Ezcape from Sobibor Read online

of Camp II, just as gray and depressing as their initial disembarkation point, where they were addressed by another SS staff sergeant, Oberscharführer Hermann Michel, dressed in a white coat as if he was a doctor, who explained what lay ahead of them.

  "You will soon be traveling to the Ukraine where you will work on behalf of the German Reich," he said in a harsh voice that would brook no questions. "In order to avoid epidemics, you are going to have a disinfecting shower. Put away your clothes neatly, and remember where they are, as I shall not be with you to help to find them. All valuables must be taken to the desk. Scharführer Floss will catalogue them and keep them safe for you to retrieve before you leave."

  Many of the deportees seemed satisfied with this procedure. They had been ripped from their homes, stuffed onto a freight train, and treated like animals, but things appeared to be looking up, at least a bit. The prospect of forced labor wasn't pleasant, but if they were going to get any work out of their prisoners, they had to feed and shelter them. They were even going to return what few personal possessions the Jews had brought with them. Under the circumstances, things could be a lot worse.

  Rabbi Snaidman was not reassured. He listened to Michel's speech, but heard what others missed. Why the need for showers, for instance, if they were just going to get back on the freight trains? Why would the Nazis care about their captives' valuables? And both the tone and bearing of the man giving the instructions was not those of a man who cared about his charges, or even thought them human.

  Michel's speech having concluded, the prisoners took their possessions to the "Cashier," and then after undressing began the walk down a path that Rabbi Snaidman heard one of the SS refer to as the "street to heaven," a phrase that chilled him to the bone. Two rows of Jews–men on the right, women and children on the left–marched down a path about four meters wide and a hundred and fifty meters long, with ferocious-looking barbed wire on both sides. As they walked, the rabbi grew more and more apprehensive. The people around him were being treated as less than human, as carcasses to be disposed of, rather than as workers to be valued.

  Near the front of the other line, Liora found herself shuffled off to a gray, run-down building labeled "Barber." She stepped inside what looked like a camp barracks, and was pushed into a chair in front of a man who looked more like a butcher than a barber. The barbers in Sobibor, however, did not style hair–they cut if off. Clutching her son, Liora was shorn to the scalp, and her lovely hair tossed on a pile, soon be sent along with the hair of other female prisoners to German factories for use in mattresses on U-boats and other military purposes. The barracks filled with the sound of crying, as women whose hair had been their most glorious feature lost it in a few spare seconds.

  Upon finishing, Liora and the other women were sent back to the path leading to the showers. She fell into line across from Rabbi Snaidman, who looked at her and smiled. He mouthed, "You're still beautiful" at her, and a tear dropped from her cheek and she smiled wanly back.

  Finally, they came to the end of the path, and there before them stood a white-washed brick building with a wide veranda and three doors leading into the bathhouses. Men were pointed toward the door on the right, women to the door on the left. Children who could walk were sent to the middle room, while babies were grabbed from their mothers' arms, passed along and then tossed with utter carelessness into the middle room with the rest of the children.

  As Liora came to the door to the women's room, she saw what was being done with the babies and began to scream, "You'ill never take my baby from me!" One of the Ukrainian guards sneered at her and cracked her across the temple with the butt of his rifle. She went down, stunned, Dovydas crying and slipping from her arms.

  Before she could gather him to herself, the Ukrainian grabbed the child by the right hand and tossed him as he would a ball to a fellow guard. As he was thrown, the baby's shoulder separated, and his shriek pierced the air. The guard said with a laugh, "Here, take this and put it with the rest of the garbage." Liora's last sight of her son was seeing him being thrown like a sack of potatoes into the children's room. She heard a crack as if his head had hit the concrete floor, and then he was quiet.

  Dragged to her feet by the same guard who had hit her, she cried out in agony for her lost son. Wanting more than anything to gain some measure of revenge for him, she struck out at the guard, but he caught her hand before it could make contact with his face. "You're a feisty one," he said, and grabbed her crotch. "I could get to like that." She spat in his face, and he snarled and pushed her into the woman in front of her. "Go along with you, you whore. Even after a few months in this place, I've still got standards." And with that she passed into the shower room, and the door was sealed behind her.

  Rabbi Snaidman saw what happened to Liora and Dovydas, and how all the Jews were being treated. What had been fear was quickly replaced by anger, though he knew there was nothing he could do about what was happening. As he stepped into the shower, his anger turned to rage as his worst fears were realized. He immediately noticed that some of the shower heads on the walls were coming away from the cinderblock, and that they were not attached to any plumbing. He also noticed vents in the ceiling that were unlike any kind of bathroom fixture he had ever seen. Then it hit him: these were not showers at all, but gas chambers.

  A dozen other men had come to the same conclusion within moments of hearing the door being sealed from the outside. Some began banging on the door and demanding to see the commandant. Others searched the room for an avenue of escape. Still others broke down and began to cry, or to call out to their wives or parents. Rabbi Snaidman responded differently, in accordance with his training and experience. He began to pray.

  He raised his voice so that it was heard above the shouts and wails, and above the sound of the engine outside that was even now filling the chamber with deadly carbon monoxide. The prayers that came forth from the rabbi, the spirit of which were quickly taken up by the other men, were not the ritual prayers he knew by heart, but the angry words of a man who knew his life was about to end, and who had no intention of going quietly.

  "O God of Israel," he thundered, "hear the cries of Your children. Hear us, O Lord, hearken to the voice of our anger. You have seen how Your people have been humiliated and degraded, You have seen our faces crushed into the dirt, You have seen how we have suffered, and now You see the Nazis slaughtering us like cattle.

  "We call upon You now, O Lord, hear us in our dying moments. Vengeance is Yours, You have told us, You shall repay. We now ask for vengeance to be wrecked upon those who have destroyed us. Give us justice, O God! Strike down those who would spit in Your face even as they kill Your children!

  "Your people have asked where You are in the midst of our agony, O Lord. Show us! Show forth Your almighty power, and send Your justice upon our murderers!"

  All around him, men had dropped to the floor as the carbon monoxide invaded their lungs and smothered them. Now, even Rabbi Snaidman was forced to the concrete as he found it more and more difficult to breath. His lungs filled with the lethal gas, and he began to choke, but not before he offered up one last imprecation.

  "Make me an instrument of Your vengeance, my God. May all of us haunt our killers to their dying day."

  And with that, he gave up the ghost.

  As five hundred human beings died horribly by suffocation, Deputy Commandant Johann Niemann was stepping into the tailor's shop. His uniform had become threadbare after months of daily wear, repeated washing to get out the mud of the camp and the blood of the prisoners, and the occasional scuffle with a hysterical inmate. Also in the tailor's shop was a Jew named Alexander Aronovich Pechersky, a Soviet POW who upon his arrival in September had become the leader of the underground resistance by virtue of of his military experience and defiant attitude toward his captors.

  Pechersky had been drafted into the Red Army on the day the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, serving until his capture near Vyazma during the Battle of Moscow. He was a sur
vivor–he had beaten typhus, escaped from one POW camp, been recaptured, and lived through the horror of a Minsk labor camp where random killings of workers were the order of the day. He had been one of eighty prisoners chosen to work in Camp II upon his arrival at Sobibor, while almost two thousand others went straight to the gas chambers.

  He was also a man who couldn't be cowed by the Nazis. Shortly after he came to Sobibor, he had been chopping wood when Karl Frenzel came by to watch his charges and started whipping a Dutch Jew who was too weak to work. Pechersky observed the whipping, and when Frenzel noticed him, asked him if he didn't like what he saw. The Red Army man didn't so much as flinch, and simply said, "Yes, Oberscharfuhrer." Frenzel then told him he had five minutes to split a large tree stump, or he'd get 25 lashes. Pechersky finished in four-and-a-half minutes, and then refused the reward that Frenzel offered. Word of his defiant attitude spread through the camp, and soon afterward a group of Polish Jews approached him about leading an escape.

  The Soviet lieutenant had worked out a plan for escape that would also give the prisoners a measure of revenge by killing as many of the SS and their Ukrainian collaborators as