The Sobibor Survivor Who Helped Hunt Down Nazis: Stanisław Szmajzner
World War II Camp Escapes
•
13m
At just 15 years old, Stanisław Szmajzner was deported to the Sobibór extermination camp, where he was forced to work for SS officers as a goldsmith while witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust.
In October 1943, he joined the famous Sobibór uprising led by Alexander Pechersky and escaped the camp during the chaos of the revolt. After the war, Szmajzner settled in Brazil, where he later helped identify former Nazi criminals, including Franz Stangl and Gustav Wagner.
This story follows one of the survivors of Sobibór who escaped Nazi terror and later helped expose those responsible for it.
Up Next in World War II Camp Escapes
-
419 Escaped, Hunted to Death by Civil...
From the cheers of the 1938 Anschluss to the genocidal war in the East, Nazi propaganda transformed entire societies into instruments of persecution. Nowhere was this more brutally exposed than in Mauthausen’s Block 20 — the camp’s secret death block for Soviet officers erased from official recor...
-
The Last Survivor of the Sobibor Upri...
When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, young Red Army soldier Simjon Rosenfeld was wounded and captured during the first weeks of the war. After years of imprisonment, forced labor, and survival in the Minsk Ghetto, he was deported to Sobibor, one of the Nazi regime's deadliest ...
-
Love, Resistance, and Revolt: Mala Zi...
After the turning point at Stalingrad in 1943, the Red Army began pushing west — but inside Auschwitz-Birkenau, the machinery of death continued. Among the deportees from Belgium was Mala Zimetbaum, a brilliant young Jewish woman fluent in six languages.
Assigned as a translator and runner in th...
