Richard Rashke's Escape From Sobibor
In the "New Afterword" to the 1995 reprint of Escape From Sobibor, Richard Rashke makes explicit what was already implicit in the original 1982 edition. He forthrightly challenges historians of the Holocaust to reexamine a "flawed premise" of much of their writing. Unconsciously accepting the flawed premise that "if the Nazis...did not give it much significance, it wasn't significant," Rashke argues, historians have distorted the nature of the Jewish response to the Final Solution. Most historians have mistakenly portrayed Jews "as a flock of sheep on the road to slaughter," he insists, "causing intense suffering and irreparable damage to the Jewish people." He offers his own book as an antidote. The story of the escape from Sobibor and those who survived it, he argues, "represents the buried stories of hundreds of thousands who fought and died in ghettos no one ever heard of; who tried to escape on the way to camps but never made it; who fought back inside camps but were killed anyway; who managed to escape only to be recaptured and executed; who formed or joined partisan groups from the woods of Vilna to the forest of the owls and who never saw liberation...." I find Rashke's argument very convincing, and I would like to encourage others who teach about the Holocaust to join me in reexamining the way we present the Jewish response to the Final Solution to our students.
Rashke's book provided the basis for a film of the same title which was first televised in 1987 and which is still available on videocassette. The film, which tells the story of the planning and successful execution of a mass escape from one of the three major Operation Reinhard death camps, Sobibor, in eastern Poland, has been widely used by teachers to illustrate Jewish resistance to the Final Solution. Rashke's book, however, goes far beyond what is depicted in the film. In fact, Rashke notes in his "New Afterword", a sequel to the original film, tentatively subtitled "The Aftermath," had already been scripted, when its sponsor, the Chrysler Corporation, decided not to proceed with the project in face of a lawsuit filed by a chapter of the Ukrainian Congress Committee. Without making any judgment about the appropriateness or the merits of the lawsuit, I think it is unfortunate for those of us who teach about the Holocaust that the sequel was never made.
The historical documentary directed by James Moll, The Last Days, exemplifies the cruel conditions and sufferings of the Jewish people through firsthand accounts of five survivors. At night, Rabbi Eliahu and his son marched together from the concentration camp in Buna to a different camp in Buchenwald. When they marched to Buchenwald, the son “.had seen [Rabbi Eliahu] losing ground.he had continued to run in front, letting the distance between them become greater” (Wiesel 91). When Rabbi Eliahu’s son sees him fall while marching, the son continues to march forward and leaves his father behind.
The book took place from 1944 - 1945 on Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald towards the end of World War II.
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
The Holocaust is a topic that is still not forgotten and is used by many people, as a motivation, to try not to repeat history. Many lessons can be taught from learning about the Holocaust, but to Eve Bunting and Fred Gross there is one lesson that could have changed the result of this horrible event. The Terrible Things, by Eve Bunting, and The Child of the Holocaust, by Fred Gross, both portray the same moral meaning in their presentations but use different evidence and word choice to create an overall
Many different responses have occurred to readers after their perusal of this novel. Those that doubt the stories of the holocaust’s reality see Night as lies and propaganda designed to further the myth of the holocaust. Yet, for those people believing in the reality, the feelings proffered by the book are quite different. Many feel outrage at the extent of human maliciousness towards other humans. Others experience pity for the loss of family, friends, and self that is felt by the Holocaust victims.
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
Rosenbaum, Alan S. Is The Holocaust Unique?. 3rd ed. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2008. 387. Print.
Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg has said, “There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.” The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind, consisting of the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped and many others during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, and his army of Nazis and SS troops carried out the terrible proceedings of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and suffers a relentless “night” of terror and torture in which humans were treated as animals. Wiesel discovers the “Kingdom of Night” (118), in which the history of the Jewish people is altered.
“BBC TWO unravels the secrets of Auschwitz.” BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation, 12 Mar. 2004. Web. 4 Mar. 2014
Levi, Neil, and Michael Rothberg. The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Print.
Dwork, Deborah, and R. J. Van Pelt. Holocaust: a History. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.
Bard, Mitchell G., ed. "Introduction." Introduction. The Holocaust. San Diego: Greenhaven, 2001.
"A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims." A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims. University of South Florida. Web. 19 May 2014.
Escape from Sobibor, is a reverent account of prisoners from the concentration camp Sobibor, who made one of the most daring and courageous escapes in World War II history. Following real accounts of eighteen individuals who survived the escape, the author, Richard Rashke, tells the story of cruelty, desolation and ultimately the will to live so that others could know what happened.