Leon Feldhendler
Leon Feldhendler , also Felhendler or Lejb Feldhendler (* 1910 in Żółkiewka in the Generalgouvernement Warsaw , Russian Empire ; † April 2, 1945 in Lublin ) was a Polish Holocaust survivor. Together with Alexander Pechersky , he planned and led the successful Sobibór uprising in the Sobibor extermination camp from October 14, 1943.
Life
Leon Feldhendler was the son of a Polish rabbi . As a former member of the Żółkiewka Jewish Council , Feldhendler was deported to the Sobibor camp in 1942. When the deportation train arrived at the ramp, it was selected from the group of those arriving to take on special tasks. He spent more than a year in the camp. During this time he witnessed several attempts to escape, which the SS always responded to with acts of revenge.
In the summer of 1943, the camp inmates learned of the defeat of Stalingrad and the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto . In addition, Himmler's announcement on July 5, 1943, that the Sobibor extermination camp would be converted into a concentration camp became known . Feldhendler feared that all witnesses to the mass murders should be gotten out of the way and came to the conclusion that only a mass flight of all prisoners would lead to a solution.
Between mid-July and the end of August 1943, Feldhendler developed various escape plans. A plan stipulated that the young people between the ages of 14 and 16 should kill the SS men in the early morning, take their weapons and then forward them to the adults. The escape would then take place together with the Trawniki . Another plan was to set the camp on fire or to overcome the barriers through a tunnel. However, all plans failed due to the lack of a personality with suitable, possibly military leadership experience. Feldhendler finally found this in the Dutch Jew Joseph Jacobs. However, his escape plan was revealed. The SS tried to use torture to find out who was behind it, but Jacobs stuck to his statement that he wanted to flee alone. In revenge, he was shot along with 72 other Dutch Jews.
Feldhendler finally allied himself with Alexander Petscherski, who was interned in the camp on September 23, 1943, through a contact made by the Polish Jew Shlomo Litman . They knew each other from the SS camp in Minsk , where Pechersky was previously imprisoned. Feldhendler and Pecherski planned the escape together with a small group of initiated men. At 4 p.m. on October 14, 1943, the captured forced laborers succeeded in killing eleven SS men on the spot. Between 300 and 600 prisoners were able to overcome the barriers. Despite high losses, around 150 prisoners were able to overcome both the electrically charged barbed wire fence and the minefield. Field traders fled to the forest near the camp and escaped his pursuers.
Until the end of the war he hid in Lublin with Chaskiel Menche, a fellow prisoner of Sobibor, and Moshe Blank. On April 2, 1945, Feldhendler and Blank were shot dead by a soldier of the Polish Home Army in an argument, allegedly over a love affair .
literature
- Jules Schelvis : Sobibór extermination camp . Unrast-Verlag , Hamburg / Münster 2003, ISBN 3-89771-814-6
- Aleksandr Pechersky : Report on the uprising in Sobibor . Ed .: Ingrid Damerow. Metropol Verlag , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86331-387-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . P. 11 and p. 319 note 4 (see literature)
- ↑ Escape from Sobibor ( Memento from May 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ The Nizkor Project
- ↑ Tomorrow we will flee . In: Die Zeit , No. 42/1991
- ↑ Schelvis: Sobiór extermination camp . P. 276
- ↑ auschwitz.dk ( Memento from February 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Feldhendler, Leon |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Felhendler, Leon; Feldhendler, Lejb |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Polish organizer of the revolt in the Sobibor extermination camp |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1910 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Żółkiewka |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 2, 1945 |
| Place of death | Lublin |