Tonight we watched the movie "Escape From Sobibor." It's from 1987, and it depicts the biggest escape from a Nazi death camp in WWII. I'd never heard of this, as I imagine most haven't. But Sobibor was a death camp on the eastern edge of Poland, considered Heimler's "Best kept secret." It's estimated that about 250,000 Jews were killed in Sobibor. Roughly 600 were kept alive to maintain the camp - unloading the incoming trains, running the gas chamber "showers," and acting as the Nazi's personal tailors, shoemakers, gold smiths, seamstresses, cooks, servants, and so on. The man who comes up with the escape idea, Leon Feldhandler, gathers a small group of men to plan with, then connects up with the leader of a group of Russian Jewish soldiers, Sasha Pechersky, who have been brought in to the camp to do hard labor. Together they orchestrate a plan that will see that every person in the camp walks out through the front gate - after stealing pistols, rifles and ammo, making knives, then killing the SS guards one by one. From there they need to make it past the Ukranian guards with the machine guns, and run through a mine field. Out of the 600 in the camp that made a run for it, 300 made it out alive. The rest were gunned down or blown up before they reached the forest. The book, "Escape From Sobibor" was written back in 1982, and features 75 pages of story on how the author tracked down survivors who were still alive in the world to get the story, and gives the post script on their lives after they made it out. The movie also has a post script narrative at the end of what happened to some of the main characters after making it out. Some lived, and you hear about where they were living as of 1987, with a short blurb about stuff that happened to them since their escape. Some were killed shortly after making it out. Some disappeared with no record either way of what happened to them.
http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Sobibor-Ri … amp;sr=1-1
http://imdb.com/title/tt0092978/
I have bits and pieces of memories of "Schindler's List," but I can't be entirely sure that I actually formally watched the movie. I think possibly somebody I lived or roommated with was watching it and I saw parts of it. But in contrast, if you see this movie you will never forget it. It spares no punches. Every review that I read on imdb said the same - far more realistic and horrific then anything in Schinder's. I wasn't expecting that. I'm not really sure what I thought this movie would be - I was only watching it in a "going along for the ride" sort of way, since we'd finished watching "The Great Escape" last week and Tom remembered this movie from years ago. So I knew it was an escape from a Nazi camp in WWII but I had no idea that fully half the movie was going to depict the horrors of what went on there. The movie has a very personal, documentary feel to it, so it's hard to watch. You have to detach yourself if you're going to get through it.
So with that in mind, it brings things back around to Druid's comments.
druid wrote:There were never any nazi gas chamber. If you want great info on the Holohoax....
This leaves me wondering then. Either druid needs a serious lesson in history, or, all the survivors of Sobibor either don't really exist and the entire story was fabricated, or they do exist, but the camp didn't exist, or else it did, but all these survivors are all just lying about what went on there.

Confused now? Yeah, so am I. For myself, I'm leaning more towards the former theory, rather than the latter theories. I find it hard to believe that the survivors of what was supposedly the biggest break out of a Nazi death camp would have all been in on some "Holohoax" and all made up the story about what went on there.
But that's just me.
"Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting "Holy shit ... what a ride!" - Anonymous
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"I get by with a little help from my (higher density) friends."
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