The most remarkable thing we encountered during the research for this podcast is a stack of unknown photos from Sobibor. They are unique; they've never been seen in the West before. They were pasted into a photo album by a lieutenant colonel from the infamous secret service of the Soviet Union, the NKVD, Nikolai Volski. Bernolf Kramer from the Stichting Sobibor found them on a Russian website, probably from the Russian state archive.

Anyone visiting Sobibor now sees the site as it has never looked before. It no longer resembles the descriptions given by survivor Thomas Blatt in the seventies and eighties: "here and there barely passable due to dense bramble bushes, man-high nettles, and if you looked a little, you found ashes of victims in the grass in many places," was his description. That's different now. Now "camp three," the area where the gas chambers among others stood, is covered with gray-white stones. The iconic ash hill is also covered with them. How did that happen?

In this episode, we also provide an answer to the question of the authenticity of the photos from the Russian website. Did Sobibor really look like that at the end of the war? Was it such a huge mess there? Are these photos real?

We'd love to hear what you think of this episode: info@audiodroom.nl. For more information, visit the website of Stichting Sobibor (https://www.sobibor.org/). Music written and performed by Mark Lobenstein (https://marklobenstein.com/). Spoken word created and performed by Ben Oranje (https://benoranje.nl/).

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