Escape from Sobibor

Carl R. Schulkin

Pembroke Hill School

In the "New Afterword" to the 1995 reprint of Escape From Sobibor, Richard Rashke makes explicit what was already implicit in the original 1982 edition. He forthrightly challenges historians of the Holocaust to reexamine a "flawed premise" of much of their writing. Unconsciously accepting the flawed premise that "if the Nazis...did not give it much significance, it wasn't significant," Rashke argues, historians have distorted the nature of the Jewish response to the Final Solution. Most historians have mistakenly portrayed Jews "as a flock of sheep on the road to slaughter," he insists, "causing intense suffering and irreparable damage to the Jewish people." He offers his own book as an antidote. The story of the escape from Sobibor and those who survived it, he argues, "represents the buried stories of hundreds of thousands who fought and died in ghettos no one ever heard of; who tried to escape on the way to camps but never made it; who fought back inside camps but were killed anyway; who managed to escape only to be recaptured and executed; who formed or joined partisan groups from the woods of Vilna to the forest of the owls and who never saw liberation...." I find Rashke's argument very convincing, and I would like to encourage others who teach about the Holocaust to join me in reexamining the way we present the Jewish response to the Final Solution to our students.

Rashke's book provided the basis for a film of the same title which was first televised in 1987 and which is still available on videocassette. The film, which tells the story of the planning and successful execution of a mass escape from one of the three major Operation Reinhard death camps, Sobibor, in eastern Poland, has been widely used by teachers to illustrate Jewish resistance to the Final Solution. Rashke's book, however, goes far beyond what is depicted in the film. In fact, Rashke notes in his "New Afterword", a sequel to the original film, tentatively subtitled "The Aftermath," had already been scripted, when its sponsor, the Chrysler Corporation, decided not to proceed with the project in face of a lawsuit filed by a chapter of the Ukrainian Congress Committee. Without making any judgment about the appropriateness or the merits of the lawsuit, I think it is unfortunate for those of us who teach about the Holocaust that the sequel was never made. I hope that someday the sequel will be filmed, if possible, in a manner acceptable to those who objected to the portrayal of Ukrainians in the original film.

My primary purpose in this review essay is not to summarize the contents of Rashke's book, but rather to make and briefly elaborate upon the argument that every teacher who wishes to do justice to Jewish resistance to the Final Solution should read Escape From Sobibor. The book contains important details about the planning and execution of the escape which are not depicted in the film, and the final third of the book raises important issues concerning the behavior of Poles and Ukrainians (and presents much valuable evidence about the behavior of many different Poles) that every teacher should take into consideration.

The film follows the book faithfully in most respects, but some of the subtleties and complexities of the day-to-day operation of the death camp and the planning of the escape are inevitably lost in the telescoping of events and the creation of a few composite characters in the interest of time. The viewer may also fail to appreciate what the careful reader cannot avoid being impressed by: Rashke's meticulous research and scrupulous honesty in differentiating between fact and opinion. The author succeeds in recreating for the reader the sense of urgency felt by the organizers of the escape plot, especially its principal leader, Leon Feldhendler, in face of their fear that the Nazis might soon liquidate the entire camp. The film omits this important context. The author painstakingly recreates the manner in which longtime prisoner Leon Feldhendler makes contact, feels out and negotiates with a group of Russian Jewish POWs and their leader , Alexander Pechersky, who arrive at Sobibor belatedly in September 1943. Rashke indicates that the Russian POWs were probably sent to Sobibor and received better treatment because the Nazis were planning to collect and rehabilitate captured Russian weapons and ammunition there to aid the German war effort. Again, the film omits this important point. Finally, the film greatly oversimplifies the complexities of communication among the Jewish prisoners in Sobibor and omits the key role of Solomon Leitman, who acted as both interpreter and go-between for Feldhendler and Pechersky, who had no common language to enable them to converse directly.

In the final third of the book, Rashke tells the story of the trials and tribulations of many of the three hundred Jews who joined the mass escape attempt. In addition to thought provoking interviews with a number of survivors, which cast considerable light on the issue of how one explains who survived and who perished, the author explores in great depth the relationship between the Jews who had escaped and the non-Jewish Poles who inhabited the Lublin district of eastern Poland. Rashke very carefully delineates the variety of responses that non-Jewish Poles exhibited toward Jews and presents enough important examples to permit the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. At the beginning of the third section, entitled "The Forest," Rashke recounts how Toivi Blatt, Esther Terner-Raab and Shlomo Szmajzner were alternately assisted by Poles at great risk to themselves, refused assistance, threatened, robbed or betrayed. Toivi was first given food by a poor peasant woman who refused to accept any payment (245), turned away by a former acquaintance in his hometown of Izbica out of fear of the Germans (246), then hidden for several months in exchange for substantial payments by a farmer named Bojarski who had done business with his father (247-252). After months of hiding Toivi and two other young men, Bojarski eventually betrayed the three Jews for reasons which are difficult to determine even today. Esther Terner-Raab headed