Thomas Toivi Blatt | Nazi-camp escapee, 88

Thomas Toivi Blatt, 88, one of about 300 Jews who overwhelmed guards to escape a Nazi concentration camp in Poland and who decades later became a key witness at the trial of former guard John Demjanjuk, died Saturday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He had dementia.

Well into his later years, Mr. Blatt spoke to audiences around the world about the atrocities he witnessed as a teenager at Sobibor. He wrote two books and consulted on the 1987 TV film Escape From Sobibor.

On Oct. 14, 1943, Mr. Blatt, who was then 16, took part in the only mass escape from a World War II death camp. Some 250,000 prisoners - virtually all of them Jews - died at the camp. Mr. Blatt's father, mother, and brother were taken to one of its five gas chambers, just after the family arrived from their village in Poland. Mr. Blatt was chosen, seemingly at random, as a camp laborer.

After the uprising, most of the 300 escapees were hunted down and killed. Some perished in the woods surrounding the camp. Mr. Blatt and a companion bribed a farmer, who hid them in his barn for months before shooting them. With a bullet lodged in his jaw, Mr. Blatt was left for dead but managed to survive in the forest until the war's end.

Even after he established himself in the United States, owning three electronics shops in Santa Barbara, Mr. Blatt kept returning to the site of the Sobibor camp. In weeds and tall grasses, he would find bone shards and bury them.

He raised funds to preserve what remained of the camp. In 2011, his testimony helped convict Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker, of being an accessory to the murder of more than 28,000 people. - L.A. Times