Dov Freiberg
| Dov Freiberg | |
|---|---|
Freiberg at the trials
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| Born |
May 15, 1927 Warsaw, Poland |
| Died | March 1, 2008 (aged 80) Ramla, Israel |
| Other names | Berek Freiberg |
| Citizenship | Polish, Israeli |
| Known for | Sobibor prisoner uprising |
Dov Freiberg (15 May 1927 – March 2008) born Berek Freiberg, was a Holocaust survivor, writer, and witness at the Eichmann trial and the Demjanjuk case. During World War II, selected by the SS to join the Sonderkommando work unit, Freiberg participated in the Sobibor prisoners' revolt in October 1943, and managed to escape into nearby woods and survived until the Soviet Army liberated the region in July 1944.
Dov Freiberg was born to Moses and Rebecca Freiberg in 1927 in Warsaw, Poland. The first years of his childhood were spent in the industrial city of Lodz, where his father was a factory worker. At the beginning of the Nazi occupation his father and brother tried to escape eastward, but his father was shot by the Germans when his convoy was attacked. A few months later his mother moved with her four children to her parents' house in Warsaw, which was situated in the ghetto that had been established in November 1940 in the heart of the Jewish Quarter. A year later, in autumn 1941, when conditions in the ghetto had worsened and tens of thousands of its residents had died or were killed, this spurred him to escape from the ghetto with the assistance of a smuggler; Freiberg escaped to the remote town Turobin in the district of Lublin, where the Jews, including the family of his father, lived with a sense of relative calm. On May 17, 1942 the town was surrounded suddenly by the SS accompanied by local assistants and Ukrainians. Most of the town's Jews, along with the Jews of other nearby towns, were brutally deported to the Sobibor extermination camp.
Upon Freiberg's arrival in Sobibor, some Jewish prisoners managed to squeeze into the group of the Sonderkommando temporarily reprieved from their intended deaths in the gas chambers, and Freiberg was employed with other members of this group initially as a sorter of clothing and belongings. He was then forced to do other tasks including cutting the hair of the women before they went to the gas chambers. Freiberg managed to survive the regime of daily abuse, starvation and cruel treatment for about 17 months. In October 1943, Freiberg participated in the Sobibor prisoners' revolt and he managed to escape into nearby woods and joined the Joseph Serchuk's Jewish partisan unit in the Lublin area of occupied Poland until the Soviet Army liberated the region in July 1944.
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