court’s attention away from numbers and relatives and onto the victims themselves. In so doing, he made Sobibor come painfully alive for the seven judges and the packed gallery. Bialowitz’s two sisters and a niece were murdered at Sobibor on the day they all arrived. He survived by conning the SS into believing that he had been a pharmacist’s assistant before he was captured. That he could be useful at Sobibor if spared.
Bialowitz’s first job was cutting the hair of women and girls who had been told that Sobibor was a transit camp. After a delousing, a silver-tongued SS officer announced over a loudspeaker, they would be sent to a work camp along with the rest of their families.
“Many of these women came from Holland and they appeared to believe that this was a resettlement camp,” Bialowitz testified. “Before I cut their hair, some of these Dutch women politely asked me not to cut [it] too short. They showed no signs of knowing that they were about to be murdered. Hundreds of women at a time passed through the hair-cutting shed in this manner. Within minutes of cutting their hair, we heard the roar of a motor, mixed with a horrible mass scream, at first loud and strong, then gradually subsiding into silence.”
The SS also ordered Bialowitz to help unload passengers and luggage from the boxcars. The Dutch, who had no idea where they were or what would happen to them, would offer him a tip for helping them with their bags. “My heart was bleeding,” Bialowitz testified, “because I knew that in less than an hour they would perish.”
One experience at the unloading platform gave him a lifetime of nightmares. When he slid open a boxcar door, an overpowering smell of decomposing bodies assaulted him. Half the people crammed inside were dead. The rest were demented and barely alive.
“We began helping the few survivors down from the train,” he testified. “Despite being in such pitiful and helpless condition, they were brutally beaten and shot by several German officers and Ukrainian guards.
“Next, we removed the corpses. I tried to pull a dead woman off the train, but her skin came away in my hands. I saw another woman with a baby on top of her. Both were dead and swollen. They were still embracing each other.”
When attorney Ulrich Busch finally began his opening statement for the defense, he raised two critical questions that went to the very heart of the Munich trial. “How can you say that those who gave the orders were innocent,” Busch argued, “and the one who received the order is guilty. There is a moral and legal double standard being applied today.”
Busch had a valid point. Germany had tried eleven Sobibor SS officers in Hagen in 1965–66. One committed suicide. One was sentenced to life in prison. Five got three to eight years. Four SS officers were acquitted because no one could testify that they had seen them commit a specific murder as required for conviction under the 1871 German penal code.
Busch’s second perceptive question drew a hiss from the mostly Jewish spectators in the gallery. How did a Ukrainian SS guard differ from a Jewish Kapo? To even ask the question was viewed by survivors and their families as an anti-Semitic insult. But the question begged for an answer.
Jewish Kapos were prisoners appointed by the Nazis to help manage and discipline their fellow Jews. They didn’t volunteer for the job, but many prisoners, if not most, would have done so if asked. The job came with privileges and power and, most important, it increased the chances of survival.
Kapos performed a number of tasks at Sobibor. They were in charge of roll calls and had to tell the SS officer in charge if anyone was missing, usually because of illness. The assignment was far from humanitarian. Sickness meant inability to work. Inability to work meant death. When someone did not show up for roll call, the Kapo had to order a team to go get the missing prisoner. An SS officer or an SS guard would then walk or drag the sick Jew to camp three to be shot.
Kapos served as barracks supervisors or warders. They were supposed to be the eyes and ears of the SS. If a Kapo failed to report a problem, such as talk of escape or eating stolen food, and the SS found out about it later, the Kapo would be punished with a whip or a gun.
Kapos with whips supervised work Kommandos. They accompanied SS men as they made their rounds of the workshops looking for shirkers or hoping to catch some Jew breaking a rule. If a worker was at fault, the Kapo would be ordered to give him or her twenty-five lashes.
Kapos also supervised their fellow Jews who were sorting the clothes and belongings of those who had just been gassed. He was required to report to his SS superior any acts of sabotage, such as cutting up good clothes to make them useless to the Reich, or the theft of tins of milk and sardines or gold coins and jewels. The money and stones could later be traded with the SS guards for food or sewn into prisoners’ clothes in case they ever escaped.
Sobibor Jews did not resent or hate their Kapos, who, like them, were merely trying to survive. But they did distinguish between good and bad Kapos. A good Kapo whipped a fellow Jew as lightly as he could get away with. He shared his extra food. He helped tend the bloody welts of those whom he had been forced to beat. He tried to cover for the sick.
Sobibor Jews trusted their good Kapos so much that they invited one to play a critical role in the October 1943 escape.
A bad Kapo was a Nazi sycophant who curried favor in the hope that he would be spared in the end. He whipped fellow Jews with enthusiasm. He reported stolen food. He sought out the sick for execution. He was a stoolie and a snitch. Sobibor prisoners distrusted their bad Kapos so much that they assassinated one—a German Jew whom they called “Berliner”—because he was a snitch and endangered their escape plan.
The Kapo and the Trawniki man had several things in common. They were both prisoners of war. Neither had necessarily volunteered for their death camp job. If they had refused to work with the Nazis, they would have been punished. Both were rewarded with privileges for their collaboration. As part of the killing process, both were ordered to commit acts of brutality. Under the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Fedorenko case, neither the guard nor the Kapo was eligible for a U.S. visa because involuntary collaboration was not an extenuating circumstance under the 1948 Displaced Persons Act.
The major difference between the Trawniki man and the Kapo was that the SS planned to kill their Kapos in the end. They had no plans to kill their Trawniki men. Other differences were a matter of degree.
If a prisoner refused to be a Kapo, he most probably would be killed. If a Trawniki man requested not to be posted to camp three or asked for a transfer from a death camp because he could not stomach killing Jews, he probably would not be punished or court-martialed and executed.
The rewards granted to a Sobibor SS guard went far beyond those given to a Kapo. The Trawniki man was paid. He got days off away from the camp. Once he was out of the camp, he was free to move around. He got regular leave, decent food, and clean, warm clothes. And he could earn promotions with better pay.
According to Sobibor survivor accounts, the SS guards at Sobibor did their jobs with sadistic enthusiasm. The good Kapo did his job with a degree of personal pain and compassion.
Survivors were quick to point out that the SS guards at Sobibor could easily desert. Were they applying a double standard? If the SS guard had the moral obligation to take a risk and flee, didn’t the Jews at Sobibor also have a moral obligation to take a risk and escape?
There is a huge difference between escaping and deserting. To try to escape from Sobibor was, for the most part, an act of suicide. Philip Bialowitz testified about why he didn’t try it until the uprising. “I often thought about escape,” he said. “But Sobibor was surrounded by barbed wire, guard towers, a mine field, and a deep forest. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, a wild animal would trigger one of the mines and we were marched out of our beds and counted like diamonds.”
The SS guards didn’t have to escape. All they had to do was disappear into the forest on their day off and join a partisan group. Many did, as Holocaust historian Peter Black points out. There were 388 known Trawniki men who served at Sobibor over the life of the camp. At least twenty-nine (7.5 percent) either deserted or tried to desert.
There is no record that Iwan Demjanjuk ever tried to desert from Sobibor, assuming he was at Sobibor. Trawniki man Ignat Danilchenko said in his sworn statement that when the SS closed Flossenburg and reassigned him and Iwan Demjanjuk to another camp safe from the advancing Red Army, he decided to desert. He asked Demjanjuk to join him. Demjanjuk declined.
The SS guards at Sobibor had a second realistic option. There were between 150 and 200 SS guards at the camp and only twenty-five to thirty SS men. How hard would it have been to pick a day and an hour and start shooting? There was a
