COEUR d'ALENE -An 82-year-old Holocaust survivor who escaped the grip of a Nazi German extermination camp in 1943 told students Friday at Coeur d'Alene Charter Academy he speaks out about his experiences to tell the world what happened.

"When you come face to face with a survivor, history comes alive," Thomas "Toivi" Blatt told students. The school has 550 students in grades six through 12.

"Having been born into the wrong religion was a deadly sin," Blatt said.

Blatt participated in the revolt at the extermination camp Sobibor, which was located near the present-day eastern border of Poland. The camp had gas chambers and was sited near a railway line in a wooded, and thinly populated area, he said.

The Germans and their auxiliaries killed at least 167,000 people at Sobibor, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C.

"The will of life, the instinct" to stay alive strengthened him during the horrible experience of living at Sobibor and later fleeing from it, he said.

He broke out of Sobibor during the prisoner revolt in October 1943, when there were about 600 prisoners in the camp. Approximately 300 prisoners escaped during the revolt, as they killed guards, cut through barbed wire, and ran through the minefield surrounding the camp, he said.

Many were killed by guards, gunmen perched in towers on the compound, and land mines.

Blatt, as he sought freedom, was betrayed by a farmer who had hid him for a time, shooting the boy in the face. The bullet remains lodged in Blatt's jaw to this day, he said.

Blatt was 15 years old when he arrived at the camp, and was there for six months, he said. Today, Blatt lives in Santa Barbara, Calif.

He told the students to "accept, understand other groups," regardless of their religion, race or other differences.

In difficult times, he said, "Don't look on someone else to blame."

Blatt said that the Nazi Germany effort to exterminate Jewish people was so lethal because it was organized, it was supported by government policy, and "blindness" was widespread by people and countries around the world at the time.

"It was a case of special circumstances," he said.

He harbors no animosity toward the Germans who participated in the Holocaust.

"No. We are not looking, we survivors, for revenge," he said.

He said he's not angry at those who don't believe the historical accounts of the Holocaust, because the Nazi extermination efforts of Jewish people were so extraordinary and evil.

Blatt went on to write "From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival" about his experience at Sobibor, including his part in the plot that led to the prisoner uprising, as well as his life before the war leading up to the German occupation of his village in Poland.