SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

26 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
unnoticed. We will discuss the Pechersky report in chapter 4.2. in more
detail.
2.3.4. Adam Rutkowski (1968)
It took 23 years after the end of the war for anything to be published
about Sobibór by a historian. Although it was not a book, at least it was
a 40-page article. Its author was Adam Rutkowski, a staff member of
the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The title can be translated as
“The resistance movement in the Hitlerian execution camp of Sobibór.”
27 Rutkowski’s article exhibits most clearly certain fundamental
contradictions and absurdities which reappear throughout the later literature
about the camp. We will now discuss two of them.
2.3.4.1. The knowledge of the “working Jews” about the fate of the
other deportees
Rutkowski writes:
“Initially not even those detainees who had been in Sobibór for
some time knew what Sobibór really was due to the internal structure
and organization of the camp (the complete isolation of the individual
camp sections, especially of section 3 where the gas chambers
stood).” (p. 5)
A few pages further on, we read:
“The ‘old’ detainees who wanted to spare the new arrivals any
overly violent discoveries did not tell them the whole truth about Sobibór,
especially about section 3, hermetically closed-off, but introduced
them only slowly, in a stepwise fashion, to what Sobibór
was.” (p. 10)
In contrast to this we have Rutkowski’s description of the arrival of
new transports:
“We must stress that the deportees, after having travelled for a
long time (e.g. from Holland), were immediately made part of the efficient
machinery of annihilation; this machinery would herd the victims
from the first into the second barbed-wire cage, accompanied
by deafening shouts on part of the SS men as well as by shooting,
and would finally chase them into the gas chambers.” (p. 4)
Other authors report that the SS received the new arrivals in a soothing
manner, with an SS man giving a deceptive speech describing So-
27 Adam Rutkowski, “Ruch Oporu w Hitlerwoskim Obozie Strace� Sobibór,” in: Biuletyn
�ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, No. 65-66, Warsaw 1968.