Tomasz Blatt

Tomasz Blatt, born in 1927 in Izbica.

As a teenager, Tomasz Blatt experienced the hell of the transitional ghetto created by the Germans in his native Izbica. He later ended up in the extermination camp in Sobibor, amongst the few of its  prisoners. He was one of the few to survive the camp and the uprising of the prisoners in October 1943. He lived to testify of the Holocaust and did so tirelessly until his death.

“Blatt was a witness in the post-war trials of the perpetrators, including the head of the Gestapo in Izbica, Kurt Engels. Engels had a Jewish boy Mojszełe, who worked for him. He took care of the garden. Engels talked to him about growing flowers. He liked him. “You’re a cool boy,” Engels used to say to Mojshełe. “You will die the last one and I will shoot you personally so that you do not suffer.” Blatt confirmed that the Gestapo man had kept his word” – an excerpt from Hannah Krall’s reportage “Portrait with a bullet in the jaw.”