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Escape from Sobibor

1987 television film directed by Jack Gold From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Escape from Sobibor
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Escape from Sobibor is a 1987 British television film which aired on ITV and CBS.[1] It is the story of the mass escape from the Nazi extermination camp at Sobibor, the most successful uprising by Jewish prisoners of German extermination camps (uprisings also took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka). The film was directed by Jack Gold and shot in Avala, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). The full 176-minute version shown in the UK[note 1] on 10 May 1987 followed a 143-minute version shown in the United States on 12 April 1987.

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The script, by Reginald Rose, was based on Richard Rashke's 1983 book of the same name, along with a manuscript by Thomas Blatt, "From the Ashes of Sobibor", and a book by Stanisław Szmajzner, Inferno in Sobibor.[2][3] Alan Arkin, Joanna Pacuła, and Rutger Hauer starred in the film. The film received a Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries or Television Film and Hauer received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role—Television Film or Miniseries. (The film tied with Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story.)[4][5] Esther Raab was a camp survivor who had assisted Rashke with his book and served as a technical consultant.[6][7][8]

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Background

On 14 October 1943, members of the Sobibor camp's underground resistance killed 11 German SS-Totenkopfverbände officers and a number of Sonderdienst Ukrainian and Volksdeutsche guards. Of the 600 inmates in the camp, roughly 300 escaped, although all but 50–70 were later re-captured and killed.[9] After the escape, the SS Chief, Heinrich Himmler, ordered the death camp closed. It was dismantled, bulldozed under the earth and planted over with trees to cover it up.[10]

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Plot

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When a new trainload of Polish Jews arrives for processing at Sobibor, the German Commandant assures them the place is a work camp. SS officers select a small number of prisoners with trade skills (such as goldsmiths, seamstresses, shoemakers, and tailors) and the remainder are sent to a different part of the camp from which a pillar of smoke rises day and night. The prisoners come to realise Sobibor is a death camp where Jews are exterminated in gas chambers, and cremated in large ovens. The skilled prisoners who are spared must sort the belongings of the murder victims and then repair the shoes, recycle the clothing, and melt down any precious metals to make jewellery for the SS. The existence of the surviving prisoners is precarious and they are subject to random beatings and murders. When two prisoners escape from a work detail, the most sadistic of the SS officers, Gustav Wagner, gives the remaining thirteen prisoners the choice of either selecting another prisoner to die with them, or refusing in which case he will kill fifty prisoners. The prisoners comply and he executes all twenty six.

The leader of the prisoners, Leon Feldhendler, realises that when the trains eventually stop coming, the camp will have outlived its usefulness, and all the remaining Jews will be murdered. He devises a plan for every prisoner to escape, by luring the SS officers and NCOs into the prisoners' barracks and work huts one by one and killing them as quietly as possible. Once all the Germans are dead, the prisoners will assemble into columns and simply march out of the camp as if they have been ordered to, hoping the Ukrainian guards will remain oblivious with no Germans to give orders or raise the alarm. A new group of Red Army prisoners who are Russian Jews arrives, and their leader, Sasha Pechersky and his men willingly join the revolt, their military skills proving invaluable.

The camp commandant departs for several days with Wagner, ensuring the most sadistic SS officers will be absent. On 14 October 1943 SS officers and NCOs are lured one by one into traps and killed with knives and clubs. Eleven Germans are killed, but one officer, Karl Frenzel discovers the corpse of one of his colleagues and raises the alarm. The prisoners have already assembled on the parade ground and, realising the plan has been discovered, Pechersky and Feldhendler urge the prisoners to revolt and flee the camp. Most of the 600 prisoners run for the perimeter fences, some of the Jews using captured rifles to shoot their way through the Ukrainian guards. Machine gun fire from the observation towers kill many of the fleeing prisoners, and other escapees are killed in the minefield surrounding the camp. Over 300 Jews reach the forest and escape into the forest.

Newscaster Howard K. Smith narrates the fates that befell some of the survivors on whose accounts the film was based. Of the 300 prisoners who escaped, only approximately 50 survived to see the end of the war in 1945. Pechersky made it back to Soviet lines and rejoined the Red Army and survived the war while Feldhendler was killed shortly after the war by anti-semitic Poles. Sergeant Wagner escaped to Brazil, where he was stabbed to death in 1980. After the uprising, the largest escape from a prison camp of any kind in Europe during World War II, Sobibor was bulldozed to the ground, and trees were planted on the site to remove any sign of its existence.

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Cast

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In credits order:

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Footnotes

  1. [1]
    Running to 169 minutes with PAL speed-up.

References

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