The last of nine former prisoners of war who rebelled in the Nazi death camp Sobibor, from which it was considered impossible to get out alive. Under the sign of death Most of the concentration camp prisoners were to become the basis for the prosperity of the new European "master race": the entire theory, ideology and economy of the Third Reich were based on the use of free labor for the benefit of the Germans. Those who were able to work were immediately sent to Germany. However, from the occupied territories to factories and camps, not only in Germany, but also in Eastern Europe, not everyone got alive. The prisoners were affected by the monstrous conditions of transportation: the lack of normal food or the absence of food as such, diseases, complete unsanitary conditions and lack of clean water carried away up to half of the prisoners locked in the wagons. The exact figures revealing the number of concentration camp prisoners are still disputed by historians. According to some reports, 16 million people could pass through the concentration camps built both in Germany and in Eastern Europe, including the civilian population.
However, not everyone was ready to put up with the new reality: starting from 1941, the protection of the camps from varying degrees success tried to stop single and group escape attempts of prisoners.
The security system of the death factories, carefully built and structured, began to burst at the seams after the August 1943 escape. The relatively successful rebellion of the prisoners of the Treblinka concentration camp, as well as problems with the control of facilities where the genocide of the civilian population was carried out, showed that the camp guards were not able to provide an absolute guarantee of the obedience of the prisoners.
Historians note that in reality there were much more successful escapes from concentration camps than is commonly believed.
“Well-known and mass escapes - yes, few. In fact, escapes from concentration camps occurred quite often, and the prisoners themselves regularly replenished partisan detachments, ”said military historian Yuri Pasholok in an interview with the Zvezda TV channel.
Fateful meeting
As part of Operation Reinhard, aimed at exterminating peoples objectionable from the point of view of the Nazi “racial theory”, three special-purpose facilities were built on the territory of Poland. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka belonged to the category of concentration camps of the so-called "continuous" cycle. Behind the dry terminology is a monstrous reality: at facilities of this type, the extermination of prisoners was carried out according to an "accelerated" scheme - 24 hours a day immediately after the arrival of prisoners.
Hunger, disease and systematic extermination by the Nazis of representatives of "inferior" peoples led to the fact that in just a year and a half, from July 1942 to October 1943, at least two million people died at three facilities due to unbearable conditions of detention and targeted destruction. Jews.
In the autumn of 1943, Alexander Pechersky, a Red Army officer, arrived in Sobibor as part of a group of Soviet prisoners of war, whose actions would cause irreparable damage to the entire system of German death factories. The officer who was captured by the Nazis back in 1941 after serving in the 596th artillery regiment of the 19th Army was not an ordinary prisoner.
Historians note that Pechersky was the most dangerous for the camp guards, since the Red Army soldier had already attempted to escape.
“Already six months after the first captivity, he tried to escape. But that escape attempt was doomed to failure: the plan was not thought out to the end, and there were too few participants - only five people. This number is quite enough to advance outside the concentration camp, but it was not enough to neutralize the guards and leave the territory of such a group, ”said a military historian, candidate, in an interview with the Zvezda TV channel. historical sciences Andrey Zinchenko.
Chance saved Pechersky from death. Almost all the prisoners, in the car with which the Red Army officer arrived, were deceived into a separate building, allegedly for sanitization and medical examination. In fact, instead of a shower and a medical examination, a gas chamber awaited them in the building, in which the lives of 500 prisoners ended at once.
Pechersky, along with several other prisoners, was selected for household work - cleaning the territory, working with the corpses of exterminated prisoners, and so on.
Already in Sobibor, Pechersky met other prisoners, who, by the will of fate, were saved from inevitable death. Among the new acquaintances of Pechersky was Rabbi Leon Feldhendler, who became the right hand of the Red Army officer almost immediately after they met. A few days later, the prisoners of the Sobibor camp began to develop an escape plan.
Noose around the neck of a Nazi
Among the nine key actors, recruited by Feldhendler and Pechersky from among other prisoners, was also the commander of the department, Sergeant Arkady Vayspapir, who was captured by the Nazis, who arrived in Sobibor from Minsk.
The Sobibor prisoners' plan did not imply a secret exit from the facility - in order to break through the camp's guards, nine prisoners planned to take possession of weapons locked in a special building.
The first part of the plan involved establishing personal contacts with the camp guards. Each guard was studied individually - habits, habits, shoe size and the number of cigarettes smoked per day - everything was carefully memorized and discussed among the conspirators. The result of the "development" of the camp guards was the permission for relatively free movement of some of the prisoners employed in household work.
On October 14, 1943, prisoners who had become trusted by the Nazis began to put the plan into execution. In workshops, industrial premises, warehouses, 11 guards were destroyed with the help of screwdrivers, nails, hammers and metal pins with an interval of several minutes.
Arkady Vayspapir also took a direct part in the elimination of the camp guard: together with a cellmate, they ambushed those who entered the premises to try on a new suit of overseers and, taking advantage of the moment, hacked them to death with axes.
The path to freedom
The escape plan, developed by Alexander Pechersky and other prisoners in just three weeks, was practically implemented. However, at the decisive moment, everything went wrong: in the confusion, it was not possible to open the armory, where rifles, machine guns and a large amount of ammunition were stored, with the help of which the prisoners sentenced to death were supposed to break free.
Several units of captured weapons were no longer enough for a serious breakthrough - the guards from other sections of the camp quickly realized that the prisoners had gone for a breakthrough and began to shoot to kill.
However, the guards of the object could no longer suppress the rebellion with fire from machine guns - 420 people, physically capable of running and fighting, killed several more guards on the way to freedom and, leaning on their bodies, removed the camp gates from their hinges.
The high barbed wire fence was not the only obstacle in the way of the now former prisoners of the Sobibor concentration camp. The minefields surrounding the death factory claimed the lives of 50 people when they tried to escape. Another 30 prisoners who escaped to freedom were shot in the back.
More than a hundred of the concentration camp prisoners who remained to watch the uprising were defiantly shot the next day. Later, the camp itself, in which a quarter of a million people were killed during its existence, was demolished, and the whole land was plowed up: nothing should have reminded the Nazis of a shameful failure.
Fight for life
Historians note that immediately after the successful uprising, the wounded and hungry, but already former prisoners of war, had to decide what to do next. There was no trace of the former unanimity born of hatred for the Nazis: a group led by Pechersky, consisting mainly of front-line Red Army soldiers, decided to go to the front line and make their way to their own. Members of other groups decided that it would be safest to stay in Poland, mix with civilians and wait for a successful outcome.
“Despite the fact that the combat group of former prisoners of war without weapons was, in general, not very effective, it was the decision to go to the front line and return to Belarus that saved the lives of most of those who left Sobibor,” the military man said in an interview with the Zvezda TV channel. historian, candidate of historical sciences Andrei Zinchenko.
Almost all the Red Army soldiers who fled from Sobibor joined the partisan detachments that destroyed the enemy on the territory of Belarus. The leader of the uprising, Alexander Pechersky, together with several fighters, became part of the Shchors partisan detachment, in which he fought as a demolition officer until the liberation of Belarus and the connection of partisan detachments with the Red Army.
The leadership qualities of Pechersky appeared again: he was in good standing not only with the command, but also with his colleagues. Later, after checks by counterintelligence, Pechersky fought as part of units of the 1st Baltic Front. Having miraculously escaped death, having shown valor and heroism, the leader of the uprising of suicide bombers from the Sobibor camp continued military service and was later awarded the medal "For Military Merit".
Arkady Vayspapir, after fleeing, also continued military service - after moving to Belarus, he joined the Frunze partisan detachment, in which he served as a machine gunner until the connection of the partisan underground with units of the Red Army.
The escape from the Sobibor concentration camp, along with the riots in the Mauthausen concentration camp and the flight of Soviet prisoners of war from the Peenemünde missile range, still symbolizes resilience more than 70 years later different peoples in the face of imminent death.
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 performed leading role, became 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 the echelons - as a rule, most of them came at night, but sometimes in the daytime too - well, when we heard the whistle of the camp commandant, this meant that the next echelon was approaching and the personnel 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 he, on the basis of the directive General Staff of the Red Army dated 14.06.44 under No. 12/309 593 he atoned for his guilt before the Motherland with 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.
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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 be released - after all, a former prisoner of war was considered and is still considered in this country folk hero. 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.
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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 last days life of Alexander Aronovich.
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 for various jobs 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 concentration camp, whose prisoners will be re-equipping the trophy 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 take part in the escape attempt, because without knowing the Polish language and not knowing the area, 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. Defending the dignity of 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.
happened 74 years ago an important event in the history of the struggle of prisoners of fascist concentration camps. In October 1943, an uprising broke out in the Sobibor Nazi death camp.
What was this camp like? It was built in the spring of 1942, in southeastern Poland near the village of Sobibur. It was one of 4 camps designed to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. They were real factories of death.
Jews were transported to Sobibor from Holland, France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. People were unloaded from the wagons and forced to hand over all valuables. Then, under the pretext of sanitizing, they were asked to completely undress, women were cut bald. After the unfortunate destroyed. At first, people were simply shot, later a gas chamber was built, disguised as a bathhouse. The doomed were brought into it, the doors were locked and exhaust gas from old tank engines was let into the room. Not all who arrived at the factory of death were destroyed immediately. A small part became a permanent contingent of the camp. These were skilled tailors, watchmakers, jewelers, carpenters, etc. The funeral team, which burned the corpses of tortured people, also consisted of prisoners. However, a person who got into the service personnel was saved from death only for a certain time. The Nazis carried out the rotation of the permanent contingent. Instead of the destroyed specialists, new ones were recruited from freshly arrived echelons. Anyone who got into Sobibor was doomed. Death inevitably came for him, sooner or later.
It was a real conveyor of destruction, a combination of German pedantry and Nazi ruthlessness. At a small cost for a small staff, an impressive "efficiency" was achieved. The procedure from arrival to the massacre took no more than 3 hours. The camp worked in several shifts, almost without breaks. Having existed for a little over a year, Sobibor absorbed a quarter of a million people. The victims were not just destroyed, they replenished the treasury of the Reich. Their valuables and clothes went to the needs of the Nazi regime, even women's hair was used for sewing winter military clothes.
The Nazis sought to hide the fact of the mass destruction of innocent people as much as possible. The camp was divided into 3 sectors, separated by a high wall of barbed wire, along which electricity. Behind the fence was a minefield. The entire territory of the camp was shot from machine guns located on the towers. The staff consisted of 30 German SS men and about 120 Ukrainians, graduates of the SS training camp "Travlenki", where they trained guards for the death camps. From April 1942, the camp commandant was SS-Obersturmführer Franz Stangl, the future commandant of Treblinka. The permanent contingent of prisoners numbered approximately 500 people.
Of course, most of the prisoners realized that they were doomed. There was an underground committee in the camp headed by Leon Feldgendler. But both Leon himself and his associates were civilians, and they would hardly have been able to carry out a successful uprising. The participants in the resistance were limited to organizing escapes for individuals and small groups. Few of the brave smiled luck. Most died or were caught, after which the unfortunate were tortured and executed. The Nazis tried to terrorize their prisoners, they introduced collective responsibility. Every 10th prisoner was killed for escaping. It seemed impossible to escape from Sobibor. But everything changed when in September 1943 a trainload of citizens from the occupied Soviet territories arrived.
There were 2,000 people in it, among them approximately 600 Soviet prisoners of war of Jewish nationality. It was unusual, because Sobibor was intended to destroy the civilian population. The fact is that the Germans wanted to destroy these captured Red Army soldiers as quickly as possible. These were Jewish prisoners of war who viciously violated the camp regime: they tried to escape, conducted anti-fascist propaganda. On the day of arrival, most of the people from the echelon were destroyed, the Nazis left only 83 Red Army soldiers alive. They were sent to work in a carpentry shop, whose staff was recently eliminated in in full force. Thus, a close-knit, passionate group of anti-fascists with combat experience appeared in the camp. Alexander Aronovich Pechersky stood out in it. His pre-war life path was far from heroism and militancy. He was born in 1909 in Kremenchug, in the family of a lawyer. In 1916, the Pecherskys moved to Rostov, the city that became Alexander's hometown. Then there was studying at school, working at a factory, studying at a university. In 1941, Pechersky worked in the administration of the Rostov House of Culture, led amateur art circles.
June 22, 1941 Alexander Pechersky was drafted into the Red Army. Then he was 32 years old. as having higher education, the former head of amateur arts, he was awarded the rank of junior lieutenant. Pechersky served in the supply units of an artillery regiment. As often happens in war, people peaceful professions, completely far from military affairs, unexpectedly show such qualities that you will not find in every professional military man. Alexander Aronovich Pechersky was just such a nugget. In the terrible days of 1941, he showed endurance, courage and organizational skills. After he carried the wounded commander out of the battle, in September 1941 he was awarded the rank of quartermaster technician of the 2nd rank, corresponding to military rank"lieutenant". In October, part of it was surrounded near Vyazma. Alexander Aronovich was taken prisoner. Pechersky changed his patronymic and hid his nationality. The torment began in various fascist camps. He tried to escape, for which he fell into the category of "unreliable". In the spring of 1942, the Nazis found out that he was a Jew. So Pechersky got into the echelon of death, going to Sobibor.
Being among the permanent composition of the prisoners of the camp, Alexander Aronovich began to actively prepare for the escape. He had no illusions about his fate in Sobibor. A great difficulty was the connection with the underground, the language barrier interfered. Leon Feldgendler, leader of the resistance, tried to communicate with him in Yiddish, which Pechersky did not understand. A Polish Jew who knew Russian well came to the rescue. In a short time, our hero came up with a daring plan - it is necessary to abandon the practice of single escapes, it is necessary to undertake a mass uprising, seize weapons, go into the forest, create a partisan detachment and move to join the Red Army. It would seem that the idea was unrealistic, but Pechersky noticed weaknesses in the camp security system. The key was human factor. The German SS, having gained access to the values of the destroyed people and the free labor of highly qualified specialists, quickly mired in corruption. They appropriated the best things of the murdered, forced shoemakers, tailors and jewelers to remake for themselves the clothes, shoes and jewelry of the murdered Jews. In this regard, the imprisoned artisans had the opportunity to move freely around the camp, they had a fairly decent food.
Pechersky had a daring idea to behead the guards, killing the German SS officials one at a time, and then, taking advantage of the confusion of the Ukrainian guards, seize the armory and break out into the forest. The indefatigable energy of Alexander Aronovich, his organizational skills yielded stunning results. In just 3 weeks in the camp, he managed to prepare a massive uprising. On October 14, when the commandant Stangl left for a meeting, the conspirators decided to act. The main task was to kill the SS before the evening verification, during which it was planned to start a general performance.
One by one, the Nazis began to be lured into the workshops under plausible pretexts, such as trying on a uniform. Here they were strangled or killed with hatchet blows. Basically, this task was entrusted to Pechersky by his comrades from among the prisoners of war - they had hand-to-hand combat skills, so it was easier for them to cope with the guards. Of the 17 German officers who were in the camp, 12 were killed. At this time, the prisoners managed to cut off the telephone connection in the camp. At the appointed time, the prisoners lined up for the evening inspection went on a breakthrough. However, the Ukrainian guards did not lose their heads, they repulsed the attack on the armory. The dense columns of the rebels were hit by machine guns from the towers. The crowd broke through the barbed wire fence and rushed towards the forest through the minefield.
Of the 550 prisoners, 400 took part in the uprising. Approximately 80 people died during it. Hiding in the forest, 320 prisoners of Sobibor dispersed in different directions. Part, led by Pechersky, went east, hoping to get to the Red Army. Some preferred to seek refuge in the surrounding areas. 260 fugitives were killed by the Nazis, or anti-Semitic Poles. Until the end of the war, 52 participants in the uprising survived. Most fortunate were those who obeyed Pechersky and went east, they soon met Soviet partisans, many survived until the arrival of the Red Army. Alexander Aronovich himself fought in the partisan detachment named after Shchors, then in the Red Army. Finished the war with the rank of captain. He lived all his life in Rostov, died in 1990.
After the uprising, the Sobibor death camp was closed and destroyed. The Nazis feared in panic that news of their atrocities would come out, that there would be living witnesses to their crimes. Sobibor was literally razed to the ground. 150 concentration camp prisoners who did not want to escape were destroyed after torture and abuse.
Most publications compulsively repeat the idea that the uprising in Sobibor was the only successful performance in the Nazi concentration camps. With all due respect to the courage of the Sobibór uprising, by what criteria is the success of a performance judged? The fact of a mass escape from the camp? Such cases were not uncommon. Suffice it to recall the uprising in Treblinka in August 1943, or the Uprising Soviet officers at Mauthausen in February 1945. Maybe by the number of survivors? Most of the participants in the uprising in Sobibor did not live to see victory. In the same Treblinka, out of 1000 rebels, more than 150 survived. The most successful action of the prisoners of the German camps should be recognized as the mass action of the Buchenwald prisoners in April 1945. Then the prisoners not only managed to prevent massacres, but also completely captured the camp.
So the performance in Sobibor was neither unique nor the most successful. However, it became one of the symbols of resistance to Nazism. The rebellious prisoners of Sobibor showed that no barriers, no terror can stop people from breaking through to life and freedom.
A film of the same name about the only escape from the death camp in the history of the Great Patriotic War was released on the screens. About how the fate of Pechersky after the war, his daughter told.
Alexander ended up in the Sobibor death camp in September 1943. Three weeks later, together with other prisoners, he organized and led an uprising in this concentration camp. Having eliminated the guards, under heavy fire from machine-gun towers, a group of fugitives broke through the minefields and hid in the forest. More than 400 prisoners took part in the escape. Until the end of the war, only 53 participants in the uprising survived ...
Photo Fund in memory of Alexander Pechersky
Then Pechersky joined partisan detachment named after Shchors, in which he blew up two German echelons. After reuniting with the Red Army, Alexander was sent to the NKVD filtration camp, from where, after a security check, he ended up in an assault rifle battalion. While fighting in its ranks, in August 1944 he was wounded in the thigh by shrapnel. And until the end of the war he was treated in hospitals. In March 1945, while still in the hospital, he wrote a book of memoirs about the Sobibor uprising. Returning to Rostov-on-Don (where Pechersky lived before the war), he worked as an administrator at the Musical Comedy Theater, then at the Rostmetiz plant. In 1949 he was presented for an award - the Order of the Patriotic War of the 2nd degree, which was later replaced with the medal "For Military Merit", but Pechersky did not receive it during his lifetime either. The next award, the Order of Courage, was awarded only in 2016 (posthumously).
Alexander Aronovich died on January 19, 1990. Rostov cherishes the memory of the hero to this day: in 2007, a memorial plaque was opened on the facade of the house where Pechersky lived, in 2014 his star was “lit up” on the alley of outstanding countrymen, in 2015 one of the streets was named after him, and On April 24, 2018, a bust was erected in the courtyard of gymnasium No. 52.
Alexander with his daughter Eleanor
Eleonora Alexandrovna Grinevich, daughter:
The warmest memories of dad are connected with music. When I was born, he bought a real German piano. Dad at home is songs, fun and many guests, his friends from the folk theater, in which he and his mother played after work. Father not only performed other people's compositions, but also composed himself, he had a wonderful ear. And mother Lyudmila Vasilievna Zamilatskaya sang romances with amazing soulfulness.
I started learning music from the age of four and a half. They hired a teacher, and they themselves studied with me in the evenings. And I didn't want to study. The nanny dressed me up for the arrival of the teacher: she put on socks with lace, a dress. As soon as she was distracted, I ran into the yard, took off my socks, shoes and hid in the entrance. Dad saw my reluctance, but never punished. He sat down at the instrument and began to convince: “You love music. Do you like to sing with your mom? Then you have to practice. How come? You're running away from the teacher, hiding! What will people think of us?
Sometimes my parents took me to the theater with them. One trip is very memorable. I was four years old. On the way home, dad suggested to colleagues to go to the store. Adults began to treat me with sweets, but I still refused. Then the father bought tangerines and said: "This is something you should definitely try." How beautiful they were! They came home, but for some reason I didn’t eat them. Then I could not try them for a very long time - first because of the war, then because of hunger and poverty.
Dad adored me. My last peaceful photograph went through the whole war with him. I was told that when dad came to his senses after being wounded, the first thing he asked was: “Where is my tunic? Give it back, there's a photo of your daughter." In the photo - my sister Zoya (by mother) and my friends in the steppe when we went for tulips. My maternal grandmother, a Don Cossack, lived in the village of Tsimlyanskaya, Rostov Region, and I visited her. Mom and dad were also supposed to come on vacation in July, but it didn't happen. Both survived the war, and in 1945 they divorced.
Photo: Alexander Pechersky Memorial Fund and personal archives of Eleonora Grinevich and Natalia Ladychenko
After the war, dad worked as an administrator at the Rostov Theater of Musical Comedy. It was impossible to get to the performances, always sold out. As expected, important people were sitting in the forefront - members of the district committee, members of the regional committee. None of them bought tickets, and dad somehow had to cover the costs. That's what they got hooked on. They began to call dad to the investigator, but they quickly realized that he was the person who would not be silent. “Why are you asking me,” he said. “You ask those who went to performances for free.” And the case was put on the brakes, because there was nothing to plant. He was quickly expelled from the party and fired. There was no persecution by the KGB, as many write. But there was control, and no one was surprised at that time. In 1945, a book of papa's memoirs "The Uprising in the Sobiburov Camp" was published. He was written from all over the world - former prisoners, their relatives, directors ... Of course, we guessed that the letters were read at the top. And the fact that dad was constantly invited abroad was learned much later. Letters ended up in the committee, where they unsubscribed to the addressee that dad was not feeling well and was in the hospital, or he was not in the city at all. In a word, he will not be able to come. And how many times the father was invited as a witness when the Nazis were tried! And not once did the Soviet authorities allow him to leave.
With his second wife Olga and little Ella
Photo Alexander Pechersky Memorial Fund and personal archives of Eleonora Grinevich and Natalia Ladychenko
Dad after his dismissal, dad did not work for three years. He found something to do: for some time he sawed out a huge model of Sobibor, then embroidered - apparently, he drove heavy thoughts away from himself. Apparently, my mother taught him to embroider, no one in his family knew how to do it. True, she is a satin stitch, and he is a Bulgarian cross. He embroidered a meter-long picture with a hunting dog on a metal mesh and a carpet on a pale blue checkered chintz. I chose the thread color and dyed it myself. Once I read that my father was selling his paintings. So this is not true! Pope and trade are completely incompatible things. He always said, "Never ask anyone for anything."
After Stalin's death, my father got a job in a baguette artel, then at the Chentsov factory. He worked there until the end of his life. He played the piano less and less often: his heart was junk, then problems with the kidneys began, one was removed. And he still loved music. For hours he played an old record, on which the songs were performed by the Far Eastern choir. The record hissed, wheezed, and he listened and listened.
My eldest grandson Anton, the son of Natalya's daughter, sang and read poetry at the age of three. Father was seventy. He used to sit in an armchair at the coffee table, think, and then call his great-grandson to him: “Sing to me, Antosha.” He draws in: "Oh, roads", "Nightingales, nightingales ...", songs from the film "Belarusian Station". I see my dad start crying. He became sentimental, especially in recent years.
From the book of memoirs of Alexander Pechersky:
... Trucks drove up to the camp, loaded women and children on them and took them to the station. The men were lined up in a column and, under the escort of the SS men with dogs, were led on foot. When the column passed by the ghetto, its inhabitants, themselves starving, living skeletons, began to throw bread, potatoes, beets, carrots, heads of cabbage through the barbed wire. Words of farewell, weeping and desperate cries were heard from the ghetto:
- You are being led to your death! You hear? To death...
... The camp in Sobibor was built on the special order of Himmler. It began to function on May 12, 1942. The project was prepared by the SS engineer Tomols. The construction was supervised by the chief inspector of the death camps Golzeimer and engineer Moser. Himmler himself visited the camp in July 1943. After his visit, they began to burn thousands of people a day. This "factory of death" is located between Wlodawa and Chełm. It is surrounded by four rows of wire fences, three meters high. Behind the barbed wire is a mined field fifteen meters wide and a moat filled with water. There are many watchtowers and security posts in the camp itself ...
……I looked at my comrades and my heart was torn to pieces. I wanted to tell them: “Hold on, guys! Above your head! Let the enemies feel that we remain human.”
... Some women, shocked by what was happening, suddenly raised a cry, someone was close to fainting, someone started to run aimlessly. It became clear that it was impossible to build people in a column. Then I shouted loudly: “Comrades, forward to the officer’s house, cut the barbed wire!”
…I stopped to catch my breath. I looked back and saw how the stragglers of men and women, bending down, continue to run towards the forest. The bullets whistled faster and faster. One fell face down. Another hit a mine. Here, a woman who was already very close to me was knocked down by a bullet ...
... Seven Sobibortsy gathered on Soviet soil - active participants and organizers of the uprising in the death camp: Arkady Vaispapir, Alexei Vaizen, Semyon Rosenfeld, Efim Litvinovsky, Naum Plotnitsky and Boris Tabarinsky ...
...Luca took out a man's overshirt from her bosom and gave it to me...
- Sasha, please put it on. She will bring you happiness. Do it for your daughter. In this shirt you will pass through all dangers. And if you pass, then we will live.
