ABSTRACT
Sobibor was sealed off from its immediate surroundings geographically, but the camp was not isolated from the rest of the world. By 1943, Byelorussia and Eastern Poland had become major battlefields for a tenacious fight between partisans and occupiers. Between 1941 and 1943, underground resistance movements developed in approximately 100 ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. In a study of the historiography of the resistance of Jews against the Germans, historian Michael Marrus argues that after the war the accusation was made, by resistance fighters themselves that the Jews had gone to their deaths "like sheep to the slaughter". The resistance in Sobibor is rooted in a world in which Jews began to defend themselves and where they did fight. During the summer of 1943, the inmates of Treblinka staged an uprising that had as its main goal to inform the outside world about the mass exterminations.
