Book dossier

Escape from Sobibor

by Richard L. Rashke, Richard Rashke

It was the scene of the biggest prison escape of World War II, yet hardly anyone has heard of Sobibor, one of three Nazi death camps in eastern Poland, where six hundred Jews revolted against their guards and broke through the walls. Three hundred of them made it to the woods of Sobibor, the forest of the owls. Because the Nazis destroyed all the physical evidence and all but three documents about the camp, even historians of the Holocaust scarcely mention Sobibor. But the Nazis did not destroy all the evidence. More than thirty survivors are still alive -- including the Red Army officer-prisoner who led the revolt -- and Richard Rashke has sought them out. From their diaries, notes, testimony at war crimes trials, and, above all, from their vivid memories, he has re-created an important piece of neglected history. In addition to recounting the compelling story of the uprising and the escape, Rashke gives us an unforgettable picture of the day-to-day existence in a Nazi death camp where a quarter of a million Jews were killed. - Jacket flap.