Selma Engel was born Saartje Wijnberg on May 15, 1922, in Groningen. Her parents ran a kosher hotel in Zwolle during the crisis years. Being Jewish, Selma went into hiding during the German occupation. She was rounded up and deported to Sobibor as a penitentiary measure in April 1943. She lived in this extermination camp for six months, working in the sorting barracks and, sometimes, in the woods. ...

Martin (Martijn) Haas was born in Breda, where he spent his childhood together with his two sisters, Liesje (Elisabeth) and Roosje, and his brother Isaac. He is from a well-to-do family. The youngest children, Roosje and Martijn, went into hiding with two Catholic families and survived the war. The other members of the family were killed: mother, Liesje, and Isaac in Sobibor, father in Auschwitz. After ...

Esther Raab was born in Chelm (Poland). Having grown up in a middle-class Jewish family, she remembers a "comfortable" childhood. Her father had many non-Jewish clients, with whom he could get on well. One of them helped Esther and her brother hide from the Nazis during the last year of the war. Esther had worked in a number of labour camps before she arrived in Sobibor in December 1942. In Sobibor, ...

Alexsy Wajcen was born in the shtetl of Hodorov, a Jewish community not far from the town of Lvov in Ukraine. Horodov was part of Poland before the Second World War, but annexed by the Soviet Union after 1939. Alexsy was the oldest of five children. He served in the Soviet army from 1940 onwards and as a prisoner of war arrived in Sobibor, where he was selected for forced labour. With the exception ...

'The Long Shadow of Sobibor' is an interview project representing a unique historical document. The collection comprises open interviews taken by Professor Selma Leydesdorff with 9 survivors of the Sobibor revolt (1943) and 22 next of kin to persons murdered in Sobibor. These unique testimonials are far more than stories about camp life alone. --Stories of lives-- The interviews are the stories of ...