On the eve of the Victory Day of the Red Army and the Soviet people over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War in the Russian box office comes out with the title role. The film tells about the feat of Soviet prisoners in the German death camp.
Konstantin Khabensky in the film "Sobibor", Khabensky's official website
In the autumn of 1943, a prisoner riot took place in the Sobibor death camp, located near the Polish village of the same name, which eventually became the only successful uprising in a concentration camp in World War II. The rebellion was led by an officer, and many articles on the topic of the uprising in Sobibor are based on his memoirs.
Sobibor was called the "conveyor of death." Jews and prisoners of war were brought there literally by "cars" and on the same day they were killed in specially equipped "shower cabins", where instead of water, gas was released from the walls.
People were brought there under the pretext of “disinfection”, however, according to the recollections of the survivors, after a quarter of an hour the bodies of prisoners were taken out of there. Fastidious Nazis could not personally take out, inspect and destroy the bodies, for these purposes they kept “labor force” in Sobibor.
Suvorovski.ru The uprising in Sobibor took place on October 14, 1943. The prisoners one by one killed 11 SS men and several Ukrainian guards who helped the Nazis. There were 550 people in the camp, 130 of whom refused to participate in the rebellion, 80 died during the uprising, 170 were later found in the forests and killed, some were missing. Until the end of the war, 53 of the rebels survived.
However, historians find a number of dubious points in the accounts of witnesses. About some of them - in the material.
The number of deaths in the camp
News of Kyiv " In his memoirs, published in Moscow in 1946, Alexander Pechersky claims that at the time of his arrival at the death camp, about 500 thousand people died there, which differs from the official historical point of view. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 250,000 Jews died in Sobibor.
However, none of these points of view can be considered reliable. To date, no documents and records have been preserved that can name the exact number of deaths. Historians call figures far from each other - from 30-35 thousand dead to 2 million.
Echelons with people
Classmates " In the book “Sobibor. Myth and Reality” calls into question Alexander Pechersky’s assertion that trains full of people arrived in Sobibor every other day. Pechersky assured that for 4.5 days he was traveling in a car full of people, and his comrades in misfortune did not receive any food or water.
In addition, the book calls into question the very process of extermination of the arrived prisoners. Alexander Pechersky claimed that the extermination chambers were disguised as a bathhouse, where there were taps for hot and cold water and washbasins, but from the holes in the ceiling, instead of water, “a thick black liquid instead of water” poured out. This description does not correspond to the officially confirmed version, according to which the prisoners were killed with the help of exhaust gases.
Mystery of Sobibor
Gas chambers found during excavations in SobiborIt is known that “Sobibor” is a “conveyor of death” disguised as a transit camp. If we believe the reports of witnesses and prisoners, the prisoners were assured that they would undergo disinfection, put themselves in order, and then go to Ukraine. Even those working on the territory of the neighboring camp did not know what was happening in Sobibor.
However, some sources claim that the Poles who lived in the village of Sobibor knew about what was happening in the camp and even tried to warn the prisoners as they were being led through the streets. This was recalled by the former prisoner of Sobibor Yitzhak Lichtman. These two versions contradict each other.
Another witness - Dov Freiberg, a prisoner who got to Sobibor on one of the first echelons, worked a couple of hundred meters from the alleged gas chambers and for two weeks did not notice any evidence of massacres. In addition, Freiberg noted that some of the prisoners still received clean clothes and went to Ukraine. This led the authors of the above book to the idea that Sobibor really was a transit camp, and reports of the mass murder of Jews using a gas chamber were fiction.
One way or another, immediately after the riot, the Nazis destroyed the camp and planted vegetable gardens in its place. If we start from the idea that thousands of people were really killed in Sobibor, the uprising led by Alexander Pechersky saved many lives, because it is not known how many more innocent Jews would have become victims of Nazi arbitrariness.
Sobibor was created by the Nazis as part of a program to physically exterminate people of Jewish origin. Massacres of both prisoners of war and civilians, including minors, took place there. From the documents published by the RIO, you can find out the details of how the institution functioned.
“The Nazis began to build the camp in May 1942 with the help of civilians, mainly Jews brought to the Sobibor station from neighboring regions and from countries occupied by the Germans: the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and others. First, the camp was surrounded by barbed wire, then a foundation pit was dug in it and a brick building was built without windows, with one entrance, with tightly closed iron doors and an armored roof. A large ditch was dug next to this room. Seven towers six to seven meters high were built around the camp to monitor the territory, ”says the act“ On the atrocities of the Nazi invaders, ”which was drawn up by representatives of the Red Army who examined the territory of the death camp, and residents of the settlement Zholobok II on July 22 1944.
It also notes that the institution's security system made escape extremely difficult: a minefield was located behind the first row of barbed wire, and then another row of "thorns" followed.
Up to six echelons per day
In the certificate "On the atrocities of the Nazi invaders" of the 7th branch of the political department of the 8th Guards Army, Lieutenant Colonel Shelyubsky tells in detail how the process of extermination of people in Sobibor took place.
“It was announced that at Sobibur station (the document contains exactly such a spelling. — RT) will create a marmalade factory. Echelons with the population (adults, old people, children) arrived throughout 1941, 1942 and 1943, ”the certificate says.
It is noted that on some days up to six echelons of 2,000 people each arrived at the death camp. At the same time, there is one inaccuracy in the document: it says that the institution began to function in 1941, while other materials provide information that it was created in 1942.
Further, the certificate states that immediately after the arrival of each batch of people, they were gathered on the square, where the camp administration delivered welcoming speeches with the promise of "a good life for those who arrived." After that, a false medical examination of the prisoners was carried out, as they were explained, in order to send the weakest to light work.
“The first batch of those selected were sent to the bathhouse to bathe. People went into a specially built bathhouse, where there were rooms for undressing, hangers, and numbers were given out for the handed-over linen. After that, they entered a special bathing room, which was filled with gas. People were dying, the locals heard how the engine was running, and after a while, the screams of people could be heard, ”the certificate says.
Separately, it is noted that the camp administration tried to hide the screams and groans of the dying prisoners, for which, at the time of gas supply, geese were taken out of the utility rooms to graze, which raised a cry. The corpses of people were sent by narrow-gauge railway to a specially created cemetery, where they were buried in a deep ditch in a common grave.
“The suicide bombers waiting in line lived in the camp and worked - they prepared firewood, dug stumps and so on. Local residents witnessed how people who worked there were thrown onto bonfires from stumps. People were on fire, ”the certificate says.
The document was compiled on the basis of acts of inspection of the former territory of Sobibor, where the testimonies of local residents were also entered. Photos are attached to the certificate, they show the remains of people, broken baby carriages, personal belongings of prisoners, a narrow-gauge railway along which the dead were taken to the cemetery.
The documents say that the leadership of the administration consisted of members of the SS, and up to 50 people from the guards were Germans. Ordinary camp guards were recruited from prisoners of war, many of whom, as well as from among volunteers - residents of the surrounding Polish villages. From March to September 1943, Ivan Demjanjuk, nicknamed Ivan the Terrible for his cruelty in dealing with prisoners, was the Sobibor guard. After the war, he managed to move to the United States, but he was extradited for trial, first to Israel and then to Germany. During the trials, a number of former prisoners of Sobibor testified against him. According to the first sentence, Demjanjuk served seven years in prison, and then he was sentenced to a five-year term, but during the hearing of his appeal against this decision, Demjanjuk died at the age of 92.
Uprising in Sobibor
In the documents published by RIO, there is also an account card, a prisoner of Sobibor, who organized the only successful uprising in this death camp. He served as the clerk of the headquarters of the 596th howitzer artillery regiment, held the rank of lieutenant. Near Vyazma, his part was surrounded, and Pechersky himself was wounded and captured. Until 1943, he was in various camps and ghettos on the territory of Minsk, and then he was sent to Sobibor.
According to the stories of the surviving participants in the uprising, upon arrival at the camp, the captive lieutenant of the Red Army met the son of the Polish rabbi, Leon Feldhendler, who by that time had managed to create a group of conspirators to prepare the uprising and escape. However, Pechersky's organizational skills turned out to be better, and Feldhendler gave him informal leadership of the future performance, and he himself provided all possible assistance to the participants in the uprising.
- Alexander Pechersky
- Wikimedia Commons
On the appointed day, the rebels were supposed to secretly kill the camp guards, and then seize the armory and destroy the entire administration of Sobibor. The conspirators managed to do this only partially: on October 14, 1943, they organized an organized attack on the guards and SS officers and were able to kill 11 Germans and several ordinary security officers. However, the prisoners failed to capture the weapons warehouse, its guards opened fire on the rebels.
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Most of the participants in the speech were unarmed, so their losses were very high. The remaining fugitives managed to break through the minefields and barbed wire, after which they tried to hide in the forest. The Germans and collaborators conducted a search operation. More than 90 participants in the speech were caught and killed, who were actively handed over to the punishers by local Poles. But some fugitives still managed to escape and join various partisan detachments. Among them was Lieutenant Pechersky, who, along with eight more comrades, was able to get to Belarus, where he joined the Shchors detachment.
After the liberation of Belarus by the Red Army, the organizer of the uprising ended up in an assault rifle battalion, where he fought until 1944, until he was seriously wounded. Having received a disability, he was commissioned to the rear. Even before he was wounded, Pechersky, at the insistence of his commander, went to Moscow and testified to the Soviet Commission for the Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices, the materials of which later became the basis of the evidence base of the Nuremberg Trials.
The story of the former prisoner amazed the members of the commission - the writers Pavel Antokolsky and Veniamin Kaverin - who, on its basis, published the essay "The Uprising in Sobibor". Later, it was included in the world-famous Black Book collection, which publishes numerous testimonies and evidence of the extermination of Jews during the Second World War.
“At the end of 1943, the Germans began to hastily liquidate this camp. In order to cover up the traces of the crimes, all the buildings were burned, except for the office premises, which have survived to this day. The area where the buildings were located was plowed up and planted with young pine. However, it is enough to slightly dig up the ground to find traces of a wild crime. At this place you can find a lot of bones, ashes, the remains of clothes, shoes, and various household utensils. Burnt baby carriages and dishes were also found, ”said in a memorandum from the deputy head of the main political department of the Red Army, Lieutenant General Iosif Shikin, to the chairman of the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, Nikolai Shvernik.
"A captive, but not a conquered man"
The historian of the Third Reich, writer and publicist Konstantin Zalessky explained in an interview with RT that the relative success of the uprising in Sobibor is a unique phenomenon, since the entire camp organization system was built in such a way that people simply did not have time to organize themselves.
“In order to prepare an uprising, it took a lot of time, and in Sobibor, in general, the captives did not have this time - people came and destroyed them almost immediately. In addition, any escape had to be prepared by the prisoners themselves in advance and without outside help, and this is always very difficult. To escape from Sobibor was a more difficult task than, for example, from Buchenwald, since the prisoners in Sobibor had no connection with the outside world. Consequently, they had nowhere to run," Zalessky said.
The head of the archive of the Holocaust Scientific and Educational Foundation Leonid Tyorushkin, in turn, told RT that in many respects the successful performance in Sobibor was due to the coincidence of two factors: the internal readiness of many prisoners for the uprising and the leadership qualities of Pechersky.
“There have been uprisings before, for example, in the Warsaw ghetto. It is possible that the newly arrived prisoners told about this to those who were in the camp before, and they were inspired by this example. However, the conspirators lacked an authoritative person, a leader who would be followed, ”Terushkin said in an interview with RT.
The expert noted that at that moment the captured lieutenant was 10 years older than many of the conspirators, had more life experience, and most importantly, he was a military man, and therefore he was able to unite civilians around him who did not have any combat training.
“Before the Nazis, he behaved like a “captured, but not conquered person.” In this he differed from many. Pechersky showed that it is not easy to break him and he is not afraid of the Nazis. It was impossible not to notice. In the eyes of civilian Jews, Jews from Poland and Holland, he was the personification of the Red Army that everyone was waiting for. For the prisoners of the camp, a Soviet officer - a Jew psychologically meant a lot, ”concluded the expert.
In May 2018, the premiere of the film "Sobibor" dedicated to the famous escape of prisoners from the Polish death camp in 1943 will take place in Russia. The director of the film, as well as the actor who played the main role, was Konstantin Khabensky. He played in the film the captive lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, who was the main organizer of the escape.
Despite the exclusivity of this event, few people still know about the only successful escape from a Nazi concentration camp in history.
The Nazis created Sobibor in March 1942. The territory of the camp was surrounded by wire and a minefield was set up. Towers with machine guns were placed in the corners. The camp was divided into three sectors, one of which was the so-called baths - gas chambers, in which about 250 thousand Jews were killed in the history of Sobibor. One batch of prisoners, arriving in 33 railroad cars, was usually killed in three to four hours. Most were sent to the gas chambers as soon as they arrived at the camp. Some were left alive for chores: the prisoners took the corpses to a special ditch for burial, sorted out the personal belongings of the dead, and did chores. At the same time, those who had not yet been sent to the baths knew that their turn would also come sooner or later.
When trains - as a rule, most of them came at night, but sometimes daytime too, - so, when we heard the whistle of the camp commandant, it meant that the next echelon was approaching and the staff needed to get ready to unload people; and when you heard that whistle, it felt like someone was tearing out all your insides,” recalls Esther Raab, a former prisoner at the camp. - You knew that there are other people inside, children, old people, adults who have not done anything wrong in their lives, and now they will die, and you can’t say a word, you can’t prevent this, you can’t do anything, only inside everything accumulates, all this thirst for revenge, indignation, anger, pain ... You understand what was happening in the soul of each of us ... and sometimes these echelons came in the afternoon, sometimes there were so many of them that they did not have time to manage them, and then they lined up those people behind the barbed wire that fenced us in and ordered us to just walk back and forth, back and forth, so that what they told them - that they were supposed to work here - sounded like the truth, and it was hard, very hard. You walked by, looked the person in the face, understood that after half an hour he would no longer be alive, and could not even warn him.
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Esther Raab, prisoner of the Sobibor camp
Soviet officer Alexander Pechersky was also among the prisoners. He was drafted into the army on the first day of the war from Rostov-on-Don, in October 1941 Pechersky was surrounded near Vyazma. He spent two years in labor camps. From there, the already experienced prisoner Pechersky was sent to an extermination camp in Poland. He was one of the first batch of Soviet prisoners of war who arrived in Sobibor on September 23, 1943. Of the 600 people, about 520 were immediately executed. 80 people were left for household work - including Pechersky.
Pechersky had no illusions about his fate, and he decided to use the granted respite in order to try to give the Nazis the last battle. Among the prisoners of the camp was Rabbi Leon Feldgendler, the former head of the Judenrat in Zolkiyevo, who had long thought of escaping. Soon the rabbi and the Soviet officer began to work together. As Pechersky recalled, initially they thought about running away in a small group. However, then a more daring plan arose - to rise up and flee with the whole camp.
As Lev Simkin, the author of the book One and a Half Hour of Retribution, wrote, the uprising of the prisoners was being prepared gradually. Eda Lichtman testifies: “The women who worked in the laundry were instructed to get as many cartridges as possible from the houses where the SS lived. We found cartridges in the pockets of their uniforms, in the drawers of tables and cabinets. There were other women who in the fourth camp (zone) were engaged in dismantling captured weapons, they were instructed to bring hand grenades ... ", finally, how they decided who and what to do when the "hour X" comes.
All these plans were not worth a penny, at least at first, but we discussed them, we saw in our dreams how we were released, and all the Nazis died, and this gave us the strength to live, - says prisoner Esther Raab. “We started looking for a way, we started making plans, going secretly to meetings, even though there were only a few, because we had to be careful, and when you came back from there, you felt like you were doing something, planning something, trying to do something. If it works, that'll be great. If not, you'll get shot in the back - which is better than going to the gas chambers. I made a promise to myself that I would never go to the gas chamber, that I would run, I would fight, and they would have to waste a bullet on me.
According to the plan, the prisoners were going to destroy the German guards in the workshops, where everyone was to be called one by one under various pretexts. And so it happened. On October 14, 1943, SS officer Josef Wolf was told by the prisoners that among the belongings of the new arrivals they found an excellent leather coat that would clearly suit him. He ran to look at the new thing, and they killed him. The deputy head of the camp, Untersturmführer Johann Neumann, came to try on a suit - he suffered the same fate. The head of the camp guard, Oberscharführer Siegfried Greatshus, coveted a new winter coat. While some were killing the Fritz, others cut off the connection with the guard's quarters. Subsequently, it was planned to break through the camp fence.
mostinfo.su
Of course, only a few were devoted to the plans - this increased the chances for a successful outcome of the case. A few days before the “X-day”, edged weapons were made and then hidden in the workshops. According to some reports, two camp guards provided significant assistance to the prisoners: they were also prisoners, but they performed some administrative functions and had relative freedom of movement.
ribalych.ru
Having finished with the SS, the exhausted and unarmed prisoners grabbed their weapons, cut the wires and turned off the telephone connection in the camp, de-energizing at the same time the barbed wire of the fence. The head of the guard was killed, but the plan was only partially successful - the guards who survived opened fire on the prisoners running through the minefield. Someone, alas, was killed. But several dozen people managed to break through and escape into the forest.
ribalych.ru
Of the nearly 550 prisoners in the workers' camp, 130 did not take part in the uprising, remaining in the camp. However, the enraged Germans, having learned about the escape, killed them. However, as well as those who were found in the forests as a result of large-scale searches. As a result, 80 people died during the escape, another 170 were caught by the Germans after. Until the end of the war, only 53 participants in the uprising survived.
Exhausted by the escape, Pechersky's group joined the partisans. Soon he became a demolition officer in the detachment, together with the battle group derailed two German echelons. However, after some time, Pechersky was arrested and sent to an assault rifle battalion - a kind of penal battalion - to atone for his captivity. Despite this, he rose to the rank of captain and was also severely wounded in action. On August 20, 1944, he received a certificate: “Given to the technician-quartermaster of the 2nd rank Pechersky A. A. that, on the basis of the directive of the General Staff of the Red Army dated June 14, 1944, No. 12/309 593, he atoned for his guilt before the Motherland blood. The certificate was issued for further service.
After four months of difficult treatment in hospitals, Pechersky returned to Rostov. By the way, in the hospital, Pechersky met his future wife, Olga Kotova, who gave birth to his daughter.
The history of the destruction of the Sobibor camp was included in the archives of the accusatory documents at the Nuremberg trials. The International Tribunal asked Pechersky to come to court as a witness, but the Soviet authorities did not let him go to Germany.
In 1948, during the political campaign to persecute the so-called rootless cosmopolitans (in other words, a separate layer of the Soviet intelligentsia, which was suspected of pro-Western sentiments), Pechersky lost his job. After that, for five years he could not get at least some kind of service and lived at the expense of his wife.
newrezume.org
The hero's granddaughter, Natalya Ladychenko, says that Pechersky was not allowed to go abroad, and in general, they were not very honored:
In 1987, grandfather was not allowed to go to America for the premiere of the Hollywood film "Escape from Sobibor," she shares her memories. - Immediately after the war, the Rostov publishing house "Molot" published a thin booklet "The Uprising in the Sobiburovsky Camp", written by him. He began to write it while still in the hospital, and his sister knew the editor and showed him her brother's notes. One of the first copies of the book is kept in our family; several years ago it was reprinted for the first time. In the same 1945, Komsomolskaya Pravda told about the feat of his grandfather. He did not let anyone near his archive, not even his wife, my grandmother. He had everything neatly laid out in chronology and geography. Because there were a lot of letters and from everywhere. He kept every last one. For what? With the sole purpose of not forgetting about Sobibor.
Pechersky had few awards: back in 1949 he was presented for the award of the Order Patriotic War II degree, however, the Rostov regional military commissar, Major General Safonov, changed the award to the medal "For Military Merit". Pechersky did not receive any awards specifically for the feat in Sobibor during his lifetime. It is known that the wife of Alexander Aronovich persuaded him for a long time to leave to live in Israel - where he would probably have been released - after all, the former prisoner of war was and is still considered a national hero in this country. However, Pechersky did not want to leave his native country. He died on January 19, 1990 at the age of 80 and was buried at the Northern Cemetery of Rostov-on-Don. There is a memorial plaque on the house where he lived.
chayka.org
By the way, one of the participants in the uprising in Sobibor, a native of Ukraine, Semyon Rosenfeld, is still alive. He is 95 years old, he emigrated to Israel in 1990 and has been living in Tel Aviv ever since. Semyon Moiseevich was friends with Pechersky: the heroes of Sobibor did not lose contact until the last days of Alexander Aronovich's life.
On October 16, 2012, a monument to Alexander Pechersky was unveiled there, and a personalized tree was planted. The monument was erected on the territory of the social housing complex, where Semyon Rosenfeld now lives.
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Sobibor(Polish Sobibor, German SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor listen)) is a death camp organized by the Nazis in Poland. Operated from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943. About 250,000 Jews were killed here. At the same time, it was in Sobibor on October 14, 1943 that the only successful of the major uprisings in the Nazi death camps, led by Soviet officer Alexander Pechersky, took place.
Camp history
The Sobibor camp was located in the southeast of Poland near the village of Sobibur (now in the Lublin Voivodeship). It was created as part of Operation Reinhard, the purpose of which was the mass extermination of the Jewish population living in the territory of the so-called "governor general" (the territory of Poland occupied by Germany). Subsequently, Jews from other occupied countries were brought to the camp: Lithuania, the Netherlands, France, Czechoslovakia and the USSR.
The camp commandant from April 1942 was SS-Obersturmführer Franz Stangl, his staff consisted of about 30 SS non-commissioned officers, many of whom had experience in the euthanasia program. Ordinary guards to serve around the perimeter of the camp were recruited from collaborators - former prisoners of war from the Red Army, for the most part (90-120 people) Ukrainians - the so-called. "herbalists", due to the fact that most of them were trained in the camp "Travniki" and civilian volunteers.
The camp was located in the forest next to the substation Sobibor. Railway reached a dead end, which was supposed to contribute to the preservation of the secret. The camp was surrounded by four rows of barbed wire three meters high. The space between the third and fourth rows was mined. Between the second and third - there were patrols. Day and night, on the towers, from where the entire system of barriers was visible, sentries were on duty.
The camp was divided into three main parts - "subcamps", each had its own strictly defined purpose. The first housed a work camp (workshops and residential barracks). In the second - a hairdresser's barracks and warehouses, where the belongings of the dead were stored and sorted. In the third there were gas chambers where people were killed. For this purpose, several old tank engines were installed in an annex near the gas chamber, during operation of which carbon monoxide was released, which was supplied through pipes to the gas chamber.
Most of the prisoners brought to the camp were killed on the same day in the gas chambers. Only a small part was left alive and used on various works in the camp.
During the year and a half of the camp, about 250,000 Jews were killed in it.
Destruction of prisoners
The essay “The Rebellion in Sobibur” (Znamya magazine, N 4, 1945) by Veniamin Kaverin and Pavel Antokolsky cites the testimony of the former prisoner Dov Fainberg dated August 10, 1944. According to Feinberg, the prisoners were exterminated in a brick building called a "bathhouse" that housed about 800 people:
When a party of eight hundred people entered the "bathhouse", the door was tightly closed. In the annex there was a machine that produced asphyxiating gas. The produced gas entered the cylinders, of which through hoses - into the room. Usually, after fifteen minutes, everyone in the cell was strangled. There were no windows in the building. Only there was a glass window on top, and the German, who was called the “bath attendant” in the camp, watched through it whether the process of killing was completed. At his signal, the gas supply was cut off, the floor was mechanically moved apart, and the corpses fell down. There were trolleys in the basement, and a group of doomed people piled the corpses of the executed on them. The trolleys were taken out of the basement into the forest. A huge ditch was dug there, into which the corpses were dumped. People involved in the folding and transportation of corpses were periodically shot.
Later, the essay was included in the "Black Book" of the Red Army war reporters Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman.
Resistance attempts
On New Year's Day 1943, five Jewish prisoners fled from the extermination zone (Zone No. 3). But a Polish peasant reported on the fugitives, and the Polish "blue police" managed to catch them. As a punitive action, several hundred prisoners were shot in the camp.
One prisoner also managed to escape from zone No. 1. He took refuge in a freight car under a mountain of clothes belonging to the dead, which were sent from Sobibor to Germany, and managed to get to Chełm. Obviously, thanks to him, Chelm learned about what was happening in Sobibór. When at the end of February 1943 the last batch of Jews from this city was sent to Sobibor, there were several attempts to escape from the train. The deported Jews of Vlodava, upon their arrival in Sobibor on April 30, 1943, refused to voluntarily leave the cars.
Another case of resistance took place on October 11, 1943, when people refused to go to the gas chamber and began to run. Some of them were shot near the camp fence, others were captured and tortured.
On July 5, 1943, Himmler ordered Sobibor to be turned into a concentration camp, the prisoners of which would be re-equipping captured Soviet weapons. In this regard, new construction began in the northern part of the camp (zone No. 4). The brigade, which included 40 prisoners (half Polish, half Dutch Jews), nicknamed the "forest team", began to harvest the wood that was required for construction in the forest, a few kilometers from Sobibor. Seven Ukrainians and two SS men were assigned to guard.
One day, two prisoners from this brigade (Shlomo Podkhlebnik and Yosef Kurts, both Polish Jews) were sent to the nearest village to fetch water under the escort of a Ukrainian guard. Along the way, the two killed their escort, took his weapons and fled. As soon as this was discovered, the work of the "forest team" was immediately suspended and the prisoners were returned to the camp. But on the way, suddenly, on a prearranged signal, the Polish Jews from the "forest team" rushed to run. The Dutch Jews decided not to participate in the escape attempt because, not owning Polish and not knowing the terrain, it would be extremely difficult for them to find shelter.
Ten of the fugitives were captured, several of them were shot dead, but eight managed to escape. The ten who were caught were taken to the camp and shot there in front of all the prisoners.
Insurrection
The underground operated in the camp, planning the escape of prisoners from the concentration camp.
In July and August 1943, an underground group was organized in the camp, led by the son of the Polish rabbi, Leon Feldhendler, who had previously been the head of the Judenrat in Zolkiev. The plan of this group was to organize an uprising and a mass escape from Sobibor. At the end of September 1943, Soviet Jewish prisoners of war arrived in the camp from Minsk. Among the new arrivals was Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, who joined the underground group and headed it, and Leon Feldhendler became his deputy.
On October 14, 1943, the prisoners of the death camp, led by Pechersky and Feldhendler, revolted. According to Pechersky's plan, the prisoners were supposed to secretly, one by one, eliminate the camp's SS personnel, and then, having taken possession of the weapons that were in the camp's warehouse, kill the guards. The plan was only partially successful - the rebels were able to kill 11 (according to other sources 12) SS men from the camp staff and several Ukrainian guards, but they failed to take possession of the armory. The guards opened fire on the prisoners and they were forced to break out of the camp through minefields. They managed to crush the guards and escape into the forest. Of the almost 550 prisoners of the work camp, 130 did not take part in the uprising (remained in the camp), about 80 died during the escape. The rest managed to escape. All those remaining in the camp were killed by the Germans the next day.
In the next two weeks after the escape, the Germans staged a real hunt for the fugitives, in which the German military police and camp guards took part. During the search, 170 fugitives were found, all of them were immediately shot. In early November 1943, the Germans stopped active searches. In the period from November 1943 until the liberation of Poland, about 90 more former prisoners of Sobibor (those whom the Germans failed to catch) were extradited to the Germans by the local population, or killed by collaborators. Until the end of the war, only 53 participants in the uprising survived (according to other sources, 47 participants).
The uprising in Sobibor was the only successful camp uprising in all the years of the Second World War. Immediately after the escape of the prisoners, the camp was closed and razed to the ground. In its place, the Germans plowed the land, planted it with cabbage and potatoes.
After the war
At the site of the camp, the Polish government opened a memorial. In connection with the 50th anniversary of the uprising, Polish President Lech Walesa sent the following message to the ceremony participants:
There are places in the Polish land that are symbols of suffering and meanness, heroism and cruelty. These are death camps. Built by Nazi engineers and run by Nazi "professionals," the camps served the sole purpose of the complete extermination of the Jewish people. One of these camps was Sobibor. A hell created by human hands... The prisoners had almost no chance of success, but they did not lose hope.
Saving life was not the goal of a heroic uprising, the struggle was for a dignified death. By defending the dignity of the 250,000 victims, most of whom were Polish citizens, the Jews won a moral victory. They saved their dignity and honor, they defended the dignity of the human race. Their deeds cannot be forgotten, especially today, when many parts of the world are again seized with fanaticism, racism, intolerance, when genocide is being carried out again.
Sobibor remains a reminder and a warning. However, the history of Sobibor is also a testament to humanism and dignity, a triumph of humanity.
I pay tribute to the memory of Jews from Poland and other European countries, tortured and killed here on this earth.
As of January 2015, 4 participants in the uprising in Sobibór survived. One of the participants in the uprising, Aleksey Vaytsen, died on January 14, 2015.
In 1962-1965, trials of former camp guards took place in Kyiv and Krasnodar. 13 of them were sentenced to death.
On May 12, 2011, a Munich court sentenced Ivan Demyanuk, a former Sobibor security guard, to five years in prison.
On January 14, 2015, the last prisoner of Sobibor, Aleksey Angelovich Vaytsen, who gave accusatory evidence against Ivan Demjanyuk, died.
Sobibor in cinema
In 1987, based on the book by Richard Raschke, the feature film "Escape from Sobibor" was shot.
In 2001, the French documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann shot the historical documentary film Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 pm.
https://www.site/2018-05-03/originalnaya_istoriya_vosstaniya_v_sobibore_glazami_ego_organizatora
“These are the corpses of your comrades on the echelon burning”
The uprising in the Sobibor camp: memories of the organizer Alexander Pechersky
Website "Sobibor" (http://sobibor.histrf.ru/)
On May 3, Russian cinemas began showing Konstantin Khabensky's film Sobibor, which tells about the uprising that took place in October 1943 in the German concentration camp of the same name in Poland. As Khabensky himself noted, the authors of the tape took the “mass escape, rebellion” as the basis of the film as historical fact, "Further it's all rather our fiction, our reflections - I hope honest." Before the Russians go to the cinemas, the site decided to introduce them to the original story of the uprising in Sobibor. Fortunately, it was published in a small print run (5,000 copies) back in 1945 in Rostov-on-Don, as presented by the organizer of this riot, quartermaster 2nd rank Alexander Pechersky.
Pechersky's memoirs are a pocket book, only 64 pages of text on rough paper. It is not available in all libraries. It is called "The Uprising in the Sobiburov Camp".
The memories of the Soviet quartermaster begin from the moment 2,000 Soviet women, children and men were sent from the SS Arbeitcamp (labor camp), located in Minsk on Shirokaya Street, to Germany for work. At least, this is how they explained what was happening, having built in September 1943 in the courtyard of this very SS Arbeitcamp. “In an hour you will be taken to the station. The great favor of the Fuhrer awaits you: you are going to work in Germany, ”Pechersky quotes in his memoirs the speech of the camp commandant Wax, which he uttered“ in a voice hoarse from drinking. How Pechersky himself ended up among the prisoners of the Minsk camp, he does not explain.
To "Sobibor"
It is now known that the future officer of the Red Army was born on February 22, 1909 in Kremenchug in the family of a lawyer, a Jew by nationality - Aron Pechersky. In 1915 the family moved to Rostov-on-Don. There, Pechersky Jr. graduated from the university and led a musical circle. The man had nothing to do with the military. He was drafted into the army on the first day of the Great Patriotic War - June 22, 1941. In September of the same year, Pechersky was awarded the rank of quartermaster technician of the 2nd rank (corresponding to a lieutenant). He served as the clerk of the 596th Corps Artillery Regiment of the 19th Army. At the very beginning of the battle for Moscow, he was wounded and taken prisoner in the Vyazma region.
In captivity, he was ill with typhus for about nine months, but he carefully concealed this from the guards and was not shot for the only reason. In May 1942, as soon as he recovered, he tried to escape with four other prisoners. The attempt ended in failure. Through a penal camp in Borisov, Pechersky was sent to a labor camp in Minsk. It finally turned out that he was a Jew by nationality. After spending five days in the "Jewish basement" - an underground punishment cell, Pechersky in October 1942 ended up in the SS Arbeitcamp, located on Shiroka Street in Minsk.
In February 1943, 50 prisoners of this camp made another attempt to escape. “All of them were not just killed, but tortured for a long time. At first, they beat them mercilessly with whips and set dogs on them. Then they mockingly led them through the whole city with their hands up, then drove them into the bathhouse and, stripping to the naked, doused them alternately with hot, then cold water. Only after that, the Nazis threw them into the yard on the snow and opened fire on them from machine guns, ”Pechersky describes the result of this escape in his memoirs.
Pechersky's first day at Sobibor
From Minsk to Sobibor, the echelon with prisoners walked for four days. The first thing the prisoners saw was a white shield with the Gothic inscription "Sobibur" (that's what Pechersky calls this place) and rows of a three-meter-high wire fence. Pechersky, among 80 “solitary joiners and carpenters,” was separated from the rest of the mass of arrivals and taken to another courtyard. There, he almost immediately got into a conversation with the “old camper” (the Sobibor concentration camp began working on May 15, 1942, Jews from all over Europe were driven here to exterminate them - approx..
Here is how Pechersky describes in his memoirs his next vivid impression of the Sobibor camp: “What is it that is burning there? I pointed to a crimson flame that could be seen on the side of the camp at a distance of no more than half a kilometer. Boris looked around, looked inquisitively at me, then answered quietly: “Don’t look there, it’s forbidden. It is the corpses of your comrades on the echelon that are burning.”
A little lower, Pechersky describes the procedure for the extermination of people in more detail: “[People] walked in a column, surrounded by reinforced guards, along a wire fence. Ahead are women in only shirts and children, behind - at a distance of a hundred meters - naked men. Here, finally, are the gates, above them is the inscription: Camp No. 3. In the courtyard there are large stone buildings of two baths with small windows protected by a thick iron grating. The women and children went into one bathhouse, the men into another. The guards remained outside and immediately locked the heavy, iron-studded doors behind the intruders. Some in the bath, taking basins, went to the taps for water. But a wild, inhuman scream made them look around and numb. From the ceiling, through the wide metal pipes dark, thick clouds of gas were crawling, pumped with the help of electric machines ... Not even fifteen minutes had passed before it was all over. In two bathhouses, heaps of blackened corpses remained on the floor.
The idea of organizing an escape, according to Pechersky, came to him on the very first night after arriving at the Sobibor camp. The core of the conspirators were the surviving prisoners from the Minsk echelon, Pechersky had already spent eight months with them and trusted most of them. They staged their first act of civil disobedience the very next day after their arrival, playing the song "If there is war tomorrow" on the way to work.
“Everyone picked up the chorus and the song “Like one man, the entire Soviet people stands up for a free homeland” burst out. The song infused vivacity, called for a fight, recalls Pechersky. — That day we worked at the Nord-Camp. Everything turned out relatively well, except for the fact that fifteen people received twenty-five lashes each “for negligence.” Once again, they tried to show their position a few days later, tightening the Soviet "March of the Aviators" in front of the head of the German guard, who was injured during the bombing. The consequences were much worse, the prisoners were severely beaten.
How the plan of rebellion was born
The Sobibor prisoners began to discuss the escape plan directly on September 27, when a new echelon with prisoners arrived at the camp. “It was as if my heart broke - at that very moment I heard the cries of children and women, full of tormenting anguish and horror, which were immediately drowned out by the frantic cackle of geese.” To drown out the screams of the dying, 300 geese were kept in a German concentration camp, which were forced to cackle when people were gassed.
The organizers of the uprising used the women's hut as headquarters. Pechersky came here under the pretext of a meeting with a Jewish woman of German origin named Luka (real name Gertrude Popert, her fate after the uprising is unknown - approx. site). As it turned out later, the girl's father was a communist from Hamburg. After the Nazis came to power, the family fled to Holland. There, Luka's mother, herself and her brothers were arrested by the Gestapo. The brothers were later killed. The father managed to escape again. Luca herself was tortured many times, trying to find out where her runaway father was. Apparently, the closest relations were established very quickly between the captured Soviet officer Pechersky and Luka. The Pechersky family still keeps the "happy shirt" of Luka's father, which the girl gave to her partner before the uprising.
Despite all the conspiracy, the conspirators had to be constantly on the alert, even when talking to each other. They were afraid of "kapos" - overseers from among the activists, cooperating with the camp administration and able to report on the impending uprising.
“Escape from here is very difficult, almost impossible. Each camp is fenced with barbed wire three meters high (in fact, Sobibor consisted of four sections - approx. site), then there is a mined field fifteen meters wide, followed by another row of barbed wire. Don't forget about the deep ditch. The guards are approximately 120-130 people, including 14 officers, ”Pechersky described the situation, referring to his friend Boris.
Pechersky outlined the first escape plan to his comrades on October 7th. It consisted in digging an underground hole under wire barriers and minefields about 35 meters long and getting out through it. It seems that even the author himself doubted the success of this variant. “The bad thing is that it will take a very long time for 600 people to crawl one after another through a 35-meter-long tunnel. Yes, and not only crawled, but to make their way further unnoticed, ”recalls Pechersky in his memoirs. On the same day, October 7, he asked to make 70 knives in the camp forge: “I will distribute them to the guys. In the event that our plot is discovered, we will not surrender to the enemy alive.
On October 11, one of the main "kapos" - Brzetsky, went over to the side of the conspirators, who won over to his side another "kapo", who is mentioned in Pechersky's memoirs as Genik. These people had the right necessary for the conspirators - they could move almost freely around the camp, respectively, to maintain communication between different groups prisoners preparing an uprising.
The idea of undermining was rejected at the general meeting. We decided to prepare for a general uprising in the camp. This plan, as Pechersky writes, was developed by him together with his “friend Shleyma Laitman”, with whom they were still in the Minsk camp.
“Everyone needs to run. Having previously destroyed all the German officers one by one and quickly, within one hour, so that they would not have time to detect the disappearance of their own and raise the alarm. It is necessary to destroy them in the workshops, where they will be called under various pretexts, - Pechersky writes the essence of the new plan voiced by him. “At four o'clock we must cut off the connection passing through the second camp to the premises of the reserve guard. Also, at four o'clock, begin the destruction of officers in camp No. 1. At four and a half hours, Brzetsky puts all the campers in a column, supposedly for work, and they head to the main gate. In the first rows of the column are people from the USSR. On the way, they must take possession of the armory, then quietly attach themselves to the column, and when they reach the gate, remove the sentry and attack the guardhouse.
This plan had a backup option. In case the rebels fail to capture enough weapons and the central gate. According to the idea of Pechersky-Leitman, with such a development of events, the prisoners should have broken the barrier at the officer's house. “The house is close to the wire fence. I think that the Germans either did not mine the passages to the house at all, or used only signal mines that did not pose a danger. Thus, it is easy to break through in this place. Those running ahead must throw stones at the road to blow up mines, ”Pechersky recalls in his memoirs, as he explained the essence of this part of the plan to his comrades.
14 October uprising
The uprising began on October 14 at around 2:40 pm local time. First of all, SS Untersturmführer Ernst Berg, who had come to try on his new suit, was hacked to death with an ax in the camp tailoring workshop. “Ernst Berg all the time stood facing Shubaev (a camp inmate who was instructed to liquidate Berg - approx. site). Then [the tailor] Józef turned the German to face the door on the pretext that it was better to do the fitting this way. Shubaev instantly grabbed the ax and, with all his might, hit Berg with a butt on the head. Blood spattered from her. The fascist screamed and staggered. The horse (on which Berg arrived - note .. If she ran around the camp, it could frustrate all our plans. Fortunately, one of the campers managed to grab the horse by the bridle. Shubaev Berg was finished off with a second blow. His corpse was thrown under a bed in workshop and threw things. The blood-stained floor in the workshop was quickly covered with sand prepared in advance. Shubaev grabbed Berg's pistol and brought it to me. I hugged him, ”Pechersky describes the beginning of the uprising.
At 16:00 in the shoe shop, his assistants hacked to death the head of camp No. 3 (where, in fact, the prisoners were destroyed) Gedtinger. By 16:20, four officers were liquidated in the camp and communications were broken. By 16:35, the number of German officers killed was already ten people. About 11 pistols and a machine gun fell into the hands of the rebels. They managed to prepare six more rifles in advance with the help of metalworkers who repaired German weapons. The rifles were hidden in advance in the drainpipes.
At 16:45 "kapo" Brzhetsky whistled a prearranged signal to the general formation. “The head of the guard, a German from the Volga region, entered the courtyard and began to swear. He put his hand on the holster, but before he could draw his pistol, several axes landed on his head. The women became agitated (not all of the 550 prisoners were initiated into the conspiracy - approx. site). At that moment, a column from the second camp was approaching us. There was not a second to lose. I shouted: “Comrades! To the gates!” Everyone rushed forward. First we ran to the armory. The surviving German officers tried to block the crowd by opening fire from machine guns, but they did not have time to raise a general alarm, Pechersky describes what happened next. - Some began to cut the wire near the officer's house. The rest rushed to the central gate. Having removed the sentry, they ran into the forest, shooting back on the move from pistols and rifles captured from the dead Germans. Those who did not have weapons covered the Nazis' eyes with sand and threw stones at them. The group that fled from the second camp, led by Boris, rushed to the left of the central gate. They had to overcome a mined field, and here many died. I was one of the last to leave the camp, only when I was convinced that everyone was leaving it.”
Pechersky himself, at the head of a group of eight fugitive prisoners, which included "Shubaev, Tsybulsky, Arkady Vayspapir, Mikhail Itskovich, Semyon Mazurkevich and three others" went east and on the fourth day they managed to cross the old Soviet border, fording the Bug River. “On the night of October 20, we entered the land of Belarus. On October 22, we met partisans from the Voroshilov detachment not far from Brest. And on October 23, we already received the first combat mission, ”this is how the memories of the uprising in the Sobiburovsky camp of Alexander Pechersky end.
Of the 550 Sobibor prisoners, 130 did not take part in the uprising. All of them were soon shot. Another 80 died during the riot. In hot pursuit, the Nazis managed to find and shoot about 180 more participants in the uprising. By the end of the war, only 53 people survived. The camp itself was closed on October 15, 1943. His site was razed to the ground and planted with cabbage and potatoes. Later, fragments of human bones were found under this field, shoes different sizes, baby milk horns and dentures, Jewish prayer books and Polish novels, postcards with views of European cities, documents and photographs of the victims and their families.
Pechersky after the German "Sobibor"
In this small book by Pechersky about a great feat (the uprising in Sobibor turned out to be the only successful one in the practice of German concentration camps), there is not a word about how his own fate developed further. Until April 1944, Pechersky fought as a demolition officer in a partisan detachment, derailing at least two echelons. When Belarus was liberated by units of the Red Army, he, as a former Soviet soldier who had been captured by the enemy, ended up in a special department of the NKVD. From there he was sent as a machine gunner to an assault battalion (a softer version of a penal battalion).
The battalion commander Major Andreev helped. Having learned the history of the uprising in Sobibor, he allowed Pechersky to go to Moscow to the Commission for the Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders.
Frame from the Hollywood movie "Escape from Sobibor", 1987
Journalists learned about the history of the Polish concentration camp there. On August 6, 1944, an essay by Vasily Grossman about the uprising in Sobibor was published in the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper. A little later, another essay about these events was published in the Znamya newspaper by writers Pavel Antokolsky and Veniamin Kaverin. Later, he entered the Black Book collection about torture in German concentration camps. Soviet censorship banned this collection from publication in 1947. The official USSR tried not to pedal the issue of Jewish persecution. In the 1980s, the collection was published in Israel. In Russia, they were published only in 2015.
Pechersky himself, however, continued to fight as part of the assault battalion of the 1st Baltic Front. During the attack on the city of Bausk (Latvia) on August 20, 1944, he was seriously wounded in the thigh by a mine fragment. After four months of treatment in hospitals, Pechersky became disabled and was discharged.
He returned to Rostov-on-Don, worked as an administrator at the Musical Comedy Theater. For the courage shown in battles on May 19, 1949, Alexander Pechersky was presented to the Order of the Patriotic War II degree. But in June of the same year, the Rostov regional military commissar, Major General Safonov, changed the award to the medal "For Military Merit".
Moreover, in 1948, during a political campaign against the "cosmopolitans" (actually against the Jews), Pechersky lost his job. For five years he could not get a new job and lived dependent on his wife. After Stalin's death in 1953, Pechersky was able to get a job as a laborer at the Rostselmash machine-building plant. Because of this, in old age he was forced to live on a meager pension.
In 1987, Hollywood director Jack Gold made the blockbuster Escape from Sobibor based on the book by Richard Raschke. Alexander Pechersky was played by Rutger Hauer. Pechersky himself was not at the premiere of the film - he was simply refused to be released from the USSR to the USA.
Alexander Aronovich Pechersky died on January 19, 1990, his body was buried at the Northern Cemetery of Rostov-on-Don.
