Alexander Pechersky

Alexander 'Sasha' Pechersky (Алекса́ндр Аро́нович Пече́рский; 22 February 1909 – 19 January 1990) was one of the organizers, and the leader, of the most successful uprising and mass-escape of Jews from a Nazi extermination camp during World War II, which occurred at the Sobibor extermination camp on 14 October 1943.

Pechersky, a son of a Jewish lawyer, was born on 22 February 1909 in Kremenchuk, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine).

In 1915, his family moved to Rostov-on-Don where he eventually worked as an electrician at a locomotive repair factory.

After graduating from university with a diploma in music and literature, he became an accountant and manager of a small school for amateur musicians.

On 22 June 1941, the day when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Pechersky was conscripted into the Soviet Red Army with a rank of junior lieutenant.

By September 1941, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant quartermaster (class II).

In the early autumn of 1941, he rescued his wounded commander from being captured by the Germans.

He did not receive any medals for this deed.

One of his fellow soldiers reportedly said: "Sasha, if what you've done doesn't make you a hero, I don't know who is!" In October 1941, during the Battle of Moscow, their unit was surrounded and captured by the Germans in the city of Vyazma, Smolensk Oblast.

Captured, Pechersky soon contracted typhus, but survived the seven-month-long illness.

In May 1942, he escaped along with four other prisoners of war, but they were all recaptured the same day.

He was then sent to a penal camp at Borisov, Belarus, and from there to a prisoner of war (POW) camp located in the forest next to the city of Minsk.

During a mandatory medical examination it was discovered that he was circumcised.

Pechersky recalled a German medical officer asking him: "Do you admit to being a Jew?" He admitted it, since any denial would result in a whipping, and was thrown into a cellar called "the Jewish grave" along with other Jewish prisoners of war, where for 10 days he sat in complete darkness, being fed 100 grams (3.5 oz) of wheat and a cup of water every second day.

On 20 August 1942 Pechersky was sent to a SS-operated Arbeitslager, a work camp, in Minsk.

The camp housed 500 Jews from the Minsk Ghetto, as well as Jewish Soviet POWs; there were also between 200–300 Soviet inmates whom the Germans labeled as incorrigible: people who were suspected of contacting the Soviet partisans and those who were repeatedly truant while working for the Germans.

The prisoners were starved and worked from dawn till dusk.

Pechersky wrote about the Minsk work camp:

"The German Nazi camp commandant didn't let a single day pass without killing someone. If you looked at his face you could tell he was a sadist. He was thin, his upper lip shaking and his left eye bloodshot. He always had a hangover or was drunk and committed unspeakable horrors. He shot people for no reason and his favorite hobby was commanding his dog to attack random people who were ordered not to defend themselves."

On 18 September 1943, Pechersky, along with 2,000 Jews from Minsk including about 100 Soviet Jewish POWs, was placed in a railway cattle wagon which arrived at the Sobibor extermination camp on 23 September 1943.

Eighty prisoners from the train, including Pechersky, were selected for work in Lager II.

The remaining 1,920 Jews were immediately led to the gas chambers.

Pechersky later recalled his thoughts as the train pulled up to Sobibor, "How many circles of hell were there in Dante's Inferno? It seems there were nine. How many have already passed? Being surrounded, being captured, camps in Vyazma, Smolensk, Borisov, Minsk... And finally I am here. What's next?"

The appearance of Soviet POWs produced an enormous impression on Sobibor prisoners: "hungry hope-filled eyes following their every move".

Pechersky wrote about his first day in Sobibor:

"I was sitting outside on a pile of logs in the evening with Solomon (Shlomo) Leitman, who subsequently became my top commander in the uprising. I asked him about the huge, strange fire burning 500 meters away from us behind some trees and about the unpleasant smell throughout the camp. He warned me that the guards forbade looking there, and told me that they are burning the corpses of my murdered comrades who arrived with me that day. I did not believe him, but he continued: He told me that the camp existed for more than a year and that almost every day a train came with two thousand new victims who are all murdered within a few hours. He said around 500 Jewish prisoners – Polish, French, German, Dutch and Czechoslovak work here and that my transport was the first one to bring Russian Jews. He said that on this tiny plot of land, no more than 10 hectares [24.7 acres or .1 square kilometer], hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, children and men were murdered.

I thought about the future.

Should I try to escape alone or with a small group?

Should I leave the rest of the prisoners to be tortured and murdered?

I rejected this thought."

During his third day at Sobibor, Alexander Pechersky earned the respect of fellow prisoners by standing up to Karl Frenzel, a SS senior officer, as the incident was recalled by Leon Feldhendler.

"Pechersky, still wearing his Soviet Army uniform, was assigned to dig up tree stumps in the North Camp. Frenzel was in charge because an underling was elsewhere and was in a bad mood. Frenzel was waiting for an excuse to pick on someone since he considered himself an officer and a gentleman and waited for some reason to begin his sadistic games. One Dutch Jew was too weak to chop a stump so Frenzel began beating him with his whip.

Pechersky stopped chopping and watched the whipping while resting on his axe.

Kapo Porzyczki translated when Frenzel asked Pechersky if he didn't like what he saw.

Pechersky didn't bow down, shake or cower in fear but answered, Yes Oberscharführer.

Frenzel told Pechersky that he had 5 minutes to split a large tree stump in two.

If Pechersky beat the time he would receive a pack of cigarettes, if he lost, he would be whipped 25 times.

In 1948, Pechersky was arrested by the Soviet authorities along with his brother during the countrywide Rootless cosmopolitan campaign against Jews suspected of pro-Western leanings but released later due in part to mounting international pressure.

Pechersky was prevented by the Soviet government from leaving the country to testify in international trials related to Sobibor, including the Eichmann Trial in Israel; foreign investigators were only allowed to collect his testimony under KGB supervision.

The last time he was refused permission to exit the country and testify was in 1987, for a trial in Poland.