The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 5

BEST AVAILABLE' COF Montreal, Monday, February 8, 1988 A-5 Death camp survivor determined world will never forget horror; (Continued from Page A-1) Polish officials created the inaccurate plaque, Blatt said, in an attempt to prove they also were victims of the Nazis and because Sobibor "is on the Russian border and they want to show their commitment to the Russians." "They are falsifying history," Blatt said, suddenly standing and pacing the room. "Jews, Jews and only Jews were killed there." Blatt visits Sobibor every year and spends hours at the site, talking to the visitors, correcting their misconceptions, explaining who died at the camp, telling them how his own family was killed. The Roman Catholic Church, Blatt said, has shown great insensitivity by building a church on the site and by displaying next to it a large wooden carving depicting the Virgin Mary holding Jesus behind barbed wire at Sobibor. "This is absurd because if you were a Christian, you wouldn't have died at Sobibor; you would have been the plaque would be changed so only Jews would be listed as victims. The official also promised to provide better care for the site and was receptive to the museum, he said.

Blatt is a small, nervous man who often appears distracted and distant. But when asked about the Holocaust, he addresses the subject with an almost violent intensity. "I still dream about it, I still feel the same terror," he said. "Maybe that's why I'm working so hard to create the memorial. I need to see it.

In many ways I've never really made it out, and this is the way to convince myself that I've finally escaped." Blatt is selling his Santa Barbara stereo store so he can spend more time raising funds for the project and supervising the site in Poland. He wants to devote the remainder of his life to Sobibor. Blatt's obsession, he said, has cost him his marriage. He talked about Sobibor constantly, dreamed about it and, occasionally, on a whim, left his job, packed and flew to Poland be- ingly march to their death. Alt the survivors of Sobibor, Blatt said, bear a terrible burden today.

"I have this feeling of, how do you" say it?" Blatt asked, pausing and extending an arm, as if reaching out for the right word. "In Polish it is dluj (debt). I owe. So I always must work to keep the memory alive." After the escape, Blatt slipped through the countryside with two friends until they reached their home village, but only Gentile neigh; bors lived there and they refused to hide them. I Blatt and the others had some gold and jewelry they had taken from the camp and they bribed a farmer into hiding them in his barn.

For more than five months they hid in a tiny compartment, until the farmer and his friends shot and robbed One of the trio was killed and Blatt was left for dead with a bullet in his jaw, which he still carries. He survived another three months in the forest, then, suddenly, the war was over. He returned to school and worked in Poland at various jobs until 1957, when he emigrated to Israel. He met Dena, an American visiting Israel, and they married. When they first moved to the United States two years later, the only work Blatt could get was as a janitor.

He later worked as an electronics technician and eventually bought his own stereo store. The store was extremely successful and Blatt bought two more. He and Dena had two children, his business prospered and he bought a home on a hill overlooking the ocean. Blatt has worked his whole life to make the story of Sobibor known. He helped author Richard Rashke find survivors of the camp for Rashke's book, Escape From Sobibor, and he translated during the interviews in Russian, Yiddish and Polish.

When Blatt sells his business, he will return to Poland. And if the schoolchildren at Sobibor can be transferred to another site, Blatt plans to turn the kindergarten on the camp's grounds into a temporary home, live there and watch the renovation process every day. cause he "had to be in Sobibor." Before Blatt's wife, Dena, left two years ago, she told him: "I don't want to live in Sobibor any more. I've lived there for 30 years." Blatt lives in an exclusive neighborhood in Santa Barbara and finds it disorienting to talk about the horrors of Sobibor and a moment later turn toward the window of his den and the sweeping ocean view. "I remember waking up at 4 in the morning at Sobibor and seeing the fire and smoke in the distance, smelling burning flesh," he said softly.

"I wondered how could this be true, how they could burn people in the 20th Century. Blatt was 15 when he and his family and the other Jews in the small Polish town where they lived were rounded up by the Germans and taken by train to Sobibor. Blatt's family was under the impression they were being taken to a labor camp. Even after they arrived at Sobibor, they did not realize they would soon be killed. The prisoners lined up, Blatt said, and the Germans picked about 30 craftsmen to perform menial work at the camp.

Blatt was picked as an errand boy. The others, including Blatt's mother, father and brother, were taken to the edge of the camp, told to disrobe and enter the "showers" to prevent the spread of diseases. It was not until they were locked inside, Blatt said, that they realized they were to be gassed. About an hour after Blatt's family was taken away, he was assigned to haul piles of clothes to sorting rooms. He immediately spotted a dress worn by a woman on the train.

Blatt realized his family and everyone else on the train had been killed. "I didn't cry," he said softly. "The shock was so overwhelming; it was almost incomprehensible. I think that instinctively I blocked out all feeling so I could survive." Blatt spent six months at Sobibor along with about 600 other prisoners who were being held as camp workers. They endured the horrific ordeal of watching thousands of prisoners arrive each day and then unknow Jews ran like Crusaders attacking free." Blatt shook his head and then shouted: "The SOBs know it's a lie, but they're using the Holocaust for their own means.

This makes me so hurt and angry." And, Blatt said, in the area where Jews were once unloaded from boxcars, unaware they were about to be marched to their deaths by gassing, there is a kindergarten. Children play on grounds where people died 45 years ago. Every year when Blatt returns to Sobibor he combs the grounds, finds numerous bones in the tall grass and weeds, and buries them. He hopes to raise enough money and win Polish government approval to move the kindergarten, pave over the area so people don't trample the remains and build a museum on the site. Blatt would like to build a fence, so the church is separated from the camp.

Whether the Polish government tary tactics and were unable to develop a workable plan. But in late September 1943, Feldhendler and his organization got the break they needed. The Nazis transferred to Sobibor about 70 captured Soviet Jewish soldiers. Feldhendler immediately noticed one of the leaders of the Soviet PoWs, Lieut. Alexander "Sasha" Pe-chersky.

The Soviet lieutenant and the rabbi's son agreed to work together, and a few days later Pe-chersky had a plan. He decided to coordinate the plan around the Nazis' greed and obsessive punctuality. They would lure the Nazis to different spots around the camp by offering them clothing or boots. Then they would kill them and take their weapons. There were 12 Nazi SS officers in the camp and 120 Ukrainian guards.

Pechersky's plan called for killing all the Nazis in one hour, one by one. Then a "kapo" Jews assigned by the Nazis as overseers would march the prisoners right out the Los Angeles Times Thomas Blatt, a 15-year-old errand boy at the Sobibor concentration camp, approached a Nazi officer and told him he had found a leather overcoat that would fit him perfectly. The officer, Joseph Wolf, followed Blatt to a warehouse where six prisoners were piling into bins the clothes of Jews who had just been gassed. Two of the prisoners solicitously offered to help Wolf try on the coat. As Wolf slipped his arms into the sleeves, they bound the coat like a straitjacket.

Another Jew leaped out from a bin where he had been hiding and split Wolf's head with an ax. The revolt had begun as planned. Jews had attempted several small escapes at Sobibor, but all had failed. Then a rabbi's son, Leon Feld-hendler, formed a cadre of about 20 people to organize a mass revolt. But Feldhendler and the others shoemakers, tailors and businessmen in civilian life knew nothing of mili Dale Carnegie, Founder" WHEN THINK THE THE DALE WEDNESDAY, THE DALE YOU THINK OF TRAINING OF DALE CARNEGIE TRAINING PEOPLE CARNEGIE COURSE BEGINS FEBRUARY 10th CARNEGIE SALES COURSE BEGINS MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15th 1 THOMAS BLATT "I still feel the terror" would permit this remains uncertain.

However, Blatt 'said that last year during a conference in Poland, the head of the Polish Institute of National Memory, which investigates Nazi war crimes, assured him main gate. "The idea was that, without Germans around, the guards would think it was a move ordered by the Nazis," Blatt said. The plan was initiated at 4 p.m., Oct. 13, 1943. In the next hour, 10 Nazis were killed, most with axes by Pechersky's soldiers.

One Nazi showed up for his appointment with the shoemaker and was killed trying on a pair of boots. Another died in the tailor's shop, trying on a uniform. At 5 p.m. the bugle sounded, ending the workday. The prisoners returned to their barracks and prepared for roll call.

But their plan for an orderly escape fell apart when a Ukrainian guard discovered a dead Nazi. "A Jew shouted, 'Hurrah! and a tornado hit the yard," wrote Chomedey Ford Chomedey 688-9200 Fortier Auto Ville d'Anjou 353-9821 Montmorency Brossard 678-9940 Mont-Royal Montreal 526-9111 FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT DALE CARNEGIE TRAINING CALL 285-1237 Presented by E. J. Glowka 300 Leo Pariseau, Suite 714, Montreal, Quebec mmm .1 (0)(0)(0)K castle wali' Richard Rashke in his book, Escape from Sobibor. "Jews ran In all directions.

like Crusaders attacking a castle wall, they threw up the ladder the carpenters had left in the weeds, and began to stream over the The rest rushed the main gate. A German with a machine gun opened fire. The. fences began to fall under the weight of the Jews." About 150 Jews were killed in the uprising, but more than 300 escaped. Most, however, were captured and executed, died in the woods or were killed by anti-Semitic bands of Poles and Ukrainians, Blatt said.

Only 49 survived until the end of the war. Pechersky is a retired bookkeeper in the Soviet Union. Feldhendler also survived the escape, but a few months after the war, "Polish anti-Semites broke into his apartment and killed him," Rashke said. 6 6 Versailles Ford St-Leonard 376-8180 Action Ford Montreal 731-8271 Avenue Ford West Island 685-1330 Laval FORD TEMPO '88 2 DOORS including: AIR CONDITIONING WINNERS PRIZES 66 2 $3,651,349.60 56 11 $94,006.30 56 439 $1,801.20 46 24,967 $60.90 36 489,595 $10.00 TOTAL SALES: $24,397,146.00 NEXT GRAND PRIZE: $1,700,000.00 2.3 litre engine with fuel injection Dual electric remote control mirrors Electronic AMFM stereo radio Interval windshield wipers 5 speed manual transaxle Power steering Power brakes Electric rear window defroster Tinted glass All season radial tires Draw 88-02-06 if; You can play up to 8:00 P.M. on Wednesday and Saturday 4, 7, 8, 12, 42, 43 Bonus number: 49 Draw 88-02-06 iNflV, You can play 5, 12, 15, 19, 20, 35 Bonus number: 37 TOTAL SALES: $1,668,408.00 Claims: See back of tickets.

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Examination of application: 2000 Berri Montreal, H2L 4V7. The complete text of this notice and the application may be viewed at CRTC, Central Building, Les Terrasses de la Chaudiere, 1 Promenade du Portage, Room 201. Hull, Quebec; and at the CRTC regional office: Complex Guy Favreau, East Tower, 200 Dorchester Blvd. West, Room 602, Montreal, Quebec H2Z 1X4. Interventions must be filed with the Secretary General, CRTC, Ottawa, Ont.

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