@jamallabarge2665 fascism.
@@fkboyStalin "fascism."
How many Phalangists and Peronists wanted to make soap out of Jews?
To the best of my knowledge Peron never put anyone into a camp. Franco made a list of Spanish Jews, but not a single one was deported to camps.
Franco met with Hitler in 1940. They could not resolve anything. Hitler left, disgusted at Franco's' ingratitude".
Stalin was starting a pogrom against Jews in the 1953. This was called his "anti-Cosmopolitan campaign. A few Jews were murdered, like Stalin's doctors and the head of the Jewish anti-fascist committee, actor Solomon Mikhoels.
Mikhoels was drugged then run over by a truck a few times.
This didn't happen
Thanks youtub for chopping off half the sub-title translations, really helpful...
I am going to check that was not a mistake at my end.....
This is fascinating, I wish this documentary was longer... Part 1 and 2 very good
Paul, you might want to see more films on this subject on my site Alan Heath - which has materials that I have produced which contains interviews with Tom and other survivors. You might also want to see my facebook site Alan Heath's History Page.
This is a universalist message. To all of us. To come to tolerate differences and embrace humanism.
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
😢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.
There was a track to it as there had been forestry there before the war but I believe the road was not hardened.
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.
You do not see that the older man was being sarcastic?
Clearly you do not know Poland. There are many alcoholics and townies that would do such things as digging up graves, steal headstones, and beat jews out of their ignorance.
This is not what the majority of the town did. You have heard yourself that the lady serving as a witness was herself beat.
God rest their souls.
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!
Dear NatDelfin, as you are fully and well aware Polish nationalism in the 2nd Polish Republic hit harshly all those minorities of non-Polish nationality - Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans AND Jews, the last extra heavy because of their religion. They were 2nd class citizens, object partly of segregation and discrimination (e.g. in universities with max. quotas and certain seats in lecture halls, forbidden to sit elsewhere), even a gvt. plan to deport them to Madagascar occurred. The refusal to take back 10th of thousands of Polish citizens, expelled by Germany in 1938 is another leaf of this tree of dishonor. Continued after the war by the treatment of those who survived and had the "chuzpe" to reclaim any of their property. Till 1949 a huge part of them escaped to Germany (!), partly travelling further to Israel. The next waves of expelling Jews out of public Polish life were seen in 1956 and 1968-70. And legions are the reports from Jews who received help and shelter by brave Poles that stated the most those Poles feared in AND after the war was that their comrade citizens might get to know about it. As a Pole you KNOW all this - and because of it you come up with the story of the no. of honoured Poles in Yad Vashem 'forgetting' the simple fact that Poland was by far the nation of the biggest population WITH the highest no. of Jews per capita at the same time. So, instead of counting and comparing the percentage of Poles hiding Jews or the percentage of Jewish Polish citizens rescued by Poles you as Poles today come either with the nonsense comparison of total numbers and/or (in fear this szwindl gets uncoverred) with the 'harsher punishment' argument ....as usual pointing out that the Poles were and are the most heroic&brave men on earth. Like at the end of your post with shaming the Danes. Maybe you haven't heard of it yet: the DANES hid and shipped out the entire Jewish population in Oct.1943; under occupation - while free PL in 1938 closed her borders to block entry of her own 'but Jewish' citizens. IF you are so against black-white painting history a wide field of engagement awaits you explaining your co-citizens that the Wolhynia massacre of up to 300,000 Poles is the ugly child of the Polish treatment of Ukrainians on their soil after the Great War in the 1920s by which 100-150,000 Ukrainians were brought to death and many more lost health and/or property. Poles are always ready to justify post-war German civilian atrocities by what Nazis did to Poles before but NEVER acknowledge that Ukrainians 'just' tried to prevent the 1920s repeating.
Yes, it was a slaughter of innocent civilians - as done by Poles before. Get mature.
Rip to all innocent victims of sobibor concentration camp😥😥😥😥😥😥🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
More accurately extermination camp. 😢
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.
Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians today by the Ottoman Turks during the great war? Adolf Hitler to his inner circle Aug-1939.
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.
What lies did the Church spread? The Church gave many baptism certificates to Jewish kids. I'm sorry but this was more help than any English or American organisations at the time. When the Polish Gov In Exile presented the Holocaust the accusations were laughed out by Americans. Everything should be placed in the correct context.
Please make this documentary long 1&2
Do you want the two parts stuck together?
It is a shame those jews were disarmed .Maybe if they had been armed like the Texans history would have been different.
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!
Skoro nie wolno, to czemu np. IPN o tym robi wykłady?
I understand what you're saying (thanks to Google translate 😂) but you must not blame them over the people who were in power at the time. This is one of the tricks that the enemy uses to escape punishment and keep us fighting ourselves. I see this all the time when I'm talking about the other Holocaust: the American slave trade. They always say: "hey! What about the Africans who sold other Africans into slavery!" But its a moot point because in both situations, those traitors were only doing what they thought needed to do to survive in the system. Also, the number of people who did things like that were much smaller than people make it seem.
So i said all that to say: don't be misled, keep your eyes on ones who really hate you.
Mother of God! This has to rank as one of the most disturbing documentaries I have ever watched. How conveniently history is rewritten.
You do realize that this was Poland during Communism, don't You? What else did You expect?
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.
Adam, there is absolutely no reason for you to be ashamed of this. You did not do it, you were not around at the time.
You did nothing.... the people in the SS, and the hundreds of thousands of German bureaucrats and industrialists who helped, bear that burden of guilt and shame.
I jumped the gun on that...I thought you had it uploaded and I missed it. Thank you for all these videos!
Rip THOMAS BLATT TOIVI
The Reinhard camps were sloppy affairs. They buried a lot of the bodies. Later they dug some of them up to burn them.
If it was me, I don’t know if I could go back to a place that held so much fear and pain. These people’s stories should be listened and paid attention to. This is what pure animals humans can be.
Where is the full documentary?
Part two is here : ruclips.net/video/v78KTbU922c/видео.html
I never notice how different we are culturally in America until I watch footage from other countries. Here they would’ve embraced eachother and hugged and kissed goodbye. That handshake kinda made me sad. Those people saw so much and still maintain their composure. God bless the souls who had to witness those atrocities committed by the Nazis. .
I just finished reading Mr Blatt's incredible book.. the absolute inhumanity expressed throughout it still has me shocked, how human beings can behave. But wars still go on - you think there aren't atrocities going on with the 1 million+ casualties already in the Russian/Ukrainian war? Yet only 62K have seen this video... more views will be gotten with a popular a music video within a day. Mr Blatt spent the rest of his life trying to educate us, and he did a magnificent job for one man.
I was in Bucha the month after the Kremlin Nazis left and I interviewed witneses to crimes committed in Borydianka. I have travelled extensively in Ukraine during this war.
62k is quite good for this channel - most videos get far less views.
I knew Toivi Blatt very well. He lived with me in Warsaw, and I with him in Santa Barbara. We spoke at least once a week when not in the same place.
@@HistoryonRUclips Oh wow.. thank you so much for your uploads, and how much also you must have seen and been through. And to have met Toivi, such an amazing human being!
Is there a part 2
Yes and I have not uploaded it yet!
I missed some of his comments near the end because of the mournful wailing.
@Viry Luxan They were burned. There are a lot of burned bones in those sites.
The Nazis were sloppy.
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..
As I write, I am sitting in my motorhome next to the death camp at Chełmno nad Nerem where Lanzmann filmed a large part of Shoah.
@@HistoryonRUclips Hello, HELLO. I just set up your notification for the next installment. After I sent my comment I remembered that the man's name was Mueller, not Steiner. I also was able to jog the memory of the man's testimony. He was assigned to 'help' as you are well aware young Jewish men were. He spoke about a contingent of French resistance arrestees and Jews who knowing their fate went stoically to their deaths and.. dramatically(!) sang the "Internationale" as they were gassed. ANYONE.. who watches.. WON'T forget that man speak about it..
@@christopherfritz3840 Fillip Mueller?
@@HistoryonRUclips
There must be thousands of ghosts still walking the grounds in dispare. Many likely do not even know they are dead and are living and reliving their experience.
@@HistoryonRUclips I believe that Mr. Mueller was part of the Sonderkommando, the body disposal group, at Auschwitz.
He encountered a transport from Czechoslovakia. They were going to be gassed.
He went in with them. He wanted to stand with them and join them.
One of the women, said to him, "We are doomed. Someone must be out Witness, tell the world about us".
In the moment he acquired a heavy burden, to be a Witness. He saved himself and told us that people like her once existed.
Tradusir em português desde ja agradeço 👉🇧🇷
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.
+Catherine H.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Why? They're only bones. The dead can do no harm.
Please keep in mind that he saw/knew that his family was being gassed and suffering a horrific cruel death. Plus everyday deaths, starving, beaten, murdered, tortured, with plenty of bodies being burnt in the crematorium. Picking up the bones isn't gruesome just very sad that the bodies are buried in a respectful manner.
They're just bones. Dry bones at that. Nothing gross about it.
It's a known thing that one cannot pick up a handful of dirt that doesn't contain human bone fragments anywhere near the death camps. Hard to imagine that people live normal lives at the site of the world's largest murder scene.
The bones are still there 😢
They are very easy to find.
Sorr😢y for the massacre it feels alote of pain sorry for jews and also Palestinians facing the same pain
traduzi em português
if it's feels pain for this horror they should have not do the same to other human being
Y this had to happen
No problem!
get rid of the music!!!!
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
When they beat him they made mud of him
?
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?
I think that there were a lot of ethnic tensions in Poland before the war, Polish Catholics made up around two thirds of the population but that left one third belonging to other groups - Ukrainian, Jewish, Belarussian, German and others. As the Catholic religion taught hatred of Jews, this had its negative consequences. However, in most places everyone got on together. I used to speak at conferences where I said that anti Semitism was a thing of the past but regretfully I was wrong. Anti Semitism has risen a great deal with the current government which has been in power since 2015. There is someone who regularly posts anti Semitic comments on this channel claiming to be Polish and one can find plenty of anti Jewish conspiracy theories on the internet in Poland.
@@HistoryonRUclips Really Astonishing to see your comments . Thanks for posting the video sir
@@HistoryonRUclips That's true that there's a noticeable anti-Jewish sentiment in PL and it has it's roots primarily in a fraudulent stereotype of Jew-Communist, to some degree it's also a continuation of a late 1930's anti-Jewish propaganda from the newspapers and, to some degree, also from Catholic Church.
I wouldn't say there was a rise of it since 2015 though, rather opposite. Slowly but surely that stereotype is being exposed as a lie by Polish authorities, especially by Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, very much so in recent years.
You may be mixing Polish-Israeli relations with the historical research taking place in post-communist Poland, those are two separate issues in my book.
@@carlsowell8099
Why should we, Poles, be apologetic to Jews for German cruelty ?
ruclips.net/video/mVEoMzW-ol0/видео.html
?
Derogatory, antipolish piece
What is antipolish here? The attitude presented by the people? As long as I know they are 100% polish, therefore it can't be "antipolish". You wouldn't call it like that if these people showed empathy.
@@evivalarte5172 twas 1987 people probably didnt wanna talk about that.
However Toivi is right. Why his father sold vodka? Coz he fought for Poland in 1st Piłsudski Legion
The Socialist government was still in power when this was filmed. The State was more focused on the future than on the past.
Finding bones at a Death Camp is not a novel thing. So many died there, you're not going to get all of their remains.
Those two men? I can take you to any US small town, you'll hear the same comments about Jews.
As for that woman Mr. Blatt ran into in the cemetery? She seemed like a sympathetic person. Good hearted.
The one who is anti Polish is you.
@@jamallabarge2665 I would say the same thing. Maybe the anti Polish Mr Nowak is upset that she is showing empathy.