Letter from Holocaust survivor delivered to cousin after 75 years
Jules Schelvis sent the letter from a hospital in Germany. Photo: Wikipedia
A letter from a survivor of the Nazi extermination camp in Sobibor has been discovered 75 years after the war by Amsterdam’s Resistance Museum.
The letter by Jules Schelvis to his cousin Karel Stroz, dated May 7, 1945, is the earliest evidence from a Dutch survivor of the existence of Sobibor, which was razed to the ground by the Nazis in 1943 following a prisoners’ uprising.
An estimated 180,000 predominantly Jewish prisoners, 33,000 of them from the Netherlands, were murdered in the camp near Lublin in Poland. Just 18 Dutch detainees survived, including Schelvis, who dedicated the rest of his life to ensuring the horrors of the camp were not forgotten. He died in 2016, aged 95.