Alexander Pechersky

Alexander "Sasha" Aronovich Pechersky (; 22 February 1909 – 19 January 1990), also known as Oleksandr Aronovych Pecherskyi , was a Jewish-Soviet officer. He is one of the organizers, and the leader, of the most successful uprising and mass-escape of Jews from a Nazi extermination camp during World War II, which occurred at the Sobibor extermination camp on 14 October 1943.

In 1948, Pechersky was arrested by the Soviet authorities along with his brother during the countrywide Rootless cosmopolitan campaign against Jews suspected of pro-Western leanings but released later due in part to mounting international pressure. After graduating from university with a diploma in music and literature, he became an accountant and manager of a small school for amateur musicians.

World War II On 22 June 1941, the day when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Pechersky was conscripted into the Soviet Red Army with a rank of junior lieutenant. In the early autumn of 1941, he rescued his wounded commander from being captured by the Germans. He did not receive any medals for this deed. One of his fellow soldiers reportedly said: "Sasha, if what you've done doesn't make you a hero, I don't know who is!" Pechersky wrote about the Minsk work camp:

The two Russian Jewish soldiers who Yahov Biskowitz met with Pechersky were Alexander Shubayev (who was responsible for killing SS-Untersturmführer Johann Niemann and was later killed fighting the Germans) and Arkady Moishejwicz Wajspapier (who was responsible for killing SS-Oberscharführer Siegfried Graetschus and Volksdeutscher Ivan Klatt, survived the war). For over a year, Pechersky fought with the Yehiel's Group partisans as a demolition expert and later with the Soviet group of Voroshilov Partisans, until the Red Army drove out the Germans from Belarus. Pechersky's battalion commander, Major Andreev, was so shocked by his description of Sobibor that he permitted Pechersky to go to Moscow and speak to the Commission of Inquiry of the Crimes of Fascist-German Aggressors and their Accomplices. The Commission listened to Pechersky and published the report Uprising in Sobibor based on his testimony. This report was included in the Black Book, one of the first comprehensive compilations about the Holocaust, written by Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg.

For fighting the Germans as part of the penal battalions, Pechersky was promoted to the rank of captain and received a medal for bravery. He had to sell handcrafted clothes on the local market for five years because he could not find a job. Only after Stalin's death in 1953 could he find a job, in the Rostselmash factory. His brother, however, succumbed to a diabetic coma while incarcerated. In 1963, he appeared as a witness during the Soviet trial of eleven former Ukrainian guards at Sobibor, all of whom were convicted and ten of whom were executed.

According to his daughter in an interview, Pechersky was prevented by the Soviet government from testifying in international trials related to Sobibor. The final time Pechersky was refused permission to leave the country and testify was in 1987 for a trial in Poland and according to his daughter, this refusal "just crippled my father. He almost stopped getting out of bed and instantly aged".

The New England Holocaust Memorial bears his name alongside a quote.

In 2013, Alexander Pechersky was posthumously awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. In January 2016, he was posthumously awarded the Russian Order of Courage by decree of Vladimir Putin.

Konstantin Khabensky directed and played the role of Pechersky in the 2018 film Sobibor.