The Silence of Sobibor

About The Silence of Sobibor

Listen to the story of Sobibor. The extermination camp where more than 34,000 Dutch Jews were killed during the Second World War, yet today, hardly anyone knows the place. While Auschwitz grew to become a symbol of the war after 1945, Sobibor—as a site of guilt—fell into oblivion. During the production of this podcast, the creators gained access to a Russian archive that had remained closed until now. In that archive, they discovered unknown photographs of Sobibor that give the history of the camp a new turn. This series broadens and deepens our knowledge of Sobibor. This series was produced by Audiodroom Podcast Productions in collaboration with the Sobibor Foundation the Netherlands (Stichting Sobibor).

Publisher

Audiodroom

Category

education · history · news

Language

nl

Explicit

No

First episode

26 Jan 2026

Latest episode

26 Jan 2026

Latest episodes

7 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   26 Jan 2026

   Ep 7 From extermination to remembrance

   The most remarkable thing we encountered during the research for this podcast is a stack of unknown photos from Sobibor. They are unique; they've never been seen in the West before. They were pasted into a photo album by a lieutenant colonel from the infamous secret service of the Soviet Union, the NKVD, Nikolai Volski. Bernolf Kramer from the Stichting Sobibor found them on a Russian website, probably from the Russian state archive. Anyone visiting Sobibor now sees the site as it has never looked before. It no longer resembles the descriptions given by survivor Thomas Blatt in the seventies and eighties: "here and there barely passable due to dense bramble bushes, man-high nettles, and if you looked a little, you found ashes of victims in the grass in many places," was his description. That's different now. Now "camp three," the area where the gas chambers among others stood, is covered with gray-white stones. The iconic ash hill is also covered with them. How did that happen? In this episode, we also provide an answer to the question of the authenticity of the photos from the Russian website. Did Sobibor really look like that at the end of the war? Was it such a huge mess there? Are these photos real? We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl/). #Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943

2. 

   26 Jan 2026

   Ep 6 The puzzle from the past

   We now know what it was like to enter the Sobibor extermination camp, even though the Germans tried to keep its existence secret at the time. Prisoners revolted, they escaped and told the world what happened there. Only, the people who survived Sobibor are no longer with us. The people who consciously experienced the war as children will soon be gone too. Who will then tell what happened when there are no more eyewitnesses? Will the stories still be so vivid and personal? In this episode, we speak with people who talk in schools and museums about their experiences as war children, as children of parents who perished in Sobibor. Can you still access your memories of that time even after eighty years? How do they find those puzzle pieces? In this episode, you will also hear from German professor Harald Welzer. He is a social psychologist who investigated how perpetrators look back on their own actions after the Holocaust. According to him, we must be careful that the story about camps like Sobibor slowly turns into a film script, where the main characters are divided into purely good and evil. We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/?js_artist=mark_lobenstein). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl). #Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943

3. 

   26 Jan 2026

   Ep 5 Pioneers for justice

   A Dutch newspaper in 1950, page twelve in a three-line report. “Erich Bauer, a 50-year-old former SS officer, has been sentenced to death by a West Berlin court. He is accused of gassing hundreds of thousands of Jews.” In the report, the name of Sobibor is mangled to ‘Silobor’. The trial against one of the guards of the Sobibor extermination camp made little impression in the Dutch media at the time. But that changed completely in the years that followed. In this episode, we follow among others the story of Samuel Lerer, who survived Sobibor and after the war recognized the ‘gasmeister’ of the extermination camp on the street in Berlin. We also look at the subsequent trials against camp guards who were tracked down in Brazil. Franz Stangl, who chose in his cell to talk to a journalist about his life as deputy commander of Sobibor and died of a heart attack in the cell after the last conversation. And Demjanjuk. The trial with the most media attention, although Iwan Demjanjuk was no more than a small fish, a subordinate. Many people know his name from the Netflix series about his life ‘The Devil Next Door’. We follow Jules Schelvis during that trial, who acted as co-prosecutor and expert in the process. We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/?js_artist=mark_lobenstein). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl). #Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943 #JulesSchelvis

4. 

   26 Jan 2026

   Ep 4 Fear is contageous

   “You lived in Sobibor in constant fear. Every moment could be your last.” This is a statement from Selma Wijnberg about the time she spent as a forced laborer in Sobibor. What did that fear do to the rest of her life? How do you prevent passing that fear on to your children? It is the central theme of this episode, which revolves in part around epigenetics: how events in your life change your DNA. And in this episode, we also look at a sudden wealth of information coming from Russia: material from a website with years of secret documents about Sobibor. Statements, photos. What do they show? Was there really a children's playground on the former extermination camp in the years after the war? We speak again with Esther, about what her family history did to her. Did she inherit an extra sensitivity to fear through her mother's DNA? And what can you do about it if so? Yael, the daughter of a Sobibor survivor, began creating artworks. She drew inspiration from what archaeologists found in the soil of the former camp. We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/?js_artist=mark_lobenstein). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl). #Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943 #DovFreiberg

5. 

   26 Jan 2026

   Ep 3 The the doors opened

   How must it feel when you watch television and see the world briefly pause for the death of Selma Wijnberg, and the newsreader says: "The last Dutch survivor of Sobibor has passed away." And you know Selma, because you were in Sobibor just like her. And you too barely survived the camp. It happened to Sophie Huisman, who lived for many more years and in the 1960s recorded her story on a tape recorder. It would be the first and immediately the last time she publicly spoke about her past in Sobibor. In this episode, you hear the story of the actual last Dutch survivor of Sobibor. What few people know: there are also letters from Sobibor camp. Prisoners had to write optimistic messages under German supervision and send them to the Netherlands. Truus Goud from Haarlem did that, and her letters even arrived. Esther, her great-niece, still has them and reads from them. And we follow the story of Dov Freiberg. He is fifteen when he has to step out of the train in Sobibor, but he survives as a forced laborer. He talks about his time in the camp, about the day of the uprising, about his escape across the minefield, about the insane moment when he looks back and realizes he is free. But what is freedom in the forests of eastern Poland? How does he survive there until the end of the war? We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/?js_artist=mark_lobenstein). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl). #Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943 #DovFreiberg #KoentjeGezang

6. 

   26 Jan 2026

   Ep 2 Stories from the soil

   You can form an idea of what Auschwitz looked like just by walking around it, as the iconic gatehouse with its fencing is still there. In Sobibor, almost the entire camp was razed to the ground. Sobibor was a secret camp where no photos were allowed. It was a visual black hole in history until a camp guard's grandson found some photo albums in his grandmother's attic. Suddenly, Sobibor gained a face. In this episode, we follow Jules Schelvis, Philip Bialowitz, and Selma Wijnberg. They arrived on trains from the Netherlands packed with Jews. After four days in cattle cars, they stumbled out completely exhausted. "We fell out," says Selma. Within an hour, almost everyone from that train was crammed into the gas chambers. The door closed, a diesel engine started, and everyone was slowly gassed. But a small group survived the camp; they had to help search victims' luggage for valuables or drag the bodies of their relatives from the gas chambers. In this episode, we also follow the archaeologists who sometimes found very personal belongings in Sobibor's soil. We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/?js_artist=mark_lobenstein). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl).[5]springcast+1 #Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork #Amsterdam #ghetto #1943 #DeddieZak

7. 

   26 Jan 2026

   Ep 1 A guilty place

   Sobibor, an extermination camp from the war, in the far east of Eastern Poland, at the tripoint with Belarus and Ukraine. On quiet days, you can hear the war in the distance. If ten people were murdered on your local football pitch, you would likely never forget it. There would be a monument, commemorations. A documentary. And what if a hundred people were murdered there? Or a thousand? Or ten thousand? In less than a year and a half, 170,000 people were murdered in Sobibor, a place no larger than a few sports fields. Yet, for a long time after the war, Sobibor became a neglected and forgotten place. More than 34,000 of those victims came from the Netherlands. And every story shows once again how horrific and insane Sobibor was. In this first episode, we follow Richard Oostwal. He lived with his parents in the Jewish ghetto of Amsterdam but survived the war. One day, his little friend Robbie had disappeared. "To a camp," Richard’s parents said. But what kind of camp? Richard went searching and discovered the gruesome reality. In this episode, we, podcast makers Patty-Lou Middel-Leenheer and Richard Grootbod, accompany Richard to the place where his companion was murdered. Every episode of this series ends with a ‘spoken word’ by Ben Oranje. Someone once said, "you shouldn't write poems about Sobibor, because the language of poetry is too elegant for what happened there." And perhaps that person was right, but we are going to try anyway. We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode: info@audiodroom.nl (mailto:info@audiodroom.nl) For more information, visit the website of the Sobibor Foundation (Stichting Sobibor). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein. Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje. #Sobibor #WWII #history #Audiodroom #Holocaust #Jews #war #Westerbork

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