Except where noted, the survivors were Arbeitshäftlinge, inmates who performed slave-labour for the daily operation of the camp, who escaped during the camp-wide revolt on October 14, 1943.
Of the Arbeitshäftlinge forced to work as Sonderkommando in Lager III, the camp's extermination area where the gas chambers and most of the mass graves were located, no one survived.
In his June 20, 1942 report, Revier-Leutnant der Schutzpolizei Josef Frischmann, in charge of the guard unit on the train, wrote that "51 Jews capable of work" were removed from the transport at Lublin station.
Thousands of Jews initially selected for slave-labour were among those killed in the Lublin district during Aktion Erntefest, and many were shot or succumbed on the death marches in the closing stages of the Nazi regime.
[40] On August 17, 1943, a survivor from Sabinov in Slovakia, who has remained anonymous, wrote a report in which he described his selection in Sobibor, together with approximately 100 men and 50 women, upon arrival.
Upon arrival they were separated from the other deportees and shortly afterwards taken by train to Lublin, where they spent the next months in various work details divided over Majdanek and the Alter Flugplatz camp, on the site of an airfield.
His experiences include a period operating machinery in the ammunition factory in Skarżysko-Kamienna, where the poisonous materials and lack of protections decimated the forced-labourers.