08-09-2017, 06:24 AM
Sigmund Sobolewski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈɕiɡmunt sɔbɔˈlɛfskʲi]; May 11, 1923 – August 7, 2017) was a Polish activist, lecturer and Holocaust survivor. He was the 88th prisoner to enter Auschwitz on the first transport to the concentration camp on June 14, 1940, and remained a prisoner for four and a half years during World War II. He was an opponent of Holocaust denial and was notable for having confronted modern neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers.
Sobolewski was born in Toruń, Poland, the son of the mayor of a small Polish town.[1]
Sobolewski was detained at Auschwitz at the age of 17 as a result of the anti-Nazi activities of his father.[2] Fluent in German, Sobolewski was pressed into service as a translator.[3]
"I survived also because I was young," said Sobolewski. "I didn't realize the seriousness of what was going on. Most of the people who survived were simple people; workers, peasants from Polish villages who couldn't read and write, but who were used to the hard work.[3] Lawyers, doctors, technicians, university graduates: many of them after three or four weeks in Auschwitz had committed suicide because they realized their chances of surviving were very, very slim."[4]
He was the sole surviving witness of the October 7, 1944 revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau, when a group of Jewish prisoners blew up Crematorium Number 4 and attempted to escape. Sobolewski was on the fire brigade and was ordered to put out the fire. He witnessed the execution of 450 Jewish Sonderkommandos in retaliation.[5]
In a 1999 interview, he said, "I survived only to live with the nagging question, 'What distinguished me from [the Jews]?'"[6]
Sobolewski (who was also known in Canada as Sigmund Sherwood or Sigmund Sherwood-Sobolewski) traveled the world following the war and settled in Canada in 1949.[7] In 1967, he was engaged as an activist opposed to neo-Nazism. While living in Toronto, he was among the demonstrators at an event attended by 6,000 people at the Toronto Coliseum to "denounce the rise of neo-Nazi forces in Germany."[8] He went on a 7,000-mile trip across Europe to demand that West Germany compensate members of his Former Prisoners Association, all of whom had been in Nazi camps.[9] He also initiated his activity protesting against neo-Nazism by donning a facsimile of his Auschwitz prison uniform and picketing the appearance of a German neo-Nazi leader on Canadian television.[10]
In 1983, while a hotel owner in Fort Macleod, Alberta, he offered to pay for a trip to Auschwitz for Jim Keegstra, the Alberta teacher who taught the myth of a Jewish world-conspiracy and was a Holocaust denier. Keegstra declined the offer.[11] In 1989, then living in Fort Assiniboine, Alberta, he organized the first Remembrance Service at Edmonton's Holy Rosary Polish Catholic Church attended by local Jewish representatives. He told a reporter after that program that while it was bad to be a Catholic in Auschwitz, "to be a Jew there was hopeless," and that he was concerned that the "Nazi crimes against humanity will be forgotten and swept under the carpet".[10] He noted that he had advertised in a local newspaper for an assistant to help him with his memoirs, and received 43 responses. Only four of the respondents, he said, had heard of Auschwitz.[12]
In 1990, he retraced the route he travelled unwillingly 50 years earlier from Tarnów to Auschwitz-Birkenau to campaign for the creation of four "meditation gardens" at that death camp.[13] That same year, he organized a picket of Aryan Fest, a neo-Nazi festival organized by Terry Long in Alberta.[14] In 1991, he was among those in Chicago to accuse Polish Cardinal Józef Glemp, during his trip there, of being insensitive to Holocaust survivors.[15]
Sobolewski traveled the world lecturing audiences on his experiences in Auschwitz and warning against Holocaust denial,[4] including a speaking engagement as recently as 2009 to high school students in Alabama.[16] His life was the subject of the biography Prisoner 88: The Man in Stripes by Rabbi Roy Tanenbaum.[17]
Sobolewski died of pneumonia complicated by Alzheimer's disease at his home in Bayamo, Cuba, on August 7, 2017, at the age of 94. He was survived by his wife, Ramona Sobolewski, and their three sons.[10]
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Comment (and I hope that some Holocaust deniers see this): although Jews were the primary focus of Nazi efforts to exterminate objects of their virulent hatred, it is worth remembering the preliminary Holocaust against Polish gentile high-achievers was essential to the Shoah.
There is no ethical difference between one genocidal murder and another. A Pole with my level of education would have been a target for immediate murder upon the Nazi transformation of Poland from a sophisticated and cultured nation into one of the closest things to Hell on Earth, whether for a gentile Pole or a Jew of any kind.
This in no way cheapens the horror of the Holocaust against the Jews. The Nazis knew that they could never massacre Jews in places of mass incarceration except under the fog of war (as in much of the occupied Soviet Union) or in the one country that they completely wiped off the map by destroying its political, intellectual, and commercial elites. That was Poland, where practically nobody remained with the ability to interfere with the mass murders. Hitler could have never murdered Jews in the numbers that he wanted destroyed in such countries as Greece, Holland, Belgium, Norway, France, Hungary, and the interwar Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. His minions had to deliver them to sites of factory-like butchery in abattoirs with such names as Auschwitz, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Chelmno out of the range of retribution by the Royal Air Force and the (US) Army Air Corps that would have found a Nazi death squad an easy target even in Germany itself.
Hitler's minions found Poland a suitable place to do the mass killing of Jews of central, southeastern, and western Europe in a country whose very organization had been exterminated soon after Nazi conquest. The Poles who might have protested and resisted a massacre were not culpable; they were simply gone -- exterminated, often as early as the first week of September 1939.
Sobolewski was born in Toruń, Poland, the son of the mayor of a small Polish town.[1]
Sobolewski was detained at Auschwitz at the age of 17 as a result of the anti-Nazi activities of his father.[2] Fluent in German, Sobolewski was pressed into service as a translator.[3]
"I survived also because I was young," said Sobolewski. "I didn't realize the seriousness of what was going on. Most of the people who survived were simple people; workers, peasants from Polish villages who couldn't read and write, but who were used to the hard work.[3] Lawyers, doctors, technicians, university graduates: many of them after three or four weeks in Auschwitz had committed suicide because they realized their chances of surviving were very, very slim."[4]
He was the sole surviving witness of the October 7, 1944 revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau, when a group of Jewish prisoners blew up Crematorium Number 4 and attempted to escape. Sobolewski was on the fire brigade and was ordered to put out the fire. He witnessed the execution of 450 Jewish Sonderkommandos in retaliation.[5]
In a 1999 interview, he said, "I survived only to live with the nagging question, 'What distinguished me from [the Jews]?'"[6]
Sobolewski (who was also known in Canada as Sigmund Sherwood or Sigmund Sherwood-Sobolewski) traveled the world following the war and settled in Canada in 1949.[7] In 1967, he was engaged as an activist opposed to neo-Nazism. While living in Toronto, he was among the demonstrators at an event attended by 6,000 people at the Toronto Coliseum to "denounce the rise of neo-Nazi forces in Germany."[8] He went on a 7,000-mile trip across Europe to demand that West Germany compensate members of his Former Prisoners Association, all of whom had been in Nazi camps.[9] He also initiated his activity protesting against neo-Nazism by donning a facsimile of his Auschwitz prison uniform and picketing the appearance of a German neo-Nazi leader on Canadian television.[10]
In 1983, while a hotel owner in Fort Macleod, Alberta, he offered to pay for a trip to Auschwitz for Jim Keegstra, the Alberta teacher who taught the myth of a Jewish world-conspiracy and was a Holocaust denier. Keegstra declined the offer.[11] In 1989, then living in Fort Assiniboine, Alberta, he organized the first Remembrance Service at Edmonton's Holy Rosary Polish Catholic Church attended by local Jewish representatives. He told a reporter after that program that while it was bad to be a Catholic in Auschwitz, "to be a Jew there was hopeless," and that he was concerned that the "Nazi crimes against humanity will be forgotten and swept under the carpet".[10] He noted that he had advertised in a local newspaper for an assistant to help him with his memoirs, and received 43 responses. Only four of the respondents, he said, had heard of Auschwitz.[12]
In 1990, he retraced the route he travelled unwillingly 50 years earlier from Tarnów to Auschwitz-Birkenau to campaign for the creation of four "meditation gardens" at that death camp.[13] That same year, he organized a picket of Aryan Fest, a neo-Nazi festival organized by Terry Long in Alberta.[14] In 1991, he was among those in Chicago to accuse Polish Cardinal Józef Glemp, during his trip there, of being insensitive to Holocaust survivors.[15]
Sobolewski traveled the world lecturing audiences on his experiences in Auschwitz and warning against Holocaust denial,[4] including a speaking engagement as recently as 2009 to high school students in Alabama.[16] His life was the subject of the biography Prisoner 88: The Man in Stripes by Rabbi Roy Tanenbaum.[17]
Sobolewski died of pneumonia complicated by Alzheimer's disease at his home in Bayamo, Cuba, on August 7, 2017, at the age of 94. He was survived by his wife, Ramona Sobolewski, and their three sons.[10]
.........................
Comment (and I hope that some Holocaust deniers see this): although Jews were the primary focus of Nazi efforts to exterminate objects of their virulent hatred, it is worth remembering the preliminary Holocaust against Polish gentile high-achievers was essential to the Shoah.
There is no ethical difference between one genocidal murder and another. A Pole with my level of education would have been a target for immediate murder upon the Nazi transformation of Poland from a sophisticated and cultured nation into one of the closest things to Hell on Earth, whether for a gentile Pole or a Jew of any kind.
This in no way cheapens the horror of the Holocaust against the Jews. The Nazis knew that they could never massacre Jews in places of mass incarceration except under the fog of war (as in much of the occupied Soviet Union) or in the one country that they completely wiped off the map by destroying its political, intellectual, and commercial elites. That was Poland, where practically nobody remained with the ability to interfere with the mass murders. Hitler could have never murdered Jews in the numbers that he wanted destroyed in such countries as Greece, Holland, Belgium, Norway, France, Hungary, and the interwar Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. His minions had to deliver them to sites of factory-like butchery in abattoirs with such names as Auschwitz, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Chelmno out of the range of retribution by the Royal Air Force and the (US) Army Air Corps that would have found a Nazi death squad an easy target even in Germany itself.
Hitler's minions found Poland a suitable place to do the mass killing of Jews of central, southeastern, and western Europe in a country whose very organization had been exterminated soon after Nazi conquest. The Poles who might have protested and resisted a massacre were not culpable; they were simply gone -- exterminated, often as early as the first week of September 1939.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.