Death camp survivor comes to Vacaville to share tale
By Catherine Bowen/ [email protected]
Posted: 03/07/2011 01:02:17 AM
Scores of people gathered in Vacaville on Sunday to spend the afternoon with one of the few people to see the inside of a Nazi death camp and live to tell the tale.
Philip Bialowitz is one of eight living survivors from the now infamous Sobibór extermination camp in Poland, where an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed during World War II. Now in his mid-80s and living in New York, Bialowitz is the only survivor willing to talk about his experience and the horrors he witnessed during his time there and has dedicated the last 20 years of his life to fulfilling the promise he made the day of the Sobibór revolt, when he and about a third of the camp's 600 other prisoners escaped.
"Sobibór will go in the annals of history as one of the biggest uprisings in World War II," Bialowitz said, adding that, because it was a death camp, it was kept "top secret." The entire area was surrounded with land mines "so that no one could get out of Sobibór," he said.
Originally from Izbica, Poland, Bialowitz was just 17 at the time that he, along with his brother, two sisters and his 7-year-old niece, were taken to Sobibór.
"To describe the experiences at Sobibór would take a whole day and I wouldn't be through," he said.
Bialowitz said he tried his best to sabotage the Germans and to do what he could to stop "the Nazi war machine," including hiding and throwing out the jewels that he was ordered to remove from the belongings of those who were taken to the gas chambers.
On the day of his escape, Bialowitz said the revolt's leaders, Leon Feldhendler and Alexander "Sasha" Pechersky, stood on a table in the courtyard and issued the call to action to rise up against their oppressors and, "if by any chance somebody should survive, he should tell the world what happened."
And that is exactly what Bialowitz has done.
"They said in case somebody should survive (to) bear witness, so that's what I promised and I'm going around to keep my promise," he said. "I hope my mission will succeed and will help prevent any future genocide."
Also in attendance at the event was 84-year-old Helen Freibrun, a Vacaville resident who survived both the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.
After spending a year at Auschwitz, Freibrun said she was "half dead" when the Bergen-Belsen camp was liberated in April 1945. The 17-year-old was unconscious when troops arrived and spent the next three months in the hospital before being reunited with her brother, her only surviving family member, in a Prague train station.
Bialowitz's son, Joe, said he shares his father's responsibility to tell the story and the two spent about eight years co-authoring the book, "A Promise at Sobibór: A Jewish Boy's Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland" describing those experiences.
"It's very important for the world to be able to imagine what happened, even though they can never completely imagine it, to be prepared for what they face today," Joe Bialowitz said. "There are so many challenges in the world and injustice continues, genocide continues and people need to stand up and do something about it. That's what I think my father's story represents; what happens when we allow barbarism to grow out of control and the power that we have to stand up and stop it. To save ourselves and to save others."