Customer Reviews

Sobibor

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The story of war and love

This book is about war and love. The Author, Michael Lev, shows the war through the eyes of people and whisper of the nature.
Sobibor was the site of one of two successful uprisings by Jewish prisoners in a Nazi extermination camp, led by Jewish prisoners Leon Feldhendler and Alexander Pechersky.
It is fascinating story to read and know.

It has taken me far longer than usual to finish this book. It was the most difficult book I have read on the Holocaust and I have read The Theory And Practice Of Hell and The Survivor among many others. It is not that the tale is more horrific than others. I think it is the voice of the book which gives it its poignancy.

I knew of the Sobibor camp and the escape but not in detail. The style of writing used by Mr. Lev is described as historical fiction. I have not heard of that before but it is apt. The book begins with the story of Berek, a fourteen or fifteen year old Jewish boy at the outbreak of WWII. On the run from the Nazis for awhile, he eventually comes to the Sobibor death camp. Through various fortuitous events he is not killed outright and participates in the escape, led by Alexander Pechersky. Berek also survives the escape which, in reality, few did.

The power of the book lies in the voice of young Berek. I could literally see the Polish forest where he hid, his friend Rina, the camp, etc. To use such a young voice to tell the tale was a brilliant decision by Lev. This is why it was so hard for me to read. After fifty years of study of the Holocaust it is this book which hurt the most to read.

There is a section on the escape told through the leaders. Alexander Pechersky was, after only a short while in Sobibor, the unelected leader of the escape and is revered still. The plan was well thought out and several hundred inmates got out of Sobibor. Unfortunately most of them perished in the surrounding forests or were shot by the camp guards while escaping. Such was the nature of the Nazi hold on Europe. Nevertheless the escape, in as far as it was known at the time, was a point of pride for all in the camps. It remains so today.

The third section of the book concerns Berek, now called Bernard, who has become a doctor and is obsessed with the capture and conviction of Nazi war criminals. The chapters which took place in Brazil were, for me, impossible to understand. I did some research after finishing the book and was able to verify the fate of Stangl and Wagner. I don't know why Berek was in Brazil as it seems he did nothing there. I suppose I could be missing something but I could not figure it out.

All in all if you want a poignant understanding of Europe and the death camps this is a good place to start.

The book is a fictionalisation of the events around the uprising of inmates at the Sobibor death camp in the 1940's, using a young boy, Berek's, point of view to draw us in. The introduction, "Michael Lev, Sobibor, and Russian Yiddish Culture", is a mine of background information as well as some spoilers for the main story. I skimmed over the spoilers, reading the background material to orient myself in the time and place in which the story is set. We start off with Berek and Rina as young children, running from their homes to avoid death. They're shown kindness by strangers, but hiding in the forest doesn't work forever and Rina is captured. Berek voluntarily enters the death camp to search for her, but he's too late. The introduction praised the author for telling the story without unnecessary melodrama, but Rina's death was handled so off handedly, with no reaction from Berek, that it was jarring - I wasn't sure at first what had happened to her. Later in the book, the author explicitly addresses this, but at the time of reading I was thrown off. But now Berek is stuck in the death camp, aiding an artist and then a jeweller, trying to survive the random cruelties of the guards. The plot cuts over to the arrival of Russian prisoners of war, foreshadowing that the leader of the eventual uprising is among them and giving their backgrounds. Berek is almost invisible in this period, a silent witness, but he runs when he's provided the chance. The aftermath of the uprising, tracking down the Nazi's who survived, forms the rest of the book. Some of the passages were hard to localise, Berek moves around a fair amount, and we're exposed to some of the thought processes of the criminals that are brought to trial, sometimes without a clear indication of which voice we're hearing.

There are a lot of foot notes sprinkled throughout the book, explaining Yiddish and German terms, but sometimes they seem to err on the side of the obvious. Granted, some day just what the Third Reich was may be obscure, but for now it was jarring to jump down to the bottom of the page to read the simple explanation, an interruption in the flow of the text, my personal preference is for end notes. I think it would have worked well to have a one page glossary of non-English terms, and footnotes for the "where are they now" ones.

Overall, it was a fascinating read. I hadn't known about this death camp before, and I did appreciate the spare nature of the story-telling, as it's an emotionally charged topic, but at times it went too far with the cut and dried, clinical style. I'm still thinking about the events in the book (some of the foot notes listed what happened to the people later in their lives), but I didn't get emotionally drawn in during the telling of the story. Some of the passages would have worked better with more elaboration, in some it felt like the author was working too closely from historical documents, falling into a non fiction documentary style rather than a novelisation.