The Sobibor Memorial Site is the principal commemoration of the Sobibor extermination camp in eastern Poland, where between 170,000 and 250,000 Jews were murdered between May 1942 and October 1943. The memorial occupies the site of the former camp near the village of Sobibór in Lublin Voivodeship, around 280 kilometres east of Warsaw and close to the present Polish border with Belarus. The memorial in its present form was opened on 29 April 2020 after a substantial archaeological investigation and redesign that ran from 2007 to 2019; it replaces the much smaller original Polish memorial that had been on the site since 1965.
The camp that was destroyed
Sobibor was one of the three Operation Reinhard extermination camps, alongside Belzec and Treblinka, established for the murder of the Polish Jewish population. It operated for around eighteen months between May 1942 and October 1943 and was the smallest of the three camps by death toll. The camp was constructed in a forested area near the Bug river that had been chosen for its remoteness and for the rail connection. Approximately 170,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor, principally from Poland, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia, the Soviet Union and the Reich. The Sonderkommando revolt of 14 October 1943 was the most successful of the camp prisoner uprisings; around 300 prisoners escaped, of whom around 50 survived the war. The Germans liquidated the camp in the weeks following the revolt, demolished the buildings, planted the site over with pine trees and built a small farmhouse on the perimeter to disguise the location.
As at Treblinka, the post-war reconstruction of what had happened at Sobibor depended on a small number of survivors and a smaller body of surviving German records. The most-cited survivor accounts were those of Thomas Blatt, Stanislaw Szmajzner, Esther Raab, Selma Engel-Wijnberg, Philip Bialowitz and Semion Rozenfeld; their testimony, given over the post-war decades, constitutes the principal account of the camp’s operation.
The original 1965 memorial
The original memorial at Sobibor was opened in 1965 and consisted of a small mound of ashes (the Mound of Ashes, made from human remains and ash recovered from the camp area), a stone-faced platform with a stylised sculpture, and an avenue of stones leading to the mound. The original memorial was small and the site itself was substantially neglected through the post-war Communist period; it received few visitors and minimal conservation work. The 2007 to 2019 redevelopment was undertaken in response to the recognition that the memorial was inadequate to the scale of the killing it commemorated and that the site itself, much of which lay under Polish state forestry land, had been only partially identified and protected.
The 2007 to 2019 archaeological investigation
The archaeological investigation, conducted by a Polish, Slovak, Israeli and Dutch team led by Yoram Haimi (Israel Antiquities Authority) and Wojciech Mazurek (Subterranea Investigations, Poland), was the most substantial archaeological work conducted at any of the Reinhard camps. The investigation located and mapped the foundations of the gas chambers, the prisoner barracks, the SS quarters, the rail unloading ramp, the so-called Tube (the path the deportees walked from the unloading area to the gas chambers) and several mass burial sites. The recovered artefacts (estimated at over 60,000 individual objects) include personal effects of the murdered, fragments of identity documents, a small number of inscribed objects that allowed individual identifications, and the structural remains of the gas-chamber buildings whose location had previously been only approximately known.
The archaeological work was the basis for the redesigned memorial. The location of the gas chambers, previously approximated, was precisely known after the investigation; the new memorial was designed around the verified locations rather than around the assumed ones. The Mound of Ashes was retained at its original location; new structures and pathways were designed around the recovered features.
The 2020 memorial
The redesigned memorial, designed by the Polish architects Marcin Urbanek, Łukasz Mieszkowski and Piotr Michalewicz, was opened on 29 April 2020 (the formal opening, scheduled for the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, was held under COVID-19 restrictions). The new memorial includes the renovated Mound of Ashes; a new Museum of the Former Nazi German Sobibor Death Camp building on the perimeter (which houses the permanent exhibition, the recovered artefacts, the survivor testimony and the educational facilities); the redesigned Avenue of Memory leading from the museum to the Mound; the Tube, the path from the unloading area to the chambers, marked by a long open corridor of low memorial walls; and the Field of Stones, an open area at the centre of the camp on which 70,000 small inscribed stones have been placed by visitors and donors over the years.
The memorial site is small compared to Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka but receives, since the 2020 reopening, around 50,000 visitors per year. The visitor route requires deliberate effort to reach (Sobibór is a small village on a minor railway line) and the experience is, on visitor reports, one of substantial physical and emotional engagement with a remote killing site.
The standing of the memorial
The Sobibor memorial is one of the principal physical commemorations of the Operation Reinhard killing programme. Together with the Belzec memorial (substantially redesigned in 2004) and the Treblinka memorial (1964), it constitutes the Polish national memorial landscape on the Reinhard camps. The 2020 reopening, with its archaeological foundation and substantially expanded museum, brought Sobibor to the level of preservation and presentation that the historiography of the camp had long warranted. The 80th anniversary of the camp uprising in October 2023 was marked by ceremonies attended by descendants of the survivors and by the Polish, Israeli, Dutch and Slovak governments.
See also
- The Sonderkommando
- The Netherlands
- Slovakia
- The Six Death Camps
- The Sobibor Revolt 1943
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Berlin
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
- Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, 2007 (Schelvis was a survivor of Sobibor; this is the principal scholarly history)
- Thomas Blatt, Sobibor: The Forgotten Revolt, HEP, 1996
- Yoram Haimi, Wojciech Mazurek and Ivar Schute, “Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres”, in Present Pasts, vol 6 no 1, 2014
- Caroline Sturdy Colls, Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions, Springer, 2015 (chapters on the Sobibor archaeology)
- Museum of the Former Nazi German Sobibor Death Camp, https://sobibor-memorial.eu
- Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka State Museum, https://muzeumbelzec.pl (the parent institution since 2012)