Thomas Blatt, Polish writer and Holocaust survivor, Died at 88

  Writers

Thomas “Toivi” Blatt was born Tomasz Blatt on April 15, 1927, and died on October 31, 2015.

He was a Polish-American writer and speaker, who at the age of 16 was one of the few Jewish people to survive an uprising and escape from the Sobibor extermination camp in October 1943, when around 200 escaped.

150 were captured and killed by search squads and around 50 survived until the end of the war.

Following the World War II, he settled in the United States.

Thomas was born on April 15, 1927 to a Jewish family in Izbica, Poland.

He had a brother. On April 28, 1943, Thomas and his family, with about 400 other Jewish people from Izbica, was transported by the Germans to Sobibor, built as an extermination camp.

All of Thomas family was killed there, along with most of the people from his village.

In total, an estimated 250,000 Jews from Poland, France and the Netherlands were killed in Sobibor as well as 1,000 Gentile Poles.

Thomas lived in Santa Barbara, California.

He passed away at age 88 at his home on October 31, 2015.