A NAZI death camp survivor told a Munich court yesterday he was seeking “justice, not revenge” in the trial of alleged former camp guard, John Demjanjuk.
Mr Demjanjuk went on trial in November on 27,900 counts of murder between April and September 1943 at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Thomas Blatt, one of just eight camp survivors still alive, said he has never been able to put the camp behind him.
“My dreams are so real, I can’t escape it, I am still there. I suppose that’s the price I pay for still being alive,” said Mr Blatt (82), who now lives in California.
Mr Blatt was just 15 when he was rounded up with his parents and brother and deported to Sobibor, 70km (44 miles) from his home village of Izbica.
“It was a pretty place with flowers, one house had the name ‘Swallow’s Nest’, and I thought, ‘this can’t be a place of murder’, ” he said.
On arrival, Mr Blatt was picked out of the group of 200 Jews for a work crew. He sorted ammunition and burned documents related to gassing that claimed all new arrivals including his parents and brother, for whom he was never able to grieve while in the camp.
“We never cried because if the SS had seen someone crying, they would have been shot,” he said.
Later Mr Blatt worked – with an armed guard watching – cutting women’s hair before they entered the gas chambers. “We heard their screams shortly after,” he said.
After six terrible months, he managed to flee, barely surviving on the run.
State prosecutors place Mr Blatt at the camp at the same time as Mr Demjanjuk, although, crucially, neither says they have any memory of the other.
“It’s 65 years ago, memory isn’t so good anymore,” said Mr Blatt, adding that Sobibor guards were “mostly Ukrainians like Mr Demjanjuk”. These guards were more brutal than SS officers, he said, adding that without them the camp could not have functioned.
Mr Demjanjuk, who attended the session on a stretcher, denies all charges. Only a yellowed ID card links him to the camp. His attorney says it is a forgery, that he spent the period in a prisoner-of-war camp and that his client is the victim of mistaken identity, as in an earlier trial in Israel.
Mr Demjanjuk lived in Germany after the war before moving to the US in the 1950s where he worked in the auto industry.