in Sobibor, the memorial of discord

FRANCE 3 – WEDNESDAY AUGUST 24 AT 11.25 PM – DOCUMENTARY

Immersed in a soothing silence, the forest exudes calm and serenity. This Polish forest is that of Sobibor, very close to the Ukrainian and Belarusian borders. It was here, between May 1942 and the fall of 1943, that nearly 200,000 Jews were murdered in the gas chambers.

Along with the Belzec and Treblinka camps, Sobibor is one of the three extermination centers built as part of Operation Reinhard, aimed at erasing all Jewish traces in eastern Poland. Compared to other death camps, Sobibor has the distinction of having been the scene of a massive revolt.

On October 14, 1943, just over three hundred deportees managed to escape. Sixty-eight survived the war. Following this revolt, which remains an unprecedented event in the Nazi concentration camp universe, the Germans decided to raze the camp, level the ground, plant trees there and thus eliminate all traces of their crimes. In vain.

For fifteen years, the Polish archaeologist Wojciech Mazurek and his team, made up of young people (including his son), have been meticulously excavating the soil of Sobibor. More than six thousand objects as diverse as rings, metal plates with the identity of children, coins, dental prostheses, shoes, pearls came out of the ground. Personal objects having belonged to the victims, photographed, listed, classified.

initiative needed

“Thanks to our work, objects come back to life. They bring back the memory of those who died here., believes the archaeologist who has also conducted extensive research to accurately trace the limits of the camp and the location of its facilities. “ Our first objective was to locate the gas chambers. » Mission accomplished. Barracks for the deportees, hairdressers, sentry box for sorting clothes, a 240-meter long path leading to the gas chambers, mass graves, everything has been located with precision.

A remarkable work that Wojciech Mazurek must nevertheless abandon, because the site of the new memorial museum of Sobibor, decided almost ten years ago, began at the very place of the excavations. An architectural firm from Warsaw won the international competition. “We felt that there was a disproportion between the atrocious tragedy that happened at Sobibor and the perfectly indifferent nature. What came to mind was to restore the balance”explains the architect Piotr Michalewicz.

Faced with the bulldozers and trucks that are busy on the construction site of this ultramodern memorial museum, where the excavations of his team took place, Wojciech Mazurek does not hide his sadness: “We should never have built something like this here! There are still lots of things to discover under this earth…”

The local authorities present this project as a means of making available to a much wider public this place of memory, materialized until now by a large area covered with white stones, on the site of the mass graves.

Make Sobibor better known? A necessary initiative in a country where, following an investigation carried out a few years ago, the three sides of Operation “Reinhard” were unknown to most Poles. If 15% had heard of Treblinka, only 2% knew Sobibor, and 1% Belzec.

And the earth opened one last timeby Arnaud Sauli (Fr., 2022, 52 min). France 3

Alain Constant