Camp history

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

From April 1942, the camp commandant was SS-Obersturmführer Franz Stangl (Ger. 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 around the perimeter of the camp were recruited from collaborators - former prisoners of war from the Red Army, for the most part (90-120 people) Ukrainians - the so-called. "herbalists", due to the fact that most of them were trained in the camp " Herbalists" and civilian volunteers.

The camp was located in the forest next to the substation Sobibor. The railway came to a standstill, this was supposed to help keep the secret. The camp was surrounded by four rows of barbed wire three meters high. Between the third and fourth rows, the space was mined. There were patrols between the second and third. Day and night, on the towers, from where the entire system of barriers was visible, sentries were on duty.

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

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

During the year and a half of the camp, about 250,000 Jews were killed in it.

Destruction of prisoners

In the essay “The Uprising in Sobibur” (Znamya magazine, N 4, 1945) by Veniamin Kaverin and Pavel Antokolsky, testimonies of the former prisoner Dov Fainberg dated August 10, 1944 are given. According to Feinberg, the prisoners were exterminated in a brick building called a "bathhouse" that housed about 800 people:

When a party of eight hundred people entered the "bathhouse", the door was tightly closed. In the annex there was a machine that produced asphyxiating gas. The produced gas entered the cylinders, of which through hoses - into the room. Usually, after 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 “bath attendant” in the camp, watched through it whether the process of killing was completed. At his signal, the gas supply was cut off, the floor was 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 dumped. People involved in the folding and transportation of corpses were periodically shot.

Insurrection

An underground operated 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, led by 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 in the camp from Minsk. Among the newcomers was lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, who joined the underground group and led it, and Leon Feldhendler became his deputy.

The uprising in Sobibór was the only successful camp uprising in all the years of World War II. Immediately after the prisoners escaped, the camp was closed and razed to the ground. In its place, the Germans plowed the land, planted it with cabbage and potatoes.

Memory

At the site of the camp, the Polish government opened a memorial. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, Polish President Lech Walesa sent the following message to the participants of the ceremony:

There are places in the Polish land that are symbols of suffering and meanness, heroism and cruelty. These are death camps. Built by Nazi engineers and run 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 almost no chance of success, but they did not lose hope.
Saving life was not the goal of a heroic uprising, the struggle was for a dignified death. By defending the dignity of the 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 seized with fanaticism, racism, intolerance, when genocide is being carried out 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 tribute to the memory of Jews from Poland and other European countries, tortured and killed here on this earth.

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, translated from Yiddish)
• M. A. Lev "Sobibor" (novel). In the book "Sobibor. Van Nit Dee Friant Mine" ( Sobibor. If not for my friends, in Yiddish). Israel-bukh Publishing: 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 a participant in the uprising Alexei Vaizen. - "New Times" No. 35(81), 1.09.2008 (Russian) German version of the article in the newspaper. Tageszeitung (German)
• Uprising participant Yehuda Lerner and doc. film "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 16 hours" (German)
• Yitzhak Arad: Uprising in Sobibor. - j-l "Menorah" No. 26, 1985
• Stanislaw Smajzner: Extracts from the Tragedy of a Jewish Teenager

Articles and research

• Article " Sobibur» in the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia
• P. Antokolsky, V. Kaverin: Uprising in Sobibor. - "Black book"
• "KZ Sobibor" on Shoa.de (German) (+ Literature list in English and German)
• (English)

https://www.site/2018-05-03/originalnaya_istoriya_vosstaniya_v_sobibore_glazami_ego_organizatora

“These are the corpses of your comrades on the echelon burning”

The uprising in the Sobibor camp: memories of the organizer Alexander Pechersky

Website "Sobibor" (http://sobibor.histrf.ru/)

On May 3, Russian cinemas began showing Konstantin Khabensky's film Sobibor, which tells about the uprising that took place in October 1943 in the German concentration camp of the same name in Poland. As Khabensky himself noted, the authors of the film took the “mass escape, rebellion” as a historical fact as the basis of the film, “further it is more and more our fiction, our thoughts – I hope they are honest.” Before the Russians go to the cinemas, the site decided to introduce them to the original story of the uprising in Sobibor. Fortunately, it was published in a small print run (5,000 copies) back in 1945 in Rostov-on-Don, as presented by the organizer of this riot, quartermaster 2nd rank Alexander Pechersky.

Pechersky's memoirs are a pocket book, only 64 pages of text on rough paper. It is not available in all libraries. It is called "The Uprising in the Sobiburov Camp".

The memoirs of the Soviet quartermaster begin from the moment 2,000 Soviet women, children and men were sent from the SS Arbeitcamp (labor camp), located in Minsk on Shirokaya Street, to Germany for work. At least, this is how they explained what was happening, having built in September 1943 in the courtyard of this very SS Arbeitcamp. “In an hour you will be taken to the station. The great favor of the Fuhrer awaits you: you are going to work in Germany, ”Pechersky quotes in his memoirs the speech of the camp commandant Wax, which he uttered“ in a voice hoarse from drinking. How Pechersky himself ended up among the prisoners of the Minsk camp, he does not explain.

To "Sobibor"

It is now known that the future officer of the Red Army was born on February 22, 1909 in Kremenchug in the family of a lawyer, a Jew by nationality - Aron Pechersky. In 1915 the family moved to Rostov-on-Don. There, Pechersky Jr. graduated from the university and led a musical circle. The man had nothing to do with the military. He was drafted into the army on the first day of the Great Patriotic War - June 22, 1941. In September of the same year, Pechersky was awarded the rank of quartermaster technician of the 2nd rank (corresponding to a lieutenant). He served as the clerk of the 596th Corps Artillery Regiment of the 19th Army. At the very beginning of the battle for Moscow, he was wounded and taken prisoner in the Vyazma region.

In captivity, he was ill with typhus for about nine months, but he carefully concealed this from the guards and was not shot for the only reason. In May 1942, as soon as he recovered, he tried to escape with four other prisoners. The attempt ended in failure. Through a penal camp in Borisov, Pechersky was sent to a labor camp in Minsk. It finally turned out that he was a Jew by nationality. After spending five days in the "Jewish basement" - an underground punishment cell, Pechersky in October 1942 ended up in the SS Arbeitcamp, located on Shiroka Street in Minsk.

In February 1943, 50 prisoners of this camp made another attempt to escape. “All of them were not just killed, but tortured for a long time. At first, they beat them mercilessly with whips and set dogs on them. Then they mockingly led them through the whole city with their hands up, then drove them into the bathhouse and, stripping to the naked, doused them alternately with hot and cold water. Only after that, the Nazis threw them into the yard on the snow and opened fire on them from machine guns, ”Pechersky describes the result of this escape in his memoirs.

Pechersky's first day at Sobibor

From Minsk to Sobibor, the echelon with prisoners walked for four days. The first thing the prisoners saw was a white shield with the Gothic inscription "Sobibur" (that's what Pechersky calls this place) and rows of a three-meter-high wire fence. Pechersky, among 80 “solitary joiners and carpenters,” was separated from the rest of the mass of arrivals and taken to another courtyard. There, he almost immediately got into a conversation with the “old camper” (the Sobibor concentration camp began working on May 15, 1942, Jews from all over Europe were driven here to exterminate them - approx..

Here is how Pechersky describes in his memoirs his next vivid impression of the Sobibor camp: “What is it that is burning there? I pointed to a crimson flame that could be seen on the side of the camp at a distance of no more than half a kilometer. Boris looked around, looked inquisitively at me, then answered quietly: “Don’t look there, it’s forbidden. It is the corpses of your comrades on the echelon that are burning.”

A little lower, Pechersky describes the procedure for the extermination of people in more detail: “[People] walked in a column, surrounded by reinforced guards, along a wire fence. Ahead are women in only shirts and children, behind - at a distance of a hundred meters - naked men. Here, finally, are the gates, above them is the inscription: Camp No. 3. In the courtyard there are large stone buildings of two baths with small windows protected by a thick iron grating. The women and children went into one bathhouse, the men into another. The guards remained outside and immediately locked the heavy, iron-studded doors behind the intruders. Some in the bath, taking basins, went to the taps for water. But a wild, inhuman scream made them look around and numb. From the ceiling, through wide metal pipes, dark, thick clouds of gas crawled, pumped with the help of electric machines ... Not even fifteen minutes had passed before it was all over. In two bathhouses, heaps of blackened corpses remained on the floor.

The idea of ​​organizing an escape, according to Pechersky, came to him on the very first night after arriving at the Sobibor camp. The core of the conspirators were the surviving prisoners from the Minsk echelon, Pechersky had already spent eight months with them and trusted most of them. They staged their first act of civil disobedience the very next day after their arrival, playing the song "If there is war tomorrow" on the way to work.

“Everyone picked up the chorus and the song “Like one man, the entire Soviet people stands up for a free homeland” burst out. The song infused vivacity, called for a fight, recalls Pechersky. — That day we worked at the Nord-Camp. Everything turned out relatively well, except for the fact that fifteen people received twenty-five lashes each “for negligence.” Once again, they tried to show their position a few days later, tightening the Soviet "March of the Aviators" in front of the head of the German guard, who was injured during the bombing. The consequences were much worse, the prisoners were severely beaten.

How the plan of rebellion was born

The Sobibor prisoners began to discuss the escape plan directly on September 27, when a new echelon with prisoners arrived at the camp. “It was as if my heart broke - at that very moment I heard the cries of children and women, full of tormenting anguish and horror, which were immediately drowned out by the frantic cackle of geese.” To drown out the screams of the dying, 300 geese were kept in a German concentration camp, which were forced to cackle when people were gassed.

The organizers of the uprising used the women's hut as headquarters. Pechersky came here under the pretext of a meeting with a Jewish woman of German origin named Luka (real name Gertrude Popert, her fate after the uprising is unknown - approx. site). As it turned out later, the girl's father was a communist from Hamburg. After the Nazis came to power, the family fled to Holland. There, Luka's mother, herself and her brothers were arrested by the Gestapo. The brothers were later killed. The father managed to escape again. Luca herself was tortured many times, trying to find out where her runaway father was. Apparently, the closest relations were established very quickly between the captured Soviet officer Pechersky and Luka. The Pechersky family still keeps the "happy shirt" of Luka's father, which the girl gave to her partner before the uprising.

Despite all the conspiracy, the conspirators had to be constantly on the alert, even when talking to each other. They were afraid of "kapos" - overseers from among the activists, cooperating with the camp administration and able to report on the impending uprising.

“Escape from here is very difficult, almost impossible. Each camp is fenced with barbed wire three meters high (in fact, Sobibor consisted of four sections - approx. Site), then there is a mined field fifteen meters wide, followed by another row of barbed wire. Don't forget about the deep ditch. The guards are approximately 120-130 people, including 14 officers, ”Pechersky described the situation, referring to his friend Boris.

Pechersky outlined the first escape plan to his comrades on October 7th. It consisted in digging an underground hole under wire barriers and minefields about 35 meters long and getting out through it. It seems that even the author himself doubted the success of this variant. “The bad thing is that it will take a very long time for 600 people to crawl one after another through a 35-meter-long tunnel. Yes, and not only crawled, but to make their way further unnoticed, ”recalls Pechersky in his memoirs. On the same day, October 7, he asked to make 70 knives in the camp forge: “I will distribute them to the guys. In the event that our plot is discovered, we will not surrender to the enemy alive.

On October 11, one of the main "kapos" - Brzetsky, went over to the side of the conspirators, who won over to his side another "kapo", who is mentioned in Pechersky's memoirs as Genik. These people had the right that the conspirators needed - they could move almost freely around the camp, respectively, maintain contact between different groups of prisoners who were preparing an uprising.

The idea of ​​undermining was rejected at the general meeting. We decided to prepare for a general uprising in the camp. This plan, as Pechersky writes, was developed by him together with his “friend Shleyma Laitman”, with whom they were still in the Minsk camp.

“Everyone needs to run. Having previously destroyed all the German officers one by one and quickly, within one hour, so that they would not have time to detect the disappearance of their own and raise the alarm. It is necessary to destroy them in the workshops, where they will be called under various pretexts, - Pechersky writes the essence of the new plan voiced by him. “At four o'clock we must cut off the connection passing through the second camp to the premises of the reserve guard. Also, at four o'clock, begin the destruction of officers in camp No. 1. At four and a half hours, Brzetsky puts all the campers in a column, supposedly for work, and they head to the main gate. In the first rows of the column are people from the USSR. On the way, they must take possession of the armory, then quietly attach themselves to the column, and when they reach the gate, remove the sentry and attack the guardhouse.

This plan had a backup option. In case the rebels fail to capture enough weapons and the central gate. According to the idea of ​​Pechersky-Leitman, with such a development of events, the prisoners should have broken the barrier at the officer's house. “The house is close to the wire fence. I think that the Germans either did not mine the passages to the house at all, or used only signal mines that did not pose a danger. Thus, it is easy to break through in this place. Those running ahead must throw stones at the road to blow up mines, ”Pechersky recalls in his memoirs, as he explained the essence of this part of the plan to his comrades.

14 October uprising

The uprising began on October 14 at around 2:40 pm local time. First of all, SS Untersturmführer Ernst Berg, who had come to try on his new suit, was hacked to death with an ax in the camp tailoring workshop. “Ernst Berg all the time stood facing Shubaev (a camp inmate who was instructed to liquidate Berg - approx. site). Then [the tailor] Józef turned the German to face the door on the pretext that it was better to do the fitting this way. Shubaev instantly grabbed the ax and, with all his might, hit Berg with a butt on the head. Blood spattered from her. The fascist screamed and staggered. The horse (on which Berg arrived - note .. If she ran around the camp, it could frustrate all our plans. Fortunately, one of the campers managed to grab the horse by the bridle. Shubaev Berg was finished off with a second blow. His corpse was thrown under a bed in workshop and threw things. The blood-stained floor in the workshop was quickly covered with sand prepared in advance. Shubaev grabbed Berg's pistol and brought it to me. I hugged him, ”Pechersky describes the beginning of the uprising.

At 16:00 in the shoe shop, his assistants hacked to death the head of camp No. 3 (where, in fact, the prisoners were destroyed) Gedtinger. By 16:20, four officers were liquidated in the camp and communications were broken. By 16:35, the number of German officers killed was already ten people. About 11 pistols and a machine gun fell into the hands of the rebels. They managed to prepare six more rifles in advance with the help of metalworkers who repaired German weapons. The rifles were hidden in advance in the drainpipes.

At 16:45 "kapo" Brzhetsky whistled a prearranged signal to the general construction. “The head of the guard, a German from the Volga region, entered the courtyard and began to swear. He put his hand on the holster, but before he could draw his pistol, several axes landed on his head. The women became agitated (not all of the 550 prisoners were initiated into the conspiracy - approx. site). At that moment, a column from the second camp was approaching us. There was not a second to lose. I shouted: “Comrades! To the gates!” Everyone rushed forward. First we ran to the armory. The surviving German officers tried to block the crowd by opening fire from machine guns, but they did not have time to raise a general alarm, Pechersky describes what happened next. - Some began to cut the wire near the officer's house. The rest rushed to the central gate. Having removed the sentry, they ran into the forest, shooting back on the move from pistols and rifles captured from the dead Germans. Those who did not have weapons covered the Nazis' eyes with sand and threw stones at them. The group that fled from the second camp, led by Boris, rushed to the left of the central gate. They had to overcome a mined field, and here many died. I was one of the last to leave the camp, only when I was convinced that everyone was leaving it.”

Pechersky himself, at the head of a group of eight fugitive prisoners, which included "Shubaev, Tsybulsky, Arkady Vayspapir, Mikhail Itskovich, Semyon Mazurkevich and three others" went east and on the fourth day they managed to cross the old Soviet border, fording the Bug River. “On the night of October 20, we entered the land of Belarus. On October 22, we met partisans from the Voroshilov detachment not far from Brest. And on October 23, we already received the first combat mission, ”this is how the memories of the uprising in the Sobiburovsky camp of Alexander Pechersky end.

Of the 550 Sobibor prisoners, 130 did not take part in the uprising. All of them were soon shot. Another 80 died during the riot. In hot pursuit, the Nazis managed to find and shoot about 180 more participants in the uprising. By the end of the war, only 53 people survived. The camp itself was closed on October 15, 1943. His site was razed to the ground and planted with cabbage and potatoes. Later, fragments of human bones, shoes of various sizes, baby milk horns and dentures, Jewish prayer books and Polish novels, postcards with views of European cities, documents and photographs of the victims and their families were found under this field.

Pechersky after the German "Sobibor"

In this small book by Pechersky about a great feat (the uprising in Sobibor turned out to be the only successful one in the practice of German concentration camps), there is not a word about how his own fate developed further. Until April 1944, Pechersky fought as a demolition officer in a partisan detachment, derailing at least two echelons. When Belarus was liberated by units of the Red Army, he, as a former Soviet soldier who had been captured by the enemy, ended up in a special department of the NKVD. From there he was sent as a machine gunner to an assault battalion (a softer version of a penal battalion).

The battalion commander Major Andreev helped. Having learned the history of the uprising in Sobibor, he allowed Pechersky to go to Moscow to the Commission for the Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders.

Frame from the Hollywood movie "Escape from Sobibor", 1987

Journalists learned about the history of the Polish concentration camp there. On August 6, 1944, an essay by Vasily Grossman about the uprising in Sobibor was published in the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper. A little later, another essay about these events was published in the Znamya newspaper by writers Pavel Antokolsky and Veniamin Kaverin. Later, he entered the Black Book collection about torture in German concentration camps. Soviet censorship banned this collection from publication in 1947. The official USSR tried not to pedal the issue of Jewish persecution. In the 1980s, the collection was published in Israel. In Russia, they were published only in 2015.

Pechersky himself, however, continued to fight as part of the assault battalion of the 1st Baltic Front. During the attack on the city of Bausk (Latvia) on August 20, 1944, he was seriously wounded in the thigh by a mine fragment. After four months of treatment in hospitals, Pechersky became disabled and was discharged.

He returned to Rostov-on-Don, worked as an administrator at the Musical Comedy Theater. For the courage shown in battles on May 19, 1949, Alexander Pechersky was presented to the Order of the Patriotic War II degree. But in June of the same year, the Rostov regional military commissar, Major General Safonov, changed the award to the medal "For Military Merit".

Moreover, in 1948, during a political campaign against the "cosmopolitans" (actually against the Jews), Pechersky lost his job. For five years he could not get a new job and lived dependent on his wife. After Stalin's death in 1953, Pechersky was able to get a job as a laborer at the Rostselmash machine-building plant. Because of this, in old age he was forced to live on a meager pension.

In 1987, Hollywood director Jack Gold made the blockbuster Escape from Sobibor based on the book by Richard Raschke. Alexander Pechersky was played by Rutger Hauer. Pechersky himself was not at the premiere of the film - he was simply refused to be released from the USSR to the USA.

Alexander Aronovich Pechersky died on January 19, 1990, his body was buried at the Northern Cemetery of Rostov-on-Don.

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 250,000 Jews were killed here
The Sobibor camp was located in the southeast of Poland near the village of Sobibur (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 from other occupied countries were brought to the camp: Lithuania, the Netherlands, France, Czechoslovakia and the USSR.

The camp commandant 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 participating in the euthanasia program. Ordinary guards to serve around the perimeter of the camp were recruited from collaborators - former prisoners of war from the Red Army, for the most part (90-120 people) Ukrainians - the so-called. herbalists, due to the fact that most of them were trained in the camp of herbalists and civilian volunteers.

The camp was located in the forest next to the substation Sobibor. The railway came to a standstill, this was supposed to help keep the secret. The camp was surrounded by four rows of barbed wire three meters high. Between the third and fourth rows, the space was mined. There were patrols between the second and third. Day and night, on the towers, from where the entire system of barriers was visible, sentries were on duty.

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

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

During the year and a half of the camp, about 250,000 Jews were killed in it.
An underground operated 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, led by 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 in the camp from Minsk. Among the new arrivals was Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, who joined the underground group and headed it, and Leon Feldhendler became his deputy.

On October 14, 1943, the prisoners of the death camp, led by Pechersky and Feldhendler, revolted. According to Pechersky's plan, the prisoners were supposed to secretly, one by one, eliminate the camp's SS personnel, and then, having taken possession of the weapons that were in the camp's 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 they 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 crush the guards and escape into the forest. Of the almost 550 prisoners of the workers' camp, 130 did not take part in the uprising (remained in the camp), about 80 died during the escape. The rest managed to escape. All those remaining in the camp were 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 guards took part. During the search, 170 fugitives were found, all of them were immediately shot. In early 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 extradited to the Germans by the local population, or killed by collaborators. Until the end of the war, only 53 participants in the uprising survived (according to other sources, 47 participants).

The uprising in Sobibor was the only successful camp uprising in all the years of the Second World War. Immediately after the escape of the prisoners, the camp was closed and razed to the ground. In its place, the Germans plowed the land, 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 World War II.
In October 1941, he was surrounded near Vyazma, was wounded and captured by the Germans. In captivity, he contracted 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 penal camp in Borisov, and from there to Minsk.
First, Pechersky ended up in the so-called "Forest Camp" outside the city. Then, during a medical examination, the Jewish origin of Pechersky was revealed. Together with other Jewish prisoners of war, Pechersky was put in the 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 "work camp" of the SS 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 the uprising of prisoners.

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 Theater of Musical Comedy. In 1948, during a political campaign to persecute the so-called rootless cosmopolitans, Pechersky lost his job. After that, he could not get a job for five years and lived at the expense of 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 the director of a cinema, then moved to Rostov-on-Don.

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

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

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

Sobibor as a death conveyor started working on May 3, 1942. Almost simultaneously with Sobibor, other death camps appeared: Belzec (in March) and Treblinka (in July). Together with Chełmno (operated since December 8, 1941), they all became the main death camps in which the Nazis destroyed 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 outcomes 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" of the Jewish question.

It is worth emphasizing the difference between concentration camps (Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Dachau), where prisoners were supposed to work for the Nazis, and death camps, in which people were only exterminated. Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Majdanek functioned both as concentration camps and as death 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 360,000 Jews were killed in Chełmno, and only two survived. In Belzec, 600 thousand were killed, six people survived. As a result, little is known about these camps.

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

THE ECONOMY 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 a labor force.

According to SS calculations, one prisoner, based on an average life expectancy of 9 months, could bring the Third Reich 1630 Reichsmarks. The amount was formed from the costs of food, clothing and cremation (the latter - about 2 marks) and the "income" received from the work of the prisoner, the remaining personal belongings, gold teeth and clothing. These calculations did not take into account the value of the ash used for agricultural purposes.

CONVEYOR OF DEATH

Sobibor was located on the railway line between Chełm and Vlodava, with a separate line leading to the camp. It was divided into four parts, not counting the area for the arrival of new victims:

Camp 1 (about 50 Jews, they served the German guard, from cooking to tailoring).

Camp 2 (Jews destined for extermination were immediately driven here; attendants, 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 also into a concentration camp.

Among other things, there was a Catholic church in Sobibor for the needs of the Nazis. Immediately behind it was a wasteland, on which 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 certain 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 about Most of the people were driven to camp 2, but the elderly, sick, children immediately went to the trench, where the Ukrainian guards, followed by the Germans, machine-gunned them. The fiends ironically called this place "the infirmary." Victims - especially Western Jews - believed that they would simply be allowed to bathe 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 up to the last created the illusion of prosperity for them, then Polish and Russian Jews were transported in boxcars. There were several cases in 1943 when unarmed men attacked SS men upon arrival. Jews “in Russian trains” were transported completely naked to Sobibor in order to make it difficult to escape and not to let them hide something with which to defend themselves under their clothes.

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

PECHERSKY IN SOBIBOR

Alexander Aronovich Pechersky served in the military in 1931-1933. He was called up on June 22, 1941, took part in the hostilities, was certified as a quartermaster technician of the 2nd rank (lieutenant). Wounded, he was taken prisoner near Vyazma in October 1941. He was in Sobibor from September 23, 1943 until the day of the uprising - October 14. In 1943-1944 - in the partisans in Belarus. In 1944, after being checked, he fought in an assault battalion - before being wounded.

Pechersky arrived at the camp just a few days after several dozen Dutch Jews had been executed for plotting to 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 underground saw its main goal in disseminating information about the situation on the fronts, about the defeats of the Germans, however, any attempts to resist or escape were held back 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 Wevryk wrote: “They had military experience. They knew everything about guns, bullets, etc. They do not disdain hand-to-hand combat. Like all prisoners, Vevryk was very impressed by Pechersky: "He literally exuded 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 seize weapons. Then, at 17:00, a general formation, everyone heads for the main gate, as if such was the order of the Germans. The first part of the plan was successful: out of 17 SS men, 10 were killed. Of the 120 guards (mostly Ukrainians), about 10 were killed and more than a dozen were wounded.

Around 17:00, when the second part of the uprising was supposed to begin, one of the Germans noticed the corpse of a killed officer, and shooting began. From that moment on, the uprising took on a chaotic character. Against this background, Pechersky addressed in Russian to his comrades with a call to proceed to open actions. His speech, according to surviving eyewitness Thomas Blatt, ended with the call: “Forward, comrades! Behind ! Death to the fascists! The surviving Kalmen Vevryk also mentions Stalin - "Hurrah, 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: “Hurrah, for Stalin!”

There were about 550 prisoners in the camp, 150 of them did not want or could not escape (the latter 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, 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 on Himmler's orders.

On October 19, Operation Reinhard, a program to exterminate Jews, was officially completed. Its head, General Odilo Globocnik, reported that 12 million Reichsmarks were spent on its implementation, 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 most dangerous areas due to the partisan movement. Many SS officials responsible for the murders in Sobibor perished.

After the war, former leaders and guards tried to escape or hide, eventually they were arrested. So, 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 to various terms (from 3 to 8 years), the rest were acquitted. And only one of 12 pleaded guilty. Commandant Captain Franz Shtangel, who headed Sobibor for the longest time, managed to escape to Brazil together with sergeant major Gustav Wagner (in Sobibor he actually commanded the entire sergeant staff, he was especially cruel). Shtangel was arrested in 1967, he 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 accomplices. In 1962, a closed trial took place in Kyiv over eleven Ukrainians who served as guards. They were all sentenced to death.

FOUR MYTHS ABOUT ALEXANDER PECHERSKY

Myth 1: in the USSR, the feat of the prisoners of Sobibor 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 about the death camp was told by Komsomolskaya Pravda on September 2, 1944 (the article “Death Factory in Sobibur”). Then there were other articles: “The 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 the publication in the central newspaper then had a completely different weight than now.

After the publications of the early 60s, former prisoners of Sobibor who lived in the USSR were found. At the initiative of Pechersky, the seven participants in the uprising who were then alive began to gather 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 the fundamental monographs on the Great Patriotic War, in university history textbooks. At that time, practically nothing was written about Sobibor abroad (with some exceptions of Poland). It so happened that the story of the Sobibor uprising turned out to be inconvenient in different countries for various reasons. Mandatory Palestine, and then the newborn State of Israel, sculpted the image of a “new Jew”, in no way resembling those downtrodden European brethren who meekly and meekly went to the slaughter.

Poland was not ready to answer the question of how dozens of former prisoners of Sobibor 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.

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

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, houses of culture, and actively corresponded with journalists and historians, with prisoners abroad.

While he was in hospitals in 1944-1945, he collaborated with the Extraordinary State Commission for establishing and investigating the atrocities of the Nazi invaders and their accomplices, with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Pechersky was a witness at the trial of the former guards of the Sobibor camp in Kyiv (1962).

Articles about him appeared regularly in the local press. In 1961 he became a member of the Kirov District Council of Rostov. He enjoyed authority in the city, in the regional museum of local lore there were exhibits dedicated to the uprising in Sobibor.

Pechersky and other participants in the uprising in Sobibor really did not enter the main pantheon of heroes of the Great Patriotic War. But this pantheon was not numerous and consisted mainly of those who died in the war. There was no suppression of the feat of the Sobibortsy, a lot was written and talked about it.

Myth 3: Pechersky had a hard time in civilian life, he was in poverty

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 records, he graduated from the 7th grade) he served in the army. In 1933 he married. Since 1936, he served as an inspector of the economic unit at the financial and economic institute (perhaps he was simply listed in the economic unit; He was fond of the theater: since 1931 he played in an amateur drama group, staged small plays, 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 say 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 on the support of 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, was sentenced to one year of hard labor and expelled from the party. At the same time, he did not remain without work, almost immediately moving from the Theater of Musical Comedy to the blacksmith-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 the death of Pechersky 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 are L. Mlechin and S. Pashkov. In Rostov-on-Don in 2014, in honor of Pechersky, a nominal star appeared on the Prospect of Stars, and 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 Sobibór.

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 RVIO to perpetuate the name of Alexander Pechersky: it was assigned to a fast train from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don; exhibitions were held at the Kazansky railway station in Moscow and in Rostov-on-Don; in Rostov-on-Don, a bust of the hero was erected - at the school that bears his name; an exhibition was prepared at the Victory Museum; website SOBIBOR.ISTORIA.RF was created. Finally, a film-monument "Sobibor" by Konstantin Khabensky was released, filmed on the initiative of the Minister of Culture of Russia and Chairman of the Russian National Historical Society Vladimir Medinsky. The most correct review of this picture: "The film is heavy, but it is necessary to watch it."

On this day in 1945, the prisoners of Buchenwald were liberated by American tankmen. And two days before that, the camp guards fled, wherever they look. But there was a day in the history of fascist concentration camps that was much more terrible and heroic.

In the fall of 1943, the prisoners of the Sobibor death camp did the impossible: they raised an uprising, 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 the uprising of the prisoners ended in victory. It is unique in terms of plan, execution and short duration of preparation. In the West, many books have been published about him and several films have been made. 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. Preparing this article, I called many of my acquaintances, but almost none of them, including Jews, could answer my 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: neither a street or a square named after him, nor a monument on his grave. He was also not awarded with any state award ...

In March 1942, by special order of Himmler, 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 destruction 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 very Bug, where at the beginning of the war the border with the USSR passed.

On September 22, 1943, a convoy arrived in Sobibor, bringing two thousand Jews, including women and children, from the Minsk SS labor camp. Most of them were residents of the Minsk ghetto, which the Germans liquidated exactly one 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 - Lieutenant Alexander Aronovich Pechersky.

There was an underground committee in the camp that planned to organize an uprising and escape. The committee was chaired by Leon Feldgendler. But both Leon himself and his associates were deeply civilians and, of course, they could not have carried out an uprising. But then a train arrived from Minsk. Among the prisoners of war, Pechersky stood out for his height, and article, and confidence in his behavior, and the prisoners of war themselves turned to 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 the language barrier was overcome. As for the other old residents of Sobibor, Pechersky's communication with them took place with the help of Shlomo Leitman, who also arrived from Minsk.

Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibor (and later the commandant of Treblinka), during his trial, answered the question of how many people could be killed in one day: “On the question of the number of people passed through the gas chambers in one day, I can tell 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, twelve to fifteen thousand people were killed. There were many days when work went on from early morning until evening.

In total, during the existence of the camp, more than 250 thousand Jews were destroyed in it, of which about forty thousand children. As for the 600 prisoners of war who arrived from Minsk, only 83 of them remained alive by the day of the uprising. on the same day would have been destroyed. But the traitor was not found ...

Insurrection

Pechersky, having become accustomed to the situation, developed a plan for the uprising: to destroy the German officers one by one and quickly, within one hour, so that they would not have time to discover their disappearances 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 14 October. Here is what Semyon Rosenfeld, one of the Soviet prisoners of war, tells about this: “At noon, Pechersky called me and said:“ Frenzel, the commandant of the first camp, should come here after dinner. Pick up a good hatchet, sharpen it. Calculate where Frenzel will stand. You must kill him. “Of course I got ready. I was twenty years old, and I was not such a hero, but I can manage to kill Frenzel ”... Fate would have it so that Semyon Rosenfeld stormed Berlin and left an inscription on the Reichstag: “Minsk - Sobibor - Berlin” ...

death camps

The head of the camp, Hauptsturmführer Johann Neumann, arrived at the tailor shop twenty minutes ahead of schedule. He dismounted, dropped the reins, and entered. There were, besides the artisans, Shubaev and Senya Mazurkevich. At the door lay an ax covered with a tunic. Neumann took off his uniform. The belt, on which hung a holster with a pistol, he laid on the table. The tailor Józef hurried to him and began to try on a suit. Senya moved closer to the table to intercept Neumann if he rushed for a gun. Shubaev, who was as tall as Neumann, was supposed to kill the German with an ax. Neumann stood facing Shubaev all the time. Then Jozef turned the German to face the door under the pretext that it was better to do the fitting. Shubaev grabbed an ax and with all his might hit Neuman with a butt on the head. Blood spattered from her. The fascist screamed and staggered. Neumann was finished off with Shubaev's second blow. His corpse was thrown under a bunk in the workshop and pelted with things. The blood-stained floor was quickly covered with sand prepared in advance, as the second fascist was to arrive in fifteen minutes.

“Immediately Shubaev grabbed Neumann's pistol and brought it to me,” Pechersky recalled. “I hugged him. All morning I was terribly worried, although I tried my best to hide it. But as soon as I learned that the Germans were being destroyed and the plan was being carried out, I immediately calmed down.”

At exactly four o'clock, Sturmführer Göttinger appeared at the shoe shop and asked if his boots were ready. And when he sat down to try on, Arkady Vayspapir hacked him to death with one swing of the axe. At ten minutes past four, Sturmführer Joachim Greishut entered the shoe shop. He was immediately killed by Lerner. Tsibulsky and his group destroyed four fascists in the second sector. After that, he went to Unterscharführer Siegfried Wolf and said that there was a good leather coat. As long as no one has taken it, let him go and take it. Wolf was destroyed and also hidden among the belongings of tortured people. Two more fascists followed the same path. But with the fourth it turned out to be more difficult, he was in the office, where there was a fireproof cabinet with stolen gold. Cybulsky carried the jewels to the office of Sturmführer Klyatt, pretending that he wanted to give him the daily booty found in the pockets of the dead. The fascist was suspiciously alert, but Cybulsky jumped on him and began to choke him, the rest immediately jumped up.

The question may arise how it was possible to liquidate the SS so easily? The answer is simple: it never occurred to them that the Jews were capable of organized resistance, but they did not consider them to be full-fledged people, so they paid the price. But most importantly, the uprising was organized by a regular military man and the military also participated in it at the first, most difficult stage, having time, as they say, to sniff gunpowder.

The historian Thomas Blatt, a participant in the uprising, estimates the number of fled, dead and surviving prisoners of Sobibor as follows: the total number of prisoners who were in the camp on the day of the uprising is 550. Of these:
could not or did not want to flee (and were killed immediately or shortly after the uprising) - 150,
died on mines and from the bullets of the Germans and guards - 80,
escaped from the camp and reached the forest - 320.
Of these 320 prisoners, 170 were caught and executed.
Of the surviving 150 prisoners:
died in the war with the Germans in partisan detachments
and in the army - 5,
died in shelters, hiding places, etc. (mainly at the hands of hostile people from the local population) - 92,
lived to be liberated by the Red Army - 53.

The camp itself, at the direction of Himmler, was demolished to the ground, the place on which it stood was plowed up and sown with perennial grass - as if it were an ordinary field.

The President of Poland Lech Walesa gave the highest appraisal to the uprising of prisoners of Sobibor:
- There are places in the Polish land that are symbols of suffering and meanness, heroism and cruelty. These are death camps. Built by Nazi engineers and run 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 almost no chance of success, but they did not lose hope.

Saving life was not the goal of a heroic uprising, the struggle was for a dignified death. By defending the dignity of the 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 seized with fanaticism, racism, intolerance, when genocide is being carried out 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 tribute to the memory of Jews from Poland and other European countries, tortured and killed here on this earth.

This message, written on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, without changing a single line or a single word in it, could be addressed today to the surviving participants in the uprising - and now they can be counted on the fingers. There are only two in the post-Soviet space: Arkady Vaispapir lives in Kyiv, Alexei Vaizen lives in Ryazan.

The hard fate of Pechersky

Pechersky, who led the uprising, with a group of former prisoners of war who arrived with him in Sobibor, managed to join the partisans, and then the Red Army. All his comrades-in-arms continued the war in its ranks, and only Pechersky, instead of being presented for an award, was sent to one of the assault battalions, which were created specifically for officers who had been captured. Storm battalions differed little from penal battalions: both were intended for suicide bombers. In the storm battalion in 1944, Pechersky was seriously wounded in one of the battles and lay in hospitals for several months, after which he was commissioned. The lieutenant nurse came out, a simple Russian woman Olga Ivanovna Kotova. They fell in love and, having got married, arrived in the 45th in Pechersky's hometown of Rostov-on-Don. There he got a job as an administrator in the operetta theater - after all, he graduated from a music school before the war. But in 1948, when the campaign against the cosmopolitans began, he was fired, and for five years, until Stalin's death, the hero could not get a job anywhere. A former front-line soldier, partisan and penal fighter, who went through captivity and a death camp, he mastered the most peaceful specialty - he learned to embroider. His products sold like hot cakes in the market.
Only in 1953, Alexander Aronovich managed to enter a simple worker at a machine-building plant. Despite what he suffered, he lived a long life and died in 1990 at the age of 81.