Boek

Selma Leydesdorff

Sasha Pechersky

De Russische soldaat die de opstand van Sobibor leidde

An extraordinary biography of a forgotten hero

On 14th October 1943, Aleksandr ‘Sasha’ Pechersky led a mass escape from Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Despite his role in one of the few prisoner revolts at a World War II death camp, Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved in his home country of Russia. In her book, Selma Leydesdorff describes the official silence in the Eastern Bloc about Pechersky’s role in the Sobibor revolt.

Pechersky (1909 – 1990) was a Russian Jew and Red Army lieutenant who arrived in Sobibor as the commander of a group of eighty Russian prisoners. The Germans kept them alive because they needed their workforce in order to build a new part of the camp. But they seriously underestimated the physical and mental strength of the group. Pechersky organized the revolt in just twenty-two days with the help of an already existing Polish underground network and his Russian comrades.

Pechersky, along with other Russian and Jewish inmates who had been interned by the Nazis, was later considered suspect by the Russian government simply because he had been imprisoned. Based on eyewitness accounts from people in Pechersky’s life, the story is a discussion of the mechanism of memory, mixing written sources with varied recollections and assessing the collisions between the collective memories held by the East and the West. Specifically, the book critiques the ideological refusal by many societies to acknowledge the horrors suffered by the Jews at Sobibor.

This story of a forgotten hero also reveals the tremendous difference in memorial cultures between the West and the former Communist world. Leydesdorff, a professor of oral history, offers an important insight into a crucial period, emphasizing that Jews were not passive in the face of German violence, and explores the story of those Jews who fell victim to Stalinism after surviving Nazism.

Leydesdorff writes on Sasha Pechersky: ‘After the war, he was initially considered a traitor. He then fell victim to the rise of Stalinist anti-Semitism. Now people in Moscow and Israel are lobbying for his recognition. I am glad that my research is helping to break through the consciously political silence about him, as Pechersky is a Jewish hero to me.’

It has taken a long time for Sasha Pechersky, the unsung hero of the 1943 revolt in the Sobibor death camp, to find the right voice to tell his story. Selma Leydesdorff’s sad and tragic tale describes the evil he overcame and the injustice that defeated him ‘in a world that remained dark.’ Her love of truth and her passion for history, compelled by her own family’s loss years ago, highlights the quick success and slow demise of this Russian Jew’s remarkable courage and idealism.

Robert Skloot, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Selma Leydesdorff

Selma Leydesdorff (b. 1949) is an historian and emeritus professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is internationally recognised as a prominent researcher in the field of oral history. Previous titles include We Lived With Dignity: Amsterdam’s Jewish proletariat from 1900 –1940 and Water

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Details

Sasha Pechersky. De Russische soldaat die de opstand van Sobibor leidde (2018). Non-fictie, 352 pagina's.

Complete English translation available

Thema's: WOII

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