Nazi camp escapee never forgot horrors

Thomas Toivi Blatt, one of about 300 Jews who overwhelmed guards to escape a Nazi concentration camp in Poland and who decades later became a key witness at the trial of former guard John Demjanjuk, has died. He was 88.

Blatt had dementia, said Ruth Dubin Steinberg, a spokeswoman for Blatt’s family. He died Oct. 31 at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Well into his later years, Blatt spoke to audiences around the world about the atrocities he witnessed as a teenager at Sobibor. He wrote two books and consulted on the 1987 TV film “Escape From Sobibor.”

“He was passionate about getting the message out,” said Steinberg, who runs educational programs about the Holocaust for the Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara. When he was up to it, Blatt attended Steinberg’s monthly sessions for Holocaust survivors.

In a letter to Blatt’s family, federal prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum, who has spent much of his career pursuing suspected war criminals, recalled Blatt’s determination to keep the world reminded of the Holocaust’s reality.

“Many now devote themselves to realizing the post-Holocaust imperatives ‘Never Again’ and ‘Never Forget.’ But for your father these were virtually sacred obligations and they were decidedly not of recent vintage,” Rosenbaum wrote.

On Oct. 14, 1943, Blatt, who was then 16, took part in the only mass escape from a World War II death camp. Moments before the revolt began, its leader, Sasha Pechersky, urged the others to think of a larger mission.

He “spoke the words that ended up shaping your father’s life for the next 72 years,” Rosenbaum wrote. “‘Those of you who may survive, bear witness: Let the world know what has happened here.’ ”

Some 250,000 prisoners — virtually all of them Jews — died at the camp. Blatt’s father, mother and brother were taken to one of the camp’s five gas chambers, just after the family arrived from their village in Poland. Blatt was chosen, seemingly at random, as a camp laborer. One of his jobs was to cut the hair of women who had been stripped before their executions. Their hair was shipped off for use in military footwear.

After the uprising, most of the 300 escapees were hunted down and killed. Some perished in the woods surrounding the camp. Blatt and a companion bribed a farmer, who hid them in his barn for months before shooting them. With a bullet lodged in his jaw, Blatt was left for dead but managed to survive in the forest until the war’s end.