SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

78 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
bodies. I did not see the gas chamber from the inside; I only saw,
from the outside, that there was a very prominent roof, and that the
floor opened and the bodies fell below. […] underneath the gas
chamber, there was a hollow which already contained bodies.”
The problem with this description is obvious: no historian believes
the gas chambers at Sobibór to have had collapsible floors, and therefore
this testimony subsequently has dropped down the memory hole. In
the 1980s writer Richard Rashke travelled to Israel to interview former
Sobibór inmates for his book Escape from Sobibór. One of them was
Biskovitz, who Rashke talked to in the presence of Israeli Holocaust
historian Miriam Novitch. Apparently not a single word was said about
the event described above. Yet Biskovitz is not alone in claiming that
“the floor opened up and the bodies fell below into the railway wagons.”
The same details appear in the testimonies of Alexander Pechersky,
161 Zelda Metz, 162 Ursula Stern, 163 Chaim Engel, 164 Dov (Ber)
Freiberg, 161 and Moshe Bahir. 161 One might therefore assume that Biskovitz
either did not keep his supposed observation a secret or that he
was simply passing on rumors spread among the inmate population.
To the gas chambers with collapsible floors can be added the fantasies
already mentioned in chapter 3: the “thick dark substance […] spiraling
out from the vents in the ceiling,” suffocating the people inside
the gas chamber, as mentioned by the leader of the October 14, 1943
uprising, Alexander Pechersky; and the “baths” described by Leon
Feldhendler, Zelda Metz, and Salomea Hanel, where chlorine was used
to kill the victims.
But where, we may ask, did the inmates’ “knowledge” of the gas
chambers originate, if, as Arad puts it, “nothing could be seen” from the
outside, and the prisoners in camp III “had no contact with those in the
other parts of the camp”? 165
Many of the eyewitnesses assert that the camp staff made substantial
efforts to conceal the alleged true nature of the camp. According to Eda
161 Cf. chapter 3, p. 69, 69, 72.
162 Cf. chapter 3, p. 71; already quoted in C. Mattogno, op. cit. (note 11, Engl. ed.), p. 10.
163 Cf. chapter 3, p. 70; declaration by Ursula Stern; Documentation of the “Joods Recherchewerk,”
April 11, 1945. SOBIBÓR. ROD, C [23.62]09, Verklaring 72, p. 2.
164 Engel “was under the impression that the bodies fell through trapdoors inside the chambers”;
J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 71), p. 68.
165 Y. Arad, op. cit. (note 49), p. 79.