Project 'Long shadow of Sobibor' Survivors: Interview 07 Esther Raab Project 'Late gevolgen van Sobibor'

Esther Raab was born in Chelm (Poland). Having grown up in a middle-class Jewish family, she remembers a "comfortable" childhood. Her father had many non-Jewish clients, with whom he could get on well. One of them helped Esther and her brother hide from the Nazis during the last year of the war. Esther had worked in a number of labour camps before she arrived in Sobibor in December 1942. In Sobibor, among other occupations, she sorted clothes and other possessions of victims. She knew in advance about the revolt and prepared by putting sand in her pockets, so as to be able to throw it into the guards' eyes if necessary; they would then rub their eyes, enabling Esther to stab them with a knife in their stomachs. She survived the war in hiding with peasants in a barn. Shortly after the war she married with a Jewish Pole, whom she knew already before from Chelm. Polish anti-Semitism made them decide to emigrate to the United States. They got two children, whom they brought up in accordance with Jewish tradition.