Polish-born Blatt, who lost both parents and a younger brother in the gas chambers of Sobibor, died Saturday morning at his home in Santa Barbara, California, a Warsaw-based friend, Alan Heath, told The Associated Press. Heath remembered Blatt as a "quiet and modest person" who suffered nightmares and depression until the end of his life, yet never wanted vengeance either on the Germans for the murder of the Jews or for the complicity of many of his anti-Semitic Polish countrymen. "Despite what had happened to his family, he constantly repeated that one should not hate and he certainly bore no malice towards Germans - and urged others to do the same," Heath said on Monday.
Blatt lectured about the Holocaust, wrote two books and campaigned to preserve the site of the death camp as the site of one of the few uprisings by Jewish inmates against Nazi guards during World War II. Until he was his mid-80s, Blatt traveled back frequently to his Polish homeland, often visiting Sobibor, his nearby hometown and a daughter from a first marriage. Blatt was born on April 15, 1927, in Izbica, a town that was largely Jewish and Yiddish-speaking before the war although his family wasn't devout. Blatt was 12 when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 at the start of World War II, and was 15 when the Germans created a ghetto in the town in 1942, where he and his family were imprisoned.
When the family was taken to the extermination camp in April 1943, he was pulled out to do odd jobs at the camp, fixing a fence and sorting documents. His parents and brother Henryk were murdered immediately. Six months after his arrival, Blatt took part in the camp's successful uprising, in which most of the Nazis were killed and 300 prisoners escaped. Most who escaped ended up being hunted down and killed, but Blatt was among about 60 who survived the war. He eventually emigrated to the United States, where he settled in Santa Barbara, California, and owned and ran three electronics stores in the area.
MORE