The plan was made in the workshops: the tailor's shop, the cobbler's hut, the places where SS officers came for a fitting and could be met alone. Leon Feldhendler, who had led a Jewish council in Żółkiewka, had been thinking about escape for months; Alexander Pechersky, a Red Army officer brought from Minsk in September 1943, had the military knowledge. Eleven SS men were killed. Around 300 prisoners got past the wire and the minefield. About fifty of them were alive at the end of the war.
Sobibor had been built in a forest in occupied Poland, and after the revolt the Germans pulled it down, ploughed the ground and planted trees over it, so that there would be nothing to find. Something like a quarter of a million people were murdered there. Feldhendler was killed in Lublin in 1945, after the liberation. Pechersky lived until 1990.
Thomas Blatt was a teenager in the camp that day and got out through the wire. He spent much of his later life setting down what he remembered of the plan and the people who made it, so the account would survive in writing.
Because the ground was ploughed and planted, almost everything we know about the place comes from the people who got out and spoke afterwards. Pechersky gave testimony for decades, and the Sobibor trial in Hagen in the 1960s rested largely on survivors in the witness box.