Sobibor opened its gate on May 8, 1942, and closed down at the end of October 1943. Himmler ordered the camp destroyed two
days after the famous Sobibor Revolt of October 14,1943. According to an analysis of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw,
Sobibor took away 350,000 lives in seventeen months.
In March 1942 the Germans brought a group of Jewish laborers from nearby towns to build the camp. The Jews erected the gas
chamber buildings, with an intended outcome of 20,000 bodies a day. They surrounded the camp with four rows of barbed wire
fence and a mined field. Sobibor, like Chelmno, Belzec, and Treblinka, was never a real camp. It had only twenty barracks for all
prisoners and workers.
The victims of Sobibor came from all over Europe. The majority were Jews from Poland and USSR. There were also Jewish deportees
arrived daily from Czechoslovakia, Holland, France, Austria, and other occupied countries. The Nazis kept a small number of Jews to
cook, clean, launder, polish, and sew for them. They also used the Jews to do the labor work throughout the whole process of
gassing the victims.
As in any other killing centers, Sobibor separated men from women and children once they stepped down from the train. After the
prisoners undressed, barbers cut their hair while others took their clothings and belongings. The victims died in five carbon monoxide
gas chambers in about fifteen minutes. Chains pulled out the corpses through a special door. Railroad cars carried the bodies to the
pit sites. Inmates threw the corpses into pits and spread lime over them. The corpses in the pits produced a terrible smell and
polluted water. Thus, the SS ordered the workers to cremate the bodies. Toward the end, burning in large pits solved the body
disposal problem. Following cremation, workers grinded the bones with mallets and sent the powder to Germany to be sold as
fertilizer.
Other than killing Jews by the systematic method, SS also invented new ways to murder. They pushed Jews with umbrellas off roofs
to assemble parachuting. Some stabbed workers in their backs with a small knife when the workers bent over to pick up branches.
Others sewed up prisoners' trousers after throwing rats inside. Babies were thrown directly into garbage pits or "were torn apart down
the middle by their legs."
On October 14, 1943, an desperate revolt took place in Sobibor. Alexander Pecherski, a former political commissar of the Red Army
in Russia, planned the revolt. He accurately scheduled everything, including the killing of the guards, the cutting of phone wires, and
the testing of the field mines. Everything went well according to schedule, except a barrage of automatic fire cut off the attackers.
Chaos arose and many prisoners took the wrong exit, which cost their lives. Only 200 inmates survived through the land mines.
It did not ensure their freedom. Some of them were killed by pursuing Germans. More were murdered by Polish fascists. An
estimation of only thirty-five prisoners actually survived the end of the war.
