World War II began on September 1, 1939, after Nazi Germany launched a retaliatory campaign against Poland based on a false accusation that Poles had attacked a German radio station. Poland soon found itself fighting on two fronts when the Soviet Union invaded from the east on September 17.
Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on September 28, and one day later Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland under a secret protocol to their non-aggression pact. After defeating the Polish Army, the Germans ruthlessly suppressed Poles, whom they considered racially inferior.
In the weeks following the German attack, SS police and military units shot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of the nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia. Approximately 1.8 million Jews remaining in German-occupied territory were imprisoned in ghettos.
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, over 3 million Polish Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps. Among them was Chaim Engel, born on January 10, 1916, in Brv, Poland.
When Chaim was five years old, anti-Semitic violence broke out in Brv, and the Engels moved to the industrial city of Lodz. The family lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, and most of their friends were Jews.
Chaim was in his early twenties when his mother died of tuberculosis. After finishing middle school, he went to work at his uncle's textile factory.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, only two weeks before Chaim's tour of duty in the Polish compulsory army service was scheduled to end. Nazi propagandists accused Poland of persecuting ethnic Germans to justify the action.
They also falsely claimed that Poland was planning with Great Britain and France to encircle and dismember Germany. After the SS, in collusion with the German military, staged a phony attack on a German radio station, Hitler used the action to launch a retaliatory campaign against Poland.
Germany possessed overwhelming military superiority. It launched the unprovoked attack at dawn on September 1 with an advanced force of more than 2,000 tanks, nearly 900 bombers, and over 400 fighter planes.
In all, Germany deployed 60 divisions and nearly 1.5 million men in the invasion. The assault demonstrated Germany's ability to combine air power and armor in a new kind of mobile warfare that the world came to call Blitzkrieg, or lightning war.
Britain and France stood by their guarantee of Poland's border and declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Poland, however, found itself fighting a two-front war when the Soviet Union invaded from the east on September 17, sealing its fate.
The Polish government fled the country that same day, and the last operational Polish unit surrendered on October 6. After Poland's defeat, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided the country under the secret protocol of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact.
That agreement, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was signed one week before the start of the Second World War, on August 23, 1939, in Moscow. The demarcation line ran along the Bug River.
The German occupation of Poland was exceptionally brutal. The Nazis considered Poles racially inferior and launched a campaign of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture and to reduce Poles to a leaderless population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters.
Chaim was taken as a Jewish prisoner of war and sent to Leipzig, Germany, for forced labor. Ethnic cleansing was conducted systematically against the Polish people.
In the first three months of the war, from the fall of 1939 until the spring of 1940, some 60,000 former government officials, military officers in reserve, landowners, clergy, and members of the Polish intelligentsia were executed region by region. This so-called intelligentsia action included over 1,000 prisoners of war.
In the spring of 1940, the German occupation authorities launched the AB action, the second stage of the Nazi campaign of violence aimed at eliminating Poles considered members of the leadership class. The aim was to remove those seen as most capable of organizing resistance and to terrorize the Polish population into submission.
The Germans shot thousands of teachers, priests, and other intellectuals in mass killings. In March 1940, all Jewish prisoners of war were returned to Poland, and Chaim was one of them.
He then got a job at a farm near Lublin. One day a young German soldier came to the farm, and because Chaim spoke German, the soldier struck up a conversation with him.
The soldier did not know that Chaim was a Jew. With a sense of pride, he told Chaim that in the place he had just come from, he had raped a Jewish girl and then cut off her breast with his bayonet.
Nazi officials imposed a labor obligation on able-bodied Poles, which came to include children as young as 12. Germans sent Poles who tried to avoid labor conscription to concentration camps and punished their families.
Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were deported to German territory for forced labor. Hundreds of thousands were also imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps.
In May 1940, the Auschwitz concentration camp complex was established. It is estimated that the Germans killed between 1.8 and 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II, in addition to murdering at least 3 million Jewish citizens of Poland.
Chelmno, the first killing center for the mass murder of Jews, was established in December 1941. In 1942, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were established as part of Operation Reinhardt, the code name for the German plan to murder approximately 2 million Jews living in German-occupied Poland.
Chaim, his brother, and a thousand other people were deported to Sobibor in November 1942. German SS and police officials conducted deportations to Sobibor between May 1942, when regular gassing operations began, and the fall of 1943.
Most Jews brought to Sobibor were immediately gassed by carbon monoxide piped into the gas chambers from an engine. About 250,000 victims were murdered at this killing center.
Approximately 50 German and Austrian personnel served at the site, generally from lower middle-class backgrounds. According to survivors, female local civilians from the village of Sobibor were often employed in the camp as housekeeping staff and cooks.
These civilians not only had economic incentives for the camp's existence but are believed to have known what was going on inside. The Germans constructed Sobibor as a rectangle measuring 1,312 by 1,969 feet.
A double barbed-wire fence woven with tree branches surrounded the perimeter, a design intended to hide the view of what was inside. The camp had two side-by-side gates, one for trains and another for foot traffic and vehicles.
The Nazis paid special attention to the front compound, which consisted of living quarters and recreational buildings for camp personnel. SS officers lived in cottages with colorful names, which helped conceal the camp's purpose from new arrivals who would arrive at the adjacent ramp.
When transports of 40 to 60 freight cars arrived at the Sobibor railway station, only 20 cars at a time were taken into the camp while the rest of the victims remained locked in the rail cars. Victims were brought into the so-called arrival area, where an SS man would give a speech welcoming them and saying they had reached a transit camp on their way to labor camps.
They were told that before embarking on the next part of their journey they were to take showers, have their clothes disinfected, and get a meal. When Chaim's transport arrived in Sobibor, the Germans ordered him to step out of the column.
Eighteen or 20 people from the entire transport were picked out. Chaim's brother was not chosen.
The men and women were separated, and children were sent with the women. The Nazis ordered the victims to remove their clothing and hand over their valuables.
The Jews were then marched on the run to the gas chambers. The honking of geese obscured the cries of the victims from those still sitting in the locked rail cars as they were beaten, screamed at, and had warning shots fired at them.
About 450 to 550 Jews were forced into the chambers at a time. The gas chamber looked like a real shower, only instead of water, gas came out.
Once the maximum number of victims was inside, the gas chambers were sealed and poisonous gas was piped in. Within 20 to 30 minutes, all those inside were dead.
Those too ill, weak, or elderly to make the walk to the gas chambers were shot in an open pit. Partly because of his good health, Chaim was assigned to sort through the clothing of the doomed prisoners.
While doing this, he found his brother's clothing and pictures of their family that his brother had taken with him. By then Chaim had already been told by other inmates what was going on in the camp.
His father and stepmother had arrived in Sobibor about five months before him and were immediately murdered. The SS personnel working at Sobibor enjoyed privileges such as higher pay and regular visits home every three months, when they could visit their families for two weeks.
The SS also stole possessions of the victims, such as gold, food, hair, and other valuables. Guards would even take toys from murdered children home to their own families.
Between transports, the SS personnel drank, played music, and enjoyed card and board games. All of this went on in a camp where thousands of people were being murdered.
The camp personnel included barbers and butchers. One guard had a photo store in Vienna, and there was even a champion boxer who counted how many whiplashes it took for him to kill a Jew, using a special heavy whip made for him.
Once, when the Nazis executed every tenth man standing in line, Chaim was number nine. As a reward for the effective killing of innocent men, women, and children, the Sobibor personnel received an official trip to Berlin and Potsdam during the year.
During the year and a half that Sobibor was operational, several attempts were made by prisoners to escape. On one occasion, when 72 Dutch Jews were organizing an escape and were betrayed by the Kapo, they were executed on the order of Johann Niemann, the camp's deputy commander.
The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to the death camps started in the summer of 1942. Transports regularly left the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught.
On one such transport, along with 2,019 other Jewish men, women, and children, Selma Wijnberg arrived in Sobibor in April 1943. She became Chaim's girlfriend afterward.
In the summer of 1943, rumors began to circulate that Sobibor would soon cease operations, and the prisoners understood that this would mean certain death for all of them. The Sobibor prisoners knew this because Belzec prisoners who did the same work had sewn messages into their clothing before they were killed by Sobibor guards who shot them the same day they arrived.
The next day, the Sobibor prisoners found all their clothes full of blood. Chaim found a note in his pocket that said, "We worked at Belzec for one year and did not know where we would be sent next. They said it would be Germany. Now we are in Sobibor and know what to expect. Be aware that you will be killed also. Avenge us."
And they did. In September 1943, 20 Jewish Red Army prisoners of war, soldiers with the necessary expertise to pull off an escape, arrived at Sobibor on a transport from the Minsk ghetto and were selected for labor.
One of them, Alexander Pechersky, would become a leader of the revolt, which began late in the afternoon on October 14, 1943. The targets were carefully selected, and the first person assassinated by the prisoners was the deputy commander of Sobibor, Johann Niemann, the highest-ranking SS officer on duty that day.
At 4:00 p.m., Niemann, after a ride on horseback, was lured to a scheduled appointment with a tailor in the tailor's barracks with a promise to be fitted for a leather jacket taken from a murdered Jew. When Niemann arrived at the tailor's barracks armed with his pistol and whip as usual, Alexander Shubayev, a Jewish Red Army prisoner, was already waiting for him with an axe in his hand.
When Niemann came inside and asked the tailor what Shubayev was doing there with an axe, the tailor replied that he was there to repair the table. The tailor then asked Niemann to remove his pistol holster, put on the jacket, and turn around to check if alterations were needed in the back.
When Niemann complied, Alexander Shubayev snuck up behind him and buried the axe into the back of his head, splitting his skull open. Niemann was dead on the spot.
One of the other targets was Rudolf Beckmann, who was to be killed by two inmates, but at the last moment one of them got scared and did not want to go. Chaim Engel, knowing there was no turning back because too many Germans were dead, volunteered to kill Beckmann in his office.
Chaim and a Kapo named Brzeczki went to the administration building, where they found Beckmann behind his desk. While Brzeczki restrained Beckmann, Engel stabbed their overseer with a bread knife and with every stab cried, "This is for my father, for my brother, and for all the Jews you killed."
Beckmann tried to fight back, causing Engel's knife to slip and cut his own hand, covering him with blood, but this did not stop him. When Beckmann was dead, the two, not having enough time to better hide his body, pushed Beckmann under the desk and took his rifle.
When Chaim came out, Selma, his Dutch Jewish girlfriend, was there and cleaned his face, which was covered with Beckmann's blood, and put something on his wound. In total, 11 SS officers were killed by the rebels.
Chaos then took over. Prisoners had to escape by climbing over the barbed-wire fences or running out of the main gate through a minefield under heavy machine-gun fire.
Some stepped on mines, and some gave up and did not run at all. Chaim Engel belonged to those who did run.
He grabbed his girlfriend Selma and ran to the main gate. They made it outside and ran into the woods.
After running the whole night, they made it only 6 kilometers from the camp. Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape, but most were chased down and killed.
Those prisoners who had not joined the escape were killed as well, and only some 50 of the escapees survived the war. After the prisoner revolt, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that the Sobibor camp be closed.
Chaim and Selma, with hardly any food, walked at night for about two weeks and tried to stay hidden during the day. Sometimes a farmer took them in, or they hid in a field.
When they were still in the camp and knew they would run away, Chaim and Selma took with them valuables such as diamonds, gold coins, jewelry, and money that they had found in the clothes of transported prisoners. They had hoped the money and jewels would one day save their lives, and it did.
Polish farmers kept Chaim and Selma safe in exchange for the valuables they had. One day in June 1944, starving, frightened, and infested with lice, they approached a farmhouse and asked the farmer if he would be willing to hide them.
The farmer dressed Selma as an old lady and put Chaim on a wagon covered with branches, then drove them to his brother, who was living about 10 kilometers away in a better, more isolated location. They lived for nine months in a hayloft of a barn without being able to go outside, always scared that they might be found or turned over to the police.
They were covered in lice and bug bites and had very little water or food to eat from the family that hid them. In these months they got to know each other, learning each other's languages, writing in a diary about all that had happened at Sobibor, and wondering about their future.
By this point they considered themselves to be married. They were liberated by the Red Army on July 23, 1944.
When Selma tried to dress in the clothes she had been saving for that occasion for nine months, they did not fit because she was pregnant. They left the village in August 1944 and fled to Parczew, where they got married and their son Emile was born.
Because of attacks on Jewish survivors, they left Poland in 1945. Their journey to Odessa lasted from January to May 1945.
During the following sea voyage from Odessa to Marseilles, their son Emile died. After they reached the Netherlands by train, they lived in Selma's hometown, and together with Abraham, Selma's brother, and his wife, who also survived the Holocaust, they ran the family hotel.
Their daughter Alida and son Ferdinand were born there in 1946 and 1948. Life in the Netherlands was not easy for them, however.
The police of Zwolle decided that Selma, by marrying Chaim, a Pole, had lost her citizenship and become a Polish citizen too. The Dutch government even tried to send both Chaim and Selma back to Poland.
In addition, Selma received many letters from Dutch people who had lost their families at Sobibor, asking if she could give any information about those who did not return. Selma did not see any of the 34,000 Dutch Jews killed in the camp working in the clothes-sorting area at Sobibor; she only saw their clothes after they had been gassed.
The family immigrated to Israel in 1951 and then to the United States in 1957, where Chaim started his own business and became a jeweler. Until the end of their lives, Chaim and Selma remained in contact with the Poles who had saved their lives and kept helping them financially as much as they could.
Later, in the 1980s, they started to travel around Connecticut and nearby areas, and for over 25 years they told their story at schools and to community groups. Chaim and Selma could never comprehend how anyone could deny the fact that there had been concentration camps, despite all the survivors who were and still are around.
They felt that telling their life story and all that had happened was their obligation, because so many millions who died would never be able to come back and tell it. Another reason to tell their story was that the Nazis tried to remove all traces of the mass murder with regard to Operation Reinhardt and make the world believe it never happened.
At Belzec and Treblinka, the Nazi authorities even built a manor house and planted trees and crops to disguise the area as a farm. Chaim and Selma, two of the very few who survived, wanted to speak on behalf of the 1.7 million Jews killed as part of Operation Reinhardt, which had been designed as the perfect mass murder.
Despite everything, they lived a happy life together until 2003, when Chaim passed away at the age of 87. Selma died in 2018 at the age of 96.
They were both surrounded by their two children and grandchildren. Reflecting on the revolt, Chaim described how Selma gave him a knife and he went with the other fellow.
He said he did not think he was a big hero or a courageous man, but he fought in self-defense and for survival. If he did not do it, it might spoil the whole thing, so he reacted instinctively rather than by decision, and he went with the other man into the office and they killed Beckmann.