Blatt, Thomas Toivi

Thomas (Toivi) Blatt was a Polish boy 15 years of age who was deported to Sobibór in early 1943. In the 1980s, he was an advisor for the 1987 movie Escape from Sobibór. Another ten years after that, and more than half a century after the events, he published two books titled Sobibór: The Forgotten Revolt and From the Ashes of Sobibór: A Story of Survival. In these books, he included all the clichés and wild stories spread for five decades in media, literature and trial verdicts about Sobibór. This only proves that Blatt had done his homework, because no inmate could have known everything from his own experience. Hence, Blatt has written a streamlined orthodox account of the camp’s history, wrongly labeling it as his recollections. However, thusly contaminated by information from so many third-hand sources, his books are worthless as historical sources, as they cannot claim to be a source of exclusively first-hand knowledge.

Here are several peculiar statements in his books:

• He was able to keep a diary, parts of which he managed to save, but that diary was never published. Instead, he claims to quote from it in his books.
• He found another diary of a Jew who allegedly had been transported to Sobibór from the Belzec Camp. That diary also survived Blatt’s incarceration, but the person he entrusted it to afterwards (Leon Feldhendler) got killed a short while later, so this diary is now lost, too.
• He claimed that between 12,000 and 15,000 Jews were killed during an average working day. With such a daily capacity, Sobibór could have processed 5.5 million Jews in a year. Hence, there would not have been any need to have any other extermination camp; Sobibór could have handled them all!

(See the entry on Sobibór for more details, as well as Graf/Kues/Mattogno 2020, pp. 41-46, 93-98.)