Thomas (age 16) along with 40 young men was selected to join the Arbeitsjuden in the Lower, and later, the Upper Camp, where he cut the hair of naked women before gassing.

[6] During the one year and a half in which the Sobibór killing centre operated, at least 167,000 people were murdered there, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum;[7] virtually all of the victims were Jews, mostly from Poland, France and the Netherlands.

In 1947-48, he studied at the Central School of Political Officers in Lodz, after which he continued working in the Ministry of Public Security.

[3] In the late 1970s and 1980s, he worked for Richard Rashke, an American journalist and author who wrote the Escape from Sobibor first published in 1982.

Frenzel, convicted at trial and sentenced to life in prison for his actions at the camp, was released on appeal after serving 16 years.

The revolt leaders Leon Feldhendler and Alexander Pechersky, as well as other camp prisoners including Blatt were played by actors.

His first mémoire, From The Ashes of Sobibor (1997),[16] is about his life before the war and the German occupation of Izbica leading up to the deportation of his family to the Sobibór death camp.

In the 2005 BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution', Blatt claimed that he returned to his old home to find that it, like so many former Jewish residences, had been taken over.