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Riot at the "Death Factory": Who and How Organized the Uprising in the Sobibor Concentration Camp on October 14
Sobibor is a small town in southeastern Poland, not far from the border with Ukraine. Lost in the dense forest, it was the perfect place to carry out Operation Reinhardt. This was the government’s “Final Solution” program, which involved the mass extermination of all people considered “subhuman” by Nazi Germany (Jews, Roma, and later Soviet citizens).
A small railway was built from the village of Sobibor (also known as "Sobibór") to the camp, along which suicide bombers were transported. The "death factory" itself was surrounded by four rows of 3-meter-high barbed wire, with a mined area between them. This enclosure was under 24-hour surveillance. Patrols of SS officers and police officers (mostly Ukrainian) cooperating with them walked along the border. The machine gun turret had a sentry.
The camp was divided into three parts. Initially, there were workshops for sewing clothes, repairing shoes, and making furniture for the German guards. The second warehouse stored jewelry, clothes, and hair from concentration camp prisoners. And the third housed the so-called bathhouse, a gas chamber that could hold up to 800 people. Most of the people who arrived at Sobibor were taken there.
According to various estimates, between 170,000 and 250,000 people died in this camp alone during the operations of May 15, 1942. Only those who had work survived. They could be useful on the farms. This played a big role in the uprising.
By the autumn of 1943, there had already been an attempt to escape from the Nazi death camp. However, most prisoners escaped alone or in small groups, and the few who managed to break through the fence were quickly found by guards and police or turned in by local residents.
But there was an underground resistance in Sobibor. In the summer of 1943, a group was led by Leon Feldhendler, the son of a Polish rabbi and former head of the Judenrat, the Jewish autonomous organization forcibly created in the ghetto. And on September 22, a group of Soviet prisoners of war were transferred to the camp, including Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky.
Before the war, he worked as an electrician and also directed amateur performances. Pechersky was drafted on the first day of the war and worked as a clerk until he was captured in October 1941. When the train arrived at Sobibor, Pechersky, knowing that creative professionals were not held in high esteem by the Nazis, identified himself as a carpenter and was immediately sent to the gas chamber.
The underground group's plan was to prepare all Sobibor prisoners to participate in the escape plan, but this failed. Some were too weak, others were too scared. As a result, only 420 of the 550 prisoners took part in the riot. However, there were enough people and most wanted to be released.
On October 14, prisoners working in the workshop began to lure SS officers "hysterically". They urged them to take off their uniforms so as not to interfere with them wearing new uniforms. One by one, 11 police officers and several Ukrainian police officers were silently eliminated. The plan was to seize weapons and break through. But the surviving guards raised the alarm.
However, the captured rebels broke down the gates and escaped. During the riots, 80 people were killed and more than 300 were freed. They scattered in different directions. Some pursued Pechersky for invading Belarus. Some stayed in Poland. In the end, it was a bad decision.
The very next day after the uprising, the Sobibor camp was closed, the remaining prisoners were shot, and a real hunt was organized for those who escaped. Within a few days, 170 participants in the riots were arrested and executed. About 100 people were later handed over to the Nazis by local Poles and found refuge there.
Nevertheless, Pechersky and his group broke into Belarus and fought there as part of a partisan detachment. Feldhendler, along with several other Sobibor prisoners, fled to Lublin, where they remained until the city was liberated by the Red Army. The son of a Polish rabbi testified about the atrocities of the concentration camps and opened a company in which former prisoners of the "death camps" worked. But he did not live to see Victory Day. He was shot dead in his apartment in April 1945. They may have been members of the Polish nationalist underground.