On 14 October 1943, the prisoners of the Sobibor extermination camp staged the most successful prisoner revolt of the Holocaust. They killed eleven SS men in a coordinated operation lasting around an hour, took weapons from the SS arsenal, and led a mass escape. Of around 600 prisoners in the camp at the moment of the revolt, around 300 made it across the wire. Most were killed by mines in the surrounding minefield, by German pursuit forces, or by Polish villagers. Around 50 reached partisan units or hid in the forests and survived to liberation. The revolt destroyed the camp’s ability to continue operating. The SS dismantled Sobibor within weeks. The escape of so many prisoners is the single largest mass break-out from any extermination camp.
The camp
Sobibor was the smallest of the three Operation Reinhard camps. It operated from May 1942 to October 1943. Around 200,000 Jews were murdered there, mostly from the Generalgouvernement, the Netherlands, France, and the Soviet Union. The camp had no labour function and the standard processing time from arrival to death was around two hours. The permanent prisoner population was around 600 men and women working as Sonderkommando, sorters, and craftsmen.
The Soviet POWs
The revolt at Sobibor had a particular character because of the arrival, in late September 1943, of a transport of Jewish Soviet prisoners of war from the Minsk ghetto. Among them was Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, a Red Army officer who had been captured early in the war and held in various German POW camps before his Jewish identity was discovered and he was sent to Sobibor. Pechersky was 33, had military training, and was, by the time he arrived at Sobibor, mentally prepared for resistance. The other Soviet POWs in the transport had similar backgrounds.
An underground group already existed at Sobibor under the leadership of Leon Feldhendler, a Polish Jew who had been the chairman of the Judenrat in the Zolkiewka ghetto before deportation. Feldhendler had been planning a revolt for some months. Pechersky’s arrival, with his military training and his cohort of trained soldiers, was the practical capability the underground had been waiting for. The two men met in early October and agreed a joint plan.
The plan
The plan was to lure the SS officers in the camp, one at a time, to the prisoner workshops on the afternoon of 14 October. Each officer would be told that a tailor or shoemaker had something for him to inspect. He would step into the workshop and be killed by waiting prisoners with axes and knives. The killings would be done quietly so that the camp routine would continue undisturbed for as long as possible. The roll-call at four in the afternoon would be the moment when the prisoners, by then armed with the SS men’s weapons, would lead the entire camp population in a mass escape through the main gate.
The plan worked. Eleven SS officers were killed in the workshops over the course of around an hour and a quarter, between three and four o’clock. Each was lured into a workshop and dispatched with an axe to the head. The bodies were hidden under tables. The killings were not noticed by the rest of the SS until close to four o’clock, by which point the prisoners had assembled at the parade ground for what they pretended was a normal roll-call.
The escape
At four o’clock the prisoners broke for the main gate. The Ukrainian guards, taken by surprise, opened fire from the watchtowers. The remaining SS men, alerted by the gunfire, joined them. The prisoners returned fire with the captured weapons. Around 300 prisoners made it across the inner perimeter and out into the surrounding fields. The fields were mined. Around half of those who got through the wire were killed in the minefield. The rest reached the forest beyond.
German pursuit forces, including units of the Wehrmacht and the Order Police, hunted the escapers for several days. Local Polish villagers were offered rewards for any escaper turned in, and were threatened with severe punishment for any escaper sheltered. Most of the escapers were caught and shot. Some were sheltered by Polish villagers despite the threats. Some reached partisan units, particularly the Jewish partisan groups operating in the surrounding Parczew forests. Around 50 of the escapers ultimately survived to liberation.
Pechersky’s post-war life
Pechersky himself reached a partisan unit and survived the war. He returned to the Soviet Union and faced the standard treatment of repatriated Soviet POWs: he was sent to a penal battalion as punishment for having been captured, and after the war he had difficulty re-establishing himself in normal civilian life. The Soviet authorities did not publicly acknowledge his role at Sobibor for decades, partly because the Soviet Union did not officially recognise specifically Jewish heroism in the war, treating all anti-Nazi resistance as Soviet rather than national or religious. Pechersky lived in obscurity in Rostov-on-Don and died in 1990. His role was finally acknowledged formally by the Russian state in 2016, when he was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage.
The film
The Sobibor revolt was the subject of the 1987 British-Yugoslav television film Escape from Sobibor, with Rutger Hauer playing Pechersky and Alan Arkin playing Feldhendler. The film, broadcast on CBS in the United States and ITV in Britain, brought the story to a mass audience for the first time. Pechersky himself, then still alive in Rostov, was contacted by the producers but the Soviet authorities prevented him from travelling to participate. The film is broadly accurate in its account of the revolt itself, with some dramatic compression. It is one of the few mainstream depictions of organised Jewish armed resistance in the Holocaust.
What it tells us
Sobibor proves that armed resistance was possible at the scale of an entire camp population, and that it could partly succeed. The revolt did not save the prisoners who carried it out: most of the escapers were killed, and the remaining prisoners who had not joined the escape were shot by the SS in the immediate aftermath. But it shut the camp. The SS did not rebuild Sobibor. They dismantled it within weeks. The killing that would have been done at Sobibor for the rest of 1943 and into 1944 was not done. The number of lives saved by the revolt, in this indirect sense, is unknown but real.
See also
Sources
- Richard Rashke, Escape from Sobibor, Houghton Mifflin, 1982
- Alexander Pechersky, Holocaust Survivor and Resistance Hero, posthumous papers, various editions
- Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, 2007
- USHMM: Sobibor