Holocaust Essay

Adv. Comp. II

In an effort to annihilate the Jewish population in all of Western Europe, Hitler and members of the Nazi party established a number of concentration camps. Some of these camps were killing centers, some were forced labor camps, and some were transit camps. One of the most notorious of all concentration camps is Sobibor, located in Poland near Chelm.

Unlike some of the other concentration camps, something happened at Sobibor. The prisoners set up a resistance.  In Richard Rashke’s afterward, he wrote that Sobibor:

…represents the buried stories of hundreds of thousands who fought and died in ghettos no one ever heard of; who tried to escape on the way to camps but never made it; who fought back inside camps but were killed anyway; who managed to escape only to be recaptured and executed; who formed or joined partisan groups from the woods of Vilna to the forest of the owls and who never saw liberation... (Rashke).

He really stressed this throughout the entire book. He expressed strong emotions in the story and the book almost came across as angry. It had every reason to as well.

Sobibor, part of Operation Reinhardt, was established in 1942. Its initial size was only 400m x 600m, surrounded by barbed wire three meters high. It had three areas: The Administrative area, the reception area, and the extermination area. It was first used as an extermination camp, but was turned to a forced labor camp near the end of its time.

The story of Sobibor and its revolt was eye opening. It made me think of the similarity in Night: the lying the Jews did to survive, the deception of German soldiers, and the horror the German soldiers caused towards others. The Germans used any tactic necessary to trick the Jewish men into not actually revolting. They would tell them that their possessions would be given back to them after “showers” and they would receive clothes afterwards as well. Little did they know, it was a gas chamber.

During the afternoon of 14 October 1943, one of the most daring displays of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust began—the escape from Sobibor (Caplan). One problem the Jews were going to face was that the summer before Germans installed a mine field around the camp, but a few Jewish men had a plan. A small group of Jewish prisoners, who had been contemplating a smaller-scale revolt and escape for some time, named First Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, nicknamed Sasha, as commander of the revolt (Caplan).