It was based on an interview that Yehuda Lerner gave me in 1979, during the filming of Shoah, which I made Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 16:00.
Sobibor played a crucial role in the Holocaust, and the extermination camp revolt was mentioned very early on by the Polish Jan Piwonski, who was a station marshal at the time.
Piwonski witnessed the construction of the camp and the arrival of the first gas convoy. But unlike the choice I had taken for Treblinka, Chelmo or Auschwitz-Birkenau, no Jewish protagonist testified for Sobibor. However, I had shot for a long time with Ada Lichtman and her husband, who escaped during the revolt, and especially with Yehuda Lerner, who was the hero of tireless and indomitable courage.
The Sobibor revolt could not have been a moment of Shoah : she deserved a movie in itself, she deserved to be treated for herself. It is indeed a paradigmatic example of what I have elsewhere called the “reappropriation” of force and violence by Jews. The Shoah was not only a massacre of innocent people, but also a massacre of defenseless people, deceived at every stage of the destruction process and right up to the doors of the torture chambers. Justice must be given to a double legend, one that says that the Jews let themselves be led by gas without any premonition or suspicion, that their death was “sweet”, and the other that they put up no resistance to their torturers.
Without saying anything here about the great revolts, such as that in the Warsaw ghetto, acts of bravery and freedom, individual or collective, were very numerous in the camps and ghettos: insults, curses, suicides, desperate assaults. It is true, however, that a thousand-year-old tradition of exile and persecution did not prepare the Jews, in their great mass, for the effective exercise of violence, which requires two inseparable preconditions: a psychological disposition and technical knowledge, a familiarity with weapons. It was a Soviet Jewish officer, Alexander Perchersky, a professional soldier, who was therefore familiar with the use of arms, who decided, planned and organized the insurrection in just six weeks. Deported to Sobibor at the beginning of September 1943 with other Jews, who were also soldiers of the Red Army, Perchersky was fortunate not to be immediately sent to the gas chambers, like the rest of his comrades: out of the 1200 people who made up this group, the Germans selected about sixty men who were in urgent need of them for force and maintenance work. Their turn to die would come a little later, as would also be the case for shoemakers, tailors, goldsmiths, lingeries, some children too, who had been residing for months or weeks in the part of the camp called “camp number 1” (the “camp number 1”, where the gas chambers were located, where the gas chambers were located, being the death camp proper, which adjoined the first) and formed a workforce a slave in the sole service of the Nazis, herself periodically liquidated.
Alexander Petchersky is no more. Other participants in the revolt are still living, scattered around the world.
Yehuda Lerner speaks here for himself and for others, the living and the dead. To make this film, I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Yehuda Lerner, and so I came back to Poland, Belarus, Sobibor itself, where I had not returned for over twenty years. I was able to measure the passage of time: the station is even more dilapidated than it once was.
Only one train per day goes from Chelm-Wlodawa to and from Chelm-Wlodawa. The ramp where more than 250,000 Jews landed, which was then a grassy embankment, is now roughly cemented to allow the loading of logs. However, five years ago, the Polish government decided to build a small and moving museum with a red roof in Sobibor. Likewise in Wlodawa, the synagogue, whose courtyard in 1978 served as a parking lot for trucks, was also transformed into a museum and is now surrounded by a pretty park with tender grass. But museums and commemorations institute oblivion as much as memory. Let us listen to the lively words of Yehuda Lerner.
