The 1st of September 1939. After a false  accusation that the Poles attacked a German radio station, Nazi Germany launches a “retaliatory”  campaign against Poland triggering World War 2. Poland finds itself fighting a two front  war when it is invaded by the Soviet Union from the east on the 17th of September.

 Warsaw  officially surrenders to the Germans on the 28th of September and one day later in accordance with  the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partition Poland. After defeating the Polish army, the Germans ruthlessly suppress the Poles whom they consider  to be racially inferior and, in the weeks, following the German attack on Poland, German  SS, police, and military units shoot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of  the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.

Approximately 1,8 million Jews remaining  within the area occupied by Germany are imprisoned in ghettos and after the German  invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, over 3,000,000 Polish Jews are deported to Nazi  concentration camps. Among them is Chaim Engel. Chaim Engel was born on the 10th  of January 1916 in Brudzew, Poland.

When Chaim was 5 years old, pogroms  – anti-Semitic violence – broke out in Brudzew and the Engels moved to  the industrial city of Lodz. In Lodz, the Engels lived in a predominantly Jewish  neighbourhood and most of their friends were Jews. Chaim was in his early 20’s when  his mother died of tuberculosis.

After finishing middle school, Chaim went  to work at his uncle’s textile factory. The second world war began on  the 1st of September, 1939, only 2 weeks before Chaim’s tour of duty in Polish  compulsory army service was scheduled to end. To justify the action, Nazi propagandists accused  Poland of persecuting ethnic Germans who were living in Poland.

 They also falsely claimed that  Poland was planning, with its allies Great Britain and France, to encircle and dismember Germany.  After the SS, in collusion with the German military, staged a phony attack on a German  radio station, the Germans accused the Poles. Hitler then used the action to launch a  “retaliatory” campaign against Poland. Nazi Germany possessed overwhelming  military superiority over Poland.

Germany launched the unprovoked attack at dawn  on the 1st of September with an advance force consisting of more than 2,000 tanks supported  by nearly 900 bombers and over 400 fighter planes. In all, Germany deployed 60 divisions  and nearly 1.5 million men in the invasion The assault on Poland demonstrated Germany’s  ability to combine air power and armor in a new kind of mobile warfare.

 The world adopted a new  term to describe Germany’s successful war tactic: Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” Britain and France stood by their guarantee of Poland’s border and declared war on  Germany on the 3rd of September, 1939. However, Poland found itself fighting a two front war when  the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on the 17th of September, sealing Poland’s fate. The  Polish government fled the country that same day.

The last operational Polish unit  surrendered on the 6th of October. After Poland’s defeat in early October 1939,  Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided the country in accordance with a secret protocol  to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. This agreement became known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop  pact and was signed one week before the start of the WW2 on the 23rd of August 1939 in Moscow by  German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov.  The demarcation line was along the Bug River.

The German occupation of Poland was exceptionally  brutal. The Nazis considered Poles to be racially inferior and they launched a campaign  of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture and to reduce the Poles  to a leaderless population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters.

 One  such worker became Chaim who was taken as a Jewish prisoner of war and was sent  to Leipzig in Germany for forded labor. Ethnic cleansing was to be conducted  systematically against the Polish people. In the first three months of war, from the fall  of 1939 until the spring of 1940, some 60,000 former government officials, military officers  in reserve, landowners, clergy, and members of the Polish intelligentsia such as scientists,  teachers, lawyers and doctors were executed region by region in the so-called Intelligentsia  action, including over 1,000 prisoners of war.

In the spring of 1940, the German  occupation authorities launched AB-Aktion, which was a second stage of the Nazi German  campaign of violence during World War II aimed to eliminate Poles considered to  be members of the “leadership class.” The aim was to remove those Poles seen as  most capable of organizing resistance to the German rule and to terrorize the  Polish population into submission.

The Germans shot thousands of teachers, priests,  and other intellectuals in mass killings. When in March 1940 all Jewish prisoners  of war were returned to Poland, Chaim Engel was one of them. He then  got a job at a farm near Lublin. One day a young German soldier came to the farm  where Chaim was working.

 Because Chaim spoke German, the soldier got into a conversation with  him. He did not know that Chaim was a Jew. With a sense of pride and a feeling that he had committed  some heroic act, he told Chaim that in the place he had just come from, he had raped a Jewish girl  and then cut her breasts off with his bayonet. Nazi officials imposed a labor obligation upon able-bodied Poles that came  to include children as young as 12.

 The German authorities dictated where and  how Poles were employed and could conscript Poles to perform labor in the Reich. Police grabbed  Poles off streets and trains, from marketplaces and churches, and in raids on villages and  neighborhoods to fill labor quotas. German officials sent Poles who tried to avoid  labor conscription to concentration camps and punished their families. Between 1939 and  1945, at least 1.

5 million Polish citizens were deported to German territory for forced  labor. Hundreds of thousands were also imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. In  May 1940 The Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the largest of its kind established  by the Nazi regime, was established. It is estimated that the Germans killed  between 1.8 and 1.

9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II. In addition, the Germans murdered at least 3  million Jewish citizens of Poland. Chelmno, the first killing center  for the mass murder of Jews, was established in December  1941. In 1942, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were established as a part of  Operation Reinhard which was the code name for the German plan to murder the approximately two  million Jews living in German-occupied Poland.

Into one such centre, Sobibor, Chaim Engel, his brother and a thousand other  people were deported in November 1942. German SS and police officials conducted  deportations to Sobibor between May 1942, when the regular gassing operations began, and the fall  of 1943.

 Most of the Jews brought to Sobibor were immediately gassed by carbon monoxide which had  been piped into the gas chambers from an engine. About 250,000 victims were  murdered in this killing center. Approximately 50 German and Austrian personnel  served at the site and they were generally of lower-middle-class backgrounds.

 According to  the survivors, female local civilians from the village of Sobibor were often employed in  the camp as housekeeping staff and cooks. These civilians not only had economic  incentives of the camp’s existence, but it is believed that they also knew  what was going on inside the camp. The Germans constructed Sobibor as  a rectangle – 1312 by 1969 feet.

 A double barbed-wire fence, woven with tree  branches, surrounded the perimeter of the camp. This design was intended to  hide the view of what was inside. It had two side-by-side gates, one for trains and  another for foot traffic and vehicles. The Nazis paid special attention to the front compound which  consisted of living quarters and recreational buildings for the camp personnel.

 The SS officers  lived in cottages with colorful names which helped to conceal the purpose of the camp from new  arrivals, who would arrive on the adjacent ramp. When the transports of 40 to 60 freight  cars arrived at the Sobibor railway station, only 20 cars at a time were taken into the camp, while the rest of the victims  remained locked in the rail cars. The victims were brought into the so-called  arrival area where an SS man would give a speech welcoming them saying that they had reached a  transit camp on their way to the labor camps.

 They were also told that before embarking on the next  part of their journey, they were to take showers, have their clothes disinfected and get a meal. When Chaim’s transport arrived in Sobibor, the German ordered him to step out of the column.  18 or 20 people from the entire transport were picked out. Chaim’s brother was not chosen. Then, the men and women were separated.

Children were sent with the women. The Nazis  ordered the victims to remove their clothing and hand over their valuables. The Jews were  then marched on the run to the gas chambers. The honking of the geese would obscure the cries  of victims from those still sitting in the locked rail cars as they were being beaten, screamed  at, and having warning shots fired at them.

About 450-550 Jews were forced  into the chambers at a time. The gas chamber looked like a real shower, only  instead of water gas came out. Once the maximum number of victims were inside, the gas chambers  were sealed and poisonous gas was then piped in. Within 20-30 minutes, all those inside were dead.

 Those who were too ill, weak, or elderly to make the walk to the gas chambers,  were shot in an open pit. Partly because of his good health, Chaim  was assigned to sort through clothing of the doomed prisoners. While doing  this he found his brother’s clothing, and pictures of their family  his brother had taken with him. By then Chaim had already been told by the other  inmates what was going on in the camp.

 His father and stepmother had arrived in Sobibor about 5  months before him and were immediately murdered. The SS personnel working at Sobibor enjoyed  a number of privileges such as higher pay and regular visits home – every three months  they could visit their families for 2 weeks. The SS also stole possessions of the victims  such as gold, food, hair and other valuables.

The guards would even take toys from  murdered children home to their own families. Between the transports the SS personnel were  not only drinking but also playing music as well as enjoying card and board games.  All of this was going on in a camp where thousands of people were being murdered.

 The camp’s personnel consisted of barbers, butchers, one guard had a photo store in  Weimar and there was even a champion boxer who counted how many whiplashes it took  for him to kill a Jew. He had a special, heavy whip specially made for him. Once, when the Nazis executed every 10th man standing in a line, Chaim was number 9.

 As an award for effective killing innocent men, women and children, the Sobibor personnel  had an official trip to Berlin and Potsdam. During the year and a half  that Sobibor was operational, several attempts were made  by the prisoners to escape. On one such occasion when 72 Dutch Jews were  organizing an escape and were betrayed by the kapo, they were executed on the order of  Johann Niemann, the camp’s deputy commander.

The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to  the death camps started in the summer of 1942. Transports regularly left the transit  camps of Westerbork and Vught. In one such transport, along with 2,019  other Jewish men, women and children, arrived in Sobibor in April 1943 Selma  Wijnberg, who would become Chaim’s girlfriend.

Afterward in the summer of 1943, rumors began  to circulate that Sobibor would soon cease operations and the prisoners understood that  this would mean certain death for all of them. The Sobibor prisoners knew this  since the Belzec prisoners, who did the same work as they did, had sewn  messages into their clothing before they were killed by Sobibor guards who had shot  them the same day they arrived in the camp.

The next day the Sobibor prisoners  found all their clothes full of blood. Chaim found a note in a pocket which said: “ We worked at Belzec for one year and did not know where we would be sent next. They said  it would be Germany… Now we are in Sobibor and know what to expect.

 Be aware that you will  be killed also! Avenge us! “ And they did! In September 1943 twenty Jewish Red Army  prisoners of war, the soldiers who had the necessary expertise to pull off an escape,  arrived at Sobibor on a transport from the Minsk Ghetto and were selected for labor. One of them, Alexander Pechersky, would become a leader of the revolt which began  late in the afternoon on the 14th of October 1943.

The targets were carefully selected and the first  person to be assassinated by the prisoners was the deputy commander of Sobibor Johann Niemann who was  the highest-ranking SS officer on duty that day. On that day at 4 PM, Johann  Niemann, after a ride on horseback, was lured to a scheduled appointment with  a tailor in a tailors’ barracks with the promise to be fitted for a leather  jacket taken from a murdered Jew.

When Niemann arrived at the tailors’ barracks  armed with his pistol and whip as usual, Alexander Shubayev, a Jewish Red Army prisoner, was  already waiting for him with an axe in his hand. When Niemann came inside and asked the tailor what  Shubayev was doing there with an axe, the tailor replied that he was there to repair the table.

  The tailor then asked Niemann to remove his pistol holster, put on the jacket and turn around and  check if any alterations were needed in the back. When Niemann complied, Alexander Shubayev  snuck up behind him and buried the axe into the back of his head splitting his  scull open. Niemann was dead on the spot. One of the targets was Rudolf Beckmann who was  to be killed by 2 inmates, but in the last minute one of them got scared and did not want to go.

 Chaim Engel, knowing that there was no turning back because too many Germans were dead,  volunteered to kill Beckmann in his office Chaim and a kapo named Pozyczki went to  the administration building where they found Beckmann behind his desk. While Pozyczki  restrained Beckmann, Engel stabbed their overseer with a bread knife and with every stab Chaim  cried, “This is for my father, for my brother, and for all the Jews you killed.

” Beckmann tried  to fight back causing Engel’s knife to slip, cutting his own hand and covering him  with blood. But this did not stop him. When Beckmann was dead, the two, not having enough  time to better hide his body, pushed Beckmann under the desk and took his rifle. When Chaim  came out, Selma, his Dutch Jewish girlfriend, was there and cleaned his face which was covered with  Beckmann’s blood and put something on his wound.

In total 11 SS officers were killed by the rebels. Chaos then took over; prisoners had to  escape by climbing over the barbed wire fences or running out the main gate through  a mine field under heavy machine gun fire. Some stepped on mines. Some gave up and didn’t  run at all.

 Chaim Engel belonged to those who did. He grabbed his girlfriend Selma and ran  to the main gate. They made it outside and ran into the woods. After running the whole night,  they made it only 6 kilometers from the camp. Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape,  but most of those were chased down and killed. Those prisoners who had not  joined the escape were killed, as well. And only some 50 of the  escapees did survive the war.

After the prisoner revolt, the SS chief Heinrich  Himmler ordered that the Sobibor camp be closed, Chaim and Selma, with hardly any  food, for about 2 weeks walked at night and tried to stay hidden during  the day. Either some farmer took them in, or they hid in a field.

 When they were still  in the camp and knew that they would run away, Chaim and Selma took with them valuables such  as diamonds, gold coins, jewelry and money, which they had found in the clothes  of the transported prisoners. They had hoped that the money and jewels would  one day save their lives. And they did. The Polish farmers kept Chaim and Selma  save in exchange for the valuables they had.

One day in June 1944, starving,  frightened and infested with lice, they approached a farmhouse and asked the  farmer if he would be willing to hide them. The farmer dressed Selma as an old lady and  put Chaim on a wagon, covered with branches, and drove them to his brother who was  living about 10 kilometres away in a better, more isolated location.

 They lived for 9  months in a hayloft of a barn, without being able to go outside and always scared that they  might be found or turned over to the police. They were covered in lice and bug bites and  had very little water or food to eat from the family that hid them. In these  months they got to know each other, learning each other’s languages, writing in a  diary about all that had happened at Sobibor, and wondering about their future. By this  point they considered themselves to be married.

They were liberated by Red  Army on the 23rd of July 1944. When Selma tried to dress in a clothes, she had  been saving for that occasion for nine months, they did not fit as she was pregnant. They left the village in August 1944 and fled to Parczewo where they got married and their  son Emilje was born.

 Because of the attacks on Jewish survivors, they left Poland in 1945. Their  journey to Odessa lasted from January to May 1945. During the following sea voyage from Odessa  to Marseilles, their son Emilje died. After they reached the Netherlands by train,  they lived in Zwolle, Selma’s hometown and together with Abraham, Selma’s brother and his  wife, who also survived the Holocaust, they ran the family hotel. Their daughter Alida and  son Ferdinand were born there in 1946 and 1948.

However, life in the Netherlands was not easy for  them. The police of Zwolle decided that Selma, by marrying Chaim, a Pole, had lost her  citizenship and became a Polish citizen, too. The Dutch government even tried to  send both Chaim and Selma back to Poland. In addition, Selma received a lot of letters  from Dutch people who had lost their families at Sobibor. They were asking her if she could give  any information about those who did not return.

However, Selma did not see any of 34,000 Dutch  Jews who were killed in the camp. Working in the clothes sorting area at Sobibor, she only  saw their clothes after they had been gassed. The family emigrated to Israel  in 1951 and then to the USA in 1957 where Chaim started his own  business and became a jeweller.

Until the end of their lives, Chaim and  Selma remained in contact with the Poles who had saved their lives and kept helping  them financially as much as they could. Later in the 1980s they started to travel  around Connecticut and nearby areas. For over 25 years they told their story  at schools and to community groups.

Chaim and Selma could never comprehend how  anyone could deny the fact that there had been concentration camps despite all the  survivors who were and still are around. They felt that telling their life story and  all that had happened was their obligation and because so many millions who died would  never be able to come back and tell them.

Another reason to tell their story was  that the Nazis tried to remove all traces of the mass murder with regards to Operation  Reinhard and make the world believe that it never happened. At Belzec and Treblinka, the  Nazi authorities even built a manor house and planted trees and crops to disguise  the area as a farm.

 Chaim and Selma, two of very few who survived, wanted to  speak on behalf of 1.7 million Jews who had been killed as part of Operation Reinhard which  had been designed as the ‘perfect mass murder’. However, despite everything, they  lived a happy life together until 2003 when Chaim passed away at the age of  87. Selma died in 2018 at the age of 96.

They were both surrounded by their  2 children and grandchildren. There were many tears shed  for Chaim and Selma Engel. Thanks for watching the World History  Channel please help us to create more videos by clicking on the donation link thank  you and see you next time on the channel.