A Prisoner Of Sobibor

On an early autumn day a train coming from Minsk rolled into the railway station of Sobibor, a village in the Lublin district of Poland. The passengers of the train were unaware that the outskirts of this dusty small town concealed a dreadful Nazi death camp where gas chambers poisoned victims with carbon monoxide. It was September 23,1943, and a Soviet prisoner of war, First Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky was also in one of the boxcars of the deported Jews. His mind in captivity wandered restlessly. He thought about his family. And he thought about the war and about Mother Russia and of daring plans of escape. In the Great Patriotic War Sasha fought bravely against the German invaders in the Smolensk Oblast, defending the road to Moscow. as the Red Army was retreating. A Wehrmacht unit captured him in the fall of 1941 in Vyazma. Sasha found it ironic that here in 1812 the Russians defeated a French army of Napoleon retreating from Moscow. Before his arrival in Sobibor, Sasha had already spent long months in various prisoner camps. Then, during a strip search, the Nazis discovered that he was circumcised and as a Jew they deported him to Sobibor. The transport that took him to the camp was an unusual one, because the Nazis selected 80 men for work, instead of gassing them. Sasha was chosen along with 79 others to build new storage facilities in the lager. Now, exhausted and hungry, he was chopping wood with other prisoners. They hoisted their heavy axes and then let them fall on the tree stumps. SS Oberscharführer Karl Frenzel, a squad leader, guarded the group. He routinely punished prisoners for slowing down with twenty-five lashes each. Once, when Sergeant Frenzel was busy in beating a prisoner, he noticed that Sasha took a moment of rest. "Russian soldier, you don't like the way I punish this fool? " Frenzel asked. "Well, I give you exactly five minutes to split this stump. If you make it, you get a pack of cigarettes. But if you miss even by one second, you get twenty-five lashes, too." It looked an impossible assignment but Sasha was still young and strong. He started to assault the stump with all his strength, fuelled with the hatred of the enemy. He finished the task in less than the allotted time of five minutes. Impressed by the performance, Frenzel handed Sasha a pack of cigarettes. Many prisoners valued the luxury of smoking even more than their scarce food rations. But Sasha refused to take the highly prized commodity. "Thanks, but I don't smoke", he said. Then he lifted his axe and went back to work. The SS guard was puzzled and furious. He turned around and left. However, he returned soon with a piece of bread and some margarine. It was a very alluring delicacy for a starving man and Frenzel handed the food to Sasha. But, again, Sasha declined the SS man's offer. "Thank you", he said, "the food we are getting here satisfies me fully." This was obviously a lie and Oberscharführer Frenzel became even more furious. Yet at the same time he admired the strength, the pride and moral backbone of the prisoner. The SS man was at a loss how to react. But he did not whip Sasha. He just turned on his heels and left. A few weeks later a revolt broke out in the Sobibor death camp. Sasha played a central role in organizing the uprising. In the afternoon of October 14,1943, the prisoners killed most of the German SS men and some of the Ukrainian guards in the camp. Three hundred prisoners, from a crowd of nearly six hundred, managed to break through the barbed wire fences and mine fields under a hail of fire of the guards. This daring uprising was the most successful mass escape of prisoners from a Nazi lager in World War II. But only about 50 of the escapees survived the war. Sasha was one of them. He found his way to the partisan forces fighting in the forests against the Fascists and later joined again the Soviet Red Army. Seventeen years after the war, In 1962, Karl Frenzel was arrested in Germany for his participation in the mass extermination of 250,000 Jews at Sobibor. Witnesses testified that Frenzel was a sadist murderer. He brutally had beaten to death scores of prisoners, whereas others he shot through the head. A survivor of the death camp, Esther Terner-Raab saw the SS sergeant grabbing a baby and slamming the infant's head against the side of a boxcar. The Hagen Trials in Germany continued for four years. In the end, the court found Karl Frenzel guilty. It sentenced him to life imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity.