Alexander Pechersky
Alexander "Sasha" Aronovich Pechersky, also known as Oleksandr Aronovych Pecherskyi, was a Jewish-Soviet officer. He is one of the organizers, and the leader, of the most successful uprising and mass-escape of Jews from a Nazi extermination camp during World War II, which occurred at the Sobibor extermination camp on 14 October 1943.
In 1948, Pechersky was arrested by the Soviet authorities along with his brother during the countrywide Rootless cosmopolitan campaign against Jews suspected of pro-Western leanings but released later due in part to mounting international pressure. Pechersky was prevented by the Soviet government from leaving the country to testify in international trials related to Sobibor, including the Eichmann Trial in Israel; foreign investigators were only allowed to collect his testimony under KGB supervision. The last time he was refused permission to exit the country and testify was in 1987, for a trial in Poland.
Pre-war life and career
Pechersky, a son of a Jewish lawyer, was born on 22 February 1909 in Kremenchuk, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire. In 1915, his family moved to Rostov-on-Don where he eventually worked as an electrician at a locomotive repair factory. After graduating from university with a diploma in music and literature, he became an accountant and manager of a small school for amateur musicians.World War II
On 22 June 1941, the day when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Pechersky was conscripted into the Soviet Red Army with a rank of junior lieutenant. By September 1941, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant quartermaster. In the early autumn of 1941, he rescued his wounded commander from being captured by the Germans. He did not receive any medals for this deed. One of his fellow soldiers reportedly said: "Sasha, if what you've done doesn't make you a hero, I don't know who is!" In October 1941, during the Battle of Moscow, their unit was surrounded and captured by the Germans in the city of Vyazma, Smolensk Oblast.Captured, Pechersky soon contracted typhus, but survived the seven-month-long illness. In May 1942, he escaped along with four other prisoners of war, but they were all recaptured the same day. He was then sent to a penal camp at Borisov, Belarus, and from there to a prisoner of war camp located in the forest next to the city of Minsk. During a mandatory medical examination it was discovered that he was circumcised. Pechersky recalled a German medical officer asking him: "Do you admit to being a Jew?" He admitted it, since any denial would result in a whipping, and was thrown into a cellar called "the Jewish grave" along with other Jewish prisoners of war, where for 10 days he sat in complete darkness, being fed 100 grams of wheat and a cup of water every second day.
On 20 August 1942 Pechersky was sent to a SS-operated Arbeitslager, a work camp, in Minsk. The camp housed 500 Jews from the Minsk Ghetto, as well as Jewish Soviet POWs; there were also between 200–300 Soviet inmates whom the Germans labeled as incorrigible: people who were suspected of contacting the Soviet partisans and those who were repeatedly truant while working for the Germans. The prisoners were starved and worked from dawn till dusk. Pechersky wrote about the Minsk work camp:
Sobibor extermination camp
On 18 September 1943, Pechersky, along with 2,000 Jews from Minsk including about 100 Soviet Jewish POWs, was placed in a railway cattle wagon which arrived at the Sobibor extermination camp on 23 September 1943. Eighty prisoners from the train, including Pechersky, were selected for work in Lager II. The remaining 1,920 Jews were immediately led to the gas chambers. Pechersky later recalled his thoughts as the train pulled up to Sobibor, "How many circles of hell were there in Dante's Inferno? It seems there were nine. How many have already passed? Being surrounded, being captured, camps in Vyazma, Smolensk, Borisov, Minsk... And finally I am here. What's next?" The appearance of Soviet POWs produced an enormous impression on Sobibor prisoners: "hungry hope-filled eyes following their every move".Pechersky wrote about his first day in Sobibor:
During his third day at Sobibor, Alexander Pechersky earned the respect of fellow prisoners by standing up to Karl Frenzel, a SS senior officer, as the incident was recalled by Leon Felhendler.
Escape plan
Pechersky's plan merged the idea of a mass escape with vengeance: to help as many prisoners as possible to escape while executing SS officers and guards. His final goal was to join up with the partisans and continue fighting the Nazis. Five days after arriving at Sobibor, Pechersky was again approached by Solomon Leitman on behalf of Felhendler, the leader of the camp's Polish Jews. Leitman was one of the few prisoners who understood Russian and Pechersky did not speak either Yiddish or Polish. Pechersky was invited to talk with a group of Jewish prisoner leaders from Poland, to whom he spoke about the Red Army victory in the Battle of Stalingrad and partisan victories. When one of the prisoners asked him why the partisans would not rescue them from Sobibor, Pechersky reportedly replied: "What for? To free us all? The partisans have their hands full already. Nobody will do our job for us."The Jewish prisoners who had worked at the Bełżec extermination camp were sent to Sobibor to be exterminated when Bełżec closed. From a note found among the clothing of the murdered, the Sobibor prisoners learned that those who had been killed were from work groups in the Bełżec camp. The note said: "We worked for a year in Belzec. I don't know where they're taking us now. They say to Germany. In the freight cars there are dining tables. We received bread for three days, and tins and liquor. If all this is a lie, then know that death awaits you too. Do not trust the Germans. Avenge our blood!"
The leadership of the Polish Jews were aware that Bełżec and Treblinka had been closed, dismantled and all remaining prisoners had been sent to the gas-chambers and they suspected that Sobibor would be next. There was a great urgency in coming up with a good escape plan and Pechersky, with his army experience, was their best hope. The escape had to also coincide with the time when the Sobibor's deputy commandant, Gustav Wagner, went on vacation, since the prisoners felt that he was sharp enough to uncover the escape plan.
Luka
Pechersky clandestinely met with Felhendler under the guise of meeting Luka, a woman he was supposedly involved with. Luka is often described as an 18-year-old woman from "Holland", and that her real name was. However, records indicate she was in fact a 28-year-old married woman from Germany who was accompanied by her husband, which raised doubt about her being the same Luka. After the war, Pechersky insisted that the relationship was platonic. Her fate after the escape was never established and she was never seen alive again. During an interview with Thomas Blatt, Pechersky said the following regarding Luka: "Although I knew her only about two weeks, I will never forget her. I informed her minutes before the escape of the plan. She has given me a shirt. She said, 'it's a good luck shirt, put it on right now', and I did. It's now in the museum. I lost her in the turmoil of the revolt and never saw her again."The uprising
According to Pechersky's plan, the prisoners would assassinate the German SS staff, leaving the auxiliary guards leaderless, obtain weapons and kill the remaining guards. Jewish Poles were assigned German SS guards that they were supposed to lure inside the workshops under some pretext and silently kill. Ester Raab, a survivor of the escape, recalled: "The plan was, at 4 o'clock, should start, everybody has to kill his SS man, and his guard at his place of work". Only a small circle of trusted Jewish Pole inmates were aware of the escape plan as they did not trust the Jews from other European countries.On 14 October 1943, Pechersky's escape plan began. During the day, several German SS men were lured to workshops on a variety of pretexts, such as being fitted for new boots or expensive clothes. The SS men were then stabbed to death with carpenters' axes, awls and chisels discreetly recovered from property left by gassed Jews; with other tradesmen's sharp tools or with crude knives and axes made in the camp's machine shop. The blood was covered up with sawdust on the floor. The escapees were armed with a number of hand grenades, a rifle, a submachine gun and several pistols that the prisoners stole from the German living quarters, as well as the sidearms captured from the dead SS men. Earlier in the day, SS-Oberscharführer Erich Bauer, at the top of the death list created by Pechersky, unexpectedly drove out to Chełm for supplies. The uprising was almost postponed since the prisoners believed that Bauer's death was necessary for the success of the escape. Bauer came back early from Chełm, discovered that SS-Scharführer Rudolf Beckmann had been assassinated and began shooting at the prisoners. The sound of the gunfire prompted Alexander Pechersky to begin the revolt earlier than planned. Pechersky screamed the code-words: "Hurrah, the revolt has begun!"
Disorganized groups of prisoners ran in every direction. Ada Lichtman, a survivor of the escape recalled "Suddenly we heard shots... Mines started to explode. Riot and confusion prevailed, everything was thundering around. The doors of the workshop were opened, and everyone rushed through... We ran out of the workshop. All around were the bodies of the dead and wounded". Pechersky was able to escape into the woods and at the end of the uprising, eleven German SS personnel and an unknown number of Ukrainian guards had been killed. Out of approximately 550 Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor death camp, 130 chose not to participate in the uprising and remained in the camp; about 80 were killed during the escape either by machine gun fire from watchtowers or while running through a mine field in the camp's outer perimeter; 170 more were recaptured by the Nazis during searches. All who remained in the camp or caught after the escape were executed. 53 Sobibor escapees survived the war. Within days after the uprising, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp closed, dismantled and planted with trees.