ABSTRACT
Aleksandr Pechersky had arrived in Sobibor death camp 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. Pechersky was able to act at a moment when the war was turning against the Nazis. Even before the battle of Stalingrad ended in February 1943, it was clear that the Germans could not win the war. When Pechersky rejoined the Red Army in Belarus at the end of the war in 1944, it was not a moment of liberation but a time of retribution. Never recognized as a hero, Pechersky was falsely accused of corruption and lost his position and social network during the Stalinist anti-cosmopolitan campaign. In the film Escape from Sobibor Pechersky was portrayed as a superhero, hardly recognizable as an ordinary human being, let alone as a Jew.
