June 22, 1941. With 134 divisions at full combat capability and 73 more divisions to deploy behind the front, Nazi Germany, under the code name Operation Barbarossa, invades the Soviet Union, its ally in the war against Poland. Hitler viewed the invasion as part of his plan to provide the German nation with “Lebensraum,” which means “living space,” and an opportunity to destroy communism, an ideology he detested.
In the first six weeks after the German attack, the Soviet Union suffered catastrophic military losses, and during the war the German armies eventually captured some 5.7 million Soviet Red Army troops. Among them is a man who will participate in the uprising at the Sobibor extermination center during which he will brutally kill two of the 11 SS personnel members of the camp. This soldier’s name is Simjon Rosenfeld.
Simjon Moiseyevich Rosenfeld, son of a tailor, was born on October 1, 1922 in the Ukrainian village of Ternivka. Simjon had two sisters and, as a child, lived through the man-made famine known as the Holodomor, which devastated Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s and killed millions of Ukrainians.
The young Simjon grew up in his home village and attended a Jewish school, which in 1936 was converted into a Ukrainian school. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Great Britain and France maintained their guarantee of protection of Poland’s border and declared war on Germany two days later.
However, Poland found itself fighting a war on two fronts when the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east on September 17. The Polish government fled the country that same day, and after intense bombardment, Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on September 28, 1939. In accordance with the secret protocol of their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland on September 29, and the last resistance of Polish units ended on October 6.
In 1940, Simjon graduated from high school and, at the age of 18, was drafted into the Red Army, where he served in the 150th Heavy Artillery Regiment. On June 22, 1941, less than two years after the start of World War II, Nazi Germany, under the code name Operation Barbarossa, invaded the Soviet Union, its ally in the war against Poland.
In June of that same year, Rosenfeld’s regiment was located between the cities of Minsk and Baranovichy, then part of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Rosenfeld was wounded during intense fighting and captured by the Germans, becoming a prisoner of war. The SS imprisoned him in the Minsk ghetto, where, for two years, he had to perform hard physical labor.
The Germans had established the Minsk ghetto in the northwestern part of Minsk in late July 1941, and it held some 80,000 people, including Jews from nearby towns. Between November 1941 and October 1942, the German government deported nearly 24,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Minsk.
The SS authorities and the police shot or gassed (in special gas vans) most of them upon arrival at Maly Trostinets, a small village almost 13 kilometers to the east. The German occupation authorities housed the others in a separate section of the Minsk ghetto, segregated from the local Belarusian Jews. Little contact was allowed between the residents of the two ghettos.
The Germans destroyed the Minsk ghetto in the autumn of 1943. While the SS killed about 4,000 remaining Jews in Maly Trostinets, there were some Jews, including Simjon Rosenfeld, who were taken by train to Lublin, in German-occupied Poland, to what would become the Majdanek concentration camp.
However, after waiting a day at the gates of the camp, they were told there was no room and that they would be taken to Sobibor. When a Polish railway worker told them that they were going to be gassed and incinerated there, nobody believed him. The occupants of Rosenfeld’s carriage had even opened a hole in the bottom of the carriage to use as a toilet, and could have escaped through it, but no one did because they couldn’t believe they were all going to be killed. When they arrived at the camp called Sobibor, it was already too late.
German police and SS authorities built Sobibor in the spring of 1942. It was the second of three extermination centers established as part of Operation Reinhard, the code name for the German plan to murder the Jews of the General Government. It was implemented by the SS and police leader in Lublin, SS General Odilo Globocnik.
At its largest extent, the camp covered a rectangular area of 400 by 600 meters. Branches woven into the barbed wire fence and trees planted around the perimeter camouflaged the site, and a minefield more than 15 meters wide surrounded the camp. The deportations to Sobibor took place between May 1942, when regular gassing operations began, and the autumn of 1943.
Most of the Jews taken to Sobibor were immediately gassed with carbon monoxide that had been introduced into the gas chambers from an engine. Around 250,000 victims were murdered at this extermination center. From each transport, camp officials selected a small handful of prisoners who appeared suitable or capable, to supplement the supply of forced labor at Sobibor. Simjon was put to work carrying bricks.
When Rosenfeld’s transport arrived at Sobibor in September 1943, everyone was taken off the train. Rosenfeld later recalled that the Germans had separated the non-Jewish soldiers from the Jewish ones, but the SS were afraid to shoot them because they were still considered prisoners of war. In total, there were 80 Jews from Minsk in Sobibor.
Later, when one of the prisoners asked a German camp guard where the rest of his friends from the train were, the guard pointed to the smoking chimney and replied that they were: “over there.” As early as 1943, the Jewish prisoners of Sobibor began to fear for their lives because the killing operations in Sobibor were coming to an end.
The inmates at Sobibor knew what awaited them, as the prisoners at Belzec, who did the same work as them, had sewn messages into their clothes before being killed by the Sobibor guards who shot them on the very day they arrived at the camp.
The next day, the prisoners found all their clothes covered in blood. Jaim Engel, a Polish Jewish prisoner, found a note in a pocket that read: “We worked in Belzec for a year and didn’t know where they would send us next. They said it would be Germany. Now we are in Sobibor and we know what to expect. Be aware that they will kill you too! Avenge us!”
And so they did! In response, the prisoners organized a resistance group in late spring of 1943. This group increased in number and military training skills with the arrival of Jewish prisoners of war from the Red Army from the Minsk ghetto. The prisoners finally had the experience necessary to escape. When Alexander Pechersky, leader of the planned uprising, asked Simjon Rosenfeld if he was capable of killing a man with an axe, Rosenfeld, who was then 21 years old, replied: “I am not capable of killing a human being, but I can kill a Nazi.”
The targets were carefully selected and the first person killed by the prisoners was the deputy commander of Sobibor, Johann Niemann, who was the highest-ranking SS officer on duty that day. With approximately 600 prisoners in the camp, those who knew the plan started the revolt on October 14, 1943 at 4 p.m.
Niemann was murdered by Soviet prisoner of war Alexander Shubayev, who buried an axe in the back of his neck and split his skull. He died instantly. At 4:15 p.m., Oberscharführer Siegfried Graetschus, the German in charge of the Ukrainian guard in Trawniki, arrived at the shoe store to pick up an order.
While a prisoner firmly held the Nazi’s leg, pretending to remove his boots, Simjon Rosenfeld and his fellow prisoner Arkady Wajspapir came out of the back room and split the Nazi’s skull with the axe. Then his deputy, the Ukrainian guard Rai Klatt, entered and called his boss on the phone. He was also attacked and killed.
One hour after the uprising began, the rebels killed a total of 11 SS officers. Then chaos reigned in the place. The prisoners had to escape by climbing a barbed wire fence or running out the front door through a minefield under intense machine gun fire. Some stepped on mines. Others gave up and didn’t run another meter. Simjon Rosenfeld was one of those who ran.
He would later recall: “I wasn’t afraid because I didn’t have time to think about fear. I was only thinking about getting out alive.”
About 300 prisoners managed to escape from the extermination center. Approximately 100 people were caught in the raid that followed the uprising. However, about 50 prisoners escaped from Sobibor and survived the war.
Following the uprising, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, SS and Trawniki-trained guards shot the remaining prisoners, razed the extermination side of the camp, buried all evidence, and planted trees to disguise the area. Among those who were not captured was also Simjon Rosenfeld. With a small group of people that included former prisoners of Sobibor and Jews who had escaped German murder operations, he hid in the forest for eleven months.
At the end of July 1944, nine months after the uprising, the Red Army liberated the city of Chelm, located about 50 km from Sobibor. Soviet soldiers found Rosenfeld two months later in a nearby area, and shortly afterward he asked the Soviet command to send him to the front. However, the Soviets doubted that he had actually survived two years of captivity.
After a careful evaluation by the Soviet counterintelligence unit SMERSH, Simjon Rosenfeld was sent to fight in the 1st Belorussian Front. He participated in the crossing of the Vistula River and during the battle for the city of Poznan in the winter of 1944-1945, Simjon was seriously wounded. He was about to have a limb amputated when a young Jewish doctor advised him to refuse the operation.
After being discharged from the hospital, Rosenfeld was deemed unfit for combat and was sent to Berlin as commander of a unit that guarded the army’s food supplies. There he would witness the end of the war. On a column of the Reichstag, the German parliament, the following inscription was scrawled: “Baranovichi-Sobibor-Berlin”.
In 1945, Rosenfeld received medals for his combat service and courage and returned to Ukraine, to his birthplace, Ternivka. There he discovered that the Germans had shot his entire family at the end of May 1942. When he learned that his uncle in the nearby town was still alive, he went there. On January 15, 1946, Simjon married his uncle’s daughter, Yevgeniya.
They settled in the Ukrainian town of Gaivoron, where Simjon worked as the director of a photography workshop. They raised two children and followed their children to Odessa in 1975. Although the Sobibor uprising was not prominent enough in the Soviet Union, in 1963, after 20 years, Simjon met Aleksandr Pecherskii and other survivors of the uprising.
They continued to meet until 1990, when Pecherskii died and the Rosenfelds emigrated to Israel. Although the Nazis buried all evidence of the Sobibor camp and planted a forest there, archaeological work that began in 2007 revealed the exact location of the gas chambers in 2014.
When Rosenfeld was informed of this, he said: “I can’t believe they found it; the Nazis destroyed the entire camp. It’s hard to imagine anything left there now.”
Over the years, archaeologists have unearthed thousands of personal objects: rings, reliquaries, earrings, jewelry, perfume bottles, medicine jars, and utensils. When Simjon Rosenfeld died on June 3, 2019, in a nursing home in Rechovot near Tel Aviv in Israel, he was 96 years old. He was the last known survivor of Sobibor.
