It has always chapped my ass to hear
people who don’t know what the hell they are talking about
wonder aloud about why “there was no resistance” when the Nazis
rounded up Jews and other “undesirables” or in the labor and
extermination camps. First, it is another example of blaming
the victim, that always popular parlor game. And
secondly it doesn’t take into account the information that
Jews had—early on even they could not imagine industrial scale murder
and genocide, a term that had not yet even been conceived—or
the overwhelming, highly organized force arrayed against them.
These comments come most prominently, but not exclusively, from right
wingers who want to promote an armed-to-the-teeth citizenry
to resist jack booted thugs and who think concentration camp escapes could
be played out like in The Great Escape and other movies.
In fact, many Jews who were able attempted to
escape. Others famously went into hiding, and some joined or
created resistance units. Individuals committed—and
were executed for, often along with family or community
members—attacks on Nazi police, troops, and local
collaborators. There were famously organized uprisings
in Warsaw and other ghettos.
But most Jews swept up in the machinery of
death were unprepared, confused, and needed to be protective of
family. Once in the camps those not immediately killed were worked
nearly to death, starved, frozen, and subject to
disease and within weeks were too physically weakened to
resist.
There were at least three attempts at mass
breakouts from the camps—at Treblinka on August 2, 1943 and at Auschwitz-Birkenau
on October 7, 1944 which included an uprising which resulted in one of
the crematoriums being blown up. In those two cases almost
all the attempted escapees were killed. But on October 14, 1943, about
600 prisoners tried to escape from the Sobibór camp in eastern Poland.
About half got beyond the wire and about 50 survived to
the end of the war. This is their story.
Sobibór was a village in a sparsely populated
region of eastern Poland. The Nazis had established 18 labor camps in
the region. The new camp near the village was constructed in the spring
of 1942 to receive Jews from Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands,
Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Soviet POWs and to screen
them for assignment to the labor camps—and to quickly dispose
of those deemed unsuitable or unusable. Fewer than 1,000 inmates
were held there at any time. Many of those selected for the labor camps
were there for only hours or days. The life expectancy of the rejects
was days or short weeks.
The camp was mostly built by local villagers
and a Sonderkommando, a group of about eighty Jews from ghettos in the vicinity
of the camp guarded by a squad of Ukrainians trained at Trawniki.
Upon completion of construction, these Jews were shot. The gas
chambers at the new camp were hooked up to large internal
combustion engines which pumped in carbon monoxide rich exhaust to
smother the victims. Similar technology had been
used on a smaller scale with closed busses, but this was the
first major application on a large scale. The chambers were tested
in April on twenty-five Jews from Krychów who were satisfactorily
asphyxiated. After that the camp went into full operation and
the nearby rail platform became a busy place.
To give an idea of how efficient the operation was,
it was active from May 1942 to October 1943 when it was closed and replaced
by larger and more modern camps. But in less than 18 months
at least 200,000 and perhaps as many as 250,000 men, women, and children were murdered
there, the vast majority of them Jews.
Jews from Poland and the USSR knew what was going
to happen to them. They arrived in packed freight cars often hysterical
with fear and grief. Many were shot on the platform when
they did not respond quickly to orders. On the other hand, at
least in the early going Jews from Western Europe arrived in overcrowded
passenger coaches. They had been assured that they were going
to labor camps and were allowed to bring some luggage.
Their own doctors and nurses were allowed to attend the ill
in transit. Food and water during the journey were at least
adequate. These folks received the shock of a lifetime
arriving on the same platform. Because many were in better health than
Eastern Jews, able bodied men and women were often separated immediately
from their families and sent to the work camps even before they entered
Sobibór.
Attractive young women and girls were
often singled out and sent to the secluded forester house run
as a brothel for the camp’s SS contingent. Post war
trials highlighted the experience of two Austrian actresses, Ruth
and Gisela who were gang raped there over a period of days before
being taken outside and shot. Others befell the same fate.
Some prisoners were held at the camp for longer periods
as laborers including attending the gas chambers and crematoria.
Some were assigned, under heavy guard, to wood cutting beyond
the camp wire for fuel for the crematoria pyres.
From time to time, one would melt away into the forest and make
an escape. Some of those who did managed to find and
join resistance units operating from the nearby wilderness.
In the spring and summer of 1943 rumors began to
circulate in the camp that it was to be shut down. This was based
on a reduction in the numbers of incoming prisoners. In actuality,
this was due to new camps being opened. At this point SS officials
actually had plans to expand Sobibór. Fear of what might
happen to them seemed confirmed when survivors of the Bełżec
camp, one of the first extermination camps on Polish soil, was closed, arrived
at the Sobibór rail station only to be immediately shot in mass.
Polish Jews on some of the labor gangs began to organize
an escape committee by late summer. They knew that they would have
to act quickly before it inevitably became their turn in
the gas chambers. In September several Jewish Red Army prisoners
from Minsk arrived. Although there was initial distrust
between the Poles and the Soviets, several of the POWs joined the
plot and provided some military experience and leadership.
The plan was brutal in its simplicity.
On signal, prisoners would overpower and kill all of the SS men and
Ukrainian guards in the camp, using hidden homemade weapons and then
taking the arms of the Nazis. They would go from barracks to
barracks liberating the inmates and march out the front gates.
The Soviets and those who wished to join them would head east to
try to link up with Russian troops. Others would scatter
and make their way as best they could.
On October 14, 1943 under the leadership of
Polish prisoner Leon Feldhendler and Soviet POW Alexander Pechersky
they quickly managed to quietly overcome and kill 11 SS men and unknown number
of guards. But they were discovered,
and the alarm went out. Under intense fire inmates ran for their
lives scrambling over, under and through the fences as they were able. About 300 out of the 600 prisoners in the
camp made it out, but they had lost cohesion.
158 inmates were killed by the guards during the
escape attempt or died in the minefield surrounding the camp. 107 others were captured over the next few
days as SS troops, guards, and police swept the woods. All were immediately executed. Of the remaining survivors 53 died of other
causes before the end of the war—many of starvation, freezing to death, or
illness as they hid out in the forests.
About 50 eluded capture, made it to Soviet lines, and survived the war.
After the uprising a furious Heinrich Himmler
ordered the remaining prisoners killed, the camp closed, dismantled, and
the ground planted with trees. The gas chambers and
crematoria were destroyed, buried, and covered over with
an asphalt roadway. They were rediscovered in archeological
excavations in 2012.
The site of the camp is now Polish historic
site. Monuments on the grounds and at the railway station and
a small museum commemorate the dead and the uprising. The Dutch,
who lost more than 36,000 citizens at Sobibór famously including Helena
‘Lea’ Nordheim the Jewish Gold
Medal women’s gymnasts from the 1928 Olympics and the
team’s coach, Gerrit Kleerekoper have contributed funds to the upkeep and maintenance
of the site as well as newly installed signage.
After the war SS commandants, officers, and guards
were tried for war crimes. One of the most celebrated
cases took years. John Demjanjuk had been a Ukrainian POW when
he was recruited along with many others as a camp guard. He was
trained at the Trawniki concentration camp. He served as a tower
guard at Sobibór. And would have been among those who opened fire at
the fleeing escapees. After the war Demjanjuk made his way to the United
States as a displaced person. He became an American
citizen, married, and raised a family, settled in a suburb of
Cleveland where he worked as a mechanic at a Ford plant.
In 1975 Demjanjuk was finally identified as a
Ukrainian collaborator and his Nazi ID from Trawniki turned over
the Justice Department, which began deportation proceedings
against him two years later. He fought his deportation for years,
claiming at first that he was misidentified, and later that he was a
guard but had taken no part in executions or shootings. Israel
issued an extradition request for him in 1983 and he was deported to trial
there in 1986. Despite controversy over the authenticity of
the SS identification card and other issues, on April 18, 1988 Demjanjuk was convicted
in the Israeli court of being the notorious guard known to prisoners as Ivan
the Terrible. He was sentenced to death.
After serving more than 5 years in solitary confinement during appeals,
the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction on the grounds of new evidence that identified
the real Ivan the Terrible as another Ukrainian, Ivan Marchenko.
Demjanjuk was released to return to the United
States. In 1993, the Sixth Circuit Court
of Appeals ruled that he was a victim
of fraud on the court, as lawyers with the Office of
Special Investigations had recklessly
failed to disclose evidence. In a report submitted to the Sixth Circuit
prior to the Israeli acquittal, Federal
Judge Thomas A. Wiseman, Jr. concluded that Federal officials
had erred in asserting that
Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible, but that evidence instead pointed to Demjanjuk
playing a lesser role as an SS guard.
After the Court of Appeals remanded the matter to Judge Wiseman, Judge
Wiseman dismissed a
denaturalization petition in 1998, effectively restoring Demjanjuk’s citizenship.
In 1999 the government filed a new civil complaint against Demjanjuk
asking again for denaturalization on the grounds that he was a guard at the
Sobibór and Majdanek camps in Poland under German occupation and at the Flossenburg camp in Germany. It also
accused Demjanjuk of being a member of an SS-run
unit that took part in capturing nearly two million Jews in the General Government of Poland. In a new trial in 2002 he was again stripped
of citizenship. He lost an appeal in
2004 and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
In December 2005 an immigration judge ordered Demjanjuk’s deportation to Germany,
Poland, or the Ukraine. He sought
protection under the United Nations
Convention Against Torture, claiming that he would be prosecuted and tortured if he were deported to
Ukraine. Chief U.S. Immigration Judge
Michael Creppy ruled there was no
evidence to substantiate Demjanjuk’s claim.
Demjanjuk lost
more appeals in his lengthy battles, finally exhausting them all. Then Germany served extradition papers seeking custody of him. Finally, after another round of appeals
seeking relief from the extradition, Demjanjuk was finally deported on May 11, 2009.
On July 13 prosecutors charged him with 27,900
counts of accessory to murder. The aging
and ill man could only briefly attend court sessions each day
and his lawyers asserted that due to
the complexity of the case it
would take up to five years to try the case.
They ask that the case be dismissed
due to his age, infirmity, and unlikelihood that he would survive
the trial. Then the Ukrainian government interceded on his
behalf arguing for mercy. None the less,
the trial got underway in November.
On May 12, 2011, Demjanjuk, then 91, was convicted
and sentenced to five years in prison. He was released pending
appeal and died in a German nursing home on March 17,
2012. The German high court then invalidated the conviction since
the appeal could not be heard.
Justice ground slowly for the accused guard.
It ground not at all for the dead of Sobibór.
In 1987 Escape from Sobibor was filmed as
a British made-for-TV movie starring Rutger Hauer and Alan
Arkin which was also shown on CBS TV in the United States.
Hauer won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Soviet POW leader
Lieutenant Aleksandr Pechersky.
