The Silence of Sobibor

The most remarkable thing we encountered during the research for this podcast is a stack of unknown photos from Sobibor. They are unique; they've never been seen in the West before. They were pasted into a photo album by a lieutenant colonel from the infamous secret service of the Soviet Union, the NKVD, Nikolai Volski. Bernolf Kramer from the Stichting Sobibor found them on a Russian website, pro...

We now know what it was like to enter the Sobibor extermination camp, even though the Germans tried to keep its existence secret at the time. Prisoners revolted, they escaped and told the world what happened there. Only, the people who survived Sobibor are no longer with us. The people who consciously experienced the war as children will soon be gone too. Who will then tell what happened when ther...

A Dutch newspaper in 1950, page twelve in a three-line report. “Erich Bauer, a 50-year-old former SS officer, has been sentenced to death by a West Berlin court. He is accused of gassing hundreds of thousands of Jews.” In the report, the name of Sobibor is mangled to ‘Silobor’. The trial against one of the guards of the Sobibor extermination camp made little impression in the Dutch media at the ti...

“You lived in Sobibor in constant fear. Every moment could be your last.” This is a statement from Selma Wijnberg about the time she spent as a forced laborer in Sobibor. What did that fear do to the rest of her life? How do you prevent passing that fear on to your children? It is the central theme of this episode, which revolves in part around epigenetics: how events in your life change your DNA....

How must it feel when you watch television and see the world briefly pause for the death of Selma Wijnberg, and the newsreader says: "The last Dutch survivor of Sobibor has passed away." And you know Selma, because you were in Sobibor just like her. And you too barely survived the camp. It happened to Sophie Huisman, who lived for many more years and in the 1960s recorded her story on a tape recor...

You can form an idea of what Auschwitz looked like just by walking around it, as the iconic gatehouse with its fencing is still there. In Sobibor, almost the entire camp was razed to the ground. Sobibor was a secret camp where no photos were allowed. It was a visual black hole in history until a camp guard's grandson found some photo albums in his grandmother's attic. Suddenly, Sobibor gained a fa...

Sobibor, an extermination camp from the war, in the far east of Eastern Poland, at the tripoint with Belarus and Ukraine. On quiet days, you can hear the war in the distance. If ten people were murdered on your local football pitch, you would likely never forget it. There would be a monument, commemorations. A documentary. And what if a hundred people were murdered there? Or a thousand? Or ten tho...