Sobibór is a disquieting place, tethered in the present day to an evolving duty to commemorate the upwards of 180,000 Jewish people who were murdered here. This is a place that is iterating as the years progress, most recently with a new memorial finished in 2023. Excavations at the site started in earnest in 2000. Before that, it was only nominally a memorial site. Mostly, it was extensively and grotesquely plundered by local residents seeking gold and other valuables, and in later days, it was a popular dog walking and recreation spot for locals.
The memorial was evoking, in a different way than the other sites I saw. This post is principally focused on place, not people. I have a separate post I want to write about the brave Jewish fighters who destroyed this machinery of death. But, it will help to have a sense of the broader memorial space before we move on.
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My interest was captured early on by how unsettlingly close people currently lived to the death camp site. More specifically, by this green house.
This house, the train station across the street, and a barn were the only buildings in place when Franz Stangl arrived at Sobibór in the 1942 to see to setting up the Reich's newest killing site, as a newly minted SS-Obersturmführer flush with success from his work for with the T-4 Euthanasia Program. Stangl did so well at Sobibór that he was transferred to take Treblinka in hand in August of that year. He learned the lessons of Sobibór well, and made Treblinka into a darker and more efficient hellscape. After the war, he escaped via the ratline to Brazil, where he lived until Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down in 1967. In Germany, Gitta Sereny interviewed him extensively for what eventually formed her seminal work, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience.
Stangl told Sereny that on his arrival to the camp, he and the Trawniki soldiers slept in the green house while the camp was constructed and later, it served as his home for the 6 months he oversaw the camp. The house seems to have been a flop house, of sorts, for SS staff. Unsettlingly, post-war testimony from Erich Bauer (a Nazi who ran the gas chambers at Sobibór) notes that two Jewish women were imprisoned for a time in the kitchen in this house, where they were raped by SS officers including Stangl and then shot in the nearby forest (see Yitzhak Arad's book).
This is Sobibór, in the summer of 1943. The green house can be seen in the top left. The photo is from the remarkable Niemann albums.
"View of Sobibor Camp I and the Vorlager (the German living quarters) in the background, taken from a watchtower, early summer 1943."
Photo Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collection, gift of Bildungswerk Stanislaw-Hantz
To say this house has bad vibes is a severe understatement. I knew the house was one of the remaining few traces of the camp before I went. I did not know it was presently occupied by a private owner. That was a startling realization. Why in the hell would anyone chose to live there?
During our tour, our guide shared that the state museum had been unable to come to agreement with the family to purchase the home, but they hoped to some day. He was very diplomatic about it, and did not reference any issues specifically. He was gracious, even, noting that this is a relatively impoverished area and it isn't so easy to leave a home when there is no where else to go. He mentioned the family doesn't like the attention their house gets. That settled me somewhat. Sometimes choices are beyond our reach, and we do the best we can. I took photos of the house, and I felt a bit guilty about the invasion of privacy.
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Still, after leaving, I remained deeply curious about this strange little house, with its lace curtains and dog wandering the backyard off leash. There is no fence that demarcates the yard from the museum grounds. The back windows overlook an open-air exhibit about Aktion Reinhard with large photos of Jewish victims on placards. It would take the owner no more than five minutes to walk to the remains of the gas chambers, and another one to get to the heaps of bones and ashes buried under white rocks. The residents can see the terminal train tracks where Jewish victims were unloaded from cattle cars to their death out their front window. Until the early 2000s, it would have been possible to find bones unearthing in the ground if you walked close enough to the killing sites. They cook breakfast in a room where women were terrorised and the place where Stangl slept is still a bedroom. In the Serreny book, Stangl recounts his consternation at how long he had to bathe in the bathroom of this house to get rid of the sandflies. I wonder, have they replaced that bathtub at least?
It was difficult at that point not to recall that in these camps the prisoners retained as “work-Jews” had to stand at rigid attention, caps off, whenever a German passed. Anyone who moved, for any reason whatever – cramps, itches or anything else – was more likely than not to be hit or beaten with a whip, and the consequences of being struck could go far beyond momentary pain: any prisoner who, at the daily roll-call, was found to be – as they called it – “marked” or “stamped”, was a candidate for immediate gassing.
“These sandflies must have been an awful problem for the prisoners, weren’t they?” I asked.
“Not everyone was as sensitive to them as I. They just liked me,” he said, and smiled.
from Gitta Sereny's Into that Darkness
This brave new world we've entered into affords us technology that feels like magic to me so when I got home, I did some digging. I found a quote translated to English from Rosanne Kropman, a Dutch journalist who had interviewed the current owner of the house. In 2023, Rosanne published a book about Sobibór in Dutch. I ran the relevant chapter through a translation engine, and eventually the whole book. AI is a poor substitute for professional translation by a human, but the general gist is there. I hope Rosanne's book appears in proper English translation at some point, it is an important work.
For her book, Rosanne interviewed the current owner, Jerzy Zielinski. Through her writing, I learned that Jerzy moved into this house in 1988. His wife's parents were given the house in 1955 by the Polish government. Until about 15 years ago, they weren't bothered much at all by living with Sobibór as a literal backyard, but lately the visitors have been bugging them - stopping to take photos, like I did, and occasionally wandering into their unfenced garden. He doesn't see an issue with living there, though, it's a house like any other house to him. At the time of the interview, he was considering renting rooms out, but his wife didn't want strangers around, so he thought he might shift to agritourism. This is a perplexing statement, given the location, size of the lot, and state of the house. Asked why he didn't sell the house, he said he'd not been offered any money for it (untrue). In Rosanne's book, she writes that his asking price is 1 million Euros, which strikes me as absurdly greedy for a gifted house with a grotesque history. Jerzy thinks the house would have great appeal though, and he's probably right about that. It's an important historic artefact, and who knows what is in that garden. He shared with Rosanne that he once found coins from the Netherlands in his backyard, and his mother-in-law had found a broken wedding ring. When Rosanne pushes him on this issue, he replies "Just ask Mazurek [a Polish archeologist involved in forensic work on site]. He’s the one who wants to reconstruct this history… Ask him how much gold he dug up here and how much he kept."
Such weird response, tinged with antisemitism no less. After reading this, my misgivings about the intrusion of photographing his house disappeared entirely.
If I had limitless funds, I think I'd say "damn the ethics" and hand over the million euros of blood money to the present owner. I'd try to buy the houses that surround it, too, until no one lived next door to this terrible place. I'd turn the green house into museum specifically dedicated to the stories of the prisoners who brought this horrible place to its ruin. My one criticism of the museum is that it is far too sparse on memorializing this aspect of the place's history, and it was only a passing note in our tour. At some point, I'll have a part two post on Sobibór, because that's a story that deserves our time.
On our way out, we stopped at the picnic spot we saw driving in about three minutes before reaching the front entrance of the camp proper. Driving in, it had seemed an incongruous sight, and after the tour, it was downright eerie. The spot is somewhat dilapidated and scattered with garbage, so very much used. Our tour guide told us that if you hike into the trees from the back end of the mound that covers human ashes and bones, you can still find original barbed wire embedded into trees.
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We decided to head instead for the Bug River that delineates Ukraine from Poland. We parked at the end of a residential street and walked into the forest for a while, finally coming to the water's edge. And then we stayed, for a bit, a strange end to an uncanny day.
Further reading and references
Arad, Yitzhak. 1999. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press.
Kropman, Rosanne. 2023. Het Donkerste Donker: Een geschiedenis van Sobibór. Nieuw Amsterdam.
Sereny, Gitta. 1983. Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder. Random House.
Wilson, Hannah. 2021. “The Memoryscape of Sobibór Death Camp: Commemoration and Materiality.” In Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust, edited by Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová. Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag.