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Leon Feldhendler's Rebellion Essay

440 Words2 Pages

Many prisoners resisted the goals of the Nazis in many ways in the holocaust. In Sobibor, one of the ways the prisoners resisted was by revolting. There were a few Jewish resisters, including Leon Feldhendler and Aleksandr Pechersky. An underground movement, made up of a few people, made a plan. It was led by a Polish Jew named Leon Feldhendler, the son of a rabbi from the town of Zolkiewka.To not be caught, Feldhendler and his co-conspirators promised to not tell anyone until the last moment. Aleksandr Pechersky was a trained Jewish officer, who was deported from Minsk of Soviet Jewish prisoners of war. The people in the Jewish underground recruited him and put him in command. His deputy was Leon Feldhendler. Also, Thomas Blatt helped the prisoners attack and kill the SS officers, once they were lured into the storehouses.
The revolt was on October 14, 1943. At 4:00 p.m., the first SS soldier was killed with an axe. Ten more SS men and many Ukrainian guards were killed. …show more content…

The successes of the revolt were that many people escaped and that the Nazis were beaten. This would leave a mark in history. The challenges of the revolt were that they had keep the plan a secret until the last moment, they had to lure the officers into a trap without them suspecting anything, and out of the 300 people that escaped, only about 50 survived. Those 50 people had to avoid getting shot at, getting blown up by a mine, or getting killed in the forest. They went through a lot of challenges and risked their lives to make this plan work. The revolt which saved about fifty Jews is nothing compared to the six million Jews that were killed throughout the Holocaust. However, the revolt was effective because it proved that the Nazi extermination camps were not perfect. This led to the survival of fifty people who would leave a legacy. This revolt probably led to many other resistances in many other camps during the

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