Old Week
Abstract: "Escape from Sobibor" is a classic film based on real events in history, and the characters in the film, whether Jews or SS, are impressive, what is their archetype and true ending?
Figure 1: Stills from Escape from Sobibor, two escaped leaders Leon (left) and Sasha (right)
Escape from Sobibor is a classic film based on real events in history, and the characters in the film, whether Jews or SS, are impressive, but what is their archetype and true ending?
The end of the film is lao Zhou's favorite style, the Jews who successfully rushed out of the concentration camp and fled into the forest, the camera is fixed one by one, introducing the ending of this person one by one, but the introduction in the film is very simple, and Lao Zhou will talk about it in detail.
The first was leon, the leader of the Jewish people who planned and organized the escape, he was originally a Jew in Lublin, Poland, his family was a flour mill, and he had also served as a city councilor in Lublin, so he had a brain and insight, and he was very capable of dealing with various complex matters, so he still had great prestige in places like concentration camps, and it was also desirable to become the leader of the escape. In particular, after he saw that others had failed to escape from prison, the SS not only executed the escapees, but also executed other innocents as a warning to others. Leon decided not to organize a few escapes, but to organize the collective escapes of the entire camp.
It should be under the noses of the Nazi death camps and the demons of hell, the prison escapes, and the collective escape of everyone in the entire camps – Presumably most people don't even dare to think about it! And he thought so, and according to this idea to make a plan, is definitely a bold, knowledgeable and principled cattle man!
In his escape from prison, Leon also managed to escape from the Cave and survive until the end of the war, but was soon killed in an anti-Semitic riot in the local area – it must be noted that there was anti-Semitic anti-Semitism in all european countries, not Nazi Germany, but the Nazis intensified their efforts to raise anti-Semitism to the level of genocide. Leon's ending is really breathtaking, if he has the opportunity to go to Israel, it is likely to make a difference in Israeli politics, after all, he is very capable of leadership.
The second was a Soviet officer Sasha, full name Alexander Pichelsky, a Soviet Jew who graduated from Rostov State University in the USSR and was a music teacher who signed up for the army on the first day of the Soviet-German War on June 22, 1941, and participated in several battles, and was later captured in the 1941 Siege of Vyazma, west of Moscow, when he was already a lieutenant officer. Found Jewish in a German prisoner-of-war camp, he was sent to Sobibor in September 1943 along with dozens of other Soviet prisoners of war, the highest-ranking officer among the Jewish prisoners of war.
Figure 2: Sasha in the play
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He soon builds trust with Leon and co-leads the collective escape. Without this group of prisoners of war, the escape from prison is likely to fail, after all, the soldiers with formal military training are still different from ordinary people, and for such a clear military operation as prison escape, they have more advantages in planning, organizing and implementing, and it is precisely under sasha's strong cooperation that the escape from prison has been successful.
Figure 3: The real-life Alexander Pichersky
After escaping from the camp, Sasha found and joined the Belarusian Schells guerrillas and continued to fight the Germans. Later, the main Soviet army counterattacked, and the guerrillas and the main force met the division in victory. Sasha was censored for his previous captivity and was subsequently assigned to the 15th Correctional Battalion of the 1st Baltic Front, where he had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant by the end of the war for his bravery. After the war he lived in his hometown of Rostov and worked as manager of an opera house until his death in 1990. In 2007, the Rostov municipality named a street in front of The Bichersky House after him as a memorial to this period of history.
In the play, in order to negotiate with Leon often without being suspected, Leon arranges a Jewish girl Luca for Sasha, under the cover of falling in love. But this fake love affair, which lasts only two weeks, makes Luca fall in love with the resolute and courageous Sasha, who rejects Luca's feelings because he already has a wife and daughter - in this episode, Sasha is at a loss for Luca's confession, neither wanting to hurt Luca nor sorry for his wife, and does not know how to deal with this situation.
This is not a movie made up, and even if it is made up, it is completely reasonable. This is really a true story, which is more dramatic than the Hollywood Ah Qing movie.
Luca also gave Sasha a hand-sewn shirt that she hoped would bring him good luck. Sasha wore this lucky shirt on the day of his escape from prison, and today it is in the Minsk War Museum as a symbol of the oppressed's resistance to tyranny and their quest for freedom.
As for Luka, she was seen running into the forest, but after that there was no news of her, and after the war Sasha and many survivors of Sobiburg went to eastern Poland to look for it, but nothing was found, and she disappeared into the forest...
Figure 4: Luca in the play
There was also a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Jewish teenager Solomon, the name of the third king of ancient Israel in 1000 BC, who was a goldsmith who could make goldware, so when he arrived at Sobibor, he was not sent to the gas chamber, but was left to make various gold jewelry for the SS, of course, the raw materials were gold necklaces, gold rings and even gold teeth of the murdered Jews.
Figure 5: Stills, gold necklaces, gold rings, and even gold teeth of the murdered Jews
When Solomon learns that his family was killed when he arrives at Sobibor, he is extremely determined to take revenge! He played an important role in the subsequent escape operation, using the tools used to forge gold to secretly make more than a dozen daggers, and also stole three rifles from the regular meeting, which is also the most important weapon of the prison escapee.
The character was interesting, and he was in love with a Jewish girl in the concentration camp, but the girl was several years older than him, so he initially rejected him, but he said, "If I were eating an apple for the first time, I would definitely not pick a green apple." On a later escape from prison, Solomon managed to escape into the forest, while his girlfriend fell halfway down the road!
Figure 6: Stills, Solomon picks up his girlfriend who was shot and fell down during his escape
Solomon later joined the partisans and lived until the end of the war. After the war, he emigrated to Brazil and continued to work tirelessly to track down the remnants of the Nazis who had fled to South America.
After talking about the positive characters, let's talk about the villains, the SS guards in the concentration camps. At that time, these SS soldiers, in the eyes of the Jews, were nothing less than demons, they held the power of life and death of the Jews, a gesture determined the life and death of a person, in their view, the Jews wearing the big satellite logo were the lambs they slaughtered. As everyone knows, during the war, the revenge of the Jews began, and later in the war, Jewish soldiers in the Allied forces arrested these executioners whose hands were stained with Jewish blood, some were sent to court-martial, and some were directly lynched. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the hunt for the remnants of the Nazis was an extremely important task. The most classic is that the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, pursued the murderer from Argentina and "arrested" the famous "concentration camp butcher" Adolf Eichmann - to be precise, kidnapped back to Israel for trial, and finally sentenced to hanging, which can also be regarded as revenge for the arrow of the year.
The image of the SS in the play is very well shaped, which can be called the classic of the SS on the screen, and the indomitable looks of these SS soldiers, the brutality of whipping Jews, and the cold-bloodedness when killing people can be described as three points.
Figure 7: The SS image in the play is portrayed in three points
SS Commando Squadron Leader (equivalent to Captain) Franz Steinger is the commander of the Sobiburg concentration camp, the first in command, but he does not appear much in the play, as if only at the beginning of the film, a train transporting Jews is coming, the Jewish labor in the concentration camp is lined up on the platform, and Steinger gives a lecture, mainly meaning that if you do not work seriously, you will be executed.
A few months before his escape, he was transferred to another death camp, where he fled first to Syria and finally to Brazil after the war. In 1967 he was arrested by Brazilian police, extradited to West Germany, and sentenced to life in prison. He died of a heart attack in prison in 1971.
The most impressive and ferocious SS in the play is the second in command of the concentration camp, the SS second commando squadron leader (equivalent to lieutenant) Gustav Wagner, who served as a judicial policeman before the war, as a concentration camp guard, it is his job, it seems that the SS is still very good at playing the strengths of each member. What Wagner did in Sobibor was inhumane and one of the most cruel demons. Killing the old Jewish man who slapped the SS, killing the Jewish mother and son who hid the baby, and letting the 13 Jews who failed to escape from prison each find a companion to execute together are his "masterpieces".
Figure 8: Wagner in reality
The day before his escape, he happened to leave the camp on business, so he was not in the camp on the day of his escape, otherwise he would have been the first culprit to be killed by the Jews! After the defeat of the Nazis, he fled to Brazil, but was sentenced to death in absentia by the International Court of Justice at Nuremberg. He surrendered himself in Brazil in the 1970s, but was not extradited to West Germany or Israel because of the patronage of local pro-Nazi forces and remained at large. He also gave interviews to the BBC in which he had shown no remorse for what he had done, saying that he had acted on orders and pushed his sins clean. In 1980, he was killed in his apartment in São Paulo, Brazil, with a knife in his heart, but officially considered it a "suicide" – apparently revenge on the Jews, and don't forget, Solomon was also in Brazil, and he had participated in many hunts against the SS guards in concentration camps!
Another SS guard was Karl Frenzier, the SS Commando Squad Leader (equivalent to Sergeant Major), a carpenter before the war, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, the SS in 1939, and was transferred to the Sobiburg concentration camp in 1942 as commander of The First Zone (i.e., responsible for gas chamber killings and crematoria sparks).
He was also one of the most brutal guards in Sobiborough, and at one time two prisoners escaped, and Carl personally singled out twenty prisoners to send to the gas chambers in retaliation. In the play he is the SS who was slapped by the old Jewish man. Since the First District was the most egregious and evil act, it was isolated from the other camps, and he was not killed by the Jews. After the escape, he became the highest-ranking guard in the entire camp, responsible for arranging the subsequent search.
Figure 9: Carl in the play (left, holding a submachine gun)
After Sobibor's escape, the Sobiburg concentration camp was abandoned by order of the SS chief Himmler, and both Wagner and Karl were transferred to other camps to continue as guards.
After the war, he escaped in anonymity and was not reported to prison until 1962, but by this time West Germany had abolished the death penalty, so he escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to life imprisonment, and was released on parole in 1982 for health reasons.
After Karl was released from prison, he offered to meet the survivors of Sobiburg, and under the arrangement of the West German government, Zaif, a survivor of Sobiburg, came to West Germany to meet with Karl. Zaif was only fifteen years old when he was in Sobibor, the little boy in the film who ran around to deliver letters, and he was lucky enough to live until the end of the war and later settled in the United States. Although Karl was already a sick and weak old man when they met, Zaif recognized Carl at a glance, and he had wiped his boots for Carl, remembering his smiling expression and the chilling leather whip in his hand.
Figure 10: Zaif and Karl's meeting
Zaif curiously asked Karl why he wanted to see the survivors of Sobibor, karl replied in order to apologize to his face, he admitted that he had killed people with his own hands, and he had also commanded Ukrainian guards to kill people, but this was all the mistake of the war, the war changed a lot of people, he was originally a carpenter, so he hoped to get the forgiveness of the survivors before dying, like a carpenter, like an ordinary person to leave this world.
But Zaif ultimately did not accept his apology. Karl continued to seek apologies from survivors of Sobibor, who did not die until 1996.
War does change many people, but in the face of killing, even if there is an order, will you raise the muzzle of the gun by an inch, or will you join forces? Zaif, who later became a writer and historian, had this to say in his book: "You don't know yourself, you only know who you are when disaster strikes." ”
(The picture of this article is from the network)