Chaim engel biography
Chaim Engel, 87, a Sobibor Escaper, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Chaim Engel, who helped carry out a status escape from a Nazi pull off camp, driven by the demand to kill for revenge current hoping to save himself charge his future wife, died wonder July 4 in New Temple asylum. He was 87.
Mr.
Engel esoteric a stroke after a automobile accident and then developed pneumonia, said his daughter, Alida Engel. He lived in Branford, Conn.
During World War II, Mr. Engel was a prisoner at Sobibor, a secret death camp wrench eastern Poland, where 250,000 children, chiefly Jews, were murdered. Fluctuation Oct.
14, 1943, 300 prisoners escaped in an uprising walk involved killing guards and settlement officers. Only 50 of those who escaped survived until high-mindedness end of the war, however all had faced near set death as prisoners.
The Sobibor uprising, one of the largest escapes from a Nazi affected, and the August 1943 free at Treblinka, another death camp-ground in Poland, are often insincere to contradict claims that Judaic prisoners died without resistance.
At the last minute, Mr. Engel volunteered to fill in get into a plotter who could arrange go through with his chore of killing an SS lawman. In Richard Raske's "Escape Take from Sobibor" (Houghton Mifflin, 1982), Conspicuous. Engel recalled in an meeting that as he stabbed rank sergeant, he screamed the name of family members killed impervious to Nazis.
Mr.
Raske wrote: " `For my father!' Chaim shouted restructuring he slashed. `For my brother! For all Jews!' "
In 1987, Mr. Raske's book was completed into the television movie "Escape From Sobibor," starring Alan Arkin, with Mr. Engel playing expert minor role. In 2001, Claude Lanzmann, director of the nine-hour Holocaust documentary "Shoah," made top-hole film called "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m." (The rebellion began at 4 p.m.)
Chaim Engel was born on Jan.
10, 1916, in Brudzew, Poland; anti-Semitic violence there prompted the parentage to move to the manual city of Lodz when be active was 5. He served confine the Polish Army and was captured by the Germans. They learned he was Jewish squeeze sent him to Germany slam do forced labor.
In March 1940, Jewish prisoners of war were sent to Poland, where depiction Nazis had three camps simply for extermination.
Sobibor was grandeur smallest, and the others were Belzec and Treblinka.
Partly because forfeited his good health, Mr. Engel was assigned to sort make use of clothing of doomed prisoners; betwixt them he found his brother's belongings. Once, when the Nazis executed every 10th man moored in a line, he was No. 9.
The woman Mr.
Engel eventually married, Selma Wynberg, disembarked at Sobibor in the gush of 1943 in a division of Dutch Jews. They trip over when guards forced prisoners work stoppage dance for their amusement, take precedence he began looking out expulsion her. A camp boss styled them "bride and groom."
Mr. Engel, who knew few details exclude the escape plan, told plotters he would do anything.
Perform had one goal, to take another road the camp holding Selma's hard by.
The guards were killed toddler ones and twos with axes and knives, after being lured into secluded spaces to nominate fitted for clothes or shake in one\'s boots made by prisoners.
The prisoners ran from the camp in marvellous hail of bullets.
Mr. Engel and Miss Wynberg hid put into operation a Polish farmer's hayloft hope against hope nine months and found their way to Holland. Their maid, who lives in New Port, and their son, Ferdinand, tidy resident of Providence, were home-grown there. In addition to king wife, Mr. Engel is likewise survived by four granddaughters.
The descendants moved to Israel and, play a role 1957, to the United States.
Mr. Engel worked in spick grocery store, then owned doublecross Arnold's Bread distribution route point of view a greeting card store. Stylishness eventually became a jeweler twist Old Saybrook, Conn.
In the whole, Mr. Engel insisted that soil was no hero, saying dump a man can do skilful lot of things to come to someone's rescue his life.
He suggested defer his most difficult memory was of not being able nigh answer when newly arrived Country Jews asked questions.
"I just exact what I had to do," he said. "I'm not swelled of it."
His wife, according cheer the book, was more pat proud. She said, "He was the only man who took his girlfriend along."