The Nazis needed Thomas to work as a "fireman", burning the clothes and personal effects of those gassed upon arrival at the camp.
He eventually escaped after an inmate uprising at Sobibor, surviving in the forest. He claims he survived being shot in the face, and has a bullet lodged in his jaw.
Blatt is now one of the primary "eyewitnesses" "testifying" against John Demjanjuk.
Thomas Blatt holds up a newspaper showing himself along with Karl August Frenzel, a member of the Nazi S.S. staff at the Sobibor extermination camp, where Blatt was part of a revolt that led to his escape from the camp in 1943. [1]Holocaust survivor, 82, tells of grim role as 'fireman' in Nazi death camp
20 January 2010
The Scotsman
By Allan Hall in Munich
THE lights dimmed in a Munich court yesterday as the survivor of a Nazi death camp where 250,000 people died described how he stayed alive amid the carnage.
Thomas Blatt, 82, using the tip of his ballpoint pen on a map of the camp projected on to the walls of the court, transported a generation far removed from the horrors of the Holocaust back 67 years to a place called Sobibor in Poland.
Metres away from him, lying on a specially constructed bed and apparently asleep for the whole of his testimony, was the man prosecutors allege may have driven Mr Blatt's parents at bayonet-point into the gas chamber at Sobibor in April 1943.
He does not remember John Demjanjuk from the murder factory hidden in a pine forest, and cannot say if he is guilty as charged of aiding in the murders of 27,900 Dutch Jews who were gassed during his alleged tenure there.
But Mr Blatt was the first witness at 89-year-old Demjanjuk's trial able to take the judge, lawyers and relatives of the dead back to those dark days.
As relatives of those killed in Sobibor during the six months Demjanjuk allegedly worked as a guard there wept in court, Mr Blatt said: "I survived the murder project of the Nazis, and the Ukrainians, like Demjanjuk, were the worst of the worst in the camp."
Shipped off to Sobibor from his home only 43 miles away, his mother, father and ten-year-old brother were gassed and burned within an hour of arrival.
He survived on the whim of the SS commandant, who said to him, "Come, little one", as a selection was made of so-called "work Jews" who were needed by the guards to keep the camp functioning.
He told of his various tasks. "I became what was known as the 'fireman'," he said.
After sorting through the clothes of arriving victims, he was left with piles of passports, love letters, birth certificates, bank account statements and greeting cards taken from those about to die. He burned them in a pit, as the people they once belonged to burned on the "roasts" – huge funeral pyres constructed on iron rails and fuelled with diesel oil that sat next to the gas chamber.
After the victims were undressed, they went along the "Road to Heaven" – a path lined with barbed wire fences interwoven with fir boughs that made it invisible to the rest of the camp.
Asked by Judge Ralph Alt if he could recognise Demjanjuk as a guard there, he said wistfully: "Was he there? More than 60 years have passed. I cannot even remember the faces of my parents.
"The court must decide if he was there. If he was there when I was there, then I can imagine he shoved Jews forward at bayonet point to the gas chambers. Without the 100 or so Ukrainians who were there, the Germans would never have managed to kill 250,000 Jews."
Demjanjuk claims he was a prisoner of the Germans for the whole of the war and questions the authenticity of a key piece of evidence – an SS identity card that prosecutors say features a photo of a young Demjanjuk and says he worked at Sobibor.
Arrested, tried and sentenced to death by an Israeli court nearly 20 years ago for being a guard in another camp, he was cleared after new evidence surfaced. He was extradited from the US to Germany last year to stand trial for being in Sobibor. He has not said a word since the trial began last month.
source: http://news.scotsman.com/world/Holocaust-survivor-82-tells-of.5995937.jp
HolocaustDenialVidoes.com has an excellent detailed breakdown of Blatt's fraudulent story here.
2009 interview with Blatt by Der Spiegel:
SPIEGEL: And how did you get through the remaining year and a half until the end of the war?
Blatt: Freedom was difficult. If I had been a Christian boy, I'd have had a better chance. People would have taken care of me. But where could I go? There was no Jewish community anymore in my hometown of Izbica, and the Polish farmers saw us mainly as Christ's murderers. A farmer hid me and some others at first, in exchange for money we'd taken with us from Sobibor. Later he tried to shoot us. I still have the bullet in my jaw. After that I hid in the woods or in abandoned buildings.
Blatt speaking to students [2]
"Vhat part of my story don't you believe?" [3]
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