User:Botterweg14/Chaim Engel

Chaim Engel (1916-2003) was a Polish-American Jewish grocer, jeweler, and Holocaust survivor known for his role in the revolt at the Sobibor extermination camp.

Early life
Engel was born in 1916 in Brudzew but spent most of his childhood in Łódź, where his family had moved to escape anti-semitic violence. He attended secular Jewish schools through his early teenage years, but left after middle school to work in his uncle's textile factory. Engel was performing his compulsory military service in the Polish army when World War II broke out. Taken prisoner, Engel was shuffled between labor camps in Germany and Poland.

Sobibor Extermination Camp
Engel arrived at Sobibor Extermination Camp on 6 November 1942 from Lublin on a transport with two thousand other Jews including his brother. He was one of twenty eight individuals from this transport selected for forced labor rather than immediate death in the gas chambers. Engel worked a variety of jobs in the camp, including as part of the Lumpenkommando which sorted victims' luggage, repackaging valuable items as "charity gifts" for German civilians.

It was in Sobibor that Engel met his future wife, a Dutch-born Jew named Selma Wijnberg. The night of her arrival from Vught, SS officers ordered the prisoners to dance for their amusement. Engel and Wijnberg danced together that night, and soon became inseparable. He protected her by sharing his knowledge of the camp and by arranging for her to work with him as part of the Lumpenkommando. However, their relationship was not welcomed by other prisoners, both because of tensions between Dutch and Polish Jews in the camp and because their relationship had attracted the attention of SS Oberscharführer Karl Frenzel who referred to the two as “bride and groom”.

Engel assisted in the Sobibor prisoner revolt on 14 October 1943 by assassinating SS Unterscharführer Rudolf Beckmann. The original plan was to discreetly assassinate each of the camp's SS officers, and then escape out the front gate at evening roll call. Engel was not tapped for this original plan, but volunteered after overhearing that Unterscharführer Beckmann had unexpectedly returned to his office. Engel went to Beckmann's office with another prisoner, who restrained Beckmann while Engel stabbed him.

Before the rest of the plan could be carried out, Beckmann's body was discovered by a watchman who alerted SS Oberscharführer Erich Bauer. Prisoners ended up escaping by climbing over the barbed wire fence and running through a mine field under heavy machine gun fire. Engel and Wijnberg were among the 200 prisoners who made it out of the camp.

After the Second World War
After wandering in the forest for several weeks, they found shelter with a Polish couple, Adam and Stevka Nowak, whom they paid for hiding them. They spent nine months in the Nowaks' hayloft, where Wijnberg taught him Dutch and he taught her Yiddish. They were liberated on 23 June 1944. By that time, Wijnberg was pregnant.

After liberation, Engel was conscripted into the Red Army, serving as a nurse's aide at an army hospital in Chełm. He and Wijnberg fled to Parczew shortly after, in order to avoid being separated as the front moved west. Wijnberg gave birth to their son Emil while they were living in Parczew. The couple relocated to Lublin in order to escape anti-semitic violence. There, they reunited with other Sobibor survivors including Leon Feldhendler. However, Lublin was hit with a wave of anti-semitic violence, and they fled once again to Odessa, where they booked passage on a ship back to Wijnberg's native Netherlands. During the journey, Emiel was given contaminated milk and died. He was buried at sea near Naxos.

Upon their arrival in the Netherlands, the couple lived with Wijnberg's one surviving brother in their hometown of Zwolle. While they lived in Zwolle, she gave birth to two more children, a son and a daughter. However, the Zwolle police decided that Wijnberg had lost her Dutch citizenship by marrying Engel, still a Polish citizen. The couple could not be returned to Poland because the latter's government no longer accepted the return of Polish citizens expelled from foreign countries. Officials decided against interning the Engels in a displaced persons camp for foreigners near Valkenswaard because the holding center was full, and Wijnberg was a Dutch native.

The Engels attempted to move to the United States but were unable due to a strict quota on Polish citizens. They therefore settled in Israel where they initially lived on a kibbutz, before buying a local grocery store. They ran the store successfully, and expanded it to four locations. In 1957, the couple were finally able to move to the United States, where they settled in Branford, Connecticut. There, they once again worked their way up from menial jobs to small business ownership–– this time, a jewelry store.

They returned to Europe only to testify against the war criminals of Sobibor.

still send care packages to the Novak family 457

dog snoopy 458

studied languages for a hobby ; learning italian before vacation to italy 459 testifying in trials better source for their children

Representation in media

 * In the 1987 movie, Escape from Sobibor, he was portrayed by actor Robert Gwilym.