- published: 24 Sep 2014
- views: 409
Leon Feldhendler (Lejb Feldhendler) (1910 – 6 April 1945), was a Polish-Jewish resistance fighter known for his role in organizing, with Alexander Pechersky, the 1943 prisoner uprising at the Sobibor extermination camp. Prior to his deportation to Sobibor, Feldhendler had been head of the Judenrat (Ger. "Jewish Council") in his village of Żółkiewka, Lublin Voivodeship, in German-occupied Poland.
In the spring of 1943, Feldhendler led a small group of Sobibor prisoners formulating an escape plan. Their initial plan had been to poison camp guards and seize their weapons, but the SS discovered the poison and shot five Jews in retaliation. Other plans included setting the camp on fire and escaping in the resulting confusion, but the mining of the camp perimeter by the SS in the summer of 1943 rendered the plan impractical.
The arrival in a transport of Soviet POWs of Red Army officer Alexander Pechersky in late September gave new impetus to the escape plans. A seasoned soldier, Pechersky soon assumed the leadership of the group of would-be escapees and, with Feldhendler as his deputy, the group formed a plan that involved killing the camp's SS personnel, sending the Soviet POWs to raid the arsenal and then fighting their way out the camp's front gate.
Actors: Georges Delerue (composer), Keith Palmer (editor), Predrag Milinkovic (actor), Howard K. Smith (actor), Joanna Pacula (actress), Jack Gold (director), Svetolik Nikacevic (actor), Henning Gissel (actor), Mihailo 'Misa' Janketic (actor), Jack Shepherd (actor), Kurt Raab (actor), Alan Arkin (actor), Rutger Hauer (actor), Irfan Mensur (actor), Cheryl Leigh (miscellaneous crew),
Plot: During WWII, the death camp at Treblinka had an escape, causing the Commandant at a similar camp in Sobibor to vow that his camp would never experience the same thing. But those who were its captives, the Jewish laborers that had been spared from the ovens, knew that they were on borrowed time and that their only hope was to escape... the only question was how to do it. However, because the Germans would kill an equal number of others whenever a group attempted to escape, the captives knew that if ever an escape was tried, all 600 prisoners in the camp would have to be included... logistically precluding any ideas about tunnels or sneak breakouts. Indeed, to have such a mass escape could only mean that the Ukrainian guards and Germain officers would have to be killed, which many of the Jews felt simply reduced themselves to no better than their captors... thus making it a struggle of conscience. And therein lies the story, with the film being based on a factual account of what then happened at that Sobibor prison.
Keywords: 1940s, axe, baby-killer, bare-butt, based-on-novel, based-on-true-story, beaten-to-death, beating, blood, brutality