Nazi planners divided Sobibor into three parts. The Vorlager (Fore Camp) encompassed the entrance gate, railways, and housing for SS personnel and the Ukrainian guards, dressed in black uniforms, who assisted them. Camp I held prisoners chosen for labor. The workshops for blacksmiths, cobblers, cabinetmakers, and tailors, so important to the organizers of the Sobibor Uprising, were there.

In Camp II, Jewish deportees, many of them uncertain about what was next, undressed, ceded what money and belongings they still had, and passed through the “tube.” The latter was a fenced path connecting Camp II to the gas chambers. The SS ordered the women to have their hair cut about halfway down the “tube.” They explained this as simply a matter of hygiene. Elsewhere in Camp II, Ukrainian guards took many of the ill, the elderly, and children and, with German authorization, shot them in ditches.

Camp III was a testament to monumental inhumanity. This area contained the gas chambers, burial pits, barracks for guards and for the Sonderkommandos, the Jewish prisoners compelled to do the grisliest work—the disposal of human remains. The SS and Ukrainian guards mercilessly drove prisoners into the gas chambers with whips and dogs. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg brings up the account of a SS man temporarily stationed at the death camp, who recalled the use of a 200-horsepower, eight-cylinder engine seized from a Soviet tank releasing the carbon monoxide gas into the chambers. These facilities could hold more than 200 people at a time. Crematoria were never installed at Sobibor.  Men and women living near the camp, remembered the skies illuminated, at night, by the burning of corpses in mass graves. The infernal stench simply overwhelmed.  

Faced with such horror, what did human beings do? This is a very important question. Even today, after decades of education about the Holocaust, many still subscribe to crude and patently false stereotypes of Jewish passivity. Given the hellish circumstances, Jews did what they could.  In the case of Emanuel Ringelblum, a Zionist and Marxist intellectual in the Warsaw Ghetto, a project to record, for the world’s enlightenment, Nazi barbarism against the ghetto’s inhabitants unfolded under his careful direction.  Jews also organized escape attempts. And they fought, fought with everything they possessed.

In retrospect, 1943 was a year of resistance in the ghettos and camps. That year, the system of terror and annihilation meticulously created by the Nazi dictatorship in Eastern Europe faced its most direct challenge. Those condemned to the clutches of the SS certainly struggled for life and freedom.  Yet many of them, aware of the hopelessness of their situation, took up arms in order to die on their own terms.

The members of the Jewish Combat Organization initiated the best-known instance of armed resistance in impossible circumstances during the Shoah, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which broke out in April 1943 and held out for almost a month. Though crushed, word of the uprising penetrated the walls of the ghettos and the barbed wire of the extermination sites.

At Treblinka, a resistance group, calling itself the “Organizing Committee,” learned of the defiance of the Warsaw fighters and launched a revolt on August 2.  Incredibly, 300 broke out and 100 of them evaded the Nazis’ manhunt.  Two weeks later, on the eve of its final liquidation, an attempted break-out led by Abraham Shlonsky, Haika Grosman, and others occurred at the Bialystok Ghetto in northeastern Poland.  While a few, such as Grosman, escaped, the rebels endured for a week before the Germans suppressed them. In the Vilna Ghetto the following month, the United Partisan Organization, led by Abba Kovner, a Zionist, proclaimed:

Jews, we have nothing to lose.
Death is certain.
Who can still believe that he will survive when the murderers kill systematically?
The hand of the hangman will reach out to each of us.
Neither hiding nor cowardice will save lives.
Only armed resistance can save our lives and honor.

Kovner’s undoubted heroism in the face of German troops moving into the ghetto did not stir the population to rise up, however. So, with no better option left to them, he and hundreds of fighters managed to get out. Would Sobibor also follow the route of open insurrection? 

Answering that question concentrates our attention on Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, a Soviet Jewish officer.  Thanks to the research of Dutch scholar Selma Leydesdorff, who lost two grandparents at Sobibor, we understand his life and achievement much better. Born in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, in 1909, Pechersky came from an assimilated Jewish family. During the First World War, his family moved to Rostov-on-Don. Surviving the Russian Civil War, which was especially brutal in Ukraine, he became attracted to the ideas of the Bolsheviks and pursued interests in theater and the arts.

On June 22, 1941, the opening day of Operation Barbarossa. Pechersky’s life changed forever. He was conscripted immediately. Stationed at the headquarters of the 596th Howitzer Regiment of the Soviet 19th Army, he experienced in Belorussia the darkest days of the German invasion. He was quickly promoted to technical quartermaster, essentially the rank of a 1st lieutenant. When the 19th Army tried to stem the Wehrmacht’s advance to Moscow in October, Pechersky’s unit was encircled and he was captured.

Thereafter, he witnessed first-hand the brutality the German Army meted out to Soviet prisoners. Imprisoned first at a site near the Russian city of Smolensk, his captors moved him to Borisov, northeast of Minsk, the Belorussian capital. In both camps, he succeeded in concealing his Jewishness.  At Borisov, he contracted typhus but lived through the illness without receiving any medical care from the Germans.

Peckershy’s toughness and good fortune would serve him well.  In May 1943, after an escape attempt, German officials transferred him from Borisov to Stalag 352, one of the most atrocious prison camps of World War II. Up to 80,000 soldiers from the Red Army died in this camp at Minsk between July 1941 and August 1943. Held in the so-called Waldlager (forest camp), in the nearby village of Masyukovchina, Pechersky’s luck appeared to have run out that August when a German investigation of which men had been circumcised led to the discovery of his Jewish identity. Camp officials promptly shut Pechersky into an underground cell before removing him to the part of Stalag 352 set up in Minsk itself. The Germans kept him there until September 18.

That day, a train packed with 2000 people, many of them Soviet soldiers, brought Pechersky into Sobibor. Thankfully, the Nazis committed a gigantic blunder right away, one that would come to haunt them. They selected about 80 of the soldiers to be spared immediate death. Instead, they would do labor. Pechersky was one of them. He convinced the SS on his arrival that he was a carpenter. This lie saved his life.

Once there, he and the other Soviets sought out the underground group already founded under the leadership of Leon Feldhendler, a Polish Jew and son of a rabbi. Before his deportation, Feldhendler had served in a Judenrat (Jewish Council), a political body created on Nazi orders to ensure Poland's Jewish communities complied with German edicts. 

Having spent almost a year in the camp, he knew Sobibor very well. Seeing his own plans for escape repeatedly thwarted, Feldhendler feared that time was running out. He could not have known that Himmler had already decided to end extermination procedures at Sobibor and turn the place into a concentration camp. And it likely would not have mattered. Without Feldhendler’s knowledge, contacts, and determination, the uprising would have never stood a chance.   

The two men conceived one of the most daring plans of the Second World War. They did so right after some 2700 Belorussian Jews had been liquidated at Sobibor. Recognizing the skills of the Soviet soldiers, Feldhendler agreed to Pechersky having greater authority in the organization. On October 7, they met and played chess. A key part of their discussion during the game was to determine whether a tunneling operation might succeed. Could they evacuate 600 prisoners, the number still in Sobibor, after nightfall? The two leaders decided against it. There would not be enough time to get everyone out before dawn.    

What they settled on as the alternative was an idea that would require synchronization, skill with weapons, a willingness to risk everything, and sheer luck. Only a small group knew anything about it. Weapons had already been gathered—hatchets, axes, razors, knives, and a few rifles as well. A Kapo, one of the Jewish inmates picked by the Nazis to enforce their orders inside the camp, had been won over. 

German officials would be invited to the workshops and killed.  This had to be done within an hour, before the 5pm roll-call. Then the summons to rush the front gate would be given. There would be enough daylight to eliminate the SS, sow confusion among the Ukrainian guards, and flee. Yet with the shorter October days, the Nazis would not have much time to react before darkness set in.

Pecherksy insisted that he have control over who did the killing. Claude Lanzmann’s film on the uprising, cited earlier, has an incredibly candid conversation with Yehuda Lerner, a participant in the revolt. Lerner reconnects viewers to the atmosphere in Sobibor. It is chilling when he describes his readiness to kill Germans. Simultaneously, it is also inspiring that people who had been menaced with certain death and oblivion discovered the courage to wage counter-violence against their would-be murderers. Pechersky and Feldhendler gave them hope.

Originally, Lerner and the others would start the rising on October 13, which, remarkably, was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in Judaism.  The leaders postponed the breakout when a group of SS men unexpectedly showed up for a short stay. Instead, it would happen on October 14. Good fortune crowned the decision for postponement. No transports arrived in Sobibor on the 14th. Moreover, Commandant Reichleitner and one of his chief adjutants, the sadistic Gustav Wagner, were on leave.  

At 4pm, the conspirators in Camp I acted. Pechersky monitored everything from the cabinetmakers’ shop. The prisoners relied on the punctuality of the Nazis and on their greed and vanity. After inviting him to try on a new coat in the tailors’ workshop, Alexander Shubayev, one of Pechersky’s fellow soldiers, dispatched Johann Niemann, the SS deputy commandant, with an ax-blow to the head.  His body was pushed under a bed. A second Nazi followed fifteen minutes later. He, too, was slain.

Shortly thereafter, Lerner and Arkady Wajspapir finished off Siegfried Graetschus, who directed Sobibor’s Ukrainian contingent. Another Nazi succumbed while he looked at a pair of boots.  In all, about a dozen SS met their end through these ruses. Runners informed everyone of the progress made. Seizing the Germans’ weapons, Pechersky’s men awaited the next steps.    

Just before 4:30, the insurgents cut the telegraph and telephone cables, preventing the remaining Germans from notifying their superiors. Feldhendler’s people got control of Camp II.  The roll-call at 5 loomed. Elsewhere in the camp, things did not go so smoothly. The attempt to take the armory failed. Karl Frenzel, upon discovering the deaths of his colleagues, rallied the few remaining SS. When the Kapo called everyone to line up for roll-call near the front of the camp, no SS men appeared.

Then, the inmates realized what was at hand and became restless. Sometime in this mayhem, Pechersky briefly addressed the inmates and spoke to their courage, their fury, and their sense of justice. “Forward, comrades! For Stalin! Death to the fascists!” These words connected the uprising to the heroics of the Bolshevik Revolution and the defense of the USSR while ignoring Stalin’s betrayal of the Revolution and the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler. 

According to Thomas Blatt, one of the participants, Pechersky enjoined those who managed to escape to “let the world know what happened here.” Rallied by the short speech, scores of Jewish prisoners surged toward the front gate. German and Ukrainian fire claimed many of them before they could reach it. The Soviets, including Pechersky, and those who had hidden arms shot back.  Some frantically cut through the barbed wire. Others, far more desperate, climbed the fence and took their chances with the mines the Germans had planted outside the wire.

After getting through the fence, Pechersky recalled, he ran across an open field before getting to the treeline. He also remembered seeing a number of inmates picked off in that field by Frenzel’s pursuing shooters. Once in the forest, Pechersky and some of his comrades broke away from the larger group of escapees. He justified that decision on the basis of survival. Smaller groups had a better chance of slipping past the Germans and Polish collaborators who might turn them in for a reward. Many of the Polish prisoners had already headed west. Meanwhile, Pechersky ordered his men to move only at night. They walked single-file and never uttered a word to one another. During the day, they concealed themselves as best they could.

Pechersky’s group received food and information about the whereabouts of German patrols from the local populace, who were often startled and frightened by the sight of these armed men. Finally reaching the Bug, they swam across the river on the night of October 19-20.  Having returned to Soviet territory, they established contact with a group of partisans a few days later. Many of the Polish Jews who went in the opposite direction had their own harrowing stories of encounters with Polish resistance fighters and with collaborators happy to turn them into the Germans for reward money. The wait for the Red Army to liberate the area, which did not happen until the summer of 1944, seemed endless.

Altogether 300 of them—and that number leaps off the page—escaped during the commotion at Sobibor. Leydesdorff believes 184 could not escape. Scores of prisoners came so close to making it out. The Germans mowed down 41 of them during the uprising. 58 out of the 300 who escaped lived to see the war’s end. Terribly, some of those who got to the forest, feeling weary and exhausted, returned to Sobibor—and to certain death. Still, 58 survived.

Operations at Sobibor ceased right after the uprising. SS men murdered those inmates who had not escaped.  Subsequently, on Himmler’s orders, they totally dismantled Sobibor’s killing facilities, bulldozing much of what had been there and planting trees to cover the site. Jews from Treblinka, compelled by the Nazis to aid this work, were executed once they completed their tasks. While some German-trained police remained there until the spring of 1944, the intent of the SS leadership was for the extermination center to have never existed. And this was only the beginning.

The barbarity with which Himmler reacted to the Sobibor Uprising can now shock only the willfully ignorant. What he did to surviving Jewish laborers in the Lublin District of occupied Poland exemplified the “ingenuity” of his organization.  Fearing further rebellions, the Reichsführer-SS implemented Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival). This truly bloodcurdling code-name masked coordinated acts of savage mass killing.

On November 3, 1943, Himmler’s men liquidated two work camps at Trawniki and Poniatowa, both subcamps of Majdanek, shooting thousands of workers in pits. On the same day at Majdanek itself, SS guards separated Jews from other prisoners. At gunpoint, they were then forced to strip, place their hands behind their necks, and climb down into trenches, supposedly anti-aircraft trenches, dug just outside the camp fence.  Many of these individuals died atop the corpses of others already gunned down. 

The Germans also transported Jewish workers from nearby labor camps there to be murdered. For hours, loudspeakers blasted music to drown out the shots and screams.  At least in scale, the unspeakable horror of November 3 at Majdanek eclipsed everything before and after in the genocide. 18,400 perished that day. No other massacre by the Nazis—and there were hundreds of massacres of Jews—in one location and in one twenty-four period matched it during the Holocaust. In total, over 42,000 Jews were murdered as part of the operation. With Harvest Festival, the Nazis established a new benchmark for radical evil.
 
Some scholars put the number of the murdered in Sobibor at 250,000. Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offer a significantly lower estimate of 170,000. Feldhendler made it through the genocide, only to die, reportedly, at the hands of Polish anti-Semites in April 1945. Pechersky wrote his own account of the events, testified against Ukrainian collaborators on trial in the USSR in 1962, and provided statements to a West German trial of Sobibor perpetrators in 1984. Despite his commitment to communist politics, he felt, with good reason, the Soviet regime disdained him and used the KGB to intimidate him. Frequently, former prisoners of war were stigmatized in the USSR. In his later years, Pechersky cherished his contacts with other survivors and the reunions with the Sobibor fighters he could attend. He passed away in 1990, at the age of 80, after the release of Rashke’s book and the 1987 movie.
 
In 2018, the Russian-made film, Sobibor, directed by and starring Konstantin Khabensky as Pechersky, has renewed attention to the history of the Sobibor uprising. Hopefully, the motion picture will generate a new round of discussion and debate about the significance of this momentous event and the other acts of resistance which preceded it in Hitler’s annihilation system.

Each phase of the Nazi genocide (ghettoization, mass shooting, the extermination camps, the death marches) must be studied with care and rigor without “Auschwitz” or any other single aspect or site of that horror overtaking the others.  The more serious and sustained our commitment to such historical knowledge is, the better we will be able to combat those present-day reactionaries who want to deny this history occurred or, even worse, to kill again in its name.

Recommended Reading

Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Friedländer, Saul. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.  New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews.  3 Vols.  New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985.

Leydesdorff, Selma. Sasha Pechersky: Holocaust Hero, Sobibor Resistance Leader, and Hostage of History. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Rashke, Richard. Escape from Sobibor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience.  London: Deutsch, 1974.