Sobibór death camp: awareness, memorialisation and re-conceptualization

ABSTRACT

Sobibór Death Camp was established by Nazi SS in the Lublin district of Poland in March 1942, as part of Operation Reinhard. The camp was shut down in 1943 after a prisoner uprising. In post-war memory discourses of the Holocaust, public awareness of Sobibór remained comparatively less than that of other sites of killing in Poland. This paper aims to provide an overview of the impact that the initial post-war treatment of the site had on the public awareness of Sobibór, whilst following the earlier stages of commemoration at the site, and how these developments reflect the wider debates of Polish Holocaust memory. It seeks to highlight the success of the most recent archaeological excavations which began in 2007, and the 2013 plans for a new museum and memorial.

KEYWORDS:

• Sobibór
• Operation Reinhard
• commemoration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hannah Wilson is a PhD researcher at the Department of History, Nottingham Trent University. She received her Masters degree in Holocaust Studies from the University of Haifa, Israel. She has previously worked as a research assistant at the archaeological excavations of Sobibor and Treblinka Death Camps.

Notes

1. Figure according to State Museum at Majdanek, 2018.

2. Hirsch, Surviving Images, 5–37.

3. De Jong, Sobibór, 28.

4. Gross, Golden Harvest.

5. Sturdy Colls, Holocaust Archaeologies.

6. Gross, Golden Harvest, 26.

7. Ibid., 24.

8. Auerbach, Holocaust Memory in Polish Scholarship, 138.

9. Gross, Golden Harvest, 41.

10. Bem, Sobibor Extermination Camp 1942–1943.

11. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? 293.

12. Zanin, In Sobibór There is Nothing to See … , 39–47.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Bem, Sobibor Extermination Camp 1942–1943.

16. Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 78.

17. Taborska, Art in Places of Death, 54.

18. Auerbach, Holocaust Memory in Polish Scholarship, 137.

19. Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibór: A Story of Survival.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Bem and Mazurek, Sobibór.

23. Theune, Archaeology and Remembrance, 8.

24. Bustler Online Journal, Winning Entry for Sobibór Museum-Memorial Competition.

25. Dziuban, Commemorative Reburial, 7.

26. Lebovic, “Is Sobibór to be the New ‘Disneyland’ of Nazi Death Camps?”