Ezcape from Sobibor
by David Fischler
Copyright 2011 by David Fischler
Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack.
The metallic sound of wheel on rail was a monotonous counterpoint to the terrified wailing of children from every corner of the car. The noises were combining to give Rabbi Snaidman a horrendous headache, but he still couldn't decide whether the clatter in his ears was worse than the smells that permeated the atmosphere.
The Rabbi and over a hundred others had been stuffed into a freight train car in Vilnius the morning before for the 350 mile trip to the Sobibor transit camp. Because of frequent stops to take on more "freight," they were now in their second day of torturous travel. No food, no water, no bathroom facilities, little light or ventilation–between the stink of human excrement, the sickly-sweet aroma of decay from the bodies of those who had already died, and the close quarters smell of sweat and fear, the air in the car had become almost unbearable. But bear it they would. The alternative was to give up and die.
They had been told that they were being sent to Sobibor so that their skills could be catalogued, followed by shipment to labor camps elsewhere in Poland where their work could benefit the Third Reich in its glorious struggle against Bolshevism. Given the Rabbi's 67-year-old body and lifelong devotion to Torah study, he had a hard time seeing what aid he could lend to the war effort. It was a certainty that the unfortunates whose souls had already fled their wasted bodies could do nothing for the Nazis except serve as fertilizer. So where did that leave them? He had his suspicions, but hoped for the best, whatever that might be in this nightmare.
Just as he was contemplating the appalling input of his senses, Rabbi Snaidman felt a tug at his left sleeve. He looked to his left to see a young woman with dirt on her face, a cut on her forehead, and a sleeping–or perhaps unconscious–baby in her arms. He was mortified to realize he had been so wrapped up in his own pain that he had sat next to this woman and her child for over twenty-four hours and never noticed they were there.
He looked at her and waited. She had an expression on her face that was a mixture of fear and resignation. She looked at the rabbi, then down at her baby, and back at him. She opened her mouth to speak twice, but nothing came out. Finally the rabbi asked, "What is it, my child?"
That seemed to help her make the connection between her brain and her voice. "Rabbi, you don't know me, but my name is Liora Vinokuras. My baby's name is Dovydas. My husband was a member of the United Partisans. The Nazis killed him during the uprising last month. Since then I've been all alone, and when they started rounding up the Jews after the uprising I tried to hide, but had to come out when they destroyed the ghetto. They told us we're being sent to labor camps. Is that true?"
"I don't know, my child," the rabbi responded sadly. "They haven't told me any more than they've told you. I'm sure you've heard the same things I have about indiscriminate murders. I can only hope we've been told the truth."
"I'm so scared, Rabbi." She looked down again at her baby, whose malnourished little body seemed to shrink with every breath. "Neither of us have had enough to eat. My milk is drying up. What will happen to my son? What do they do with the children?"
Rabbi Snaidman could only shake his head. "Again, I don't know. One hears rumors, and tales supposedly from those who have escaped, but I honestly don't know what to tell you, Liora."
She swept some of her long black hair out of her face, and seemed to be deciding whether to ask another question. The rabbi waited, and looked at her more closely. Despite the effects of malnourishment, he could see she was a pretty girl, intelligent brown eyes, thin lips, and a smaller, straighter nose than one usually saw on Lithuanian Jews. She seemed peculiarly pale, which he put down to the confinement of ghetto life and the fear of deportation. But her hands were steady, and her hold on Dovydas was as strong as any mother's.
His concentration was broken when she spoke in a stronger, almost belligerent tone. "I have to ask you a question, Rabbi. It's probably one you've thought about a lot yourself. That question is, why? Why has God done this to us? Why has He abandoned us to the whims of beasts? Why does He not save us from those who would destroy us?"
Rabbi Snaidman sagged a bit against the wall of the freight car. He had thought a lot about those questions, of course. How could he not? But none of the answers suggested by the tradition satisfied. Yes, God had used Gentile nations to punish Israel's sins in the past, but what the Nazis were doing to European Jewry seemed to go way beyond punishment for sin. Yes, God had allowed misfortune to befall Israel in the past to drive His people back to their God, and the Lithuanian community had thought for decades that German Jews had let assimilation go way too far, but again, the punishment seemed disproportionate to the crime. The truth was that he had been filled with doubts in recent months, as the situation in the Vilnius ghetto deteriorated, and wondered whether God had decided that the world was just too sick to be worth His attention.
He looked at the ceiling of the car, sighed, and then looked back at his interlocutor, who was staring holes through him. At a loss for what to tell her, he tried deflection with humor. "I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but I don't know the answers to your questions. The Almighty doesn't consult with me when He runs the universe."
Liora didn't smile, much less laugh. She continued to stare at the white-haired rabbi, her expression hardening and anger coming into her eyes. Rabbi Snaidman knew he'd made a mistake, and tried again. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make light of your pain. I'm just at a loss to give you an answer that doesn't sound trite or pat. I genuinely don't know why God is or isn't acting. The truth is that I feel just as abandoned as you. My wife of forty-four years was beaten to death on the street by an SS officer for no other reason than that he didn't like the look on her face."
With that, Liora's expression fell, tears began to flow, and she stammered out, "I'm so sorry, Rabbi. I didn't know."
"That's all right, my child. There was no way you could know."
She sobbed, "I'm so tired of death. I think God has been killed by the Nazis just like my husband."
Rabbi Snaidman was about to respond to that when it became clear the train was slowing for another stop. He heard a prolonged whistle meant to signal their arrival to a station. He wondered aloud, "Is it possible we've finally arrived in Sobibor?" He wasn't sure he wanted a positive answer.
They had indeed arrived at Sobibor.
When the train came to a halt, armed men in black SS uniforms opened the doors to the cars and shouted at those inside to get out. Blinking against the sudden sunlight, shivering against the mid-October chill in the air, people began to climb down, many of them yanked out and tossed to the ground by the Ukrainian guards who worked alongside the SS. Those who didn't get to their feet quickly enough got a rifle butt in the back of the head or the face; some of them didn't get up at all, in which cases the guards yelled at the Jewish Sonderkommando (a "special unit" of relatively healthy young men who did the dirty work around the camp) to dispose of the bodies.
Rabbi Snaidman and Liora had been near the doors, and were among the first off, disembarking without incident and waiting on the platform while the others got out. They looked around at their surroundings, and the rabbi was struck by how dismal everything looked–gray, washed out, colorless. Even the sky, overcast and threatening, seemed to be something out of a sepia-tinged nightmare.
By the time the last person had left his car, there were about 550 Jews awaiting their captors' orders. Almost two hundred had died on the way to Sobibor. They were left to the mercies of the Sonderkommando.
Once all had assembled, they were ordered by the SS Oberscharführer, a ster
n looking man with a whip named Karl Frenzel, to arrange themselves into two lines, separated by sex. Rabbi Snaidman and Liora looked at one another, with the rabbi mouthing the words, "It will be all right," and to which she responded, "I hope so." They went to their separate lines, not knowing that they would soon be reunited.
After everyone had gotten in line, Frenzel, who was in charge of the forced labor section of the camp, walked the men's line, pulling out anyone he thought suitable for work. After picking out three dozen able bodied males, he signaled to the guards that they could begin the next act of the play.
The remaining 500 individuals trudged over to a building where they were relieved of any bags, purses, or other personal belongings they had brought with them. They then moved to the main square