The Silence of Sobibor

The most remarkable thing we encountered during the research for this podcast is a stack of unknown photos from Sobibor. They are unique; they've never been seen in the West before. They were pasted into a photo album by a lieutenant colonel from the infamous secret service of the Soviet Union, the NKVD, Nikolai Volski. Bernolf Kramer from the Stichting Sobibor found them on a Russian website, probably from the Russian state archive.

Anyone visiting Sobibor now sees the site as it has never looked before. It no longer resembles the descriptions given by survivor Thomas Blatt in the seventies and eighties: "here and there barely passable due to dense bramble bushes, man-high nettles, and if you looked a little, you found ashes of victims in the grass in many places," was his description. That's different now. Now "camp three," the area where the gas chambers among others stood, is covered with gray-white stones. The iconic ash hill is also covered with them. How did that happen?

In this episode, we also provide an answer to the question of the authenticity of the photos from the Russian website. Did Sobibor really look like that at the end of the war? Was it such a huge mess there? Are these photos real?

We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl/).

#Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943

We now know what it was like to enter the Sobibor extermination camp, even though the Germans tried to keep its existence secret at the time. Prisoners revolted, they escaped and told the world what happened there. Only, the people who survived Sobibor are no longer with us. The people who consciously experienced the war as children will soon be gone too. Who will then tell what happened when there are no more eyewitnesses? Will the stories still be so vivid and personal?

In this episode, we speak with people who talk in schools and museums about their experiences as war children, as children of parents who perished in Sobibor. Can you still access your memories of that time even after eighty years? How do they find those puzzle pieces?

In this episode, you will also hear from German professor Harald Welzer. He is a social psychologist who investigated how perpetrators look back on their own actions after the Holocaust. According to him, we must be careful that the story about camps like Sobibor slowly turns into a film script, where the main characters are divided into purely good and evil.

We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/).
Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/?js_artist=mark_lobenstein). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl).

#Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943

A Dutch newspaper in 1950, page twelve in a three-line report. “Erich Bauer, a 50-year-old former SS officer, has been sentenced to death by a West Berlin court. He is accused of gassing hundreds of thousands of Jews.” In the report, the name of Sobibor is mangled to ‘Silobor’. The trial against one of the guards of the Sobibor extermination camp made little impression in the Dutch media at the time. But that changed completely in the years that followed.

In this episode, we follow among others the story of Samuel Lerer, who survived Sobibor and after the war recognized the ‘gasmeister’ of the extermination camp on the street in Berlin. We also look at the subsequent trials against camp guards who were tracked down in Brazil. Franz Stangl, who chose in his cell to talk to a journalist about his life as deputy commander of Sobibor and died of a heart attack in the cell after the last conversation.

And Demjanjuk. The trial with the most media attention, although Iwan Demjanjuk was no more than a small fish, a subordinate. Many people know his name from the Netflix series about his life ‘The Devil Next Door’. We follow Jules Schelvis during that trial, who acted as co-prosecutor and expert in the process.

We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/).
Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/?js_artist=mark_lobenstein).
Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl).

#Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943 #JulesSchelvis

“You lived in Sobibor in constant fear. Every moment could be your last.” This is a statement from Selma Wijnberg about the time she spent as a forced laborer in Sobibor. What did that fear do to the rest of her life? How do you prevent passing that fear on to your children? It is the central theme of this episode, which revolves in part around epigenetics: how events in your life change your DNA.

And in this episode, we also look at a sudden wealth of information coming from Russia: material from a website with years of secret documents about Sobibor. Statements, photos. What do they show? Was there really a children's playground on the former extermination camp in the years after the war?

We speak again with Esther, about what her family history did to her. Did she inherit an extra sensitivity to fear through her mother's DNA? And what can you do about it if so? Yael, the daughter of a Sobibor survivor, began creating artworks. She drew inspiration from what archaeologists found in the soil of the former camp.

We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/?js_artist=mark_lobenstein). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl).

#Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943 #DovFreiberg

How must it feel when you watch television and see the world briefly pause for the death of Selma Wijnberg, and the newsreader says: "The last Dutch survivor of Sobibor has passed away." And you know Selma, because you were in Sobibor just like her. And you too barely survived the camp. It happened to Sophie Huisman, who lived for many more years and in the 1960s recorded her story on a tape recorder. It would be the first and immediately the last time she publicly spoke about her past in Sobibor. In this episode, you hear the story of the actual last Dutch survivor of Sobibor.

What few people know: there are also letters from Sobibor camp. Prisoners had to write optimistic messages under German supervision and send them to the Netherlands. Truus Goud from Haarlem did that, and her letters even arrived. Esther, her great-niece, still has them and reads from them.

And we follow the story of Dov Freiberg. He is fifteen when he has to step out of the train in Sobibor, but he survives as a forced laborer. He talks about his time in the camp, about the day of the uprising, about his escape across the minefield, about the insane moment when he looks back and realizes he is free. But what is freedom in the forests of eastern Poland? How does he survive there until the end of the war?

We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/).
Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/?js_artist=mark_lobenstein). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl).

#Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943 #DovFreiberg #KoentjeGezang