Mead Fellow Quin McGlame recently sat down with TJ Sparno and Alex Willard, both freshmen in Professor Kassow’s class, HIST-226 “The Rise of Modern Russia”. The class recently attended a screening of Deadly Deception at Sobibor, a film released in 2023 by Gary Hochman, a native of Springfield, MA, now living in North Haven. The film shares the story of the top-secret Nazi death camp, Sobibor, in Poland where more than 250,000 Jews were murdered in its time of operation from 1942-1943. After a staged revolt, more than 300 people escaped. Sobibor was quickly shut down with attempts by the Nazis to erase the horrors that occurred there. The uprising was led by Alexander Pechersky, a Russian who fought for the Red Army in The Battle of Moscow before his unit was captured by the Nazis, along with Leon Feldhendler, the leader of the Polish Jewish prisoners. While Pechersky and his men knew how to fight, they knew very little about Sobibor as they had just arrived before the uprising took place, whereas Feldhendler and his colleagues had been at Sobibor for months. With the combination of manpower and an insight into how the death camp operated, the two groups were able to combine and lead a successful uprising. The film picks up in 2008, when a team of archaeologists began to investigate the site, where all that remained were two statues that acknowledged the atrocities, with the team wanting to dig and see what artifacts lay below. For more than ten years, the team scientifically excavated the area and found artifacts from the camp and were able to piece together the mystery of what Sobibor looked like, as no archival pictures were available.
Both TJ and Alex were fascinated by the film, and neither knew of the Sobibor camp and what happened there. Alex remembered one of the first shots of the film when the team first visited the site and thought it was odd that this peaceful forest in Poland was hiding such evil secrets below the surface. Similarly, TJ was impressed by the team’s effort, which largely consisted of volunteers who thought this project was important enough to contribute and share their findings with the world. Going off this, TJ emphasized how important films like Deadly Deception at Sobibor are in educating and reminding the world of the Nazi’s crimes and that the film serves as a warning sign of what could happen if history repeated itself. Alex was fascinated by the use of technology in this historical film, especially the 3D computer renderings of the camp as the team discovered more and more beneath the ground.
Both students also agreed on how the film added to their knowledge in Professor Kassow’s class and of the Russian people, especially in a pivotal time like World War II. Both emphasized the idea of the “Russian Spirit”, which describes the uniqueness of the Russian National Identity. Alex mentioned the fighting in Moscow during Operation Barbarossa, with the German forces only a mile away from the Kremlin, but that the Russian spirit fought for their homeland and refused to suffer defeat. He saw this spirit again in Alexander Pechersky, who helped lead the uprising, and his willingness to not accept defeat and wanted his escape even if it cost him his life. The group was also equally united as they were all Jewish, which transcended any kind of nationality. As such, they fought alongside each other for the survival and freedom of the Jewish people. Uprisings in Nazi concentration camps were sporadic, and Alex wanted to highlight this point and the fact that a Russian soldier helped lead the biggest uprising in any of the concentration camps during the Holocaust.
