Escape under Fire: The Sobibor Uprising

by Richelle Budd Caplan

On Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), Jews around the world traditionally recite the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, expressing the day’s supreme holiness and the Creator’s imminent judgment. According to the emotive liturgy: “On the fast day of atonement it is sealed and determined...who shall live and who shall die...who shall perish by water, who by fire, [and] who by the sword...”

Shortly after Yom Kippur in 1943, a group of Jewish prisoners in the Sobibor extermination camp, determined to live rather than die, began devising a plan for a revolt. A couple of days later, during the afternoon of 14 October 1943, one of the most daring displays of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust began—the escape from Sobibor. 

Sobibor was constructed in March 1942, as one of the three Nazi death camps erected during “Operation Reinhard.” Located in the Lublin district near Wlodawa, Poland, it was comprised of three main areas: administration, reception, and extermination.  According to Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness “From the arrival point at the ramp, all that was visible [of the extermination center] were the fences, camouflaged with evergreen branches, distant trees, and—to the left—the small cluster of barracks (now a bare and open space) known as Camp I...” Jews were deported to Sobibor from early May 1942; most were murdered upon arrival. 

Following a number of prisoner escapes from Sobibor, camp commander, Franz Reichsleitner, laid mines around the camp in the summer of 1943. The addition of the minefields greatly limited the chances for escape, thereby forcing the prisoners to conceive each stage of the uprising all the more carefully. A small group of Jewish prisoners (“the underground committee”) who had been contemplating a smaller-scale revolt and escape for some time, named First Lieutenant Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky as commander of the revolt. A Jewish-Soviet prisoner of war, Pechersky had arrived in Sobibor from Minsk in September 1943.

The revolt began on 14 October, at approximately 16:00 with the gradual and silent liquidation of part of the SS camp staff. One by one, SS men were murdered as they arrived in set intervals for pre-arranged appointments at the Jewish artisan workshops.

In his testimony recorded in March 1964, Yehuda Lerner (a key participant in the revolt), states, “In the workshop our two men waited for [the German officer] with another one of our men. He arrived and came inside for his suit fitting with the tailor. I sat with another young man and together we had six axes between our legs. As soon as the German officer tried the suit on, we came from behind him and hit him hard in the head with an ax. We had done it.”

For an hour and a half the clandestine uprising was executed according to plan. Yet within the ensuing fifteen minutes chaos erupted in the camp. Realizing what was happening, the remaining SS and Ukrainian guards began shooting at prisoners from atop the watchtowers, causing prisoners to flee toward the main gate and barbed wire fences. Although many prisoners made it past the camp boundaries, many more died in minefield explosions or from shots fired by SS and Ukrainian guards.

Another survivor of the revolt, Ada Lichtman recalls, “Suddenly we heard shots… Mines started to explode. Riot and confusion prevailed, everything was thundering around. The doors of the workshop were opened, and everyone rushed through... We ran out of the workshop. All around were the bodies of the desd and wounded.”

According to First Lieutenant Pechersky: “It was difficult to say for certain how many people escaped from the camp. In any case, it is clear that the great majority of the prisoners escaped. Many fell in the open space between the camp and the forest. We agreed that we should not linger in the forest, but divide up into small groups and go in different directions… The shots from machine-guns and rifles that rattled behind us from time to time helped us to decide on the direction that we needed. We knew the shooting came from the camp.”

During the uprising, 11 SS men and a number of Ukrainian guards were killed. Approximately 300 prisoners managed to escape, but most were killed later as they fled. Those remaining at the camp were quickly liquidated by the Germans. All in all, only approximately 50 Jewish prisoners who escaped Sobibor on 14 October 1943, survived the war.

Following the revolt, the Nazis closed the extermination camp. Between spring 1942 and fall 1943, 250,000 Jews were murdered in Sobibor.

Dov Freiberg was one of the few to survive the revolt at Sobibor. To this day, he continues to give testimony to students and teachers from around the world about his experiences as a Jewish teenager in the Sobibor death camp. In his reflections, highlighted in the award-winning CD-ROM Return to Life developed by Yad Vashem, Freiberg notes, “There is no doubt that after the war… while you are laughing and behaving wildly you experience some sort of flash very quickly. You see one picture from Sobibor, and that’s enough...”

The topic of the escape from Sobibor has been further publicized in recent months due to the October 2001 release of filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann’s Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.. Lanzmann—who gained international recognition for his epic, nine-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah in 1985—based his second film upon interview footage from Sobibor survivor, Yehuda Lerner, that was filmed in 1979, but never previously screened. Shots of the former death camp site as it appears today and of various Polish cities and towns accompany Lerner’s testimony.

The author is the Director of Overseas Programming at the International School for Holocaust Studies