Telling the story of Sobibor has become harder, not easier, Thomas Blatt said.

In the years since Blatt has been writing and speaking about his experiences in the Holocaust, as one of the very few who survived a prisoner revolt in the Nazi extermination camp of Sobibor, Blatt has felt the responsibility.

He would have hated to go away from the world and not leave a testimony behind him, said Blatt, who recently moved from Seattle to Santa Barbara, Calif.

Blatt spoke to students and faculty at Wachter Middle School on Wednesday and will speak at other schools today. In the years after World War II ended, Blatt started putting together the pieces he had written, the fragments of the story of Sobibor into book form.

Blatt emigrated from Poland to Israel in 1957, after turning back once at the border rather than leave his collection of writings behind. In Israel, he drove a tractor and used his wages to rent a typewriter.

When he had a manuscript, he began to show it to people with the idea of publication.

They disbelieved him. No one had heard of Sobibor, where an estimated quarter-million, nearly all Jews, went to the gas chambers. And where teenage Thomas Blatt was one of only 50 or so who survived a prisoner revolt and escape in 1943.

So Blatt, who moved to the U.S. in 1959, put away his manuscript for years.

Finally, someone read the work and told him it absolutely must be published. The book became "Escape from Sobibor" (made into a movie in 1987) and was followed by "The Ashes of Sobibor."

Blatt, nearly 80, has spoken all over the world since then. He has met with Pope John Paul II, talked on television, been interviewed extensively.

Not all the words in the world, not anyone's literary skill, can approach the reality of what was, he said.

Telling the story has become harder, not easier - much worse lately, he said, following a pedestrian injury that meant a hip replacement. Depression is a constant. Maybe it's time to stop the speaking circuit, he said. He's heard the questions, again and again.

And he answers them, as he has sifted through them over the years.

Whenever someone picks up his cane for him, or helps him with his luggage, he experiences a double-edged moment of disconnect - murderers are human beings "like me and you," he said. They're not animals, they're people who can seem polite and nice when you meet them, he said.

"I've come to one conclusion,"he said. "Nobody knows himself."

Germany in the Nazi era was not some kind of fluke - under the right circumstances, the shell of civilization is thin and can break apart and release the beast within, he said.

At Sobibor, he fought to live, he said, and later, fought to make a life.

"The instinct to live is unbelievably strong," Blatt said.

One more conclusion he has reached, one essential: Not to be passive - to fight back.

Telling the story has become harder, not easier - maybe it's time for it to be enough, he says.

But for all the vanished witnesses, and for the few still living, this is still about trying to keep history from repeating itself, he said.

"I tell the kids it's up to them,"he said. "We need each other." People of all kinds make a kind of human bouquet, he said - "it's beautiful."

So, though the telling has become harder, he remembers this:

At one of his talks, a group of young men sat up front - one had on his arm a tattoo, a swastika.

The organizer of the presentation was concerned. Don't worry, Blatt told him. In all the talks, whenever there was some giggling at the beginning of the talk, there never was at the end.

Some time later, the organizer contacted Blatt. Guess what? he said.

He'd seen the young man with the swastika tattoo. It had been altered into something no longer recognizable as the Nazi symbol.

"It's good enough," Blatt said, "to reach just one."

(Reach Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or karen.herzog@;bismarcktribune .com.)