SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 39
would have amounted to 5 persons per square meter, a figure which is
physically possible.
Although it is obvious that Arad cannot present any documentary or
forensic evidence for the alleged mass killings at Sobibór, he has witness
statements such as the following:
“In the winter of 1942/43 and in the spring and summer of 1943,
transports arrived in Sobibór with Jews from the Lvov district. In
some of the transports the Jews were naked. They were forced to undress
before entering the freight cars, to make it more difficult for
them to escape from the train. […] In her testimony, Ada Lichtman
told of a transport that arrived from Lvov in the winter; nude
corpses were removed from the closed freight cars. The prisoner
platform workers said that the corpses were frozen and stuck to one
another, and when they were laid on the trolley, they disintegrated,
and parts of them fell off. These people had had a long voyage [sic]
and their corpses crumbled.”
Normally frozen corpses do not crumble, which means that the
“prisoner platform workers” related something that they could not have
seen and hence never did see.
We will not go into Arad’s statistics on the Jews that were deported
to Sobibór from various countries, because this question will be dealt
with in the discussion of the book by Jules Schelvis. Suffice it to say
that Arad gives a figure of 145,000 to 165,000 (p. 390f.) for the Jews
deported to Sobibór from the General Government (Polish areas occupied
but not annexed by the Germans during the war). Actually, the
maximum was about 54,000, 54 which means that Arad’s figure is too
high by a factor of three.
To put it mildly, Arad’s book does not measure up in any way to a
“standard” on the subject.
2.3.12. Witold Zbigniew Sulimierski (1993)
By 1993, i.e. half a century after the closure of Sobibór, there was
still no Polish monograph on this camp. To make up for this, a man by
the name of Witold Zbigniew Sulimierski published a brochure during
that year, the title of which can be rendered in English as “Sobibór. A
Hitlerian Death Camp.” 55 This booklet contains neither references nor a
54
Cf. section 2.3.19.
55
Witold Zbignew Sulimierski, Sobibór. Hitlerowski Obóz �mierci, Fundacja “Kamena” w
Che�mie, Che�m 1993.