SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

42 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
“A tragic and heroic example of spiritual resistance is recorded
in my diary:
A transport of Polish Jews had been killed. The distant, dull,
drum-like sound of bodies thrown from the gas chamber to the metal
frame of the transportation lorry was always heard in the sorting
shed. Invisible tension was tormenting us. Wolf was the supervising
Nazi of the Himmelstrasse. I attached myself to the cleaning crew. I
had never been in the dreary, fenced and camouflaged alley. I was
curious to explore the camp, and this gave me the opportunity to
trace the road to the gas chambers. At the entrance I picked up a
rake and, watching the others, I began to rake the white sand, transforming
the hundreds of footprints, human refuse and blood into an
innocent, spotlessly even surface. While raking up bigger objects, I
noted a trail of tiny green and red specks between the teeth of the
rake. I bent down to collect them by hand and to my surprise and
disbelief, I discovered paper money – dollars, marks, zloty and
rubles – money torn into pieces too small to recollect [sic].
I thought… How must the victims have felt when they acted in
this way? In the last minutes before a tortured death they could still
sabotage the Nazis. Their world was disappearing, and the lonely
Jew takes his time to tear the banknotes into irreclaimable tiny pieces,
making them unusable to the end.” (p. 55)
Fate willed it that the Poles to whom Blatt had entrusted his diary returned
to him at least a third of it. We can be sure that this literary marvel,
written by a fifteen-year-old boy, an inestimable account of the Holocaust,
once specialists had attested to its genuine character, was translated
into all the languages in the world, from Albanian to Zulu, and
sold dozens of millions of copies, to be quoted in every work of the Holocaust
literature. It is certainly a gem in the museum of Yad Vashem,
well protected by thick panes of glass that shield it from vicious attacks
by Holocaust deniers and other vandals. Or is it?
Not at all. It is quite perplexing that up to the present day Toivi Blatt
has neglected to publish his diary or at least to include a photocopy of a
page or two in his book!
As if keeping a diary in an extermination camp were not by itself a
miraculous achievement, Toivi Blatt also managed to preserve at the
last moment the diary of another detainee, written in another extermination
camp: