SOBIBOR Poland Archaeologists working at the site of the Nazi concentration camp at Sobibor, in eastern Poland, say they have uncovered previously-hidden gas chambers in which an estimated quarter of a million Jews were killed. "The extermination of people took place there; murder by smoke from an engine that killed everyone within 15 minutes in these gas chambers, in torment, shouting," he told Reuters Television. According to Israel's Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, the 1943 uprising was organized by Jewish civilians at the camp and Jewish officers in the Soviet army who had been taken prisoner and sent to Sobibor. The SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered Sobibor to be destroyed after a successful prisoner uprising in which around 300 of those being held there escaped.
– After seven years of searching, archaeologists digging in Poland have found the exact location of the Sobibor death camp's gas chambers. Less had been known about this concentration camp's chambers, which were razed by the Nazis along with the rest of the site following a prisoner uprising in 1943, the Jerusalem Post reports. A road was later built over the camp's remains, and archaeologists searching beneath it uncovered rows of bricks that they believe demarcate what one archaeologist involved in the dig says were eight chambers, Reuters reports. "We were amazed at the size of the building and the well-preserved condition of the chamber walls," says a second archaeologist, whose relatives were killed at Sobibor. Being able to determine the size of the chambers is a big win for researchers, who say it will enable them to more accurately determine how many people were killed at the camp; current estimates put the figure at 250,000. As the Telegraph explains, Sobibor was not a work camp like, for example, Auschwitz; all prisoners who arrived here were sent to the gas chambers. As such, few survivor stories exist. In addition to the chambers, a well containing prisoners' personal items discarded by the Nazis was also found. The archaeologists also surfaced a wedding ring bearing a Hebrew inscription reading, "Behold, you are consecrated unto me." (There was another very significant find at Sobibor this summer.)