Prisoner 88
mia rabson, the excalibur, toronto (CUP)

Sygmund Sobolewski seems in no way different from anybody else. He, however, thinks his past is etched so firmly into his being it is impossible to miss. "The numbers on my arm never do get erased," he says. "I feel it in everybody I meet, as if they can see, before I even open my mouth, this blue blemish deep down within me that burns whatever I will do or say."

Sobolewski is a survivor. He is achtundachtzig - Number 88. For four and a half years, he suffered at the hands of the Nazis, a prisoner at the concentration camp Auschwitz. "I was there on day one, 14 June 1940," he says. "And I was still there day one thousand, six hundred and eight, 7 November 1944." He was evacuated to another prison camp just weeks before the Russians liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

The one thing Sobolewski isn't, however, is the very thing he knows kept him alive during those interminable years in the camps: he isn't Jewish.

Born in Poland on May 11, 1923, Sobolewski was raised a Polish Catholic in the town of Towy Targ. His father, Zygmunt senior, was a captain in the Polish army. When the Nazis arrived at the Sobolewski home to arrest the elder Zygmunt on May 18, 1940, they discovered he was gravely ill and took the son instead. Sygmund believes he was taken, because, as a healthy young man, he was more useful as a political prisoner. He was just 17 at the time.

SURVIVING HELL

Sobolewski was 21 on his first day of freedom. He remembers sitting with some other Polish prisoners in a small cabin, having escaped the Nazi death march with their lives. "Softly, we sang the Polish national anthem," he remembers. "I looked around at everyone, ragged and thin, arms around each other's shoulders. I am not the same person I was four and a half years ago."

He refers to the years he spent in captivity as his education. "My university was in Auschwitz," he says. Those are the years one normally spends in a post-secondary institution, yet the kind of education Sobolewski received could never be mimicked in a school.

He saw men beaten, tortured and killed for simple offenses like asking for a bottom scoop of soup or for failing to respond quick enough to a Nazi order. While working in the crematoriums, he ate his daily soup ration, surrounded by mounds of dead bodies. He watched train loads of Jewish prisoners arrive in the camp, only to disappear forever into the gas chambers disguised as showers. He tried to ignore the constant black smoke coming from the crematoriums.

Sobolewski's education in Auschwitz was not just through observation. He learned to stand in the frigid cold wearing nothing but a pair of thin pajamas while the Nazis took roll call, often for hours on end. Once, when caught stealing some peas, his arms were handcuffed behind his back, and he was hung by his wrists until his legs dangled above the ground. "When the finally took me down, my back was breaking and my arms were like rags," he remembers. "Couldn't wipe the dribble from my mouth, had no control of my bladder. Lights were coming at me from walls and ceiling. I could feel bone in my shoulders for hours."

Despite his own searing pain, he considers himself lucky just to have survived. Another prisoner, sentenced to the same punishment, was at the mercy of the guards, who hung themselves around his neck until his tendons ripped and his shoulder bones broke. The man died. He was Jewish. "I was surprised at how glad I was not to have been Jewish," Sobolewski says.

He is very aware of how different his experience in the war was than that of the Jews. "My survival in the camp of course, was mainly due to the fact I am Roman Catholic and not Jewish." Non-Jewish prisoners were allowed to receive mail and even small amounts of money, from home. They could buy cigarettes, razor blades, and even food from the canteen in the prison camp. There was even a brothel non-Jewish prisoners were allowed to frequent.

The guilt he feels about his privileges while incarcerated has never ended. "I survived only to live with the nagging question, 'What distinguishes me from them?'"

THE MAN IN STRIPES

Sobolewski spent more than 20 years after the war desperately trying to leave Number 88 behind him. He didn't want to remember it because he didn't see what good it would do. It wasn't long before he realized that would be impossible. "You see this arm, this tattoo, this 88," he says, referring to the blue tattoo on his forearm, put there the day he arrived at Auschwitz. "That was my name. My past can't be erased or analyzed, and it's definitely not something to learn to get used to."

In January 1967, the CBC announced it would be interviewing Adolf von Thadden, a German neo-Nazi who invoked similar themes Hitler had prior to World War II. Sobolewski was outraged. "What I tried to erase from my arm and my life (came) back with force," he says. "Are the horrors forgotten so quickly?"

News of von Thadden's speech sparked a fire inside him and Survivor 88 was born. "Involuntarily I became 88 at 17," he says. "By my own decision, I became 88 a second time at age 49. By the strength of my own resolve, I will be Number 88 for the rest of my life."

Sobolewski had a pair of grey and white striped pajamas designed similar to those he had worn during his years at Auschwitz to draw attention to his cause. They are an emotionally powerful tool, even for him. "Every time the stripers go on, I cry," he said. "(But) the press fixes on my stripers, so I know my work is having an effect."

He has dedicated his life to educating people about the Holocaust. For him it isn't just about telling people what happened to him while he was in Auschwitz, but preventing history from repeating itself. Sobolewski worries a similar hatred rises out of Canada's multicultural makeup. "Auschwitz was about religious and racial intolerance," he says. "(In Canada), we have a large percentage of visible minorities. There are undercurrents trying to blame visible minorities for unemployment and increasing crime. Religious and racial intolerance will affect the future of Canada."

He speaks on behalf of the Jews whose voices were snuffed out in the gas chambers. He feels responsible to tell their story because he was lucky enough not to be of the religion the Nazis decided to annihilate. "In Auschwitz, two hundred died for one to survive," Sobolewski explains. "Jews made up ninety per cent. That means 180 Jews died so I could live. As a Christian, I feel an obligation."

Sobolewski is a member of the International Auschwitz Council in Poland. The group is made up of survivors who think the Polish government doesn't place enough emphasis on the suffering of Jews and other Nazi prisoners during the war. The council also lobbies the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau to present the truth. One of the hardest battles is to ensure the Jews who died in Auschwitz-Birkenau are given respect and their rightful memorials.

In 1985, Sobolewski formed the Auschwitz Awareness Society, acting as its vice-president and co-ordinator. The society aims to educate people about the causes of the Holocaust and to promote racial and religious tolerance among all groups.

FIGHTING DENIAL

Sobolewski cannot even express the disgust he feels about revisionists, those people who deny the truth about the Holocaust. As often as he can, he shows up to protests held by anti-Semites who say Jewish people exaggerate the Holocaust. He stands face to face with the protesters wearing his stripers, and doesn't allow them to state their opinions without consequence. They enrage him but they also give him a purpose. "This is what I survived for?" he asks himself. "Big deal. They already cut my heart out in Auschwitz. This is indeed what I survived for."

Surprisingly, there are a significant number of people willing to believe the Holocaust did not happen as it is reported.

In the early 1980s a high school teacher in Eckville, Alberta, came under fire for teaching revisionist history to his students. This man, James Keegstra, became Sobolewski's purpose and he fought to have him suspended from the Alberta Teachers' Association. "Keegstra threatens our community," he says. "Those who were never there, who tell you history on basis of ideology, know better than liberators, better than confessed Nazis, better than we surviving victims?" Many in Eckville, however, support Keegstra, including businessmen, politicians and a majority of his own students. Sobolewski does not understand it. "How is it possible so many people cannot distinguish between personality on the one hand, and racist views on the other?" he asks.

"They think if a man is evil, he must be a monster. So conversely, if Keegstra is a nice guy, then his ideas must have some merit."

Sobolewski's message challenges people to revise their thinking and accept all people. Rabbi Roy Tanenbaum, the author of Sobolewski's biography, Prisoner 88, believes Sobolewski's message penetrates places many Holocaust survivors' stories cannot. "Because he's non-Jewish it makes a whole different impact," Tanenbaum says. "For those who are skeptical and say the Holocaust is a 'Jewish thing,' Sygmund stands there in his striped pajamas and says, 'A Jewish thing?' It isn't possible to just wipe him away."

Sobolewski's work does not go unnoticed. In 1985, he received the Cross of Auschwitz, given to survivors who have worked to preserve the memory of the camp. At a recent lecture at York University, attendees swarmed him after his presentation to express their gratitude. One woman told him he was a saint.

Sobolewski is happy to pursue his mission one small step at a time.

On a train ride he took from Warsaw to Auschwitz in 1992 he found a group of school children on their way to see the camp. He explained to them who he was and despite their teacher's concern, answered their questions candidly, speaking of the gas chambers and crematoriums and forced labour.

Their interest renews his faith in his purpose. "In spite of their teacher, all during the train ride kids keep coming in our car in twos and threes to ask questions. One little girl even gives me her address. You have to believe these small achievements make a difference."

Sobolewski spent most of his years as a survivor trying to make his family understand his past.

His work to spread the truth about the Holocaust isolated him from his friends, and even from other survivors. His wife Ramona understands, but his work hurt their relationship. He feels partly estranged from his three sons. And despite constant pleading from family members to leave his past behind, he says he never could and doesn't think he ever will.

At 76, Sobolewski still travels the world, fighting to preserve the memories of the six million plus who perished at the hands of the Nazis. Why does he do it? Because he remembers the emaciated bodies of the Jews in the camp.

He sees in his mind the trainloads of people arriving at the camp who never joined its population. He still hears the screams of prisoners being tortured and smells the constant black smoke pouring out of the chimneys.

One time in the camp his friend Wojtek approached him with tears in his eyes, because he had just been summoned for a photograph. The summons meant only one thing. The friend would be executed and Sobolewski could not even console him because they both knew the truth.

"I simply threw my arms around him and whispered in his ear, 'Be certain I'll avenge your death.' I never saw him again."

He made the promise to his friend and to the millions more who perished. It is for them he keeps continuing. It is for them he will always be Prisoner 88.

"Number 88 is my pole star," he says. "From time to time my course might change, my footing might slip. At such times number 88 is a lantern on the road."

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