Just two weeks after their arrival at Sobibór, an attempt was made to dig an escape tunnel—a project that was abandoned a few days later when the tunnel became flooded. In any case, as Pechersky knew, it would scarcely be possible to enable all the inmates of Sobibór—more than 600 of them—to crawl out during one night without incident. He quickly realized that if there were to be a successful mass escape it would have to come through armed resistance. Pechersky also recognized that the prisoners had better act quickly. The first snowfalls, expected in only a few weeks, would make it easy for the Germans to track any escapees through the forest. So over a few days, and with the cooperation of some of the key Kapos, a plan began to take shape.
“The first phase,” says Toivi Blatt, “was to collect weapons—knives and axes—because a lot of carpenters had tools in their workshops.” The second phase was to “lure” the Germans to secluded places in the camp, kill them and steal their firearms. The third, and final, phase was open revolt.
In the second week of October, the underground learned that several of the most important Germans at Sobibór—including Wagner, one of the leading NCOs—had gone on leave to Germany. The German presence in the camp was thus weaker than it had been for some time. The remaining Germans were to be enticed to the tailors’ or cobblers’ workshop by the promise of personal gain—the success of the revolt thus depended upon the corruptibility of the guards.
Vajspapir was ordered by Pechersky to hide in the cobblers’ shop in the camp and use an axe to kill a German guard when he arrived for a fitting for his new shoes. “I was very excited,” says Vajspapir. “We understood that our destiny was at stake.” Elsewhere, other Germans would be lured by the promise of a new leather coat to the tailors’ shop, where they too would be killed. The next stage was for the inmates to escape through the main gate, gambling that the Ukrainian guards—who were very much dominated by the Germans—lacked both the ammunition and the will to offer much resistance.
The revolt began on October 14. At half past three in the afternoon, Vajspapir together with Yehuda Lerner, a fellow Jew from the Minsk transport, concealed himself at the back of the cobblers’ hut:The German came in, for a shoe fitting. He sat down just in front of me. So I stepped out and hit him. I didn’t know that you should do it with the flat side of the axe. I hit him with the blade. We took him away and put a cloth over him. And then another German came in. So he came up to the corpse and kicked him with his leg and said, “What is this? What does this disorder mean?” And then when he understood [what was happening] I also hit him with the axe. So then we took the pistols and ran away. Afterwards I was shivering. I couldn’t calm down for a long time. I was sick. I was splashed with blood.
Lerner and Wajspapier had killed two Germans in the cobblers’ workshop. Three more SS men were murdered in the tailors’ shop, and others who could not be enticed out were murdered in their offices. By five o’clock in the afternoon, most of the SS men in the camp, a total of nine, had been killed; but, worryingly, the commandant still remained alive. The prisoners began to assemble for roll-call as usual. Toivi Blatt recalls,But then at about fifteen minutes before six, Sasha [Pechersky] jumped on a table and made a speech—I still remember it. He talked about his motherland—the Soviet Union—and how a time will come when everything will change and there will be peace, and if somebody survives his duty is to tell the world what’s happened here.
Next, as planned, the prisoners began marching toward the main gate, but suddenly they came under fire from the watchtowers and from the commandant, Frenzel, who emerged from a barrack and started shooting. It was immediately clear that escape through the main gate was impossible. An attempt was now made to breach the barbed wire at the back of the camp—even though the area beyond was mined. As Toivi Blatt wrestled with the wire, under fire from the guards in the watchtowers, he felt the whole weight of the fence collapse, pinning him down.
My first thought was, “This is the end!” People were stepping over me, and the barbed wire points went into my coat. But finally I had a stroke of genius—I left the leather coat in the barbed wire and just slid out. I started to run. I fell down about two or three times—each time I thought I was hit, but I got up, nothing happened to me, and finally [I reached] the forest.
In front of him, as he ran, Toivi Blatt saw “flying bodies” torn apart by the exploding mines, and so came to realize that it was his “luck” to have been one of the last to leave the camp.
Altogether about half of the 600 prisoners at Sobibór managed to escape from the camp that day. As Toivi Blatt sees it, this success was made possible by one major factor, “They [the Germans] didn’t consider us as people, being capable of doing something. They considered us trash. They didn’t expect that Jews were going to [be prepared to] die, because they had seen thousands going to die for nothing.”
As far as Arkadiy Vajspapir is concerned, another necessary precondition for the escape was the arrival of the Soviet POWs, who faced every privation in the camp with solidarity. Significantly, these POWs had been in the camp for less than a month before making their move. Although they had suffered in previous German camps, they had experienced nothing like the horror of Sobibór before and they therefore had the opportunity to react quickly against the appalling sights they saw. Their military discipline and the singular personality of Sasha Pechersky were crucial to the success of the revolt.
The majority of the 300 Sobibór prisoners who escaped from the camp did not survive the war. Many wandered around, lost in the woods, and were captured within hours; others were later betrayed by Poles and handed over to the Germans. Sasha Pechersky and a handful of his comrades managed to reach partisans sympathetic to the Red Army, and eventually met up with the advancing Soviet forces. Toivi Blatt had a series of adventures and narrow escapes, helped by some Poles, hindered to the point of betrayal by others. After the war he decided to make a new life for himself in America.
Himmler was acutely concerned by the revolt at Sobibór and in its wake he ordered the murder of Jews at the Trawniki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek camps. These reprisals, carried out from November 3, were among the bloodiest of the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” Some 43,000 people were killed in the action, code named by the Nazis “Harvest Festival.” In a telling reminder that technologically advanced methods are not ultimately necessary to kill people in large numbers, 17,000 Jews were shot at Majdanek in just one day.
The “Harvest Festival” killings of November 1943 came at a time when the raison d’être behind the Nazis’ “Final Solution” had shifted. During autumn 1941 and spring 1942, the extermination program had been at least in part motivated by a desire to create “space” for a new German empire in the East. By the winter of 1943, however, it was clear that the Nazis were losing the war, and another motivation came to the fore—vengeance.
The Nazi murder of the Jews would now be primarily driven by the desire to ensure that their greatest enemies would not profit from the war—no matter how it ended. Of course, the desire to murder Jews for ideological reasons had always been present behind the planning and implementation of the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” The inclusion of the Jews of western Europe in the Nazis’ plan for mass extermination showed that economic measures and the creation of “space” were never exclusively the motivation for the crime. But not until now, with the dream of the new “Nazi Order” in the East collapsing around them, had the leaders of the Third Reich sought solace in the mass murder of Jews out of pure, unadulterated hatred.
The Germans, however, faced increasing difficulty enforcing the “Final Solution” outside their area of direct rule. While the Bulgarian authorities had previously given up 11,000 Jews from occupied Thrace and Macedonia who had then been murdered in Treblinka, there had been protests in 1943 at proposals to deport Jews from Bulgaria itself. And the Romanian leader Ion Antonescu, having participated in the destruction of Jewish communities in Bessarabia, Transnistria, and Bukovina, was now refusing to send the rem
ainder of the Jewish population of Romania to the gas chambers of Bełźec. In Italy, too, although Mussolini had implemented various anti-Semitic measures, he had so far refused to hand over Italian Jews.26 Many allies of the Nazis were no longer of the opinion that they were backing the winning side. They had helped the Nazis persecute Jews when they felt it was in their own interests—now that it was not, they started to distance themselves from the whole policy. Their change of heart was motivated less by moral awakening and more by cynical pragmatism.
Of the European countries occupied by the Germans, only one emerges untainted by the moral corrosiveness of the “Final Solution”—Denmark. A concerted effort by the Danish population enabled 95 percent of the Jews in the country to be spirited away from the Germans. And the story of how the Danes saved their Jews is not just an inspiring and an intriguing one, it is also laced with a complexity that, at first sight, it seems to lack.
Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, and from the very beginning it was clear that the Danes would experience a very different kind of occupation from that endured by other European countries. The major Danish institutions—including the monarchy, parliament, and police—remained largely untouched; and the Danes were not asked by the Nazis to enforce any of the anti-Semitic legislation that was commonplace elsewhere in the Nazi State. As far as the Danish authorities were concerned, the 8,000 Danish Jews were full citizens of the country and would remain so.
“We didn’t have any discrimination whatsoever,” says Knud Dyby,27 a Danish policeman at the time. “The Jews were absolutely assimilated. They had their businesses and their houses like everyone else. I’m sure in Denmark there was a lot of intermarriage. One of my family members married a Jewish showgirl.” Even those Jews who chose actively to practice their religion under the Nazi occupation faced little problem. Bent Melchior,28 then a schoolboy, was initially concerned when the Germans arrived since his father, a rabbi, had been outspoken against the Nazis. But nothing untoward happened: “We went to school, the synagogue, cultural activities—it all continued to function.”
One exceptional story, recalled by Bent Melchior, illustrates the extent to which tolerance was embedded in Danish society. His father wrote a short book of commentaries to the five books of Moses and, because the King of Denmark was the focus of patriotism for all Danes, he decided to have one copy of the book specially bound as a gift for his monarch. On New Year’s Eve 1941, Bent’s elder sister was given the task of delivering the book to the palace in Copenhagen. As she approached the gates, by coincidence the Queen walked out, saw her and asked, “Is this for my husband?” His sister said, “Yes, Your Grace,” and the Queen took the book. That night King Christian X of Denmark sat up and wrote a personal thank-you note to Bent’s father, sending greetings to him and to the Jewish community. “It [the letter] arrived on 1 January 1942,” says Bent Melchior, “and it made a very great impression on the whole community—how he answered a little rabbi who sends him a book.”
It seems incredible, in the context of the measures of anti-Semitic persecution the Nazis inflicted on the rest of Europe, that the Germans permitted such tolerance to exist. But they faced a delicate situation in Denmark. In the first place, the Nazis wanted to ensure that food supplies from that country to Germany were unaffected. They also recognized the propaganda value in this “ideal” occupation of a fellow “Aryan” state, and knew the added benefit that came from a peaceful Denmark that required few Germans soldiers to be stationed on Danish soil.
This attitude was to change, however, over the summer and autumn of 1943. In the wake of the defeat at Stalingrad and the retreat of the German army, there were a number of acts of resistance in Denmark culminating in a series of strikes. The Germans insisted that repressive measures must be introduced to counter such actions, but the Danish authorities refused to do so. On August 29, therefore, the Germans assumed power in Denmark.
The German plenipotentiary in Denmark, Dr. Werner Best, now faced a dilemma—what should be done with the Danish Jews? Little in Best’s background suggested he was likely to take a sympathetic line. Trained as a lawyer, he had joined the Nazi party in 1930 and the SS the following year. He had been legal adviser to the Gestapo and worked directly for Reinhard Heydrich. While at the Reich Security main office, Best was complicit in the murder of Polish intellectuals and he had then worked in France, directly involved in the oppression of French Jews. Yet, now this committed Nazi was prepared to do something completely out of character—through intermediaries, he was about to warn the Danish Jews of their impending arrest.
The roundup was planned for the night and early morning of October 1–2, 1943. But, just days before, Best had a meeting with the German naval attaché, Georg Duckwitz, and informed him about the forthcoming raids. Best did this knowing that it was almost certain that Duckwitz, who had known sympathy with the Danes, would leak the information to Danish politicians, who would in turn warn leading members of the Jewish community. This chain of causation duly occurred.
“It was on a Tuesday night [September 28],” says Bent Melchior, “that a woman came to our apartment, asked to speak to my father and said that this coming Friday night the action would take place.” Next morning, because it was a Jewish holiday, there were more people in the synagogue than usual when Bent’s father rose to speak.
My father stopped the service and told the community that this was serious, and he repeated the message he had received. “Don’t be at home on Friday night.” He also said that the services at the synagogue the following day would be cancelled. But we could not rely on this being enough. It was up to everyone present to go out and tell family, friends, people you thought of as lonely—try and get in contact with as many as possible.
The exodus began later that day, September 29, and Rudy Bier29 and his family were part of it. They traveled about fifteen kilometers out of Copenhagen to stay with some business friends of Rudy’s father. “They were a very nice family with three daughters, a bit older than us. They lived in a villa and there was a garden, which we didn’t have because we lived in a flat. They took extremely good care of us.”
As the Bier family settled into their new home outside Copenhagen, the Danish police learned of the impending deportations. “I was at the police station when I heard the news,” says Knud Dyby, “and a police comrade of mine said he had been contacted by a Jewish neighbor of his, a merchant by the name of Jacobson. He and his family were very, very nervous and needed help.” It is remarkable, of course, given the previous actions of police in other Nazi-occupied countries such as France and Slovakia, that the immediate reaction of Dyby and his colleagues was to offer assistance to the Danish Jews. In this case Dyby offered to help the Jacobsons himself and organized their escape across the narrow strait between Denmark and neutral Sweden.
We had to tell them to use either streetcars or a local train to get into the port station in the east of Copenhagen. From there we took several taxicabs down to the harbor. The taxi drivers knew what was happening and were very, very helpful, and in some cases didn’t even charge for the transport. At the harbour we hid ourselves in the sheds the Germans normally used for nets and tools.
Once the Jewish families were concealed, Knud Dyby went out in search of fishermen prepared to take the risk and carry them through the night across the strait, “I would tell the fishermen how many I had, and we would have to beg and borrow enough money to pay them—as much as we could to get everyone on board.” It was a journey fraught with difficulties. Dyby says,
I was once with three Jewish men and all of a sudden a German patrol started coming our way. We jumped deep into a trench. And we stayed there until we could hear the Germans pass by. That’s one time I had my pistol ready, because I would have defended the four of us because I didn’t want to be caught and sent to a concentration camp.
It was not just the Danish police who helped the Jews escape; many members of other institutions made their contribution, from the Danish
coastguard who looked the other way when countless small boats left the harbors at night to the Danish clergy who helped support the fleeing Jews. A statement from the bishop of Copenhagen registering their forthright position was read in Danish churches on October 3.
Wherever Jews are persecuted for racial or religious reasons, it is the duty of the Christian Church to protest against such persecution.... Irrespective of diverging religious opinions, we shall fight for the right of our Jewish brothers and sisters to keep the freedom that we ourselves value more highly than life.30
Meanwhile, Rudy Bier’s family felt that it was no longer safe to continue living with friends in the country, and it too began the journey to Sweden:We had to pass through the center of Copenhagen, and there we had this unpleasant event. Our driver made a wrong turn and stopped just in front of the German headquarters building. That was a bit frightening for a moment, but then he turned round, found his way again and off we went.
The Biers were driven on past Copenhagen, forty kilometers south to the point at which Sweden is farthest from Denmark. This was thought by their protectors to be the safest place to make the crossing. Here two ships, each capable of taking 200 passengers, waited just off the coast. The Biers were rowed out to one of the ships and began their voyage at about eleven o’clock at night: “We were on deck,” recalls Rudy, “and my smallest brothers and sisters were given some light medication [so as] not to cry and they slept their way over the crossing.” After several uneventful hours they reached Sweden.
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