It was on the basis of an interview Yehuda Lerner gave me in 1979, during the filming of Shoah, that I made Sobibor, October 14 1943, 4 p.m.
Sobibor occupies a crucial place in Shoah, and the revolt in the extermination camp is evoked very early on by the Pole Jan Piwonski, at the time an assistant ticket collector at the station.
Piwonski witnessed the construction of the camp and the arrival of the first gas convoy. But unlike my Treblinka, Chelmo and Auschwitz-Birkenau films, there was no Jewish protagonist in Sobibor. I had, however, filmed at length with Ada Lichtman and her husband, who escaped during the uprising, and above all with Yehuda Lerner, who was the hero of the uprising with his indefatigable and indomitable courage.
The Sobibor uprising could not be a moment in the Shoah: it deserved a film in its own right, it deserved to be treated for its own sake. Indeed, it is a paradigmatic example of what I have elsewhere called the "reappropriation" of force and violence by the Jews. The Shoah was not only a massacre of innocents, but also precisely a massacre of defenseless people, deceived at every stage of the destruction process and right up to the doors of the torture chambers. We must do justice to a double legend: that the Jews allowed themselves to be gassed without foreboding or suspicion, that their death was "gentle", and that they put up no resistance to their executioners.
Not to mention the great revolts, such as that in the Warsaw ghetto, but there were many acts of bravery and freedom, both individual and collective, in the camps and ghettos: insults, curses, suicides, desperate assaults.Yet it is true that a thousand years of exile and persecution had not prepared the great majority of Jews 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 soldier by trade and therefore no stranger to the use of weapons, who decided, planned and organized the insurrection in barely six weeks. Deported to Sobibor at the beginning of September 1943 with other Jews, also Red Army soldiers, Perchersky was lucky enough not to be immediately sent to the gas chambers, like the rest of his comrades: of the 1,200 people who made up this group, the Germans selected around 60 men who were urgently needed for labor and maintenance work. Their turn to die would come a little later, as would that of the cobblers, tailors, goldsmiths, lingerie workers and a few children, who had resided for months or weeks in the part of the camp known as "camp number 1" ("camp number 2", where the gas chambers were located, being the death camp proper, which adjoined the first) and formed a slave labor force at the sole service of the Nazis, itself periodically liquidated.
Alexander Petchersky is no more. Other participants in the revolt are still alive, 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 Yehuda Lerner's footsteps, so I went back to Poland, to Belarus, to Sobibor itself, where I hadn't been 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 a day runs from Chelm to Wlodawa and back. The ramp where over 250,000 Jews disembarked, which was once a grassy embankment, is now crudely cemented to allow the loading of logs. Yet five years ago, the Polish government decided to build a small, moving museum with a red roof at Sobibor. Similarly, in Wlodawa, the synagogue whose courtyard was used as a truck parking lot in 1978 has also been transformed into a museum, and is now surrounded by a pretty park with soft grass. But museums and commemorations institute oblivion as much as memory. Let's listen to Yehuda Lerner's vivid words.
