Philip Bialowitz

Philip Bialowitz (December 25, 1925 in Izbica – August 6, 2016) was a Polish Holocaust survivor and resistance fighter.

Life

Bialowitz was transported to Sobibor in April 1943 and quickly heard that his sisters and niece had been murdered in the gas chambers there. He credited his brother Simcha with saving his life, since when he arrived at the camp Simcha said he was a pharmacist and that Philip was his assistant. He was given the role of "working Jew", doing menial tasks such as shaving prisoners while avoiding being executed. The prisoners often believed they were merely being deloused instead of sent to extermination chambers. One day his task was to empty piles of dead bodies from train cars. He tried to pull a woman from the train but her skin stuck to his hands, amusing his Nazi overseer. Bialowitz moved to Columbus, Ohio. Along with fellow survivor Thomas Blatt, he was one of the witnesses for the prosecution at the trial of John Demjanjuk in 2010.

Later life

He wrote the acclaimed book, A Promise at Sobibor, which detailed his early life growing up in Poland, his experience during World War II, and his postwar life. Later in life, he traveled around the world lecturing about the Holocaust and his personal experiences. Bialowitz often said that he had "a mission to perform."