“ESCAPE FROM SOBIBOR,” 8-11 p.m. Sunday (2)(8)...

“ESCAPE FROM SOBIBOR,” 8-11 p.m. Sunday (2)(8) (Illustrated on cover)--The irony of Nazism is that it’s not only heinous and repugnant to intelligent society, but also very commercial.

Perhaps we’re slaves to our own fascination with evil and the macabre. Or maybe time is such a buffer that we can now look back on this darkest of chapters with as much awe as revulsion.

Whatever the reason, attach a swastika to a book, and sales increase. Ditto theatrical and TV movies. So count on TV for a minimum of one World War II Holocaust story a year.

At least “Escape From Sobibor” is a success story, a rare pinprick of victory for designated victims of Hitler’s “final solution.” It’s a three-hour account of an actual escape from an extermination camp in eastern Poland whose Jewish prisoners rebelled against their Nazi and Ukrainian guards on Oct. 14, 1943.

Several hundred escaped.

Reginald Rose’s script is based on a book by Richard Rashke in this Rule/Martin Starger production, directed by Jack Gold and starring Alan Arkin, Joanna Pacula, Rutger Hauer, Hartmut Becker and Jack Shepherd.

The film was shot in Yugoslavia on a set constructed from a scale model of the camp that was built by a survivor of the Sobibor revolt. Some of the prisoners, particularly Arkin, are too fat and well-fed looking. Otherwise, though, the look is convincing.

New prisoners arrive by train like cattle and hear the romantic sounds of a Viennese Waltz on a phonograph record that the S.S. play to calm their victims. Then the Jews are marched off to “shower” sheds to be gassed.

There is one especially horrible sequence here in which prisoners, stripped of their clothes, and some of them carrying their children, stand in line awaiting their fate while hearing the screams of those who have gone before them.

Across the camp, a newly arrived Jewish youth, who has been spared from immediate extinction because of his value to the S.S. as a craftsman, is puzzled by rising columns of dark smoke in the distance. “Looks like a fire,” he observes, innocently. “What could be burning?”

Also featured on the cover: Jack Lemmon re-creates his stage role as James Tyrone in Showtime cable’s presentation of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher play his sons, and Bethel Leslie is seen as Mary Tyrone. The Eugene O’Neill play premieres Monday at 8 p.m. on Showtime, with other airings scheduled throughout April.