SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

80 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
realizing their existence. 169 One will, however, search through Freiberg’s
accounts in vain for an explanation of how exactly he and the
other inmates came to this “understanding.”
Freiberg stated in his Eichmann trial testimony that at the time he arrived
in the camp “rumours were already circulating, but the people did
not believe them,” and that instead they were convinced that the deportees
were sent “to the Ukraine for agricultural work.” As can be expected,
Freiberg portrayed this as a ruse: 170
“They said that in two or three weeks’ time we would be reunited
with our families. But we saw their personal effects, the following
morning we were working with them. They [the SS] maintained that
they distributed other clothes and that from Camp No. 3 trains were
departing to the Ukraine.”
What Freiberg withheld from the court was the fact that he himself
had seen SS men distributing clothes 171 to detainees that supposedly
were to be sent to the gas chambers. In an interview by Japanese journalist
Aiko Sawada from 1999, Freiberg stated: 172
“Another time some people received new clothes and were sent
to the shower room. ‘You will work for us in German factories, but
first you are going to take a shower,’ the German soldiers told them.
Up to then they had been strict, but now they suddenly became
friendly as they handed them clothes and told them that they could
use the showers. I thought it very suspicious.”
Ada (Eda) Lichtman, who arrived at Sobibór in the middle of June
1942, 173 has made conflicting statements regarding when and how the
inmates found out about the mass murder. In one version, an inmate
working on top of a roof in camp II observed dead people in camp III
that were being buried. The man became mute from shock but his
169 Y. Arad, op. cit. (note 49), p. 79.
170 State of Israel, op. cit. (note 137), vol. III, p. 1168.
171 In a video-taped interview the witness Chaim Engel claims that prisoners from camp III
“came sometimes over to our Lager [camp II, where Engel worked in the sorting barracks]
to bring the clothes or bring things like that.” Why would clothes have been
brought to camp III? There are really only two possible answers: either the clothes were
for the camp III inmates themselves, something which would seem overly considerate on
the part of the SS (not to say impractical and, given the alleged secrecy surrounding
camp III, careless), or they were picked up to be disinfested and then distributed to newly
deloused deportees; J. M. Greene, S. Kumar (eds.), op. cit. (note 166), p. 154.
172 Aiko Sawada, Yoru no Kioku - Nihonjin ga kiita Horok�suto seikansha no sh�gen
(Memories of the night – Holocaust survivor testimonies told to a Japanese), S�gensha,
Osaka 2005, p. 303.
173 J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 71), p. 236.