Inmate escaped Nazi death camp and went on run with her future husband
Selma Engel, who has died aged 96, was a Dutch Jew who found love in the Sobibor death camp and took part in a remarkable escape with her future husband during an uprising of inmates in 1943. Their story was told in Escape from Sobibor, a book by Richard Rashke that was made into a television film in 1987.
She was born Saartje Wijnberg into an assimilated Jewish family at Groningen and brought up in Zwolle, where her parents owned a hotel. Some time after the German invasion of May 1940 she went into hiding under the name Greetje van den Berg in Utrecht – where the Dutch family in whose house she was living informed on her.
Arrested by the Germans, she spent three months in prison in Amsterdam before being deported to Vught and then Westerbork Transit Camp.
In April 1943 she was loaded on to a boxcar train with 2200 others and shipped over three days and nights to Sobibor, in eastern Poland, arriving at the camp on April 9. She recalled how, the moment the doors opened, Nazi guards with whips herded people off the train and sorted them into two groups – one, as she discovered later, to be sent straight to the gas chambers, the other, a much smaller group, consisting of healthy young women destined to become workers.
From May 1942 to October 1943, when the camp was closed, more than 250,000 Polish, German and Dutch Jews were killed there. Only 600 were permitted to live, to serve the Nazis, clean the camp and cremate the dead.
‘‘The first night we saw a big fire burning, with a smell – it was such a bad, unusual smell,’’ she recalled. ‘‘We didn’t know at first that it was the bodies from the gas chamber. The guards made us dance in couples while the fire burned. That’s what they did to enjoy themselves.’’
It was at one such dance that she met her future husband, Chaim Engel, a former Polish soldier who had been in Sobibor for five months before Selma arrived and with whom she worked in a warehouse, sorting through the belongings of victims of the gas chambers. Both he and Selma would lose their families in the Holocaust, Chaim discovering that his brother had been gassed after finding his clothes.
The couple fell in love, Chaim protecting her against other camp inmates, Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews who distrusted the Dutch Jews because they spoke German.
The uprising at Sobibor that took place on October 14, 1943, is believed to be the largest prisoner revolt and escape of World War II. After weeks of planning, prisoners killed SS guards with homemade knives, cut phone lines and – dodging bullets and mines – fled over barbed-wire fences to freedom in the woods. Chaim Engel would recall how he stabbed one of the guards to death with a kitchen knife, screaming the names of family members killed by Nazis as he did so.
Some 300 inmates escaped from Sobibor, but only about 40 survived the war. Some joined partisan; others died of disease or were caught and turned in or killed by Poles.
Selma and Chaim were lucky, partly because during his time sorting through victims’ clothes, Chaim had pocketed and buried a cache of diamonds and gold pieces, so that if he managed to escape he could buy co-operation. After two weeks of hiding by day and travelling by night, the couple found Piotr Nowak, a Polish farmer who had a brother, Adam, who could hide them.
‘‘He took us there in a cart,’’ Selma recalled. ‘‘Chaim hid under a pile of branches and leaves. I dressed as an old woman.’’ Using the treasure they had saved, they paid Adam and stayed in a farm loft for nine months until the Red Army arrived in July 1944.
While in hiding, Selma became pregnant, and after liberation, as the couple moved eastwards towards Ukraine, marrying along the way, she gave birth to a son. From Odessa, they left by boat for Marseille, but the baby died on the journey from being given contaminated milk and was buried at sea.
From Marseille, they travelled by train to Selma’s old family home in Zwolle, only to find they were no longer welcome in Holland.
They married for a second time in September 1945, but the authorities ruled that Chaim could not stay because he was Polish and that Selma, by marrying a Pole, had become a Polish citizen. Though threatened with expulsion, due to the difficulty of sending them back to Soviet-occupied Poland, and the fact that local detention centres were full, they were able to stay a few years, and Selma gave birth to another son and a daughter.
In 1951, they moved to Israel, then in 1957 to the United States, settling in Connecticut, where Chaim opened a jewellery store.
For many years the story of the Sobibor uprising, indeed the existence of the camp itself, was largely forgotten. By the time the Allies arrived to liberate other camps, Sobibor had been razed, Nazi leaders having ordered the camp torn down after the revolt. In recent years, however, the uprising has been cited to counteract claims that Jewish prisoners died without resistance.
Chaim Engel died in 2003, and in 2010 Selma returned to Holland for the first time since 1951 to be appointed a Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau and to receive an official apology from the Dutch government for the way she and her husband had been treated after the war.
Her children survive her. – Telegraph Group
‘‘The first night we saw a big fire burning, with a smell – it was such a bad, unusual smell. We didn’t know at first that it was the bodies from the gas chamber.’’