Disclaimer: I received a copy via Netgalley in exchange for a review.tWay back, in the 80s, television use to have movies, made for TV movies. Sometimes they were like the garbage that Lifetime puts on, but sometimes they were actually good. One of the good ones was about an escape from a Nazi Death Camp. I thought of it when I saw this title offered at Netgalley. It turns out this is the back the movie drew on.tRichard Rashke relates the determined revolt and escape of several prisoners of the Sobiber killing camp during the Holocaust. As a killing camp, Sobiber only had a small number of Jewish prisoners who were useful in a variety of ways, either to bury (dispose) of the dead, to sort the belongings of the dead, and to produced items of use to the camp or desired by the Nazis who ran it. Rashke starts the story with a brief introduction to Shlomo, a young man whose family was sent to the camp but who was pulled out of the gas chamber side because of his knowledge of working gold. He was able to save some of his family members, and only later found out what happened to the rest of his family, including his father, mother, and sister.tThe book is divided into three sections with a postscript/epilogue as well as afterword. The first section introduces the reader to the prisoners who were for the most part non-military and male. Women were in short supply and were not usually pulled out of those who sent to the gas chamber. The few expectations to the non military group are a bunch of Russians, including Russian Jews, who were in the Russian military and were sent to the camp (Russians were considered just a step above Jews). The prisoners, however, had been planning an escape long before the Russians were added to the camp.t The first section doesn’t over romanticize or heroize the prisoners, but instead makes them human flaws and all. Not all prisoners are detailed, but a core group including those who formed the central escape committee. Rashke not only details their pre-war and wartime lives, but he also showcases what they did to survive as well as the hard choices and decisions that they had to make. Rashke also gives some description and information about the Nazis who ran the camp, the focus, however, is not the Nazi barbarity but the strength of the prisoners who keep their humanity, intelligence, and fight back. It is also on the struggle to get out information and to make the Allies publicized the information.tThe second section of the book details the prisoner’s escape into the surrounding forest. It includes a look at the relationships that develops between various prisoners such as Chaim and Selma as well as the escape itself. The third section details the time in the forest, who lives and who dies, what the others do once they escape. The afterword and epilogue includes an essay about Rashke and his interviewing of key members of the escape as well as his thoughts after the filming of the movie.tIt should be noted that this is history told in novel like form, a format that I am not a huge fan of, and no doubt affects my rating of this book. It’s more than a four but not quite a five simply due to the narrative choice. Rashke does tell a story and because of the holding back of the afterword, the reader is caught up in the fight for freedom and survives. The novel speaks to greater themes such as the idea of living free or dying. As well as the desire to live even as the world around you wishes you to die.
Find this and other reviews at: http://flashlightcommentary.blogspot....I owe my discovery of Richard Rashke's Escape from Sobibor to my father. He introduced me to the death camp in one of our notorious late night discussions and his account of operations within the compound and the subsequent uprising that took place there were so captivating that I took it upon myself to learn more about the remarkably obscure chapter of Operation Reinhard. Rashke's was the first title Google turned up and thanks to Open Library, it was also freely available for download. I felt providence was on my side and I checked it out thinking myself well-prepared for the material it promised to address. A WWII junkie, I'd studied Auschwitz–Birkenau, Treblinka, Theresienstadt and Ravensbrück in some detail and couldn't imagine the accounts of this camp being much different. It took only a few pages for me to realize how wrong that assumption had been. Broken into three sections, the book is extraordinarily comprehensive. It covers the prisoners, their lives before transportation, life and death behind Sobibor's barbed wire, the soldiers, their duties, the planning phase of the uprising, the execution of the mass escape and the events that followed in the surrounding forests. I spent almost a month wading through the accounts Rashke painstaking recorded within these pages, but I don't regret a minute of it. I put the book aside several times to process and consider events as I discovered them, but the publication was never far from my mind. Fact is it dominated my imagination and challenged my perception in ways I hadn't expected when I first cracked it open. It put my brain into overdrive and I liked the depth and dimension it brought to the subject matter.Exceedingly intense, the book itself is a brilliant blend of historic detail and raw human emotion. Poignant, powerful, unapologetic and ofttimes overwhelming, Escape From Sobibor is easily the best Holocaust book I've had fortune to pick up. A highly recommended and unique volume that deserves a place in every WWII library collection.
Do You like book Escape From Sobibor (1995)?
The 2012 kindle edition of this book, originally published in 1982, baffled me at first due to its unique style. The first portion of the book reads like a novel in order to better convey what the individuals were thinking and feeling while imprisoned in this Nazi death camp in Poland. The later portion of the book tells the story of the author researching and interviewing the survivors. The author, Richard Rashke, does the difficult job of piecing together the individual recollections of the survivors to form the story of Sobibor. The unusual style put me off at first due to the lack of numbered notes, as is typical in a book of history. There are extensive notes at the back of the book with links to the page numbers, however. In the end, I think the decision to eliminate the typical footnotes/endnotes was wise. It would have detracted from the story as it was told in the first part of the book. The Holocaust is one of the most important pieces of human history. This book illuminates a small, but important, part of that horrible history and reminds us of why we must remember what happened. Highly recommended.
—Roger McFarland
Mr Rashke interviewed 7 of the survivors of Sobibor's escape in 1943. The book at times almost reads like a novel, but then returns to the darkness that was Sobibor and how these Jews were able to survive, escape and tell the world about Sobibor and what happened there. The great thing about this book is that it tells what happened and the aftermath of the survivors. He asks them all about how they deal with the escape and how Sobibor impacted their lives. The subjects are very candid about how in some ways they never escaped and Sobibor still haunts them even in 1981 when the book was first published. A compelling read for any Holocaust scholar or historian
—Chelly
This book really brings home the horrors of the Holocaust, and the will to survive that Jewish prisoners exhibited under horrendous conditions. I had never heard of Sobibor, one of the smaller and lesser-known extermination camps, before reading the book, but I will never forget it now. Life in the camp, and the planning for an escape attempt, are pieced together through interviews with the small number that survived to tell the story. The latter portion of the book encompasses the author's tracking down of survivors and getting them to tell their story. Escape from Sobibor is not a "fun" read, but a compelling read.
—John Findlay
