Alexander Pechersky
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Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky (February 22, 1909 – January 1990) was the organizer of a prisoner uprising at the Sobibór extermination camp in 1943.
[edit] Biography
Pechersky was born in Kremenchuk, Ukraine on February 22, 1909, and received a diploma for his studies in music and literature. In October 1941, he was conscripted into the Red Army as a junior officer.
In October 1941, Pechersky was taken prisoner by soldiers of the German Wehrmacht. After a failed escape attempt, it was discovered he was a Jewish. He was transferred he was sent to an SS labor camp in Minsk. He was later transferred to Sobibór in September, 1943. Due to his experience as a combat officer, Pechersky was approached by the leaders of the camp's resistance movement.
Impressed by Pechersky's ruthlessness and intelligence, they assisted him in masterminding a prisoner uprising which involved the assassination of Sobibór's SS officers. Each officer was lured to an isolated location and stabbed to death with knives made in the Camp's machine shop. The blood was covered up with sawdust poured on the floor. Halfway through the operation, the camp's Commandant learned of Pechersky's plans. Attired in full dress uniform as a Red Army Lieutenant, Pechersky gave a speech to the camp inmates and ordered them to break through the barbed wire and escape across a surounding minefield. Pechersky and several of his fellow Red Army POWs succeeded in escaping to the cover of the forest.
After Sobibór, he joined a unit of Soviet partisans and conducted guerilla warfare against the Nazis until a severe leg injury resulted in a medal for bravery. Afterwards, he returned to civilian life. After Joseph Stalin's invasion of Poland, Pechersky was arrested by the NKVD and charged with having allowed himself to be captured by the Nazis and sentenced to a long term in the Gulag camp. He was released amidst an international outcry over his role in the escape from Sobibór.
He died in January 1990 in Rostov-on-Don.
[edit] In popular culture
In the 1987 British movie Escape from Sobibor, Sasha Pechersky was played by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, who received a Golden Globe Award.
