Thomas Toivi Blatt

Thomas Toivi Blatt, who was among a small number of Jews to survive a mass escape from the Nazi death camp of Sobibor in 1943, has died, according to the Associated Press. He was 88. Blatt, who lost both parents and a younger brother in the gas chambers of Sobibor, died Saturday morning at his home in Santa Barbara, California, a Warsaw-based friend, Alan Heath, told The Associated Press. Heath remembered Blatt as a "quiet and modest person" who suffered nightmares and depression until the end of his life, yet never wanted vengeance either on the Germans for the murder of the Jews or for the complicity of many of his anti-Semitic Polish countrymen. "Despite what had happened to his family, he constantly repeated that one should not hate and he certainly bore no malice towards Germans — and urged others to do the same," Heath said on Monday. Blatt gave lectures about the Holocaust, wrote two books and campaigned to preserve the site of one of the few uprisings by Jewish inmates against Nazi guards during World War II. Blatt was born in Izbica, a town in southeastern Poland near Lublin that was largely Jewish and Yiddish-speaking before the war although his family wasn't devout. Blatt was was 15 when the Germans created a ghetto in the town in 1942, where he and his family were imprisoned. Six months after he arrived at Sobibor, Blatt took part in the camp's successful uprising, in which most of the Nazis were killed and 300 prisoners escaped. Most who escaped ended up being hunted down and killed, but Blatt was among about 60 who survived the war. He eventually emigrated to the United States, where he settled in Santa Barbara, California, and owned three electronics stores in the area. Years later, he was a witness in the trial of the retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, which ran from 2009 to 2011. Demjanjuk, originally from Ukraine, was convicted as an accessory to murder in 2011 but he died in 2012 still steadfastly maintaining he had never served as a death camp guard. In his 2010 interview, he spoke of the depression that would hit him after he would lecture about the Holocaust and first thing every morning, often after experiencing nightmares, when the reality of what he suffered would hit him again. He said that the longer he lived the more he thought about his beloved little brother, a highly intelligent and gifted boy. "I never escaped from Sobibor. I'm still there — in my dreams, in everything," Blatt said. "My point of reference is always Sobibor." Blatt is survived by three children and several grandchildren. A funeral will be held at the Congregation B'nai B'rith in Santa Barbara on Wednesday at 12:30 p.m., said daughter Rena Smith. She said the eulogy will be given by Eli Rosenbaum, a longtime Nazi hunter with the U.S. Justice Department. Arrangements entrusted to McDermott-Crockett and Associates Mortuary (805) 569-2424.