The uprising in the Polish Sobibor camp was the only one in which several hundred death row prisoners managed to break free at once, and this happened thanks to the courage and resourcefulness of a Soviet lieutenant

Then, on October 14, 1943, about three hundred people were able to get out of the perimeter of barbed wire and minefields - most of the Sobibor prisoners. The uprising was led by a 34-year-old lieutenant, captured near Vyazma, a hero whose feat was later practically forgotten in the USSR. Or tried to forget...

Broken dreams

On May 3, the military drama “Sobibor” will be released in Russia, becoming the director’s debut. Konstantin Khabensky. The plot centers on the legendary story of the uprising in the camp of the same name. This extermination camp, organized near Lublin, Poland, began operating in May 1942. Then the Germans opened several similar camps - they brought to life the initiated Himmler an operation to massively “cleanse” the occupied countries of Jews and Gypsies.

In the year and a half that Sobibor was in effect, more than 250 thousand people died there. In addition to the population from the occupied territories, Soviet prisoners of war were also sent there. One of them became a lieutenant in September 1943. At that time he was 34 years old.

Source: wikipedia.org

Pechersky was born on February 22, 1909 into a Jewish family; his father was a lawyer. When the boy was six years old, his parents moved to Rostov-on-Don. There Alexander graduated from school, got a job as an electrician at a locomotive repair plant, participated in amateur performances and dreamed of playing in the theater. But the war intervened in his plans, as well as in the plans of all his peers.

On June 22, 1941, Alexander was drafted into the army. Already in October, the unit in which he served was surrounded, Pechersky himself was wounded. As a result, like many other surviving fighters, he was captured.

He changed several fascist camps, almost died of typhus, and tried to escape several times. Pechersky hid the fact that he was an officer; this gave him a chance to survive. As he later recalled, for some reason he decided to call himself a carpenter - despite the fact that he had never been involved in this business. After the Germans learned about his Jewish origin, Pechersky, as part of a group of Jewish prisoners, was sent to Sobibor - to certain death.

Giver of hope

Of each batch of prisoners who entered the camp, most were almost immediately sent to the gas chambers. Those who received a deferment were engaged in household work. Pechersky and several other prisoners from his group (many of them were also captured officers or soldiers with extensive combat experience) were lucky - they avoided immediate entry into the gas chambers.

Alexander quickly came into contact with an underground group operating in Sobibor, led by the son of a Polish rabbi Leib (Leon) Feldhandler. Pechersky convinced everyone that they could only be saved if the uprising was massive, and they acted quickly, thoughtfully and harmoniously - otherwise they would suffer the sad fate of those Sobibor prisoners who tried to act alone and ended up dying.

It took about two weeks to prepare. On October 14, 1943, the prisoners rebelled. About 400 people took part in it - most of them, at that time there were about 550 prisoners in Sobibor.

Pechersky’s plan was as follows: first, one by one, destroy part of the camp personnel from among the SS men and guards; To do this, they were lured, finding an excuse, into the workshops in which the prisoners worked, and there they were strangled (fortunately, the Red Army prisoners of war had extensive hand-to-hand experience) or killed with blows to the head. After this, the plan was to get to the weapons depots - and with weapons in hands to clear the path to freedom.

But only the first part was realized, the guards managed to raise the alarm - and then the unarmed prisoners rushed to break through, despite the fire that was opened on them from the towers, the barbed wire and the minefields surrounding the perimeter of the camp. About an hour and a half passed from the start of the uprising to freedom.

"Atoned with blood"

Many died. About 300 prisoners managed to escape from behind the barbed wire, but most of them were subsequently caught by the SS men who hunted the fugitives or handed over to the Germans by the local population. Eight former prisoners of war of the Red Army, led by Pechersky, moved beyond the Bug. There Pechersky joined Belarusian partisans, became a bomber.

After the liberation of Belarus, he, like many former prisoners of war, began to be actively checked by the Soviet counterintelligence Smersh. He did not escape the penal battalion - he was sent to an assault rifle battalion. In the summer of 1944, he was seriously wounded - and soon received a certificate that quartermaster technician 2nd rank Pechersky A.A. “I atoned for my guilt before my homeland with blood.” The certificate was issued for “further service,” but his military history ended after being wounded.

After spending four months in hospitals, he was demobilized with disability. He met Victory with the rank of captain. Returned to his native Rostov-on-Don. Married a second time - to a nurse Olga Kotova who cared for him in a hospital near Moscow (he married for the first time before the war, in 1933). Like many who went through the war, he tried to integrate into peaceful life. It turned out to be not so simple. During the struggle against the “rootless cosmopolitans,” Alexander Aronovich lost his job.

Torn page

The story of the destruction of Sobibor (the camp was razed to the ground the day after the uprising) was heard at the Nuremberg trials, Pechersky was called there as a witness - but the Soviet authorities did not let him in. He used every opportunity to talk about Sobibor - in schools, libraries. A man of “rare courage,” as those who knew him said about him, he did not lose heart and did not give up. “I am, of course, tired, very exhausted,” Pechersky wrote in one of his letters to a friend.

What he was most worried about was that, figuratively speaking, they tried to erase the page connected with the history of Sobibor and the uprising there, from national history - slowly. No one denied that this event happened - but they were silent about it. In the wake of the anti-Semitic campaign in the USSR and the strengthening of friendship with Poland, which was building socialism, it did not really fit into the heroic chronicle of the Great Patriotic War, some of the pages of which were added or rewritten for propaganda purposes.

I saw the movie “Sobibor” in the cinema on May 5th. I was shocked that in Tambov the international bestseller was of interest to only 8 people who came with me to see the film by Konstantin Khabensky. For comparison, in the next hall there was a film "The Avengers", in which there were 87 people. But then I thought that not every normal person would want to watch a film about the horrors of concentration camps. I won't write my impressions of the film. The topic is too heavy. And when I got home, I read so much contradictory information about the film that its plot supposedly contained a lie about the only escape from a concentration camp. This was noted by many users of the film resource kino-teatr.ru. But when I asked them to give other examples of organized uprisings in concentration camps, no one answered. Pechersky's relatives liked the picture, but you can never please everyone.

I suggest watching documentaries about the Sobibor camp and the Pozner program, the guest of which was Konstantin Khabensky.

Posner - Guest Konstantin Khabensky. Issue dated 04/23/2018

It should be noted that Vladimir Vladimirovich Pozner corresponded with the Pechersky family, as the hero’s granddaughter talks about below.

Documentary films about Sobibor

Much has been written about the only case in history when all the prisoners escaped from a concentration camp, and about the Rostovite who organized it, Alexander Pechersky, but not all the information is reliable. The relatives of Alexander Pechersky, living in Rostov, spoke about how this actually happened. Here are the memories of Alexander Aronovich’s only daughter, Eleonora Alexandrovna:

In 1941, dad went to war, was surrounded, and captured. In 1943, together with some other prisoners, he was sent to the Sobibor concentration camp. Now everyone knows about the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, but in the 40s the Nazis claimed that these were work camps where prisoners worked for the good of Germany. Sobibor was kept secret because it was originally intended for the extermination of Jews. The world did not yet know about gas chambers. But even such a camp required staff. The Nazis selected from among the prisoners who arrived, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters - those who would sew uniforms for guards, make furniture...

They, too, were doomed to death, but they had a short period of time left. A friend persuaded dad to call themselves masters and buy time. An underground committee was created in Sobibor. A small group of people who were not yet broken in spirit decided to escape from the concentration camp.Dad immediately said: “Everyone must escape, otherwise those who remain will be destroyed immediately after escaping.” He became the organizer of the escape. The history of the uprising in Sobibor is included in many encyclopedias.

REFERENCE:

On October 14, 1943, Sobibor prisoners rebelled. According to Pechersky's plan, they were supposed to secretly, one by one, eliminate the camp personnel, and then, having taken possession of the weapons located in the warehouse, kill the guards. The prisoners, among whom were citizens of various countries, agreed that at the appointed hour the SS personnel of the camp would be called to various workshops, as if on business, and there they would be attacked.

The plan was only partially successful - the rebels were able to kill several SS men and guards, but 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 overwhelm the guards and escape into the forest.

This was the only successful uprising in a concentration camp during World War II. It is said that after Himmler learned of what had happened, he ordered the Sobibor camp to be razed to the ground.

Uprising in Sobibor

In the fall of 1943, prisoners of the Sobibor death camp did the impossible: they rebelled, killed almost all the SS guards and broke free. The uprising in Sobibor is one of the most heroic pages in the history of the Resistance during the Second World War, the only case in all this time when a prisoner uprising ended in victory. It is unique in its plan, execution and short duration of preparation. In the West, many books have been published about him and several films have been created. But in Russia few people know it, although the uprising was led by a Soviet officer, Lieutenant Alexander Aronovich Pechersky, and the core of the rebels were Soviet Jewish prisoners of war. While preparing this article, I called many of my friends, but almost none of them, including Jews, could answer an extremely simple question: “What do you know about Sobibor?” The memory of Pechersky in his homeland in Rostov-on-Don is also covered in oblivion: there is no street or square named after him, no monument on his grave. He was also not awarded a single state award...

In March 1942, by special order of Himmler, the head of the SS and chief of the Gestapo, near the small town of Sobibor in the Lublin Voivodeship, a death camp was built in the strictest secrecy exclusively for the extermination of Jews. His existence was shrouded in an impenetrable veil of secrecy. This region is located in the wilderness, far from the main routes and cities, almost at the Bug itself, where at the beginning of the war the border with the USSR passed.

On September 22, 1943, a train arrived in Sobibor, delivering two thousand Jews, including women and children, from the Minsk SS labor camp. Most of them were residents of the Minsk ghetto, which was liquidated by the Germans exactly a month later, on October 23. Its last inhabitants were shot in Maly Trostyanets. Among the new arrivals was a group of six hundred Jewish prisoners of war, and among them the only officer was Lieutenant Alexander Aronovich Pechersky.

There was an underground committee in the camp that planned to organize an uprising and escape. The committee was headed by Leon Feldgendler. But Leon himself and his comrades were deeply civilians and, of course, they would not have been able to carry out an uprising. But then a train arrived from Minsk. Among the prisoners of war, Pechersky stood out in terms of height, stature, and confidence in his behavior, and the prisoners of war themselves addressed him as a commander. Feldgendler approached Pechersky and spoke to him in Yiddish, but he did not understand him. However, Leon, like most Polish Jews, could speak Russian, so language barrier managed to overcome. As for the other old-timers of Sobibor, Pechersky’s communication with them took place with the help of Shlomo Leitman, who also arrived from Minsk.

Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor (and later commandant of Treblinka), during his trial, responded to the question of how many people could have been killed in one day: “On the question of the number of people put through the gas chambers in one day, I can report , that according to my estimate, a transport of thirty freight cars with three thousand people was liquidated in three hours. When the work lasted about fourteen hours, from twelve to fifteen thousand people were destroyed. There were many days when work continued from early morning until evening.”

In total, during the existence of the camp, more than 250 thousand Jews were killed in it, about forty thousand of them were children. As for the 600 prisoners of war who arrived from Minsk, by the day of the uprising only 83 of them remained alive. The same fate awaited the rest, so Pechersky hurried, taking a mortal risk: it was enough for at least one person to inform the Germans about the impending uprising, and that’s all would have been destroyed that same day. But the traitor was not found...

Pechersky, having become accustomed to the situation, developed a plan for the uprising: first destroy the German officers one by one and quickly, within one hour, so that they would not have time to discover the disappearance of their own and raise the alarm. The main task was to organize everything secretly, so as not to attract the attention of the SS men and guards for as long as possible.

The uprising was scheduled for October 14. Here is what Semyon Rosenfeld, one of the Soviet prisoners of war, says about this: “At noon, Pechersky called me and said: “Frenzel, the commandant of the first camp, should come here after lunch. Find a good hatchet and sharpen it. Calculate where Frenzel will stand. You must kill him. “Of course, I was prepared. I was twenty years old, and I wasn’t that much of a hero, but I can handle killing Frenzel”... Fate would have it that Semyon Rosenfeld stormed Berlin and left the inscription on the Reichstag: “Minsk - Sobibor - Berlin”...

The all-Russian premiere of Konstantin Khabensky’s film “Sobibor” took place in Rostov-on-Don. The film is dedicated to the uprising of prisoners of a fascist death camp. The city for the premiere was not chosen by chance, because the organizer of the uprising, Alexander Pechersky, lived here and his descendants live now. They shared their impressions with the RG journalist.

I am not a teacher. Neither literally nor figuratively. I can only tell a story from the screen and convey a person’s emotions. A man who once truly lived, who accomplished a feat, who walked the local streets. The premieres of such films should not only be in Moscow. Opening the rental of Sobibor in Rostov is the fairest thing, in my opinion, that could happen, the director and performer said before the show leading role Konstantin Khabensky.

To demonstrate the film in one of the city's major entertainment centers, eight cinema halls had to be used. The tape was seen by 1048 people. The show took place in complete silence. The dramatic events of the autumn of 1943 were observed by the relatives of the main character of the film, daughter Eleonora Grinevich, granddaughter Natalya Ladychenko, great-granddaughter Alina Popova and other relatives. They shared their impressions with the RG journalist immediately after the film.

We understood that the film would be difficult. We were warned that it would be difficult to watch the prisoners suffer. Moreover, the employees of the Pechersky Memory Foundation who worked on the script of the film said: the film will be as reliable as possible from a historical point of view, says Alina Popova.

According to her, the tape turned out to be shocking.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a very impressionable person, but I couldn’t watch the scene when the concentration camp guards begin to mock the prisoners to the end and closed my eyes. And then, when the pumping music began to sound, I, like a little girl, also closed my eyes. “I couldn’t see it, but I cried in several places,” the woman admitted.

She especially remembered the performance of the main actors - Konstantin Khabensky and Christopher Lambert.

The internal resistance of the Soviet prisoner of war and the concentration camp commandant was constantly felt. It was felt even when they silently looked at each other. The whole film keeps you in suspense, but the brightest flash is the uprising and mass breakthrough of prisoners,” said Alina Popova.

The film is beautiful, but very difficult to understand. We even stocked up on medications in advance, in case mom gets sick. After all, she is 84 years old, but, fortunately, everything worked out. At least at some points they cried,” says Natalya Ladychenko, granddaughter of Alexander Pechersky. - And you know, even though Konstantin Khabensky did not look like his grandfather in appearance and he was not made up to look like a portrait, at some moments my mother and I thought that they were showing grandfather on the screen. It seemed that this was exactly how he behaved in the concentration camp during all those terrible 22 days, when he was preparing the uprising. Konstantin Khabensky very harmoniously conveyed the image of his grandfather...

She also admitted that although the film came out true, she was surprised why the episode with the “lucky shirt” was not shown in the film.

On the night before the uprising, the Belgian girl Luca gave her grandfather her father's lucky shirt - an ordinary robe with vertical blue stripes. And indeed, the shirt brought good luck, and grandfather kept it all his life: in the partisan detachment, in the assault battalion and at home, it always lay in a place of honor. Before filming began, we sent her to Moscow for a while, but this story was not included in the film. However, we are not offended, because we were warned that the film would not be a documentary, but a feature. This was probably the director’s decision,” says Natalya Ladychenko.

When the lights came on in the hall, Konstantin Khabensky approached Eleonora Aleksandrovna Grinevich and asked if the film was a success. The daughter of Alexander Pechersky replied: “Very.”

Sobibor began operating as a conveyor belt of death on May 3, 1942. Almost simultaneously with Sobibor, other death camps appeared: Belzec (in March) and Treblinka (in July). Together with Chelmno (operational from December 8, 1941), they all became the main extermination camps in which the Nazis exterminated more than a third of European Jewry. The creation of such camps was carried out as part of Operation Reinhard and was one of the key results of the Wannsee conference (January 20, 1942), when the highest ranks of the party and the SS approved the basic principles of the “final solution” to the Jewish question.

It is worth emphasizing the difference between the concentration camps (Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Dachau), where prisoners were forced to work for the Nazis, and the death camps, in which people were only exterminated. Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Majdanek functioned as both concentration camps and extermination camps. There were only six of the latter (Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, Auschwitz and Majdanek). At the end of the war, Mauthausen and Stutthof began to operate de facto as death camps. It is significant that 360 thousand Jews were exterminated in Chelmno, and only two survived. In Belzec, 600 thousand were killed, six people survived. As a result, little is known about these camps.

In Sobibor, about 250 thousand people were killed, 53 survived thanks to the escape of Pechersky. Over 18 months, the total number of camp personnel was about 100 SS men and 200 Ukrainian guards.

ECONOMICS OF GENOCIDE

In March 1942, J. Goebbels wrote in his diaries that it was planned to exterminate 60 percent of the Jews, and temporarily save 40 percent of their lives as labor force.

According to SS calculations, one prisoner, based on an average life expectancy of 9 months, could bring 1,630 Reichsmarks to the Third Reich. The amount was formed from the costs of food, clothing and cremation (the latter - about 2 marks) and the “income” received from the prisoner’s labor, remaining personal belongings, gold teeth and clothes. These calculations did not take into account the cost of the ash, which was used for agricultural purposes.

CONVEYOR OF DEATH

Sobibor was located on the railway section between Chelm and Wlodawa, with a separate branch leading to the camp. It was divided into four parts, not counting the area where new victims arrived:

Camp 1 (about 50 Jews, they served the German guards, from cooking to sewing clothes).

Camp 2 (Jews destined for extermination were immediately driven here; service personnel, about 400 Jews, had to cut their hair, sort the things left behind, etc.; the administration was located in the same zone).

Camp 3 (gas chambers were located here).

The fourth zone began to be created in the summer of 1943, when it was planned to turn Sobibor into a concentration camp.

Among other things, Sobibor had a Catholic Church for the needs of the Nazis. Immediately behind it was a wasteland where prisoners who tried to resist were killed. The church was less than 500 meters from the gas chambers.

In Sobibor, primarily Polish Jews were exterminated, but trains also arrived from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Holland. It is known that a number of French and Greek Jews, as well as Jews from the USSR, were exterminated. On June 5, 1943, two special “children’s” trains left Holland for Sobibor: children and mothers were promised that they would be sent to a special work camp.

From platform b O Most of the people were driven to camp 2, but the elderly, sick, and children were immediately sent to the trench, where Ukrainian guards, followed by the Germans, shot them with machine guns. The monsters ironically called this place “the infirmary.” Victims - especially Western Jews - believed that they would simply be allowed to wash and change into clean clothes before being sent to work. Upon arrival, they were ordered to write postcards home.

If Western Jews were brought in comfortable trains and until the last moment the illusion of prosperity was created for them, then Polish and Russian Jews were transported in freight cars. There were several cases in 1943 of unarmed men attacking SS men upon arrival. Jews “in Russian trains” began to be transported to Sobibor completely naked in order to make it difficult to escape and to prevent them from hiding something under their clothes that could be used to defend themselves.

There were women who refused to undress and cut their hair, and to part with their children. In such cases, the SS slowed down the flow of gas so that the victims suffered longer in agony.

PECHERSKY IN SOBIBOR

Alexander Aronovich Pechersky served in military service in 1931-1933. He was drafted on June 22, 1941, took part in hostilities, and was certified as a 2nd rank quartermaster technician (lieutenant). He was captured wounded near Vyazma in October 1941. He was in Sobibor from September 23, 1943 until the day of the uprising - October 14. In 1943-1944 - among the partisans in Belarus. In 1944, after verification, he fought in the assault battalion - until he was wounded.

Pechersky arrived at the camp just a few days after several dozen Dutch Jews were executed for plotting an escape. Eighty Soviet prisoners of war were to do their work and build new barracks.

Pechersky relied on the underground movement, which was organized by Polish prisoners. The main figure was Leon Feldhendler. The main goal of the underground was to disseminate information about the situation at the fronts and the defeats of the Germans, but any attempts to resist or escape were restrained by the principle of collective responsibility of prisoners. They didn't know how to handle weapons.

The arrival of Pechersky with a group of prisoners of war had a strong effect. Survivor Kalmen Vevryk wrote: “They had military experience. They knew everything about guns, bullets, etc. They would not disdain hand-to-hand combat.” Like all prisoners, Vevryk was very impressed with Pechersky: “He literally radiated imperious confidence and control.”

Pechersky’s plan was to destroy as many SS men as possible in six groups between 16:00 and 17:00 on October 14, 1943 and secretly take possession of weapons. Then, at 17:00, general formation, everyone heads to the main gate, as if such was the order of the Germans. The first part of the plan was a success: out of 17 SS men, 10 were killed. Of 120 guards (mostly Ukrainians), about 10 were killed and more than a dozen were wounded.

At about 17:00, when the second part of the uprising was supposed to begin, one of the Germans noticed the body of a killed officer, and shooting began. From that moment on, the uprising took on a chaotic character. Against this background, Pechersky addressed his comrades in Russian with a call to move on to open action. His speech, according to surviving eyewitness Thomas Blatt, ended with the call: “Forward, comrades! Behind ! Death to the Nazis! Survivor Kalmen Vevryk also mentions Stalin - “Hurray for Stalin!” - and declares: “Stalin was our God then; Every Jew looked for his savior in Stalin. First one person, then twenty and finally many, many others shouted: “Hurray for Stalin!”

There were about 550 prisoners in the camp, 150 of them did not want or were unable to escape (the last ones were those who worked in camp 3), about 70 died during the escape. Thus, 320 people fled from Sobibor, about 150 were caught by the Germans, and another 90 were killed by Polish nationalists. In the end, 53 people survived.

AFTER SOBIBOR

After the uprising and escape, the camp was immediately closed and demolished by order of Himmler.

On October 19, Operation Reinhard, the program to exterminate Jews, was officially completed. Its leader, General Odilo Globocnik, reported that 12 million Reichsmarks were spent on it, and the total profit was 179 million Reichsmarks. The personnel were awarded military orders, and the leadership was transferred to occupied Italy to exterminate local Jews. Since the top of the SS understood that the war was actually lost, all the main participants were sent to the areas most dangerous due to the partisan movement. Many SS officers responsible for the killings in Sobibor died.

After the war, former leaders and guards tried to escape or hide, and over time they were arrested. Thus, in 1965-1966, a major trial of 12 SS guards from Sobibor took place in The Hague. Only one, sergeant major Karl Frenzel, was sentenced to life imprisonment, four more were sentenced to different terms(from 3 to 8 years), the rest are justified. And only one out of 12 admitted his guilt. Commandant Captain Franz Stangel, who headed Sobibor for the longest time, managed to escape to Brazil along with sergeant major Gustav Wagner (in Sobibor he actually commanded the entire sergeant staff and was particularly cruel). Stangel was arrested in 1967 and died in prison of a heart attack, but they refused to extradite Wagner. In 1980, he committed suicide.

The USSR fought most actively against Nazi collaborators. In 1962, a closed trial of eleven Ukrainians who served as security took place in Kyiv. They were all sentenced to death.

FOUR MYTHS ABOUT ALEXANDER PECHERSKY

Myth 1: in the USSR the feat of Sobibor prisoners was hushed up

Almost immediately after the liberation of Eastern Poland by the Red Army, information about the death camp in Sobibor began to appear in army reports, and a little later - in the army and central press. The first of the central newspapers to tell about the death camp was Komsomolskaya Pravda back on September 2, 1944 (article “Death Factory in Sobibur”). Then there were other articles: “Uprising in the death camp - Sobibur” (“Komsomolskaya Pravda”, 1945), “The End of Sobibur” (“Komsomolskaya Pravda”, 1962), “The Terrible Shadow of Sobibur” (“Red Star”, 1963). It must be taken into account that publication in a central newspaper had a completely different weight then than it does now.

After publications in the early 60s, former prisoners of Sobibor were found who lived in the USSR. The seven participants in the uprising who were then alive began, on Pechersky’s initiative, to gather once every five years with him in Rostov-on-Don or with one of his comrades.

Books were published: A. Pechersky “Uprising in the Sobiburovsky camp”, 1945; V. Tomin, A. Sinelnikov “Return is Undesirable”, 1964. The uprising in Sobibor was described in fundamental monographs dedicated to the Great Patriotic War, in university history textbooks. At this time, practically nothing was written about Sobibor abroad (with some exceptions in Poland). It so happened that the history of the Sobibor uprising turned out to be inconvenient in different countries for different reasons. Mandatory Palestine, and then the newborn State of Israel, sculpted the image of a “new Jew”, in no way reminiscent of those downtrodden European brothers who obediently and resignedly went to their slaughter.

Poland was not ready to answer the question of how dozens of former Sobibor prisoners died on its territory during the few months that separated the uprising and the arrival of the Red Army, and why even after the war and the expulsion of the Germans, Jewish pogroms continued in Poland.

For yesterday's allies of the USSR, this story was also not particularly beneficial: the Cold War had begun, former friends were rapidly turning into sworn enemies, the story of the heroism of the Red Army soldiers did not meet the needs of the moment. And in general, the Nazi camps and the dead Jews were not very readily remembered in the West at that time - the question was too unpleasant: how did it happen that during all the years of the Holocaust no one noticed anything?

Myth 2: Pechersky himself was treated with distrust; in Rostov-on-Don no one knew about his feat

Throughout his life, Pechersky spoke in schools, libraries, cultural centers, and conducted active correspondence with journalists and historians, with prisoners abroad.

While he was in hospitals in 1944-1945, he collaborated with the Emergency state commission to establish and investigate the atrocities of the Nazi invaders and their accomplices, with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Pechersky acted as a witness at the trial of former guards of the Sobibor camp in Kyiv (1962).

Articles about him were regularly published in the local press. In 1961, he became a deputy of the Kirovsky District Council of Rostov. He enjoyed authority in the city; the regional museum of local history had exhibits dedicated to the uprising in Sobibor.

Pechersky and other participants in the uprising in Sobibor were indeed not included in the main pantheon of heroes of the Great Patriotic War. But this pantheon was small and consisted mainly of those who died in the war. There was no hushing up of the heroism of the Sobiborites; a lot was written and spoken about it.

Myth 3: Pechersky had a hard time in peaceful life, he was poor

Alexander Pechersky was born in 1909. The family of Aron and Sofia Pechersky moved to Rostov-on-Don from Kremenchug in 1915. Since 1925, Alexander studied piano at a music school. After school (according to military registration documents, he graduated from 7th grade) he served in the army. He got married in 1933. Since 1936, he served as a household inspector at a financial and economic institute (perhaps he was simply listed as a household department, the entry on the military registration and enlistment office card is as follows: “Rostov Financial and Economic Institute, director of amateur performances”). He was fond of theater: from 1931 he played in an amateur drama group, staged short plays, and wrote music for them. Played chess.

In 1944, Pechersky, being treated in a hospital near Moscow after a serious wound, met his second wife there. He spent the rest of his life with her. Many sources write that during the years of the struggle against “cosmopolitanism,” Pechersky was fired from his job, could not find a job for several years before Stalin’s death, and lived dependently on his wife. However, a different picture emerges from Pechersky’s party file recently discovered in the archives. After the war, he worked as a theater administrator, but in 1952 he was put on trial for petty abuse, sentenced to one year of correctional labor and expelled from the party. At the same time, he did not remain without work, almost immediately moving from the Musical Comedy Theater to the forging and mechanical artel. Then he worked at a factory until his retirement. And all this time he continued to work on collecting and distributing materials about the tragedy of Sobibor and the feat of its prisoners.

Myth 4: even today the feat of Pechersky remains little known

After Pechersky's death in 1990, a memorial plaque was erected in his memory (2007). New books have been published: I. Vasiliev “Alexander Pechersky. Breakthrough into immortality"; S. Makarova, Y. Bogdanova “Heroes of Sobibor. Photo chronicle." In 2013, two new documentaries were released, the authors were L. Mlechin and S. Pashkov. In Rostov-on-Don in 2014, a personalized star appeared in honor of Pechersky on the “Prospekt of Stars”; a year later, one of the streets of the city was named after him - in the Suvorovsky microdistrict.

2015 - postage stamp dedicated to the uprising in Sobibor.

2016 - The President of Russia awarded Pechersky Alexander Aronovich with the Order of Courage posthumously.

2017 - with the participation of the Russian Military Historical Society, a street in New Moscow was named after Pechersky (a 9-kilometer section of the road from Borovskoye Highway towards Troitsk).

More from the activities of the Russian Military Historical Society to perpetuate the name of Alexander Pechersky: it was assigned to the fast train connecting Moscow - Rostov-on-Don; exhibitions were held at the Kazansky railway station in Moscow and Rostov-on-Don; in Rostov-on-Don, a bust of the hero was installed near the school that bears his name; an exhibition has been prepared at the Victory Museum; the website SOBIBOR.HISTORY.RF was created. Finally, the film-monument “Sobibor” by Konstantin Khabensky was released, filmed on the initiative of the Minister of Culture of Russia and Chairman of the Russian Military Historical Society Vladimir Medinsky. The most correct review of this film is: “The film is difficult, but you have to watch it.”

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 once again engulfed in bigotry, racism, intolerance, and 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)

The last of nine former prisoners of war who rebelled in the Nazi death camp Sobibor, from which it was considered impossible to escape alive. Under the sign of death Most of the prisoners in the concentration camps were to become the basis for the prosperity of the new European “master race”: the entire theory, ideology and economy of the Third Reich was built on the use of free labor for the benefit of the Germans. Those who were able to work were immediately sent to prison after “processing”. Germany. However, not everyone made it from the occupied territories to factories and camps not only in Germany, but also in Eastern Europe alive. The prisoners were affected by the monstrous conditions of transportation: the lack of normal food or the absence of food as such, disease, complete unsanitary conditions and a lack of clean water carried away up to half of the prisoners locked in the carriages. The exact figures revealing the number of concentration camp prisoners are still disputed by historians. According to some sources, 16 million people, including the civilian population, could have passed through concentration camps built both in Germany and in Eastern Europe.

However, not everyone was ready to put up with the new reality: starting in 1941, camp guards, with varying degrees of success, tried to stop individual and group escape attempts by 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 prisoners at the Treblinka concentration camp, as well as problems with the control of facilities where genocide of civilians was carried out, showed that the camp guards were unable to provide an absolute guarantee of the obedience of prisoners.

Historians note that in reality there were much more successful escapes from concentration camps than is commonly believed.

“There are not many known and mass escapes. In fact, escapes from concentration camps occurred quite often, and the prisoners themselves regularly joined the partisan detachments,” noted military historian Yuri Pasholok in an interview with the Zvezda TV channel.

Fateful meeting

As part of Operation Reinhard, aimed at exterminating peoples undesirable from the point of view of the Nazi “racial theory”, three special-purpose facilities were built on Polish territory. 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 the systematic extermination of representatives of “inferior” peoples by the Nazis 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 sites due to unbearable conditions of detention and targeted extermination Jews

In the fall 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 attempt to escape was doomed to failure: the plan was not thought through to the end, and there were too few participants - only five people. This number is quite enough to advance beyond the concentration camp, but such a group was not enough to neutralize the guards and leave the territory,” military historian, Candidate of Historical Sciences Andrei Zinchenko said in an interview with the Zvezda TV channel.

Pechersky was saved from death by chance. Almost all the prisoners, in the carriage with whom the Red Army officer arrived, were deceived into being herded into a separate building, supposedly for sanitary treatment 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 destroyed prisoners, and so on.

Already in Sobibor, Pechersky met other prisoners who, by the will of fate, were saved from imminent death. Among Pechersky’s new acquaintances was Rabbi Leon Feldhendler, who became the right hand of the Red Army officer almost immediately after meeting. A few days later, the prisoners of the Sobibor camp began to develop an escape plan.

Noose around a Nazi's neck

Among the nine key characters recruited by Feldhendler and Pechersky from among other prisoners was the squad commander, Sergeant Arkady Weispapir, who was captured by the Nazis, and arrived in Sobibor from Minsk.

The plan of the Sobibor prisoners did not involve a secret exit from the facility - to break through the camp security, 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 remembered and discussed among the conspirators. The result of the “development” of the camp guards was permission for relatively free movement of some of the prisoners engaged in household work.

On October 14, 1943, prisoners who had gained confidence in the Nazis began to carry out the plan. In workshops, production facilities, and warehouses, 11 security guards were killed with screwdrivers, nails, hammers and metal pins at intervals of several minutes.

Arkady Weispapir also took a direct part in the liquidation of the camp guard: together with a cellmate, they waylaid the guards who came into the room to try on a new suit 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 weapons room, where rifles, machine guns and a large amount of ammunition were stored, with the help of which prisoners sentenced to death were supposed to break free.

A few units of captured weapons were no longer enough for a serious breakthrough - guards from other parts of the camp quickly realized that the prisoners had made a breakthrough and began shooting to kill.

However, the guards of the facility could no longer suppress the rebellion with machine gun fire - 420 people, physically capable of running and fighting, killed several more guards on the way to freedom and, piling up with their bodies, removed the camp gates from their hinges.

The high barbed wire fence was not the only obstacle on the way of the now former prisoners of the Sobibor concentration camp. The minefields surrounding the death factory claimed the lives of 50 people during an escape attempt. Another 30 prisoners who escaped were shot in the back.

More than a hundred concentration camp prisoners who remained to observe the uprising were demonstratively shot the next day. Later, the camp itself, in which a quarter of a million people were killed during its existence, was demolished and all the land was plowed up: nothing should have reminded the Nazis of their shameful failure.

Fight for life

Historians note that immediately after the successful uprising, wounded and hungry, but already former prisoners of war, had to decide what to do next. Not a trace remained of the former unanimity, born of hatred of the Nazis: a group led by Pechersky, consisting mainly of Red Army front-line soldiers, decided to go to the front line and make their way to their own. Members of other groups decided that the safest thing to do would be to remain on Polish territory, mix with civilians and wait for a favorable outcome.

“Despite the fact that a 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 officer noted in an interview with the Zvezda TV channel historian, candidate of historical sciences Andrey 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 partisan detachment named after Shchors, in which he fought as a demolitionist before the liberation of Belarus and the unification of the partisan detachments with the Red Army.

Pechersky's leadership qualities appeared again: he was in good standing not only with the command, but also with his colleagues. Later, after counterintelligence checks, Pechersky fought as part of units of the 1st Baltic Front. Having miraculously escaped death, showing valor and heroism, the leader of the suicide uprising from the Sobibor camp continued his military service and was later awarded the medal “For Military Merit.”

After escaping, Arkady Vaispapir also continued his military service - after moving to Belarus, he joined the Frunze partisan detachment, in which he served as a machine gunner until the partisan underground united with units of the Red Army.

The escape from the Sobibor concentration camp, along with the riots at the Mauthausen concentration camp and the escape of Soviet prisoners of war from the Peenemünde missile site, still symbolizes the resilience of different peoples in the face of certain death more than 70 years later.