Sobibor death camp where it is located. “Better a bullet in the back than a gas chamber.” How the prisoners of the Sobibor “death camp” planned an escape, the only one in the history of Nazi concentration camps. “It’s the corpses of your comrades on the train that are burning.”

1943 . About 250 thousand Jews were killed here. At the same time, it was in Sobibor on October 14, 1943 that the only successful major uprising in Nazi camps death, headed Soviet officer Alexander Pechersky.

History of the camp

The Sobibor camp was located in southeastern Poland near the village of Sobibor (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 “Government General” (the territory of Poland occupied by Germany). Subsequently, Jews were brought to the camp from other occupied countries: 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 along the perimeter of the camp were recruited from collaborators - former prisoners of war from the Red Army, mostly (90-120 people) Ukrainians - the so-called. "Travniki", due to the fact that most of them were trained in the "Travniki" camp and civilian volunteers.

The camp was located in the forest next to the Sobibor stop. Railway came to a dead end, which was supposed to help maintain the secret. The camp was surrounded by four rows of three-meter-high barbed wire. The space between the third and fourth rows was mined. Between the second and third there were patrols. Day and night, sentries were on duty on the towers, from where the entire barrier system was visible.

The camp was divided into three main parts - “subcamps”, each with its own strictly defined purpose. The first housed a work camp (workshops and residential barracks). In the second there is a hairdresser's barracks and warehouses where the belongings of the dead were stored and sorted. The third contained gas chambers where people were killed. For this purpose, several old tank engines were installed in the annex near the gas chamber, during operation of which carbon monoxide was released, which was supplied through pipes to the gas chamber.

Most prisoners brought to the camp were killed on the same day in gas chambers. Only a small part was kept alive and used for various jobs in the camp.

During the year and a half of the camp's operation, about 250,000 Jews were killed there.

Destruction of prisoners

The essay “Uprising in Sobibur” (magazine “Znamya”, No. 4, 1945) by Veniamin Kaverin and Pavel Antokolsky provides testimony ex-prisoner Dov Feinberg dated August 10, 1944. According to Feinberg, prisoners were exterminated in a brick building called a “bathhouse” that could accommodate about 800 people:

When a party of eight hundred people entered the “bathhouse,” the door was tightly closed. There was a machine in the annex that produced asphyxiating gas. The generated gas flowed into cylinders, from them through hoses into the room. Usually within 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 “bathhouse attendant” in the camp, watched through it to see if the killing process was completed. At his signal, the gas supply stopped, the floor 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 thrown. People involved in stacking and transporting corpses were periodically shot.

Attempts at resistance

On New Year's Day 1943, five Jewish prisoners escaped 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 Chelm. Apparently, thanks to him, people in Chelm learned about what was happening in Sobibor. When the last batch of Jews from this city was sent to Sobibor at the end of February 1943, there were several attempts to escape from the train. Upon arrival in Sobibor on April 30, 1943, the deported Jews of Włodawa refused to voluntarily leave the carriages.

Another case of resistance took place on October 11, 1943, when people refused to go into the gas chamber and began to run away. Some of them were shot near the camp fence, others were captured and tortured.

One day, two prisoners from this brigade (Shlomo Podkhlebnik and Joseph Kurtz, both Polish Jews), under the escort of a Ukrainian guard, were sent to the nearest village to fetch water. Along the way, the two killed their guard, took his weapon 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 along the way, suddenly, at a pre-arranged signal, Polish Jews from the “forest team” began to run. The Dutch Jews decided not to participate in the escape attempt, since they, who did not own Polish language and those who did not know the area would find it extremely difficult to find shelter.

Ten of those who fled were captured, several of them were shot, but eight managed to escape. The ten who were caught were taken to the camp and there they were shot in front of all the prisoners.

Insurrection

An underground was active in the camp, planning the escape of prisoners from the concentration camp.

The uprising in Sobibor was the only successful camp uprising during all the years of the Second World War. Immediately after the prisoners escaped, the camp was closed and wiped off the face of the earth. In its place, the Germans plowed the land and planted it with cabbage and potatoes.

After the war

The Polish government opened a memorial at the site of the camp. On the occasion of 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 baseness, heroism and cruelty. These are death camps. Built by Nazi engineers and managed 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 virtually no chance of success, but they did not lose hope.
Saving lives was not the goal of the heroic uprising; the struggle was for a dignified death. By 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 engulfed in bigotry, racism, intolerance, when genocide is being committed 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 my debt of gratitude to the Jews from Poland and other European countries who were tortured and killed here on this land.

In 1962-1965, trials of former camp guards took place in Kyiv and Krasnodar. 13 of them were sentenced to death penalty.

On May 12, 2011, a Munich court sentenced former Sobibor security guard Ivan Demjanjuk to five years in prison.

As of December 2016, 4 participants in the uprising in Sobibor remained alive: Arkady Weispapir (Ukrainian SSR) and Semyon Rosenfeld (Ukrainian SSR), the Pole Meyer Ziss and the Dutchwoman Selma Engel-Weinberch. One of the participants in the uprising, Alexei Vaitsen, died on January 14, 2015. Arkady Vaispapir died on January 11, 2018.

• Pechersky, Alexander Aronovich (02/22/1909-01/19/1990)
• Vaispapir, Arkady Moiseevich (12/23/1921-01/11/2018)
• Vaizen, Alexey Angelovich (05/30/1922 - 01/14/2015)

Notes

1. Lev Polyakov. Sobibor. History of Anti-Semitism in 2 volumes. Volume II. The Age of Knowledge: Moscow - Jerusalem, 1998, 446 pp.
2. Sobibor on the Yad Vashem website
3. Sobibur- article from
4. , With. 49.
5. Personal composition of the SS leadership of the camp
6. Yadwashem.  Encyclopedia of the Holocaust *B lately share ethnic Ukrainians as part of the camp guard by the Ukrainian side is disputed
7. Trawniki
8. Antokolsky P., Kaverin V. Uprising in Sobibor (chapter from the “Black Book”, Jerusalem, 1980). First published in the magazine “Znamya”, N 4, 1945
9. Contents of the magazine “Znamya” for 1945 // Russian magazine
10. Kaverin Venyamin- article from the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia
11. Dr. Yitzhak Arad, Director of the Yad Vashem Memorial Institute. Uprising in Sobibor (undefined) . Translated from Hebrew by V. Kukuy. Menorah Magazine No. 26, Jerusalem (1985). Retrieved October 22, 2013.
12. “Der Tod war die bessere Option”, Tageszeitung, 10/13/2008
13. Valery Kadzhaya. Sobibor - conveyor of death (undefined) . Moskovsky Komsomolets (April 11, 2009). Retrieved January 19, 2015.
14. Alexey, son of Angel (undefined) . mediaryazan.ru. Retrieved January 22, 2018.
15. A court in Munich sentenced former Sobibor concentration camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk to five years in prison
16. Viktor Grakov “Alexey Vaizen, the last prisoner of the Sobibor death camp, died in Ryazan

Sobibor was created by the Nazis as part of a program for the physical extermination of people of Jewish origin. happened there massacres both prisoners of war and civilians, including minors. From documents published by RIO, you can find out details of exactly 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 areas and from countries occupied by the Germans: the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and others. At first, the camp was surrounded by barbed wire, then a pit was dug in it and a brick room was built, without windows, with one entrance, tightly closing 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 Atrocities Nazi invaders", which was compiled by representatives of the Red Army who inspected the territory of the death camp, and residents settlement Second groove July 22, 1944.

It also notes that the security system of the institution made escape extremely difficult: behind the first row of barbed wire there was a minefield, and then another row of “barbed wire” followed.

Up to six trains 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 describes in detail how the process of extermination of people in Sobibor took place.

“It was announced that at the Sobibur station (this is exactly the spelling found in the document. - RT) a marmalade factory will be created. Trains 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 trains of 2,000 people each arrived at the death camp. However, 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.

The certificate further states that immediately after the arrival of each batch of people, they were gathered in the square, where the camp administration made welcoming speeches with the promise of a “good life for those who arrived.” Afterwards, a false medical examination of the prisoners was carried out, as they were told, in order to direct 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 undressing rooms, hangers, and numbers were given for the returned linen. After that, they entered a special bathing room, which was filled with gas. People were dying, local residents heard the engine running, and after a while they could hear people’s screams,” the certificate says.

It is separately noted that the camp administration tried to hide the screams and moans of the dying prisoners, for which purpose, at the moment the gas was supplied, geese were taken out of the utility rooms to graze, which started screaming. 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 collected firewood, dug stumps, and so on. Local residents witnessed how people who worked there were thrown onto fires made of stumps. People were burning,” the certificate says.

The document was drawn up on the basis of inspection reports former territory Sobibor, where evidence was also included local residents. Photographs 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 transported to the cemetery.

The documents say that the leadership of the administration consisted of members of the SS, and up to 50 of the guards were Germans. Ordinary camp guards were recruited from prisoners of war, many of whom, as well as from among volunteers - residents of surrounding Polish villages. From March to September 1943, Sobibor's guard was Ivan Demjanjuk, nicknamed Ivan the Terrible for his cruelty in treating prisoners. 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 Sobibor prisoners testified against him. In the first sentence, Demjanjuk served seven years in prison, and then he was sentenced to a five-year term, but while hearing 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 of a Sobibor prisoner who organized the only successful uprising in this death camp. He served as a clerk at the headquarters of the 596th Howitzer Artillery Regiment and held the rank of lieutenant. Near Vyazma, his unit was surrounded, and Pechersky himself was wounded and captured. Until 1943, he was in various camps and ghettos in Minsk, and then he was sent to Sobibor.

According to the stories of surviving participants in the uprising, upon arrival at the camp, the captured lieutenant of the Red Army met the son of a Polish rabbi, Leon Feldhendler, who by that time had managed to create a group of conspirators to prepare the uprising and escape. However organizational skills Pechersky turned out to be better, and Feldhendler handed over to him informal leadership of the future performance, while he himself provided all possible assistance to the participants in the uprising.

• Alexander Pechersky
• Wikimedia Commons

The rebels were supposed to secretly kill the camp guards on the agreed day, and then seize the weapons room 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.

Also on topic

They invited, but did not let in: Zakharova told how Poland prevented Russia from participating in the creation of a museum in Sobibor

Poland continues to try to justify preventing the Russian side from participating in the creation of a museum on the territory of a former concentration camp...

Most of the participants in the performance 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 performance were caught and killed, who were actively handed over to the punitive forces by local Poles. But some fugitives still managed to escape and join various partisan detachments. Among them was Lieutenant Pechersky, who, together with eight other comrades, was able to reach 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 disability, he was sent to the rear. Even before his injury, Pechersky, at the insistence of his commander, went to Moscow and gave testimony to the Soviet Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Nazi invaders and their accomplices, the materials of which later became the basis of the evidence base for the Nuremberg trials.

The story of the former prisoner amazed the members of the commission - writers Pavel Antokolsky and Veniamin Kaverin - who, based on it, published the essay “The Uprising in Sobibor.” Later he entered the world famous collection“The Black Book,” which publishes numerous testimonies and evidence of the extermination of Jews during the Second World War.

“At the end of 1943, the Germans began hasty liquidation of this camp. In order to cover up the traces of the crimes, all buildings were burned, except for the office premises, which have survived to this day. The area where the buildings were located was plowed and planted with young pine. However, it is enough to dig up the ground slightly to discover traces of a wild crime. At this place you can find many bones, ashes, remains of clothing, shoes, and various household utensils. Burnt baby strollers and dishes were also found,” said a memo from the deputy head of the main political department of the Red Army, Lieutenant General Joseph Shikin, to the chairman of the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, Nikolai Shvernik.

"Captured, but not conquered man"

The historian of the Third Reich, writer and publicist Konstantin Zalessky explained in a conversation with RT that the relative success of the uprising in Sobibor is a unique phenomenon, since the entire system of organizing the activities of the camp 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 prisoners did not have this time - people came and almost immediately destroyed them. In addition, any escape had to be prepared by the prisoners themselves in advance and without outside help, and this is always very difficult. Escape from Sobibor was a more difficult task than, for example, from Buchenwald, since those captured in Sobibor had no connection with the outside world. Consequently, they had nowhere to run,” Zalessky noted.

The head of the archive of the Holocaust Scientific and Educational Foundation, Leonid Terushkin, in turn, told RT that the successful performance in Sobibor was largely due to the coincidence of two factors: the internal readiness of many prisoners for an uprising and leadership qualities Pechersky.

“Uprisings have occurred before, for example in Warsaw ghetto. It is possible that the newly arrived prisoners told about this to those who had been in the camp before, and they were inspired by this example. However, the conspirators lacked an authoritative person, a leader whom they would follow,” said Terushkin 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 was able to unite around himself civilians who had no combat training.

“Before the Nazis, he behaved like a “captive, but not conquered man.” This made him different 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 Jewish officer meant a lot psychologically,” the expert concluded.

History of the camp

The Sobibor concentration camp was located in southeastern Poland near the village of Sobibor (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 “Government General” (the territory of Poland occupied by Germany). Subsequently, Jews were brought to the camp from other occupied countries: Lithuania, the Netherlands, France, Czechoslovakia and the USSR.

The commandant of the camp from April 1942 was SS Obersturmführer Franz Stangl (German). 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 along the perimeter of the camp were recruited from collaborators - former prisoners of war from the Red Army, mostly (90-120 people) Ukrainians - the so-called. “Travniki”, due to the fact that most of them were trained in the “Travniki” camp and civilian volunteers.

The camp was located in the forest next to the Sobibor stop. The railway came to a dead end, this was supposed to help maintain the secret. The camp was surrounded by four rows of three-meter-high barbed wire. The space between the third and fourth rows was mined. There were patrols between the second and third. Day and night, sentries were on duty on the towers, from where the entire barrier system was visible.

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 there is a hairdresser's barracks and warehouses where the belongings of the dead were stored and sorted. The third contained gas chambers where people were killed. Unlike other death camps, the Sobibor gas chamber did not use special toxic substances, but carbon monoxide. For this purpose, several old tank engines were installed in the annex near the gas chamber, during operation of which carbon monoxide was released, which was supplied through pipes to the gas chamber.

Most prisoners brought to the camp were killed on the same day in gas chambers. Only a small part was kept alive and used for various jobs in the camp.

During the year and a half of the camp's operation, about 250,000 Jews were killed there.

Destruction of prisoners

The essay “Uprising in Sobibur” (magazine “Znamya”, No. 4, 1945) by Veniamin Kaverin and Pavel Antokolsky presents the testimony of former prisoner Dov Fainberg dated August 10, 1944. According to Feinberg, prisoners were exterminated in a brick building called a “bathhouse” that could accommodate about 800 people:

When a party of eight hundred people entered the “bathhouse,” the door was tightly closed. There was a machine in the annex that produced asphyxiating gas. The generated gas flowed into cylinders, from them through hoses into the room. Usually within 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 “bathhouse attendant” in the camp, watched through it to see if the killing process was completed. At his signal, the gas supply stopped, the floor 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 thrown. People involved in stacking and transporting corpses were periodically shot.

Insurrection

An underground was active in the camp, planning the escape of prisoners from the work camp.

In July and August 1943, an underground group was organized in the camp under the leadership of 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 at the camp from Minsk. Among the new arrivals was Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, who joined the underground group and led it, and Leon Feldhendler became his deputy.

The uprising in Sobibor was the only successful camp uprising during all the years of World War II. Immediately after the prisoners escaped, the camp was closed and wiped off the face of the earth. In its place, the Germans plowed the land and planted it with cabbage and potatoes.

Memory

The Polish government opened a memorial at the site of the camp. On the occasion of 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 baseness, heroism and cruelty. These are death camps. Built by Nazi engineers and managed 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 virtually no chance of success, but they did not lose hope.
Saving lives was not the goal of the heroic uprising; the struggle was for a dignified death. By 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 engulfed in bigotry, racism, intolerance, when genocide is being committed 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 my debt of gratitude to the Jews from Poland and other European countries who were tortured and killed here on this land.

Literature

• Vilensky S. S., Gorbovitsky G. B., Terushkin L. A. Sobibor. - M.: Return, 2010. - 3000 copies. - ISBN 978-5-7157-0229-6
• Yitzhak Arad "Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka" (in Hebrew)
• Mikhail Lev “Long Shadows” (in Russian, translation from Yiddish)
• M. A. Lev “Sobibor” (novel). In the book “Sobibor. Van Nit Di Fraint Maine" ( Sobibor. If not for my friends, in Yiddish). Israel Bukh Publishing House: Tel Aviv, 2002.
• Richard Raschke. Escape from Sobibor. Publ. Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995. ISBN 0-252-06479-8
• Thomas Blatt. From the Ashes of Sobibór - A Story of Survival. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1997. ISBN 0-8101-1302-3

Eyewitness accounts on the Internet

• Memoirs of uprising participant Alexei Vaitsen. - “New Times” No. 35(81), September 1, 2008 (Russian) German version of the article in gas. "Tageszeitung" (German)
• Rebellion participant Yehuda Lerner and Dr. film "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 16 o'clock" (German)
• Yitzhak Arad: Uprising in Sobibor. - magazine “Menorah” No. 26, 1985
• Stanislaw Smajzner: Extracts from the Tragedy of a Jewish Teenager (English)

Articles and research

• Article " Sobibur» in the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia
• P. Antokolsky, V. Kaverin: Uprising in Sobibor. - “Black Book”
• “KZ Sobibor” on the website Shoa.de (German) (+ List of literature in English and German)
• (English)

Sobibor(Polish Sobibor, German SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor) - an extermination camp organized by the Nazis in Poland. Operated from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943. About 250 thousand Jews were killed here. At the same time, it was in Sobibor on October 14, 1943 that the only successful major uprising in the Nazi death camps took place, led by Soviet officer Alexander Pechersky.

History of the camp

The Sobibor camp was located in southeastern Poland near the village of Sobibor (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 “Government General” (the territory of Poland occupied by Germany). Subsequently, Jews were brought to the camp from other occupied countries: 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 along the perimeter of the camp were recruited from collaborators - former prisoners of war from the Red Army, mostly (90-120 people) Ukrainians - the so-called. "Travniki", due to the fact that most of them were trained in the "Travniki" camp and civilian volunteers.

The camp was located in the forest next to the Sobibor stop. The railway came to a dead end, which was supposed to help maintain the secret. The camp was surrounded by four rows of three-meter-high barbed wire. The space between the third and fourth rows was mined. Between the second and third there were patrols. Day and night, sentries were on duty on the towers, from where the entire barrier system was visible.

The camp was divided into three main parts - “subcamps”, each with its own strictly defined purpose. The first housed a work camp (workshops and residential barracks). In the second there is a hairdresser's barracks and warehouses where the belongings of the dead were stored and sorted. The third contained gas chambers where people were killed. For this purpose, several old tank engines were installed in the annex near the gas chamber, during operation of which carbon monoxide was released, which was supplied through pipes to the gas chamber.

Most prisoners brought to the camp were killed on the same day in gas chambers. Only a small part was kept alive and used for various jobs in the camp.

During the year and a half of the camp's operation, about 250,000 Jews were killed there.

Destruction of prisoners

In the essay “Uprising in Sobibur” (Znamya magazine, No. 4, 1945) by Veniamin Kaverin and Pavel Antokolsky, the testimony of former prisoner Dov Fainberg dated August 10, 1944 is given. According to Feinberg, prisoners were exterminated in a brick building called a “bathhouse” that could accommodate about 800 people:

When a party of eight hundred people entered the “bathhouse,” the door was tightly closed. There was a machine in the annex that produced asphyxiating gas. The generated gas flowed into cylinders, from them through hoses into the room. Usually within 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 “bathhouse attendant” in the camp, watched through it to see if the killing process was completed. At his signal, the gas supply stopped, the floor 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 thrown. People involved in stacking and transporting corpses were periodically shot.

The essay was later included in “ Black Book» military reporters of the Red Army Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman.

Attempts at resistance

On New Year's Day 1943, five Jewish prisoners escaped 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 Chelm. Apparently, thanks to him, people in Chelm learned about what was happening in Sobibor. When the last batch of Jews from this city was sent to Sobibor at the end of February 1943, there were several attempts to escape from the train. Upon arrival in Sobibor on April 30, 1943, the deported Jews of Włodawa refused to voluntarily leave the carriages.

Another case of resistance took place on October 11, 1943, when people refused to go into the gas chamber and began to run away. 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 engaged in the re-equipment of 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 and half Dutch Jews), nicknamed the “forest team,” began harvesting the wood needed for construction in the forest, a few kilometers from Sobibor. Seven Ukrainians and two SS men were assigned as guards.

One day, two prisoners from this brigade (Shlomo Podkhlebnik and Joseph Kurtz, both Polish Jews), under the escort of a Ukrainian guard, were sent to the nearest village to fetch water. Along the way, the two killed their guard, took his weapon 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 along the way, suddenly, at a pre-arranged signal, Polish Jews from the “forest team” began to run. The Dutch Jews decided not to participate in the escape attempt because, not speaking Polish and not knowing the area, it would be extremely difficult for them to find refuge.

Ten of those who fled were captured, several of them were shot, but eight managed to escape. The ten who were caught were taken to the camp and there they were shot in front of all the prisoners.

Insurrection

An underground was active 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 under the leadership of 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 at the camp from Minsk. Among the new arrivals was Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, who joined the underground group and led it, and Leon Feldhendler became his deputy.

On October 14, 1943, prisoners of the death camp under the leadership of Pechersky and Feldhendler rebelled. According to Pechersky's plan, the prisoners were supposed to secretly, one by one, eliminate the SS personnel of the camp, and then, having taken possession of the weapons located in the camp 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 failed to take possession of the weapons depot. The guards opened fire on the prisoners and they were forced to break out of the camp through minefields. They managed to overwhelm the guards and escape into the forest. Of the almost 550 prisoners in 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. Everyone remaining in the camp was 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 security. During the search, 170 fugitives were found, all of them were immediately shot. At the beginning of 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 handed over to the Germans by the local population or killed by collaborators. Only 53 participants in the uprising survived to the end of the war (according to other sources, 47 participants).

The uprising in Sobibor was the only successful camp uprising during all the years of World War II. Immediately after the prisoners escaped, the camp was closed and wiped off the face of the earth. In its place, the Germans plowed the land and planted it with cabbage and potatoes.

After the war

The Polish government opened a memorial at the site of the camp. On the occasion of 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 baseness, heroism and cruelty. These are death camps. Built by Nazi engineers and managed 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 virtually no chance of success, but they did not lose hope.
Saving lives was not the goal of the heroic uprising; the struggle was for a dignified death. By 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 engulfed in bigotry, racism, intolerance, when genocide is being committed 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 my debt of gratitude to the Jews from Poland and other European countries who were tortured and killed here on this land.

As of January 2015, 4 participants in the Sobibor uprising remained alive. One of the participants in the uprising, Alexei Vaitsen, 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 former Sobibor security guard Ivan Demjanjuk to five years in prison.

On January 14, 2015, the last prisoner of Sobibor, Alexey Angelovich Vaitsen, who gave incriminating evidence against Ivan Demjanjuk, died.

Sobibor in cinema

In 1987, based on the book by Richard Raschke, it was filmed feature film"Escape from Sobibor".

In 2001, French documentary director Claude Lanzmann shot the documentary-historical film “Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 16 o’clock.”

Sobibor (Polish: Sobibor, German: SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor) is a death camp organized by the Nazis in Poland. Operated from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943. About 250 thousand Jews were killed here
The Sobibor camp was located in southeastern Poland near the village of Sobibor (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 General Government (the territory of Poland occupied by Germany). Subsequently, Jews were brought to the camp from other occupied countries: 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 along the perimeter of the camp were recruited from collaborators - former prisoners of war from the Red Army, mostly (90-120 people) Ukrainians - the so-called. herbalists, due to the fact that most of them were trained at the Herbalists camp and civilian volunteers.

The camp was located in the forest next to the Sobibor stop. The railway came to a dead end, this was supposed to help maintain the secret. The camp was surrounded by four rows of three-meter-high barbed wire. The space between the third and fourth rows was mined. There were patrols between the second and third. Day and night, sentries were on duty on the towers, from where the entire barrier system was visible.

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 there is a hairdresser's barracks and warehouses where the belongings of the dead were stored and sorted. The third contained gas chambers where people were killed. For this purpose, several old tank engines were installed in the annex near the gas chamber, during operation of which carbon monoxide was released, which was supplied through pipes to the gas chamber.

Most prisoners brought to the camp were killed on the same day in gas chambers. Only a small part was kept alive and used for various jobs in the camp.

During the year and a half of the camp's operation, about 250,000 Jews were killed there.
An underground was active in the camp, planning the escape of prisoners from the work camp.

In July and August 1943, an underground group was organized in the camp under the leadership of 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 at the camp from Minsk. Among the new arrivals was Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, who joined the underground group and led it, and Leon Feldhendler became his deputy.

On October 14, 1943, prisoners of the death camp under the leadership of Pechersky and Feldhendler rebelled. According to Pechersky's plan, the prisoners were supposed to secretly, one by one, eliminate the SS personnel of the camp, and then, having taken possession of the weapons located in the camp 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 failed to take possession of the weapons depot. The guards opened fire on the prisoners and they were forced to break out of the camp through minefields. They managed to overwhelm the guards and escape into the forest. Of the almost 550 prisoners in 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. Everyone remaining in the camp was 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 German military police and camp guards participated. During the search, 170 fugitives were found, all of them were immediately shot. At the beginning of 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 handed over to the Germans by the local population or killed by collaborators. Only 53 participants in the uprising survived to the end of the war (according to other sources, 47 participants).

The uprising in Sobibor was the only successful camp uprising during all the years of World War II. Immediately after the prisoners escaped, the camp was closed and wiped off the face of the earth. In its place, the Germans plowed the land and planted it with cabbage and potatoes.

Alexander Aronovich Pechersky (Pechersky; February 22, 1909, Kremenchug - January 19, 1990, Rostov-on-Don) - Red Army officer, leader of the only successful uprising in a concentration camp during the Second World War.
In October 1941, he was surrounded near Vyazma, was wounded and captured by the Germans. In captivity he suffered from typhus, but survived.

In May 1942 he tried to escape from captivity with four other prisoners. The escape failed and the fugitives were sent to a punishment camp in Borisov, and from there to Minsk.
At first, Pechersky ended up in the so-called “Forest Camp” outside the city. Then, during a medical examination, Pechersky’s Jewish origin was revealed. Together with other Jewish prisoners of war, Pechersky was put in a basement, which was called the “Jewish cellar.” There they sat for ten days in complete darkness.
On August 20, 1942, Pechersky was sent to the Minsk SS “work camp” on Shirokaya Street in Minsk. In this camp there were about five hundred Jews from the Minsk ghetto, as well as Jewish prisoners of war.

On September 18, 1943, as part of a group of Jewish prisoners, Pechersky was sent to the Sobibor extermination camp, where he arrived on September 23. There he became the organizer and leader of a prisoner uprising.

After the end of the war, Alexander Pechersky returned to Rostov-on-Don, where he lived before the war. He worked as an administrator at the Musical Comedy Theater. In 1948, during a political campaign against so-called rootless cosmopolitans, Pechersky lost his job. After that, he could not find a job for five years and lived dependently on his wife. After Stalin's death, Pechersky was able to get a job at a machine-building plant - Rostselmash.
According to other sources, until 1955 Pechersky lived in Moscow, where he worked as a cinema director, then moved to Rostov-on-Don.

In 1963, Alexander Pechersky testified for the prosecution at the trial of eleven guards at the Sobibor camp.

Alexander Aronovich Pechersky died on January 19, 1990 and was buried in the Northern Cemetery of Rostov-on-Don.

As of the beginning of 2009, Pechersky’s own daughter, granddaughter and two great-grandsons live in Rostov-on-Don, his niece, her son and their descendants live in Israel.