SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

92 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
good,’ he babbled on. ‘Are my boots ready?’ ‘Here, please,’ Jakub
said, handing him the boots, ‘try them on.’ ‘Hey, you, Jakub,’ the
Oberscharführer went on, ‘five days from now, I will be going to
Germany. You must make a pair of slippers for my Frau. Remember
that.’ ‘I hope your Frau will be satisfied,’ Jakub replied. At this
moment, Arkady brought the hatchet down on his head. […] At four
thirty, Brzecki and his group returned from the Nord-Camp. Just
then, Unterscharführer Haulstich appeared in the yard. Shloime ran
up to him.
‘Unterscharführer,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how to continue with
the dug-outs. The people are standing around doing nothing.’ The
Unterscharführer started walking towards the barracks. […] In the
meantime, the Unterscharführer was taken care of inside. Shloime
himself had finished him off.” (pp. 45 – 49)
Is this report believable? Our answer is: Yes, absolutely so; it is the
only believable part of Pechersky’s account.
From German documents we know that the uprising was successful.
Eleven SS guards and two non-German helpers were killed and 300
Jews managed to escape. This was possible only if the SS neglected to
take even the most elementary precautions, because it did not even consider
the possibility of an uprising. If, however, Sobibór was an extermination
camp where a horrifying number of Jews had been murdered,
where the Jewish workforce were facing death at any time and were
whipped all along, one would have had to reckon permanently with a
revolt. Thus, the absolutely hare-brained behavior of the SS who practically
asked to be killed, as Pechersky describes it, proves that Sobibór
was, instead, a camp where conditions may have been tough, but where
the lives of the detainees were not in constant danger and where they
were not continually ill-treated. Thus, the only credible portion of Pechersky’s
account belies the legend of “Sobibór, the extermination
camp.” It takes but a minimum of common sense to recognize this.
We come to the same conclusion when we look at Miriam Novitch’s
book, in which Pechersky gives us a condensed version of his 1946 report:
He tells us that the guards, at tattoo every night, had to hand in the
clip of five cartridges which came with the rifle each of them had been
issued 214 – but in a real extermination camp the camp administration
214 M. Novitch, op. cit. (note 39), p. 95.