"Sobibor" ("Собибор") Russian film about an escape from an extermination camp in Poland during WWII

[thorbiorn]

In Spanish section of there is a mention of Escape de Sobidor/Escape from Sobidor based on a book, Escape from Sobibor, by Richard Rashke available on Amazon with good reviews https://www.amazon.com/Escape-Sobib...511320273?tag=duckduckgo-d-20#customerReviews

Recently, a new film about the escape came out in Russian and it has been shown in various cities outside of Russia as a part of the celebration of remembering the victory over Nazi Germany in May 9, 1945. The version I watched was in Russian mainly with a bit of German and with English subtitles for everything. The film can be found on various Russian pages, but not on Amazon yet. There is also a book in Russian: https://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/145060001/

Sobibor was a Nazi-German exetermination camp in Eastern Poland, where the most successful escape of Jews from a prison camp took place in October of 1943. It was led by Alexander Pechersky _Alexander Pechersky - Wikipedia a Sovjet officer and POW who was Jewish. He is the main character of the new film. In the film he is on friendly terms with a woman called Luka, supposedly Dutch, but in fact a German according to other sources. As is depicted in the film and written about in the Wiki, although they only knew each other for two weeks and only met for short periods of time, they formed a strong friendship.

The film has many scenes of cruelty or scenes where cruelty is allued to, (it is rated 12+,) but based on the descriptions about the camp from former prisoners, or from staff serving the German government at the time, it is not far from the truth and could have been depicted much worse. Even if the film shows dark sides of life, it also gives examples of human resillience, resourcefulness, trust, faith, patience, courage and love.

It is strange to think that all these events happened while our not so remote ancestors were alive, when the war was being engaged in actively by participants or passively by the observers. Now these people are mostly gone, still we can learn from their lessons.

Below are some links to Russian sites where the film is mentioned. With a translation function in the browser, these pages become accessible. After that there are maps, quotes and a few references.

"Sobibor" Konstantin Khabensky as a belated but important historical truth
"Собибор" Константина Хабенского как запоздалая, но важная историческая правда
"With him one wants to live life": the Minister of culture about the main character of the film "Sobibor"
"С него хочется делать жизнь": министр культуры — о главном герое фильма "Собибор"

And on Wikipedia the story is Sobibór extermination camp - Wikipedia which has a map of various camps:

Sobibor is in the center right position of picture.
View attachment 26691
From a video "Sobibor Death Camp Poland,the real mcoy" As the timestamps reveal just 3 days after 9/11. The map shows that Sobibor is located in the very East of Poland close where the borders of Belarus, Ukraine and Poland meet.

The English Wiki writes about Sobibor

[...] Up to 200,000 people were murdered at Sobibór[10] and possibly more. At the postwar trial against the former SS personnel of Sobibór, held in Hagen two decades into the Cold War, Professor Wolfgang Scheffler estimated the number of murdered Jews totalled a minimum of 250,000.[11][12] This would make it the fourth worst extermination camp, after Bełżec, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

During the revolt of 14 October 1943, about 600 prisoners tried to escape; about half succeeded in crossing the fence, of whom around 50 evaded capture. Shortly after the revolt, the Germans closed the camp, bulldozed the earth, and planted it over with pine trees to conceal its location. Today, the site is occupied by the Sobibór Museum, which displays a pyramid of ashes and crushed bones of the victims, collected from the cremation pits.

In September 2014, a team of archaeologists unearthed remains of the gas chambers under the asphalt road.[...]

And what happened to the camp after the escape:

Within days of the uprising, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp closed, dismantled, and planted with trees.[2] The gas chambers were demolished. Remnants of their foundations were covered with asphalt and made to look like a road.[42] The last prisoners still in the camp, who had been used to dismantle the buildings, were killed in late November, and the last guards left the site in December.[1] Four of the chambers were uncovered by archaeologists in 2014, using modern technology.[43]

Some Sobibór survivors were spared the gas chambers because they were transferred to slave-labour camps in the Lublin reservation, upon arriving at Sobibór. These people spent several hours at Sobibór and were transferred almost immediately to slave-labour projects including Majdanek and the Alter Flugplatz airfield in the city of Lublin, where materials looted from the gassed victims were prepared for shipment to Germany. Other forced labour camps included Krychów, Dorohucza, and Trawniki before the killing spree of Aktion Erntefest. Estimates for the number of people sent away from Sobibór range up to several thousand, of whom most perished before the end of the Nazi regime. The total number of people in this group include 16 known survivors (13 women and 3 men) from among the 34,313 Jews deported to Sobibór from the Netherlands.[41] [...]

And from one of the commanders of the camp there was:

[...]
In a 1983 interview, Frenzel — who was at the camp from its inception to its closure — admitted the following about Sobibór:

Poles were not killed there. Gypsies were not killed there. Russians were not killed there ... only Jews, Russian Jews, Polish Jews, Dutch Jews, French Jews.[2]​

When my children and friends ask me whether it is true, I tell them yes, it is true. And when they say, but this is impossible, then I tell them again, it is really true. It is wrong to say that it never happened.[5]​

​

​

There is a very long and detailed Polish Wiki about the camp: Obóz zagłady w Sobiborze – Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia​

​

​

 

[thorbiorn]

It would have been good if I could have corrected the thread heading to correct English [to "extermination"]. Perhaps a moderator to will be kind to help?

 

[munaychasumaq]

Thank you for the information thorbion. I wonder why this event of Sobidor is little known when it comes to the topic of the Holocaust.Myself came into this information when i was reading a Spanih webb about cancer.It was doing an analogy with the disease.There is human beings than they will fight whatever it costs against adversity as the prisoners in Sobidor.Then i researched a little bit and i decided to put it in Spanish section.

 

[Cosmos]

Here is the trailer of the new movie about the Sobibor escape: