Escape from Sobibor

This book represents a painful retelling of life and death in a World War II Nazi death camp where some 250,000 Jews were taken. Nearly all of them were quickly exterminated, but a sliver of a percent escaped, and from them we learn about Sobibor. We learn how thousands of lives were snuffed out daily and how thousands of bodies were disposed of daily. We learn how the "lucky" ones, chosen to work at the camp, dealt with gruesome events associated with the daily march toward annihilation of their race.After reading this book, I have a much deeper understanding not only of what Jews have been through, but how this leads many of them to think. I noticed that Rashke helped me understand the Jewish mindset, but not the Nazi mindset. I suppose Rashke didn't take this one on because there really is no defensible logic for Nazi behavior. What in the world led so many Nazis to conclude that Jews deserved no dignity or treatment as humans? What could I possibly learn from someone who could "pick up a baby by the feet, smash its head against a boxcar, and then toss it into the miners' train like a dead rat" (p. 92 in the paperback).The book ends with about 75 pages that explain how Rashke found and interviewed the people whose stories are told in "Escape from Sobibor." It's a useful format to place this at the end of the book, since by now I'm involved in their lives and want to know what happened after the war ended. This section reveals that the survivors are never really free of Sobibor. There are daily reminders and frequent nightmares. But I'm thankful that they were willing to open the wounds and bleed again. Stories like this, despite the injustice and atrocity and inhumanity they expose, should never be buried.

I am so glad the people whose lives are told about in this book were willing to share there personal histories with us the reader. I am also greatful for Richard Rashke for the time and energy spent researching this book to bring it to life. The people in this book will touch your heart and you will find yourself thinking of them as people you know and care for and cry for and pray for even still. Even though many books have been written of holocaust survivors,every one deserves to be read,no matter. They speak out for the living as well as the dead. We must never forget,and we must read books such as this one to keep them alive in our memories.

The release of Claude Lanzmann's new documentary about the escape from Sobibor may cause readers to flock to this book, first published in 1982. (Lanzmann this week won Israel's highest cinematic honor for his film). It should.As Richard Rashke noted in his 1982 introduction, even then almost no one had ever heard of Sobibor, although it had been the scene of the biggest prisoner escape in World War II, on October 14, 1943 at 4 p.m. Why? Millions of pages of Nazi records included only three documents on Sobibor--like Treblinka and Belzec, a top secret death factory. These 3 places, unlike Auschwitz and Dachau and thousands of other camps, had no satellite labor camps. Here, virtually everyone was sent immediately to their deaths. The handful of survivors were those enslaved to process transports. Even these laborers, if they did not die of exhaustion or starvation, were largely murdered after a very short while.Poland's pre-glasnost Commission for German War Crimes estimated that the Nazis gassed at minimum 1.65 million Jews (25% of all those murdered in the Holocaust) in these three camps alone--250,000 of them at Sobibor, which Rashke called Heinrich Himmler's "best-kept secret."This book was perhaps the first lengthy expose of such a place. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Rashke interviewed 18 of Sobibor's 30 survivors, who warmly welcomed his inquiries because he is not Jewish. He interviewed escape co-leaders Alexander (Sasha) Perchersky (in the Soviet Union) and Stanislaw (Shlomo) Szmajner (in Brazil) and spoke for more than 10 days with Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, who survived Sobibor for six months and made it his business to know everything about that hell. Rashke's subjects also included Chaim and Selma Engel in the U.S. and Eda and Itzhak Lichtman in Israel.What resulted from this extensive research was not any old oral history. Rashke made a valiant and largely successful attempt to check and cross check all the information he was given. The book contains 335 footnotes and an extensive bibliography including many primary sources.But this is high drama, not academic work, the more so because many of the survivors are still (even now) living. In fact, the book was in 1987 made into a television docudrama starring Joanna Pacula, Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer. After reading it in the mid-1980s, I discovered family members were acquainted with some of the survivors. And a close friend's grandparents had been murdered in Sobibor.This is a book you will never forget. Alyssa A. Lappen

This is one of the best books I have read about the Holocaust. The author interviews a number of survivors from Sobibor and from their stories provides you with The Story of Sorbibor told from multiple vantage points. It gives a very personal overview of what life was like inside a concentration camp. Obviously it was horrible, but the story is one about survival.

This is an awesome and compelling book on the cruelty and harshness of the Nazis during WWII. The heroics of Sasha, Shlomo, Toivi, and other Jewish prisoners helped the escape of more than 50 Jews from the death camp. Well written.