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Chabad of SCV
A Promise at Sobibor
An Evening with Philip Bialowitz
Nazi Death Camp Survivor
November 17, 2010
©2010 SCVTV
[SEE MORE FAITH PROGRAMS]
BOOK: A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy's Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland
By Fiszel "Philip" Bialowitz, with Joseph Bialowitz | University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
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CLICK PHOTOS TO ENLARGE
Bialowitz with Rabbi Choni Marozov, Chabad of SCV, 11/17/2010.
Bialowitz shares his story with a new generation, Chabad of SCV, 11/17/2010.
Bialowitz in a Munich courtroom, preparing to testify against Demjanjuk, 1/20/2010.
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"A Promise at Sobibór" is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers.
Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi
death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp; its sole purpose
was efficient mass murder.
On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at
Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, kllling SS officers and fleeing through minefields
and machine-gun fire into the surrounding forests, farms and towns. Only about 42 of them, including Fiszel, are known to have
survived to the end of the war.
In the book, Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz, now an American citizen, tells his eyewitness story in the
real-time perspective of his own boyhood, from his childhood before the war and his internment in the brutal Izbica ghetto to
his harrowing six months at Sobibór — including his involvement in the revolt and desperate mass escape —
and his rescue by courageous Polish farmers. He also recounts the challenges of ilfe following the war as a teenaged
displaced person, and his eventual efforts as a witness to the truth of the Holocaust.
In 1943 the heroic leaders of the revolt at Sobibór, Sasha Perchersky and Leon
Feldhendler, implored fellow prisoners to promise that anyone who survived would tell the story of Sobibór: not
just of the horrific atrocities committed there, but also of the courage and humanity of those who fought back.
Bialowitz has kept that promise.
Today, Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz is a retired jeweler living in New York. He has spoken in North America
and Europe about his experience at Sobibór, including testifying at several war crimes trials, most recently in January 2010 at the
German trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukranian-born, 90-year-old retired autoworker from Ohio who is
charged with accessory to murder in 28,060 deaths — the number of people who died while he allegedly served as a guard at Sobibór.
Coauthor Joseph Bialowitz is Philip's son. He is an environmental manager and a
Holocaust lecturer who lives in California.
Visit Philip Bialowitz's website at SobiborHolocaustSurvivor.org.
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