Their visit stemmed from the transition occurring in the Hitler regime from mass murder to genocide. In the autumn of 1941 SS officers gathered in Sobibor, a small village a few miles west of the Bug River in the Lublin District of the General-Government (the area of Poland under German occupation), to examine the track and the ramp at the train station. The murder of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, by a white supremacist forces us to realize that the worst of the 20th century is not at all distant. Seventy-five years later, this history presses on us more than ever as Holocaust survivors dwindle and anti-Semites feel emboldened. Serious students of film also may know Claude Lanzmann’s 2001 documentary about the revolt, Sobibór, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 heures ( Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4PM). The 1987 made-for-television movie Escape from Sobibor, based on the book with the same title by Roger Rashke, brought this event to life for many in the English-speaking world. The story, gripping, inspiring, and heartbreaking at the same time, is of the uprising of October 14, 1943. This article is a brief reconsideration of a powerful example of armed resistance from one of the less familiar Nazi death camps, Sobibor. Moreover, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek, the other killing centers constructed by the Nazis in annexed Polish territory or in areas of Poland under direct occupation, deserve their own distinct historical treatments, attentive both to what was similar to Auschwitz-Birkenau and also to what was different. We must not neglect either what happened to those who disappeared in the death marches from the camps in 1945. The experiences of those in the ghettoes of German-occupied Eastern Europe or those who fell before the guns of the Einsatzgruppen (the special, mobile killing squads staffed by the SD, Gestapo, and Order Police) cannot be assimilated to the kind of industrial murder Auschwitz-Birkenau represented. Transforming Auschwitz-Birkenau into such a symbol, however, risks doing injustice to many of the victims of the Third Reich’s monstrous project of killing every single Jewish man, woman, and child on the European continent. In this type of discourse, “Auschwitz” becomes a symbol or central metaphor for the Holocaust as a whole. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex looms so large in discussions of the Nazi genocide that many intellectuals prefer to speak of “after Auschwitz,” of a definitive and catastrophic rupture in world history. Anne Frank, the Holocaust victim most familiar to Americans, spent several weeks there before being removed to Bergen-Belsen, where she perished. An abridged list of them would include Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Olga Lengyel, Aharon Appelfeld, Jean Améry, Filip Müller, Maurice Cling, Charlotte Delbo, Rudolf Vrba, Hermann Langbein, Giuliana Tedeschi, and Otto Dov Kulka. Many of the survivors whose books and speeches profoundly shaped our understanding of the Holocaust passed through and out of its gates. Over 70,000 Poles, 25,000 Roma and Sinti, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war died in Auschwitz-Birkenau as well. That staggering figure does not nearly exhaust the number of its victims. Both a forced-labor camp and a site for mass, mechanized annihilation, more than 1.1 million Jews from across Europe were murdered there before the Red Army arrived on January 27, 1945. For historical reasons, this is quite understandable. Courtesy of the Holocaust Research Project.įrequently, Auschwitz-Birkenau overshadows the other Nazi killing centers in the American popular imagination. Top Image: 1944 Photo of Sobibor Survivors Top Row, First from Right is Leon Feldhendler.
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