There are 58 known survivors of the Sobibor camp, 48 male and 10 female, albeit not all of them were involved in the uprising since e.g. 5 of them managed to flee by killing some Ukrainian guards previous to the uprising while collecting fire in the woods. Also, there are also those whose names are still unknown, including one survivor from Slovakia who in 1943 wrote a detailed report about selections at Sobibor. The report is kept today in the NIOD in Amsterdam.

Anyways, for those who survived the uprising, the situation was complicated. As you can see here Sobibor is located somewhat east of Lublin. Here is a map of the frontline from August to December 1943, indicating that the Soviets had not even reached Minsk yet. That left the survivors of the Sobibor uprising on the run from the Nazis and in a situation where – without assistance – it was virtually impossible to reach safety. I mean, they had little in the way of money, wore prisoner uniforms, were hunted by the Germans, and couldn't just get on a train or boat to somewhere safe since the frontline essentially blocked that.

Some of the survivors like Selma Wijnberg and her later husband Chaim Engel survived the war by hiding out with a sympathetic Polish family they came across. Spending several months in their attic, they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. Others like Zelda Metz manged through contacts in the Polish resistance to obtain faked papers and was able to pretend to be Catholic until the liberation of Poland by Red Army.

But most of those who did survive the war, did so because they joined nearby Partisan group, such as the Parczew partisans in the forests near Lublin or the Serchuk Partisans. Founded by a previous Sobibor excapee, Joseph Serchuk, this Jewish Partisan group operated alongside several other Partisan groups in the same area. Both groups founded by other Jews who had escaped Nazi ghettos or camps, in the case of Josef Serchuck even Sobibor itself, these groups fought alongside the Polish Home Army and the Communist Polish People's Army while also making it their priority to save other Jews. Most of the Jews who survived Sobibor, did survive there.

This also meant that they did not really have a chance to inform the media about their story directly right away. They were in contact with the Soviets and the Home Army. With lines of communication hampered and the Soviets supplying the Partisans via parachute drops, the knowledge that reached the Soviets about Sobibor and the other Reinhard Camps was rather poor. As Yitzhak Arad has shown, these camps while they did feature in several articles in Russian and Yiddish media in the Soviet Union were poorly understood in their functions. There was a similar dynamic to the Western Allies when they received further information about the Holocaust, namely, that it was really hard to believe the stories about camps that served no other purpose than killing a huge amount of people. And while the Polish Home Army did indeed also smuggle reports and information to the Polish government in exile in London, including some info on the Reinhard Camps, they apparently did not include testimony of those particular survivors.

It was only after their liberation that many of them started talking and writing about their experiences but during the war, it was simply not possible for them to contact Allied media outlets to spread their story.

Sources:

• Arad, Yitzhak (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps.

• Schelvis, Jules (2007). Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp.

• Yitzhak Arad, ‘The Holocaust as Reflected in the Soviet Russian Language Newspapers in the Years 1941-1945’; in Robert Moses Shapiro (ed), Why Didn’t The Press Shout? American & International Journalism During the Holocaust. Yeshiva University Press, Jersey City, NJ, 2003, pp.199-220.

• Dov-Ber Kerler, ‘The Soviet Yiddish Press: During the War, 1942-1945’ in Robert Moses Shapiro (ed), Why Didn’t The Press Shout? American & International Journalism During the Holocaust. Yeshiva University Press, Jersey City, NJ, 2003, pp. 221-249.