Richard Rashke

One of the frequently asked questions when Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi spoke publicly about his experiences was “Why weren’t there more escapes?”. Levi would patiently explain: if an inmate escaped, his entire barracks would be immediately executed; thus the prisoners were their own guards – anyone who seemed to be preparing for escape would be turned in. If questioners used the example of Allied soldiers escaping from POW Levi pointed out that the POWs were reasonably well fed and could store up rations in advance of an escape, while the death and labor camp inmates were always on the knife edge of starvation and had no chance to store up supplies.

Still, there was a camp where an escape did succeed. Sobibor was in the extreme east of the Polish General Government, just across the Bug River from the Soviet Union. Compared to the vast death factory at Auschwitz, it was something of a stepchild; the gas chambers used exhaust from a Russian tank engine instead of Zyklon B and the crematorium was just large open air racks where the bodies were piled in heaps and incinerated over piles of wood cut from the surrounding forest. Still the procedure was more or less the same; a transport train would come in and unload one car at a time. The passengers would be separated by age and sex; women and children in one line and men in another. If any asked questions, an SS man in a white doctor’s coat would assure them that they were being disinfected before transfer to another train taking them further east to a labor camp. Other SS men would walk down the lines selecting people who claimed some ability – tailors, cobblers, women who could knit. The unselected would enter a sort of tunnel – high barbed wire fences covered with branches cut fresh every few days, so they were unable to see out. They diverted into a room where they left their hand luggage behind – each receiving a claim check – then into another room where they disrobed (again receiving a claim check), then into a third room where their heads were shaved, and finally into the shower room. After it was over the bodies were removed by camp inmates and heaped in cars on a little railway, which was shoved by hand to the cremating racks and unloaded. The inmates then raked over the dirt in the tunnel to erase footprints and removed all the belongings to warehouses for sorting; trying to convince each fresh batch they were the first to take this path.


Many, of course, knew exactly what was going on. When the SS inspector called for tailors or cobblers, they would volunteer even if they didn’t know one end of needle from the other or which side of a shoe the sole went on. And they watched while their parents and brothers and sisters disappeared down the tunnel. (Unlike the GULAG, it didn’t help to be an attractive young woman or a pretty boy; the SS and Ukrainian guards had brothels stocked with Russian women, and it was a serious offence to have any sort of intimate relationship with a Jewish inmate; transfer to a penal unit at the front for the guard and immediate execution for the Jew).


The selected few stayed alive as long as they didn’t attract too much attention and were adequately obsequious. Some really were cobblers and tailors and knitters; the others learned quickly or died. One coveted position was luggage sorter; people sometimes had canned food in their suitcases or money sewed into the seams of their clothing. Of course, if a guard caught you with food or money it meant an immediate bullet in the head, but if you were lucky there were places to hide it.


The selected inmates realized, of course, that their days were numbered and eventually they would join their families. Various escape plans were discussed, more urgently as incoming transports began to slow down in 1943. Fortuitously, a train came in with a batch of Jewish Russian POWs who had been working in labor camps and were now surplus. The inmates, led by Leon Feldhendler, cautiously approached the Russians and broached the subject of an escape; Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky agreed to take over the operation. The Russians had been put to work in the forest cutting wood; they were able to steal some axes.


They waited until some of the more astute of the guards were on leave. Then, one by one, SS men were lured by some pretext – to a cobbler or tailor for a fitting, to a warehouse to examine something found in luggage – and a Russian came up behind them with an axe. One this started, of course, there was no turning back; unfortunately only a few inmates could be let in on the plan, so when the sirens started blowing almost all were just as surprised as the Germans. The original idea had been to simply march out of the camp through the main gate, as if it were an unusually large work detail; but only the Russians could maintain this sort of discipline so everybody else just broke and ran, forcing down the barbed wire with the weight of their own bodies and taking their chances with the minefields. There were about 600 inmates in the camp; about 300 actually tried to escape. Most off these either died in the minefield or were quickly tracked down and shot; Polish partisans accounted for more and others were turned in by Polish civilians when they came begging for help. After leading the escape Pechersky abandoned the non-Russians and headed east, eventually joining up with a partisan band. Between 50 and 70 Sobibor escapees survived the war (Leon Feldhendler was murdered after the war by anti-Semites in his own home village).


Author Richard Rashke succeeds in a difficult task. Previous literature about the camp and the escape was extremely limited; a book published in Moscow in 1964 is “pure fiction” and a memoir by one of the survivors who emigrated to Brazil is only available in Portuguese. The survivors that Rashke was able to locate were almost uniformly reluctant to be interviewed; many expressed surprise that a non-Jew would write a book about Sobibor and insisted he could never understand what happened there. Rashke traveled to California, New England, Brazil, Israel, and the Soviet Union for the interviews and his accounts of these are almost as compelling as the main story, as men and women who had tried to put Sobibor out of the minds for years now broke down as they attempted to speak of it again. Not surprisingly, almost nobody had anything complimentary to say about Germans, Poles, or Ukrainians (one couple who was helped by a Polish farm family was still sending them gift packages in 1982 when Rashke interviewed them, but they were an exception). The book was made into a TV movie in 1987 (scripted by Rashke); a still used as the book cover shows Alan Arkin (playing Feldhendler), Rutger Hauer (playing Pechersky) and Joanna Pacuła (playing Pechersky’s love interest) looking remarkably healthy as they triumphantly wave weapons over their heads while running from the camp; nothing like this is described in the book so I expect Rashke added it for cinematic value. A sequel (Escape from Sobibor: The Aftermath) was proposed but sponsors dropped out when American-Ukrainians protested.


Well written, if gut-wrenching. The book is now 30 years old; I expect most of the people Rashke interviewed are no longer with us. There are extensive endnotes, which explain some of the editorial decisions Rashke had to make; these are all immaterial to the history (examples: the exact spelling of the names of some of the guards and prisoners; whether the gas chamber was powered by a tank or truck engine). The bibliography (as mentioned) is sparse, considering the historical importance of the event.


One thing Rashke doesn’t do is explain why Sobibor was the most successful escape at any of the death camps (there was an escape attempt Treblinka which involved more inmates but fewer actually made it out of the camp and survived to the end of the war). Reading the interviews provides some explanation. The Sobibor camp was surrounded by forest; until the Russian POWs arrived all the inmates were urban Jews who had no outdoors experience. One of the survivors recounted wandering in circles in the forest for four days only to arrive outside the camp gates again; another was more terrified of imaginary hazards in the forest (wild animals) than staying in the camp and had to be more or less dragged out by her boyfriend. More inexplicably, a number of the escapees headed toward their former homes, where they were quickly spotted and turned in by local Poles. It’s ironic that people who had survived successfully in the camp couldn’t make it outside.


Another factor Rashke doesn’t mention is survivor guilt; the same thing occurs in memoirs of former GULAG prisoners. In order to live for any time in either the death camps or the GULAG, you had to cooperate with the authorities. In the GULAG, for example, you could get extra rations or an easy job by turning informant – Solzhenitsyn, for example, was nominally an informant although he claimed he never revealed any information that harmed another prisoner. In Sobibor, in order to live you had to make jackboots for the SS, or repair uniforms, or sort through the belongings of the dead, or cut their hair just before they died. One of Rashke’s informants had the barber’s job for a while; he was only 16 and had never seen a naked woman before but now had to shave them at the last stop before they went to the gas chamber. He didn’t look in their eyes. I expect forty-year delay between the escape and Rashke’s interviews allowed some of the escapees to come to terms with this but it’s probably the reason why others wouldn’t talk to him at all. I’m not judging; you do what’s necessary to survive but that doesn’t mean you want to talk about it.… (lisätietoja)