Thomas Blatt, a Holocaust survivor, speaks Thursday at Camp Casey's Warrior Club. (Seth Robson / Stars and Stripes)

CAMP CASEY, South Korea — “Tell the world what happened here” was the last thing Russian Jew Alexander (Sasha) Aronowich Pechersky told prisoners at Sobibor death camp before staging a rebellion that led to a mass escape and closure of the facility where about 250,000 Jews died in German gas chambers.

More than 60 years later, Thomas Blatt, who participated in the rebellion as a teenager, still is telling the story.

He spoke to soldiers at Camp Casey’s Warrior’s Club on Thursday about Sobibor and the Holocaust — Adolf Hitler’s genocidal “final solution” that led to the deaths of 6 million European Jews.

“It is my conscience that is talking to you,” Blatt told the soldiers. “People deny us and say the Holocaust never happened. What I have to tell you ... sometimes I can’t believe it... but every word is true.

“Whatever I tell you, my eyes have seen it. I hope in my sorry personal story you will find an answer to the question, ‘How is it possible to kill so many people and why didn’t they fight back?’”

The Holocaust was so devastating because of the German state, he said.

“According to the Nazis, a German born in Germany went to the top of the list; next came Germans born outside Germany; then Aryan nations such as Norway and Sweden,” he said. “The Slavs from Eastern Europe were to become slaves to the German nation. At the end were the Gypsies and Jews.

“Their destiny was to be eliminated — to be killed,” Blatt told the soldiers.

Germans built three death camps in Poland, including Sobibor. Several thousand Jews would arrive at the camps and immediately were sent to the gas chambers, said Blatt, who grew up in a small village in Poland the Germans occupied during World War II.

After the Germans occupied Poland the local Jews at first did business with the soldiers, said Blatt, who remembers swapping tobacco for chocolate and sweets.

“However, soon another type of German arrived — the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel — German for “Protective Echelon”). They were tall fellows with black uniforms with death skulls on them,” he said.

Blatt’s village was designated a ghetto and the SS asked for volunteers for resettlement. More than 1,600 men, women and children who volunteered stepped aboard a train and never were seen again. Later, the SS started rounding up Jews and forcing them onto trains. The same was happening in other Jewish towns all over Poland, Blatt said.

Polish neighbors who followed the trains discovered the awful truth, he said.

“The train only goes 70 miles and stops in the middle of a forest at a place close to the village of Sobibor. Farmers living nearby say the trains come day and night and leave empty. There is a fire coming from the middle of the forest and from the smell it is obviously a killing place,” he said.

Blatt tried to go to Hungary but was caught. He escaped and returned to his village, which soon was declared off-limits for Jews, forcing his family into hiding. Eventually, he said, he found himself on a truck with his parents, bound for Sobibor.

He said the camp was well organized with no clue of the killing. He said he expected to die with his family but instead was chosen as a shoeshine boy for an SS officer. He said he was one of about 300 Jews allowed to live and work in the camp.

Blatt said he soon witnessed the Nazi death machine’s efficiency.

“A Dutch transport of 3,000 Jews arrived. The people were told to go down front of the wagons and leave their bags. A German officer pretending to be a doctor made a speech and apologized for the three-day trip from Holland. He told them that for sanitary reasons they must undress and go to the showers. The people went down a corridor straight to the gas chambers. When the gas came out of the showerheads they probably thought there was some malfunction. Three thousand people died in three hours,” he said.

But he said the Germans made a mistake by selecting 70 healthy young Jews brought from Russia as camp workers. The Jews were former Russian Red Army soldiers who organized a rebellion, Blatt said.

During the rebellion he used the Nazis’ greed against them - luring several key leaders into buildings with the promise of clothing confiscated from murdered Jews. In fact teams of prisoners were waiting to kill them, he said.

“I was shaking inside but I had something to do,” Blatt said.

The Camp Casey soldiers watched scenes from the movie “Escape from Sobibor,” which dramatized the prison escape in which 300 Jews gained their freedom. After the rebellion, Blatt said, the camp was closed.