Museum Day LA: The Sobibor Death Camp at the Museum of the Holocaust
I recently visited the Museum of the Holocaust for the first time in Los Angeles. It was busier than usual as it happened to be Free Museum Day LA (although this particular museum is always free). I was quite amazed by the number of people who were eager enough to learn the devastating history surrounding this cruel, and vicious event. There were locals, tourists, adults, teenagers — and they were all soaking in the displays and written content that was available to them.
My wife and I are history buffs who are always looking for an excuse to do something educational. Therefore, it felt right to visit several museums on this particular day. We started at the Museum of the Holocaust before we eventually made our way over to LACMA.
My first impression of the Museum of the Holocaust was that it was well laid out. It was spacious, and different sections represented a certain period or theme relating to the Holocaust. You are given a tape recorder with headphones so that you can hear a voice telling you facts and information about whatever it was you were interested in listening to. Being somebody who values history, there wasn’t much I didn’t listen to.
When I entered the combined room, I spent countless minutes taking in the scale model of the Sobibor Death Camp, created by Thomas Blatt, one of the Sobibor survivors. I was impressed by the sheer size and the amount of detail that was applied — although the dark reality of realizing its existence soon came over me, and I was hit with fact after fact surrounding its sinister history via an available video.
The real-life Sobibor Death Camp was based near the Sobibor village, which was located in the eastern part of the Lublin district of Poland. Built at the beginning of March 1942, the Sobibor Death Camp was one of three extermination camps, alongside Treblinka and Bełżec, which had all been apart of Operation Reinhard. Under the strict leadership of Obersturmführer Richard Thomalla, it was built by locals and various dozens of Jews from nearby Ghettos.
The camp wasn’t the largest there was — consisting a size of 400 by 600 meters. Inside this space, there were three different areas. There was Camp I — an administrative part that included a railway platform and accommodations for Germans and Ukrainians. Camp II was an area where the deportees had to strip off, have their haircut, as well as being forced to give up precious and valuable items. Lastly, Camp III came to the extermination area. Here there were gas chambers, mass graves, and accommodations for Jewish prisoners.
Around 150 workers had worked at Sobibor Camp. These workers predominantly consisted of Germans, but there were Ukrainians too. Together, they were responsible for around a thousand prisoners who had been selected and forced to work at the camp. The jobs they gave to the prisoners were straining, but other jobs were outright vile and disturbing. Removing the dead from the chambers and burying them was one task, and pulling the gold teeth from certain prisoners was another. When workers began to fade, they would be replaced by new and stronger prisoners before being taken to the gas chambers.
The gas chambers were each around 16 square meters in size, which had a capacity of 160 to 180 people. When the prisoners were escorted into the chamber, they entered through the front area of the building. Once the process was completed, the bodies were taken through the back exit. However, this number of people did not seem enough to those in charge. They wanted to be able to have larger capacities for their chambers. After suspending activity for three months during the middle of 1942, each chamber increased its capacity to 1,200 people. This was the number of people who could be killed at just one time.
In February 1943, Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of the Nazi party, had visited the camp. During this visit, he witnessed the transport of girls being murdered upon their arrival from camp Majdanek. Later that year, Himmler decided to change Sobibor from an extermination camp to a concentration camp, with a munitions factory. While some prisoners were shot, others were motivated to escape.
By August 1943, an underground organization was on the rise. This group was formed and led by the head of the Judenrat in the Galician town of Zolkiew, Leon Feldhendler. The members of this group were mostly the heads of the labor workshops, who had all planned a mass escape. Despite the several versions of what may have happened, historians are sure that the escapees’ ultimate plan was to kill the camp’s staff, seize weapons, and escape from the devastating camp.
The uprising broke out on the 14th of October, 1943. Twelve German officers were killed, including the camp commander, Franz Reichsleitner, which was alongside several Ukrainians. With this, 300 prisoners attempted their escape, but not all of them had made it out alive. Some were killed while fleeing, whether it was being gunned down or not surviving the minefield. Those who never joined the escape group were also killed during the aftermath, leaving only 50 prisoners who eventually survived the camp at Sobibor. Many of these survivors eventually joined the Russian Partisans which were operating within the area, leaving their troubled, and disturbing experience at Sobibor behind them.
When the uprising was over, the Germans decided to close the camp and place a farm on the land that it had covered — like they had done with the camps at Treblinka and Bełżec. In the summer of 1944, the camp was liberated by the Red Army and divisions of the Polish People’s Army.
Post-war, charges were brought against eleven of the SS officers who worked at the Sobibor Death Camp. Between the 6th of September 1965 and the 20th of December 1966, they went on trial at the Hague. Furthermore, justice had come to fruition when Franz Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1970 by the court in Düsseldorf.
Today, you will find a small museum and memorial on the site that held the Sobibor Death Camp. As somebody who has seen the scale model in Los Angeles, and immediately imagined the pain and anguish that the camp must have induced, I can only imagine the emotion one may feel when visiting Sobibor’s memorial site.
