106
Sobibór camp
Sobibór, Poland
THE TRIP SPANNED THREE days. Three thousand Dutch Jews, Lars von der Haas and his family among them, traveled by cattle train.
Twenty cars with a capacity for fifty people each instead held one hundred and fifty.
The passengers stood shoulder to shoulder with only a small portal for ventilation.
The heat and stench were overpowering. Children struggled to breathe.
Infants cried relentlessly. Baggage was stacked to create seating, with children and the elderly taking turns.
Lars was particularly worried about his daughter and his mother, with her asthma problems. Dahlia was too grown for Lars to hold in his arms, so he put her on his shoulders for as long as he could. His family encircled his mother to give her extra space to breathe.
At least ten different people passed out at one time or another during the trip and were placed on stacked baggage until they could recover. One man died on the second day from a heart attack. His wife did not stop crying for the remainder of the trip.
The village of Sobibór was a swampy and sparsely populated hamlet on the eastern border of Poland.
The Nazi camp was cocooned within a dense forest of birch and pine trees and was not visible from the popular Lublin-Chelm-Wlodawa railway line.
A spur off the railway, however, allowed the Nazis to roll the train right up to the camp.
When the doors on the cattle cars clanged open outside the camp, morning sunlight streamed into the car, blinding the detainees.
A row of inmates, Jews dressed in blue jumpsuits, were lined up to help them off the cattle cars like bellhops at a hotel.
Behind them was a row of armed SS guards in gray uniforms.
The three thousand Jewish detainees slowly spilled out of the cattle cars, taking the hands of their Jewish counterparts in the blue jumpsuits, who were stoic and largely avoided eye contact.
Lars jumped out before the rest of his family and made sure to keep his wife, daughter, and parents near him, each carrying their luggage.
Beyond the greeting committee, Lars was pleased with what he saw.
The camp looked, in a word, charming. The officers’ quarters were quaint cottages painted in vibrant colors, with meticulous landscaping, intricate gardens, and picket fences, each with a pleasant name like Schwalbennest (the Swallow’s Nest), Lustiger Floh (the Merry Flea), or Gottes Heimat (God’s Home).
The camp’s only mark of being a detention facility was its double barbed-wire fences enclosing the camp, though the fences were thatched with pine branches—whether to keep inmates from looking out, or others from looking in, Lars did not know.
On the front porch of the administrative building, the Obersturmführer—the camp commander—approached a microphone while holding a piece of paper. “Quiet. Quiet. Stand where you are and be quiet.”
Lars looked at his family and put a finger to his lips. Jews from Nazi-occupied territory understood the price of disobedience. Three thousand people quickly grew silent.
“Welcome to Sobibór,” the commandant continued, speaking slowly while reading from the paper, as Dutch was clearly not his first language.
“This is a labor camp. You will be treated well. You will be given adequate food and shelter as long as you work hard and comply with our orders. For temporary purposes, we will ask you to separate into groups. On this side,” he said, gesturing to his left, “women and children. On that side, men and boys aged fourteen or older. I say again, this is only temporary.”
Lars untucked his arms from his wife and daughter. “It’s okay,” he whispered to Dahlia, kissing her on the forehead. “Do not worry.” He kissed his wife. Then he and his father took their positions, while Annika and Lars’s mother stood on the other side with their arms looped with young Dahlia’s.
The separation took a long time. Spouses were reluctant to split apart.
A man, a widower with two young daughters, refused to leave his children.
SS guards used whips to force him into compliance.
Senior SS officers, however, were quick to quell the overly violent reaction.
The point, clearly, was to remain as calm and orderly as possible.
“Very good,” the commander said through his microphone, his voice echoing. “We are looking for individuals with particular skills. If you have experience in woodsmithing, tailoring, or goldsmithing, raise your hand.”
A smattering of hands went up. SS guards walked down each column, questioning those who raised their hands. Most of those people were then told to step out of their lines, placing them in the middle of the two columns.
As the SS guards worked their way down the line, Lars debated whether he should raise his hand.
He did, in fact, have considerable experience in woodwork.
After being forced to resign his position as a physics professor at the University of Amsterdam in 1941, he’d worked as a carpenter, principally building furniture.
Yet he was reluctant to set himself apart from the rest of his family.
Would he be sent to a different labor camp?
Nothing was more important than staying together as a family.
He looked across at Annika. Her brow furrowed as she nodded at him.
Why did she think he should raise his hand?
Perhaps, Lars reasoned, having a unique skill would grant him an elevated status with the Nazis.
And perhaps that heightened status would allow him more leverage in keeping his family together.
“Raise your hand, boy,” his father whispered to him.
Lars raised his hand.
An SS guard soon reached him. “What is your trade?” the guard asked in Dutch.
“Woodsmithing,” Lars answered in German. “I build furniture.”
“You speak German.”
“I grew up in Munich. I moved to Amsterdam for university and stayed there.”
The guard, far younger than Lars, probably no more than twenty, nodded. “Step out of the line,” he said before moving on.
Lars complied. He stood perfectly still between the two columns, but his eyes moved to his wife’s. Annika gave him a tight smile. Had he made the right decision?
Across from Lars, an SS guard approached a small woman with dark hair. “I am a seamstress, sir,” she said in Dutch. “I can tailor clothes.”
“All right, step out of line.”
The woman gestured to her right, to her son, whose hand she was holding. “And my son, too,” she said. “We must stay together.”
“You have a son?” The guard shook his head. “Never mind. Get back in the line.” The woman didn’t understand, pausing, before the guard barked at her. “Back in line!”
“Very good,” said the commander when the questioning of all prisoners was completed, by which time over a dozen Jewish detainees had been separated out.
“As I said, you will be put to work. Some of you may remain in this camp.
Some of you may be transferred to other camps temporarily.
But be assured, we will not separate mothers from children.
And we will do our best to keep entire families together.
“First, we must address hygiene,” the commander continued.
“Some of the labor camps have been infiltrated with lice and typhus. So each of you will now be provided a hot shower. And your hair will be cut short. While you are showering, we will disinfect your clothes. You may leave your baggage here. It will be returned to you after your baths.” The commander turned to one of the guards. “Oberscharführer Michel?”
The Oberscharführer waved the column of men forward. “Follow me!”
Lars reached out his hand. His father took it. “I will see you soon, Papa,” he managed to say, his voice breaking. He watched his father march with over a thousand men through an arched gate bearing the sign SONDERKOMMANDO.
Then it was time for the column of women and children, ranging in age from their eighties to merely newborn. Elderly women hobbled forward. Mothers held the hands of their children or carried their newborns or infants in their arms. The children looked about with wonder.
With tears in his eyes and a dull ache in his stomach, Lars von der Haas blew kisses to his wife, to his daughter, to his mother, as they looked back at him before disappearing beyond the arched gate.