SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

28 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
thing from the detainees in section 3 because these people, as we know,
“were murdered without exception,” and she could not have seen it with
her own eyes because section 3, after all, was “hermetically closed off.”
One of the most revealing passages of this article is the following:
“A special place in the history of the camp and in the memories
of the prisoners is occupied by the project of a mass escape in the
summer of 1943, which became known as the Dutch plan or the plan
of a Dutch revolt. Over the years this event, as well as its instigator,
have assumed fantastic, even legendary traits. Some detainees and
some historians who follow them [the statements of those detainees]
state mistakenly that the organizer was a captain of the Dutch navy
(the Dutch navy or the Dutch merchant fleet).” (p. 21)
Then Rutkowski tells us in a footnote:
“Dr. L. de Yong [recte: Jong], a well-known Dutch historian of
the Hitler-German occupation, who heads the Amsterdam Rijksinstituut
voor Oorlogsdocumentatie [Imperial Institute for War Documentation],
states in a letter to the Jewish Historical Institute: ‘at
that time there was no Jewish naval officer.” (p. 22)
So the story of the “Dutch captain” at Sobibór was a legend, cooked
up in the rumor department of the camp. Rutkowski’s article abounds
with such legends, probably without the author realizing this. The same
goes for the whole orthodox historiography about Sobibór.
2.3.5. Stanis�aw Szmajzner (1968)
Stanis�aw Szmajzner, a Polish Jew and former detainee at Sobibór,
emigrated to Brazil in 1947 and was a witness for the prosecution in the
extradition procedures against the former SS men Franz Stangl and
Gustav Wagner. 30 He therefore played an important role in the drama of
Sobibór, and we have every reason to take a close look at a book he
published in 1968 under the title Inferno em Sobibór 31 (“Hell in Sobibór”),
even though it exists only in Portuguese and was never fully
translated into another language. 32 It is easy to understand why it never
appeared elsewhere: Szmajzner’s description of the camp is so different
30
Cf. section 6.7.
31
Stanis�aw Szmajzner, Inferno em Sobibór. A tragédia de um adolescente judeu, Edições
Bloch, Rio de Janeiro 1968.
32
On the Internet page www holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/sobibor/smajzner html is a
partial translation into English which seems to have been prepared on the basis of a
Polish text. No source is given. Possibly Szmajzner’s book, published in Portuguese, was
based on a Polish manuscript.