Remembrance of Mass Escape Counters Myth

Thomas Blatt, a 15-year-old errand boy at the Sobibor concentration camp, approached a Nazi officer and told him he had found a leather overcoat that would fit him perfectly. The officer, Joseph Wolf, followed Blatt to a warehouse where six prisoners were piling into bins the clothes of Jews who had just been gassed.

Two of the prisoners solicitously offered to help Wolf try on the coat.

As Wolf slipped his arms into the sleeves, they bound the coat like a straitjacket. Another Jew leaped out from a bin where he had been hiding and split Wolf’s head with an ax.

The revolt had begun according to plan.

Jews had attempted several small escapes at Sobibor, but all had failed. Then a rabbi’s son, Leon Feldhendler, formed a cadre of about 20 people to organize a mass revolt. But Feldhendler and the others--shoemakers, tailors and businessmen in civilian life--knew nothing of weapons or military tactics and were unable to develop a workable plan.

70 Captured Soldiers

But in late September, 1943, Feldhendler and his organization got the break they needed. The Nazis transferred to Sobibor about 70 captured Soviet Jewish soldiers. The Nazis wanted barracks built and they needed the soldiers for heavy labor.

Feldhendler immediately noticed one of the leaders of the Soviet POWs, Lt. Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky.

“Sasha was a big, husky man, in almost full uniform, and he carried himself with a real military bearing and presence,” recalled Blatt, who now owns a stereo store in Santa Barbara. “You could tell the other soldiers looked up to him.”

Six days later, Feldhendler visited Pechersky in his barracks and told him he wanted to join forces. Feldhendler and his small organization intimately knew the workings of the camp, the habits of the Nazi officers and Ukrainian guards and the terrain outside the barbed wire. But Pechersky and his men were trained soldiers, and Feldhendler needed them.

The Soviet lieutenant and the rabbi’s son agreed to work together, and a few days later Pechersky had a plan. He decided to coordinate the plan around the Nazis’ greed and obsessive punctuality. They would lure the Nazis to different spots around the camp by offering them clothing or boots. Then they would kill them and take their weapons.

There were 12 Nazi SS officers in the camp and 120 Ukrainian guards. Pechersky’s plan called for killing all the Nazis in one hour, one by one, and returning for roll call to avoid suspicion among the Ukrainians. Then a “kapo”--Jews assigned by the Nazis as overseers--would march the prisoners right out the main gate.

“The idea was that, without Germans around, the guards would think it was a move ordered by the Nazis,” Blatt said.

Officer Killed

The plan was initiated at 4 p.m., Oct. 13, 1943, three weeks after Pechersky arrived at Sobibor. After the German officer Wolf was killed trying on the overcoat, Blatt attempted the same ruse on a Nazi sergeant named Beckmann. But after Beckmann walked to the entrance of the warehouse, he suddenly stopped, as if he sensed something, and then returned to his office.

Feldhendler, who was overseeing the operation, had to quickly alter the plan. He dispatched two Polish prisoners to slip into Beckmann’s office and kill him. One of the Jews panicked so Chaim Engle, whose father and brother were killed at Sobibor, grabbed a kitchen knife and volunteered.

“I decided to do it in a split-second; there was no time for uncertainty,” said Engle in a telephone interview from his Connecticut home, where he is a retired jewelry store owner. “I put the knife in my boot and we walked across to the office. I was afraid, nervous . . . very tense. When we walked in the office one of the others stabbed Beckmann in the back. Then I lunged over, stabbed him and I said: ‘For my father!’ I stabbed him again and said ‘For my brother!’ I stabbed him again and said ‘For all the Jews you killed.’ ”

Most Killed With Axes

In the next hour, eight more Nazis were killed, most with axes by Pechersky’s soldiers. One Nazi showed up for his appointment with the shoemaker and was killed trying on a pair of boots. Another died in the tailor’s shop, trying on a new SS uniform. The Nazi supervisor of barracks construction was killed when he was asked to check out a broken bunk.

At 5 p.m. the bugle sounded, ending the workday. The prisoners returned to their barracks and prepared for roll call. But their plan for an orderly escape fell apart when a Ukrainian guard discovered a dead Nazi.

“A Jew shouted, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah!’ and a tornado hit the yard,” wrote Richard Rashke in his book, “Escape from Sobibor.”

“Jews ran in all directions. . . . Like Crusaders attacking a castle wall, they threw up the ladder the carpenters had left in the weeds, and began to stream over the fence. . . . The rest . . . rushed the main gate. A German with a machine gun opened fire. . . . The fences began to fall under the weight of the Jews.”

300 Escaped

About 150 Jews were killed in the uprising, but more than 300 escaped. Most, however, were captured and executed, died in the woods or were killed by anti-Semitic bands of Poles and Ukrainians, Blatt said. Only 49 escapees survived until the end of the war. Pechersky is a retired bookkeeper and lives in the Soviet Union. Feldhendler also survived the escape, but a few months after the war, “Polish anti-Semites broke into his apartment and killed him,” Rashke said in a telephone interview from his home in Washington.

The escape at Sobibor should counter the myth that Jews during World War II “meekly went to their death,” Rashke said. Jews have been “inaccurately portrayed as cowards during the war. That’s a hoax of history.

“I feel my book is a symbol--a symbol of all those Jews who were involved in acts of resistance and whose story was never told,” Rashke said. “In my research I found pockets of resistance everywhere. In the ghettos of Poland people fought the Gestapo and police. In other camps there were revolts. . . . And in the forest outside Sobibor there were at least two Jewish resistance groups blowing up trains and tracks, fighting the Nazis.”