Next Question by Life Story Magic continues! I think I’ve realized Tuesday is the most logical day — and the one that fits in my schedule.
See you there — and here — tomorrow!
Escape From Sobibor
This week marks an important anniversary. It’s even more important because some of the worst people ever made it necessary, and then tried to make sure nobody would remember it.
There are so many places this story could start, but I’m going to start it in Kremenchuk, in what’s now Ukraine, where Alexander Pechersky was born in 1909.
His family moved to Rostov-on-Don when he was 6. He worked as an electrician at a locomotive repair shop, earned a university diploma in music and literature, and became an accountant who ran a small school for amateur musicians.
On June 22, 1941, the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Pechersky was conscripted into the Red Army as a junior lieutenant. In October, during the Battle of Moscow, his unit was surrounded near Vyazma, and he became a prisoner.
From there, Pechersky was held in one horrible place after another. In May 1942, he escaped with four other men, but they were all caught the same day. Things got worse after that.
At a POW camp outside Minsk, a medical examination revealed he was circumcised, and when a German officer asked, he admitted to being a Jew. He spent 10 days in a pitch-black cellar the guards called “the Jewish grave.”
Vyazma, Smolensk, Borisov, Minsk — and then, in September 1943, a train carrying about 2,000 Jews from Minsk, including roughly 100 Soviet Jewish POWs like him.
“How many circles of hell were there in Dante’s Inferno? It seems there were nine,” Pechersky later recalled thinking as the train pulled into the station.
This one was called Sobibor.
The guards picked 80 men for work, and the other 1,920 went straight to the gas chambers.
Pechersky started thinking immediately about escape. But, on his third day, an SS sergeant named Karl Frenzel was whipping a Dutch prisoner who was too weak to chop a tree stump, and Pechersky stopped working.
Frenzel turned his ire on Pechersky and gave him five minutes to split a stump himself: a pack of cigarettes if he made it, 25 lashes if he didn’t. Pechersky did it in four and a half minutes, told Frenzel he didn’t smoke, and went back to work.
Word of that small act of resistance got around the camp. Soon, it reached Leon Feldhendler.
Leon was the son of the rabbi of Żółkiewka, a small town near Lublin. At Sobibor, he’d been organizing an underground for months.
But his group lacked any military experience. They’d also seen the Germans punish murder prisoners left behind after earlier escapes as reprisals. So, their goal was to get everyone out—or die trying.
Pechersky spoke neither Polish nor Yiddish, so the two worked through an interpreter. With little time to plan, Pechersky came up with an idea:
Use the SS men’s greed to get them alone.
Kill their leaders one at a time, in the course of no more than an hour.
Have the Russians put on the Germans’ uniforms and march the rest of the prisoners out, right under the noses of the rest of the guards, who were (ironically) mostly Ukrainian.
A 16-year-old from Izbica named Toivi Blatt made the rounds, telling the cruelest and highest-ranking SS men that a fine leather coat or a new pair of boots, taken from a murdered Jew, was waiting for them in the workshops.
On October 14, 1943, 83 years ago this Wednesday, at about 4 p.m., the SS men came in for their fittings. The prisoners killed them with axes and chisels and covered the blood with sawdust.
It didn’t quite go according to plan; gunfire broke out, alerting the guards. Still, about 300 of the 600 prisoners ran for the forest, through rifle fire and a minefield.
Only about 50 of the escapees survived the war.
Leon Feldhendler was one of them—but he was killed in April 1945, days after the war in Lublin. There are many theories of what happened; no 100% answer.
Toivi Blatt hid with a farmer who later shot him and left him for dead with a bullet in his jaw. He survived, moved to America, wrote two books, testified at the trials of three Sobibor guards, and served as chief adviser on the 1987 TV movie Escape from Sobibor, in which Rutger Hauer played Pechersky, and Alan Arkin played Leon Feldhendler.
Blatt said he’d made a promise during the escape: “God, let me live and I will tell!”
Pechersky fought on with the partisans and went home to Rostov, where he spent the rest of his life in a country that didn’t want to hear his story.
But Blatt found out he was still alive and went to the Soviet Union to reunite and interview him in 1980.
As for Sobibor itself, within days after the escape, Heinrich Himmler ordered it torn down.
The Germans plowed the ground, planted trees, and set up a fake farm on top of the place where as many as 250,000 people had been murdered — hoping to hide what happened from history.
They failed.
And since you’ve now read this, you’re a small part of the victory over them.
7 other moments from history this week
Sunday, October 11: “That was the bulliest experience I ever had.” — Theodore Roosevelt, to pilot Arch Hoxsey that evening, after becoming the first U.S. president to fly in an airplane on this day in 1910 at Kinloch Field in St. Louis. The impromptu flight covered nearly three miles in about three minutes and twenty seconds, while more than 10,000 people watched from the ground.
Monday, October 12: “No human is limited.” — Eliud Kipchoge, after running a marathon in 1:59:40 in Vienna on this day in 2019, the first person to cover the distance in under two hours. The time did not count as an official world record because he ran in a closed event with rotating pacemakers.
Tuesday, October 13: “Please look after this bear.” — The note attached to Paddington’s coat in Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington, first published on this day in 1958. Bond got the idea from a lone teddy bear he spotted on a London shop shelf on Christmas Eve 1956 and bought for his wife.
Wednesday, October 14: “For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.” — Winnie-the-Pooh, in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, first published on this day in 1926. The book sold 150,000 copies before the end of that year and has since been translated into more than 50 languages. (Ironic, right?)
Thursday, October 15: “Much of my work has come from being lazy.” — John Backus, who led the IBM team behind FORTRAN, the first modern programming language, which was released to programmers on this day in 1956. Backus said he started the project because he hated hand-coding programs for missile trajectories on the IBM 701.
Friday, October 16: “It has more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember, or the reader would believe.” — Charles Dickens, in American Notes, describing Boston’s Tremont House, which opened on this day in 1829. Often called the first modern hotel in the U.S., it gave guests private rooms with keys, free soap, and indoor plumbing.
Saturday, October 17: “The fortune of war, General Gates, has made me your prisoner.” — British General John Burgoyne, handing his sword to American General Horatio Gates at Saratoga on this day in 1777. It was the first time an entire British field army had surrendered, and the victory helped bring France into the war as America’s ally.