SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 89
Looking at the matter from the point of view of the official version of
Sobibór, we have here a blatant anachronism:
According to Jules Schelvis, there were six, possibly eight transports
to Sobibór from the Soviet territories then occupied by the Germans,
with Pechersky’s being number two; the first one had left Minsk on 15
September. 205 Apart from these Soviet Jews, Jews from Holland,
France, the General Government, as well as from the city of Skopje
were taken to Sobibór in 1943. 206 The last transport from Holland departed
on 20 July 1943, 206 the last one from France on 25 March
1943, 207 and the only one from Skopje on 30/31 March 1943. 208 Deportations
from the General Government ended in June of 1943. 209 In other
words, between 21 July and 14 September not a single transport reached
Sobibór. This fits in very well with the fact that Himmler had decreed
on 5 July that the “Sobibór transit camp […] is to be converted into a
concentration camp.” 210
What, then, was the origin of the victims mentioned by Pechersky’s
anonymous witness, those victims of whom “every other day, a transport
of 2,000” had been arriving until 23 September?
If we follow Pechersky, we learn that, according to his informer, the
mass murder was not carried out with engine exhaust gases at all, but by
means of a “thick dark substance” which came down spiraling from the
holes in the roof of the death chamber. 211 There are more absurdities
which the Jewish Soviet officer asks his readers to believe:
Whenever people in camp III are led to the death chamber, which is
disguised as a “bath,” three hundred geese that were kept in the yard
“were chased around so that their honking would drown out the shrieks
of the people” (p. 25).
Pechersky learns from his friend Ber Feinberg, a Warsaw hairdresser,
that formerly a train of ten cars filled “with clothing, shoes and sacks
of women’s hair” left Sobibór every day for Germany (p. 27).
Pechersky befriends an eighteen-year-old German Jewess named
Luka who emigrated to Holland in the 1930s together with her parents.
Even though she speaks only German and Dutch and he only Russian,
205
J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 71), p. 218-220.
206
Ibid., p. 198.
207
Ibid., p. 218.
208
Ibid., p. 226 (note 5).
209
J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 72), p. 263.
210
Cf. chapter 2, p. 21.
211
Cf. chapter 3, p. 69.