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Sobibór was a Nazi extermination camp that was part of Operation Reinhard. It is also the name of the village outside which the camp was built, which is now part of Lublin Voivodship in Poland. Jews, Soviet POWs, and possibly Gypsies were transported to Sobibór by rail, and suffocated in gas chambers that were fed with the exhaust of a petrol engine. About 260,000 people were killed in Sobibór.
Sobibór was the site of the only successful rebellion by Jewish prisoners in a Nazi camp. On October 14, 1943, members of the camp's underground succeeded in covertly killing 11 of their SS guards and a number of Ukrainian guards as well. Although their plan was to kill all the SS and walk out the main gate of the camp, the killings were discovered and the inmates ran for their lives. Of the 600 inmates in the camp, roughly 300 made it out. Most of them were rounded up and shot in subsequent days, but about 50 prisoners managed to survive the war. The escape forced the Nazis to close the camp. They dismantled it and planted a forest at the site in an effort to hide what they had done there.
The revolt was dramatized in the 1987 TV movie "Escape from Sobibor," directed by Jack Gold, based on the book of the same name written by Richard Rashke.
Other recommended reading:
- From the Ashes of Sobibor by Thomas Toivi Blatt
- Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka by Yitzak Ahrad
External links
- Description of Sobibór (http://auschwitz.dk/Sorbibor.htm)
- Internet Movie Database entry (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0092978/combined) for the popular TV-movie "Escape from Sobibor" starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauerhe:סוביבור