Saturday, December 24, 2011

Overview
and Historiography of Aktion Reinhard

Between March 1942 and
October 1943, nearly 1.4 million Jews were deported to the camps of Belzec,
Sobibor and Treblinka. The camps were operated under the auspices of the SS and
Police Leader (SS- und Polizeiführer, SSPF) Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, and used
the codename ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ or ‘Aktion Reinhard’. German SS men along with
companies of Ukrainian auxiliaries trained at the Trawniki camp manned the
camps in detachments designated ‘SS-Sonderkommando’. The majority of the German
staff had previously served in six euthanasia ‘institutes’ in Germany as part
of the T4 organisation named after its headquarters on Tiergartenstrasse 4 in
Berlin. There they had helped murder 70,000 ‘incurable’ psychiatric patients
using carbon monoxide gas dispensed from cylinders, and to cremate the bodies.

The overwhelming majority of the
1.4 million Jewish deportees to the Aktion Reinhard camps died either en route
or immediately after arrival, victims of the Nazi ‘Final Solution of the Jewish
Question’. A tiny percentage were selected after arrival for forced labour
either in the three camps or, more rarely, in nearby labour camps, work which
the majority did not survive. A significant number of the deportees died en
route while still on the trains from asphyxiation or exhaustion. Many more were
shot immediately after arrival for resisting or because they were deemed too
weak to walk towards the main killing method at the three camps, gas chambers into
which carbon monoxide-laden engine exhaust fumes were piped. At first, the
corpses of the victims – from whatever cause – were dragged to mass graves by
the Jewish slave labourers who had been temporarily spared execution and buried
there; later on, the decomposed and decomposing bodies were exhumed and burned
on large open-air pyres along with the corpses of newly arrived victims. In two
of the three camps, the slave labourers successfully revolted, breaking out of
Treblinka in August 1943 and Sobibor in October 1943.

Most of the victims of Aktion
Reinhard were Polish Jews from the Warsaw, Radom, Cracow, Lublin and Galicia
districts of the Generalgouvernement as well as the Zichenau and Bialystok
districts annexed into Germany proper. But transports arrived directly or
indirectly at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka from Germany, Austria, the
so-called ‘Protectorate’ of Bohemia-Moravia (today’s Czech Republic), Slovakia,
the Yugoslavian region of Macedonia, the Greek region of Thrace, France, the
Netherlands, Lithuania and Belorussia. Virtually none survived. Precisely two
out of 17,004 Jews deported from Theresienstadt to Treblinka in the autumn of
1942 were alive at the time of liberation. Among those who did not survive were
three of Sigmund Freud’s sisters.[31]
Of the 34,313 Jews deported from the Netherlands to Sobibor in the spring and
early summer of 1943, just 18 survived the war.[32]

How do we know all this? How
did we come to know about Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka? A short answer to this
question would go something like this: during the war, reports began to appear
within a month of the opening of Belzec that large numbers of Jews were
entering the camp and not coming out.[33]
A growing number of reports reaching the Polish underground state, the
Delegatura, as well as Jewish organizations such as the Oneg Shabes archive in
Warsaw[34],
led virtually all within Poland quickly to conclude that Belzec, Sobibor and
Treblinka were sites of extermination. Hearsay rumours of the use of
electricity and steam circulated among the Polish and Jewish population of
Poland as well as among German occupation officials and troops, but the
majority of the reports in Poland converged on the use of gas chambers.
Eyewitness accounts were written at the time by a small number of escaped
prisoners.[35]
The news was communicated in partially distorted form to the outside world.
Reports of Belzec and Sobibor reached London along with reports on the Chelmno
extermination camp in the annexed territory of the Warthegau, in June 1942.[36]
A further crucial report, combining information compiled by Oneg Shabes with
Polish underground sources, was brought out by the Polish underground courier
Jan Karski in November 1942[37],
and together with other evidence from other regions of Nazi-occupied Europe, led
the Allies to issue a declaration in December 1942 condemning the Nazi
extermination of the Jews.[38]
Further reports leaked out via exchanges of citizens of Mandate Palestine with
interned Germans[39],
Slovakia[40],
Sweden[41]
and into Germany.[42]
By 1943, the Polish underground was tracking the course of the extermination
campaign as well as the cover-up attempts of the Nazis at the camps very
closely.[43]
Wartime publications outside Nazi-occupied Europe reprinted some of the most
crucial early reports, complete with inaccuracies such as misidentifying gas
chambers as steam chambers[44],
while other publications, based on more recent reports without the distortion
of wartime hearsay and Chinese whispers, spoke of gas chambers[45],
and newspapers reprinted testimonies from Treblinka escapees offering a
detailed account of the extermination process.[46]

In the summer of 1944, the sites of
the three camps were overrun in the Soviet summer offensive, and survivors
began to come out of hiding, joining nearby villagers who had observed the
killing and burning on their doorsteps in giving testimonies and statements to
Polish and Soviet investigators[47]
as well as Polish and Soviet journalists[48];
these recipients were soon joined by the Central Jewish Historical Commission
of Poland[49],
which took down further testimonies and also began the process of historical
research by sifting through captured German documents[50]
as well as publishing memoirs, narrative accounts and studies in Polish and
Yiddish.[51]
The sites – which rapidly resembled moonscapes due to grave-robbing by peasants
and others searching for imaginary ‘Jewish gold’ – were inspected in 1944 by the Soviets and
examined in greater detail by investigators of the Polish Main Commission in
the autumn of 1945. Enormous quantities of ash from cremains as well as other
body parts littered the sites, which stank according to visitors who recorded
their impressions at the time.[52]
Utilising eyewitness testimonies, the physical inspections and investigations
of the condition of the sites and a certain number of captured German
documents, the Polish Main Commission concluded that Belzec, Sobibor and
Treblinka had been extermination camps and estimated the number of victims at
1,631,000 (Belzec: 600,000; Sobibor: 250,000; Treblinka: 781,000), rejecting
earlier overestimates from disoriented survivors that ranged up to 2 or 3
million per camp.[53]
The evidence gathered was then used in certain trials of Nazi officials
extradited to postwar Poland. For example the Treblinka investigation was
submitted in toto at the trial of Ludwig Fischer, the governor of the Warsaw
district.[54]

At the same time as investigations
in Poland were under way, eyewitnesses began to give testimonies in Western
Europe, some from survivors and some from SS men who had visited the camps or
knew of their purpose. German documentary evidence, not least from the official
diary of Hans Frank’s Generalgouvernement administration, was examined and
conclusively proved that Nazi policy towards Polish Jews was one of
extermination, leaving only a minority alive temporarily as slave
labourers. The International Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg as well as the successor Doctors’ Trial[55]
and Oswald Pohl Trial collectively uncovered the evidence of the T4-Aktion
Reinhard connection, the involvement of the SS Economic and Administration Main
Office (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, WVHA) in the processing of
plunder as well as the role of Odilo Globocnik in directing Aktion Reinhard.[56]
The Dutch Red Cross launched a systematic investigation of the fate of the
34,313 Dutch Jews deported to Sobibor, based on the records of the Westerbork
transit camp in the Netherlands and the testimonies of the 18 survivors.[57]
Dutch cooperation with the Polish Main Commission over Sobibor was close.[58]

By the end of the 1940s, the
evidence for extermination at the Aktion Reinhard Camps was sufficiently
conclusive that they could be labeled a historical fact. However, only a
fraction of the total evidence had hitherto come to light. Historians began the
process of ­research, aided on the one hand by the publication of many
documents and other sources from the 1940s trials, but hampered by lack of
access to the full range of sources – as was universal in an era before anyone
had thought of a Freedom of Information Act. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were
prominently discussed in all of the original pioneering overviews by Leon
Poliakov, Gerald Reitlinger, Arthur Eisenbach and Raul Hilberg published from
1951 to 1961.[59]
Indeed, Eisenbach published the first short English-language overview of Aktion
Reinhard in 1962.[60]
Outside the academy, survivors and members of the landsmanshaften of the
erased Jewish communities of Poland began to compile so-called yizker bukher
or memorial books, and a number of these memorial books contained the
testimonies of Sobibor and Treblinka survivors, as well as copious detail on
the deportations, and escapes from deportation trains.[61]

In contrast to other Nazi camps,
the staff of Aktion Reinhard was slow to be apprehended, not least because the
camps were closed down and the personnel transferred to other duties long
before the end of war, whereas concentration camp staff was generally captured
in or near to concentration camps in the spring of 1945. Many, like Christian
Wirth, the “inspector” of the three camps, had died during the war. Globocnik
had committed suicide in 1945, and key subordinates such as Franz Stangl, the
commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka, had assumed false identities and later
fled to Latin America. Thus it was not until 1948-1950 that the first SS men
who had served at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were interrogated about their
activities by detectives from the newly created state of West Germany, in the
course of the judicial investigation of the T4 euthanasia program, and then put
on trial.[62]
Their Ukrainian auxiliaries, however, had been apprehended and interrogated in
ever increasing numbers by Soviet investigators starting in September 1944, but
it was not until several decades later that these statements began to be made
available in the West.[63]
In 1958, West Germany began to investigate Nazi crimes systematically through
the Central Office of State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of
National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur
Aufklärung nationalsocialistischer Verbrechen)[64],
and succeeded in apprehending a significant number of the Aktion Reinhard SS,
prosecuting them in a series of trials in the 1960s while also investigating
and prosecuting the crimes of other SS and Police commands that had been
involved in the deportation side of Aktion Reinhard.[65]
The capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann prompted a further bout of publications
of evidence of Nazi crimes, including the crimes of Aktion Reinhard[66],
and saw a number of survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka give evidence during the
trial.[67]

At the same time, there were a
series of trials of Trawniki men in the Soviet Union. From the 1970s, judicial
investigations of Aktion Reinhard revolved almost entirely around the Trawniki
men, with trials in West Germany of the commandant of Trawniki, Karl Streibel,
as well as of a Trawniki man assigned to the Treblinka I labour camp. Trawnikis
who had emigrated to the United States and Canada began to be investigated from
the end of the 1970s, in the US under the auspices of the Office of Special
Investigations[68],
and in Canada by a unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. These
investigations benefited from increased cooperation between the Soviet Union,
West Germany and North America, and led to denaturalization proceedings and the
deportation of Nazis and their collaborators who had lied while immigrating.
The most prominent case involved a Trawniki man, Ivan Demjanjuk, who was
denaturalized and deported to Israel, which prosecuted him for his alleged role
at Treblinka in 1987, convicting him and sentencing him to death.[69]
This sentence was overturned on appeal due to the emergence of new evidence and
the realisation that this was a case of mistaken identity[70];
Demjanjuk had not been “Ivan the Terrible” but had in fact been a guard at
Sobibor. Returning to the US, Demjanjuk was again denaturalized and deported to
Germany in 2009, where he was put on trial in 2010 and convicted in May 2011,
almost certainly the last man to be tried for his involvement in Aktion
Reinhard.[71]

Our knowledge of Belzec, Sobibor
and Treblinka does not, however, rest solely on judicial investigations. From
the 1960s onwards, journalists, freelance writers and documentary film-makers
portrayed these camps using classic journalistic methods, interviewing
survivors and perpetrators.[72]
The first such journalistic account, by Jean-Francois Steiner, led to a major
public controversy in France in the mid-1960s.[73]
Survivors of the camps also offered their own accounts, producing a series of
memoirs and in some cases, engaging in their own historical research.[74]
Survivors were also responsible for editing two important collections of
testimonies from Treblinka and Sobibor that appeared in 1979 and 1980
respectively.[75]
Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who visited Belzec in August 1942 and witnessed a
gassing, became a kind of icon in postwar West Germany due to the widespread
dissemination of his eyewitness account and the ambiguity of his role as an SS
officer responsible for supplying Auschwitz with Zyklon B but who also tried to
spread the news of extermination.[76]

From an even earlier stage,
historians examined the Aktion Reinhard camps both in their own right and in
the context of other aspects of the Holocaust. Documents were uncovered that
had remained unknown to the earlier war crimes investigations; contemporary
sources ranging from diaries and letters to the contents of Jewish underground
archives, the intelligence reports of the Delegatura and Polish underground
newspapers were edited and published. Some historians writing on Aktion
Reinhard, like Wolfgang Scheffler, had served as an expert witness in the West
German trials and produced no comprehensive overview.[77]
Others, like the Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad, a survivor of the Wilno ghetto
and a sometime director of Yad Vashem, contributed essays and encyclopedia
entries on the Aktion Reinhard camps and also produced the first comprehensive
monograph of all three camps in 1987.[78]
In the 1980s, writers and historians such as Ernst Klee, Michael Burleigh and
Henry Friedlander also explored the connection between the T4 euthanasia
program and the Nazi Final Solution.[79]
A variety of brochures and short books from Polish and German authors and
historians of varying calibres have appeared in recent decades.[80]
Amateur researchers such as Michael Tregenza[81]
as well as historians working largely outside the academy such as Robin O’Neil[82] and Stephen Tyas[83]
have played a significant role in discovering new documents or researching
camps such as Belzec, while the German private researcher Peter Witte has done
important work on Sobibor and the surrounding context of Aktion Reinhard.[84]

At the same time, professional
historians have not remained idle, most notably in Poland, where earlier
discussions at conferences of the 1980s[85]
have given way to a fairly systematic research effort. A major conference on
‘Aktion Reinhard’ was held in the German Historical Institute in Warsaw in
2002, with the proceedings published in both German and Polish in 2004,
bringing together articles by Polish, German, Israeli and American historians
on many aspects of Aktion Reinhard.[86]
By the 2000s, biographies and biographical essays on key perpetrators within
Aktion Reinhard, including Odilo Globocnik[87],
the first commandant of Treblinka, Irmfried Eberl[88],
but also more junior SS men[89],
were appearing. The publication of the camps encyclopedia Ort des Terrors
in the late 2000s combined rather insubstantial entries based on secondary
literature for Sobibor and Treblinka, written by the editors Barbara Distel and
Wolfgang Benz, with a thorough description of Belzec written by the director of
the Belzec Museum, Dr. Robert Kuwałek[90],
whose monograph on Belzec appeared in Polish in late 2010.[91]
Kuwałek’s counterpart at the Sobibor Museum, Marek Bem, has recently edited a
collection of testimonies in Polish[92],
while Russian researchers have produced an oral history of the Sobibor revolt
from accounts of Russian survivors.[93]
A series of articles on the Trawnikis have also appeared in academic journals
and edited collections, including examinations of the cohort of Trawnikis at
Belzec by Dieter Pohl[94]
as well as studies by David Rich and Peter Black, researchers who work or have
worked for the OSI and its successor office within the US Department of Justice
on Trawniki cases.[95]
Work has also been done on the memorialisation of the sites, research which has
uncovered further information about the condition of the sites from 1944 to the
erection of memorials from the 1960s onwards.[96]
Finally, in the late 1990s and 2000s, archaeologists, most notably Andrzej
Kola, have examined the sites of Belzec[97]
and Sobibor[98]
and provided much more information than had been possible with 1940s techniques
and the limited resources of devastated postwar Poland, especially on the size
and shape of the mass graves, using techniques such as aerial photography and
bore-probes. Further archaeological work is planned for Treblinka.[99]

The question “how do we know about Belzec,
Sobibor and Treblinka?” is thus answered: from a variety of investigations.
Some have been legal, some have been what the Russians call “medico-legal”,
i.e. forensic; some archaeological; some journalistic; many historical.
Accumulating over time, our knowledge and understanding of the three camps –
just as with any historical event – has deepened and been refined
progressively. Moreover, this process will not stop any time soon. Quite aside
from the prospect of further archaeological research, historians of the
Holocaust are exceedingly unlikely to leave the subject of the Aktion Reinhard
camps alone. The results of the past two decades of research, especially since
the end of the Cold War and the opening up of archives in Eastern Europe, have
accumulated faster than they can be synthesised into a single work. The time is
ripe for a comprehensive monograph on the Aktion Reinhard camps, since our
understanding of both the camps themselves as well as their context has changed
considerably in the last quarter-century.[100]
One or more will undoubtedly be written within the next five to ten years.
Bemoaning its absence today would be to commit the single-study fallacy, and to
ignore how the exact same issue confronts virtually every topic. Research is
ultimately no different to painting the proverbial Forth Bridge: as soon as you
have completed one coat, you have to do it all over again.

[32] Schelvis, Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, New York,
2007, p.227 n.12: “Earlier publications reported nineteen survivors. However,
one of the women, Jeanette de Vries-Blitz, who registered as a survivor with
the Red Cross, was actually never at Sobibór according to the Rijksinstituut
voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (NIOD).”

[35] Most notably the comprehensive account by Treblinka escapee Abraham
Krzepicki, given to Oneg Shabes and published after the war as Abraham Krzepicki,
‘Treblinka’, Biuletyn ZIH 43-44, 1962, pp.84-109, translated in Alexander Donat (ed.), The Death Camp
Treblinka, New York: Holocaust Library, 1979, as well as the account by
Yankiel Wiernik, Rok w Treblince, Warsaw, 1944, translated as A Year
In Treblinka, New York, 1944; two more wartime (1943-44) accounts by
escapees from the Treblinka extermination camp and labour camp have recently
been published as Israel Cymlich and Oskar Strawczynski, Escaping Hell in
Treblinka. New York: Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs
Project, 2007.

[36] A good summary of this phase is in Dariusz Stola, ‘Early News of
the Holocaust from Poland’, HGS 11/1, 1997, pp.1-27. For background on
the Polish government-in-exile’s reactions to the Holocaust, see David Engel, In
the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews,
1939-1942. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, and Facing a Holocaust. The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews
1943-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1993.

[38] The spread of reports of extermination is well covered in Walter Laqueur,
The Terrible Secret. An Investigation into the Suppression of Information
About Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. London, 1980 and Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz
and the Allies. London, 1981.

[39] Tuvia Frilling, Arrows in the Dark. David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv
Leadership, and Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust. Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

[44] Jacob Apenszlak (ed), The Black Book of Polish Jewry. An Account
of the Martyrdom of Polish Jewry under the Nazi Occupation. New York, 1943.

[45] Jacob Apenszlak and Moshe Polakiewicz, Armed Resistance of the
Jews in Poland. New York: American Federation of Polish Jews, 1944.

[46]Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 13.1.1944. The account published
here is identical with the information conveyed by David Milgroim, who escaped
Treblinka in 1942, via Slovakia in August 1943. See Richard Breitman, ‘Other
Responses to the Holocaust’ in: Richard Breitman, Norman W. Goda, Timothy
Naftali and Robert Wolfe (eds), U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.45-72, here p.51

[48] The best known accounts are: Vasily Grossman, Treblinksii ad,
Moscow 1944 and many subsequent reprints/translations; Ilya Ehrenburg,
‘Sobibor’, in: Jewish Black Book Committee, The Black book: the Nazi
crime against the Jewish people. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946 and also intended
to be published in the suppressed Russian-language edition of the Black Book.

[49] On the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, see Laura Jockusch, ‘Collect
and Record! Help to Write the History of the Latest Destruction!’ Jewish
Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943-1953, PhD, New York University,
2007, pp.146-237; Feliks Tych, ‘The Emergence of Holocaust Research in Poland:
The Jewish Historical Commission and the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland
(ŻIH), 1944-1989’ in David Bankier and Dan Michman (eds), Holocaust
Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements,
Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008, pp.227-244.

[50] Samples of both testimonies and documents were published in the
three volumes of the Dokumenty i materialy series.

[51] A good overview of the early historiography of the Holocaust in
Poland can be found in Natalia Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography of the
Holocaust – Between Silence and Public Debate’, German History Vol 22 No
3, 2004, pp.406-432.

[61] On the memorial books see Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin
(eds), From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 2nd expanded edition.

[62] Dick de Mildt, In The Name of the People: Perpetrators of
Genocide in the Reflection of their Postwar Prosecution in West Germany. The
‘Euthanasia’ and ‘Aktion Reinhard’ Trial Cases. The Hague, 1996; Michael S.
Bryant, Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial,
1945-1953. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005.

[67] See the transcript published as State of Israel, Ministry of
Justice (ed), The Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Record of Proceedings in the
District Court of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 1993 , available online at http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/.
On the role of witnesses at the Eichmann trial, see Lawrence Douglas, The
Memory of Judgement. Making Law And History In The Trials Of The Holocaust.
London: Yale University Press, 2001, pp.97-182

[68] On the early years of the OSI, see Allan Ryan, Quiet Neighbors.
Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America, New York, 1984; on Canadian context see David Matas with Susan
Charendoff, Justice Delayed: Nazi War Criminals in Canada, Toronto:
Summerhill Press, 1987; Howard Margolian, Unauthorized Entry: The Truth
about War Criminals in Canada, 1946-1956, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2000.

[69] For accounts of the trial, see Tom Teicholz, Ivan the Terrible.
The Trial of John Demjanjuk. London, 1990
as well as the memoir of his defense lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, Show
Trial. The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk as ‚Ivan the Terrible’.
London, 1994.

[70] The most comprehensive examination of the mistaken identity aspect
of the case is in Willem A. Wagenaar, Identifying Ivan. A Case Study in
Legal Psychology. Hemel Hempsted, 1988. Wagenaar was an expert witness for
Demjanjuk’s defense.

[72] Jean-François Steiner, Treblinka, Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard,
1966; English edition: Simon and
Schuster, New York 1967; Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness. New York,
1974; Richard Rashke, Escape from Sobibor: The Heroic Story of the Jews Who
Escaped a Nazi Death Camp. New York, 1982. The French film-maker
interviewed Franz Suchomel as well as bystanders and survivors of Treblinka for
his documentary ‘Shoa’. See Claude Lanzmann,
Shoa, Paris: Editions Fayard, 1985, translated as Shoa, DaCapo
Press, New York 1995.

[83] Most notably, by discovering the so-called Höfle telegram giving
the 1942 statistics intercepted by Bletchley Park in 1943. See Peter Witte and
Stephen Tyas, ‘A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during
‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942’, HGS 15/3, 2001, pp.468-486.

[84] Witte’s assistance is explicitly acknowledged in the work of Jules
Schelvis.

[97] Andrzej Kola, Bełżec: the Nazi Camp for Jews in Light of
Archaeological Sources: Excavations 1997-1999, Warsaw and Washington: The
Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom and the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000.

[98] Andrzej Kola‚ ‘Badania archeologiczne terenu byłego obozu zagłady
Żydów w Sobiborze’, Przeszłość i Pamięć. Biuletyn Rady Ochroni Pamięci Walk
i Męczeństwa, 4, 2001, pp.115-122; Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi,
Wojciech Mazurek, ‘Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres’, Present
Pasts, 1, 2009, pp.10-39. Further excavations at Sobibor have been
undertaken since the archaeological work written up in these publications was
completed, both by the Gilead-Haimi-Mazurek team and by the director of the
Sobibor Museum, Marek Bem.