Escape from Sobibor (1987) on Netflix
At Sobibor, the SS keeps the prisoners with trades alive to sort what the gas chambers leave behind. Leon Feldhendler leads them and devises a plan for every prisoner to escape.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.3/1010,984 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes82%
Trailer
Plot summary
A trainload of Polish Jews arrives at Sobibor, and the commandant tells them the place is a work camp. SS officers select the prisoners with trades, and the others go to a part of the camp where smoke rises day and night. Sobibor is a death camp, where Jews are killed in gas chambers and burned in ovens. Prisoners with skills are kept alive to sort the belongings of the murdered, repair shoes, recycle clothing and melt precious metals into jewelry for the SS. Leon Feldhendler is the leader of the prisoners.
Cast
- Eli Nathensonas Moses Szmajzner
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Escape from Sobibor (1987)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Blatt recalled escaping the camp with three others and being hidden by a farmer, who later came and shot him and his friends. Blatt took a bullet to his jaw and pretended to be dead as the farmer took his personal items.
- Arkin described in an interview how Blatt became "so excited" while scenes of the escape were being filmed that he joined the actors in escaping into the woods, and it took several hours to find him.
SPOILER
The film dramatizes a real 1943 uprising in which Sobibor's prisoners killed 11 German SS officers and several guards, and of roughly 300 inmates who escaped, only 50 to 70 avoided recapture and death.- A Ukrainian-American protest group sued CBS in June 1987, claiming the broadcast falsely depicted Ukrainians as 'Nazi mercenaries' and wrongly implied that all the camp's non-SS guards were Ukrainian.
- After the uprising, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered Sobibor closed, and the camp was bulldozed into the ground and planted over with trees to erase evidence it had existed.
- Rutger Hauer expressed no issues in playing a Jew, stating in an interview that "the whole idea of a Jewish type was a fiction created by Hitler, anyway".
- The controversy grew heated enough that protesters demonstrated outside CBS studios and called for a boycott of Chrysler, the film's broadcast sponsor.
