Escape from Sobibor: A Survivor’s Story

Thomas Blatt was born on April 15, 1927 in Izbica, Poland, a small Jewish town in the Lublin district of Poland with a population of about 3,500. Thomas was the older of two boys, his mother, Felecia, was a homemaker, and his father, Leon, operated a liquor store. Until the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Thomas and his brother, Hersz, led the rural life of a ‘shtetl’ (small town) Jew, content and happy in their Jewish community.

After the German invasion, Thomas’s life became an unending struggle to survive the persecution and brutalities of the Nazis and their Polish collaborators. Thomas’s ordeal is described in horrifying detail in his personal story published in 1997: From the Ashes of Sobibor.  Initially Thomas and his family learned to avoid deportation by hiding during the routine roundups of Jews in Izbica.