Escape From a Nazi Death Camp

This powerful film is told by four of the main survivors Thomas ‘Toivi’ Blatt, Philip Bialowitz, Selma Engel-Wijnberg and former Russian POW Semjon Rozenfled, through their compelling firsthand accounts we discover the true horror of life in Sobibor. Unlike Auschwitz and Dauchau, Sobibor was created purely for extermination. In the space of 17 months a quarter of a million people arrived at the camp and put to death almost immediately. But a ‘lucky’ few men and women were picked out from the doomed crowds to work as prisoners in the camp; as bakers, tailors, cleaners, metalworkers, carpenters, even in the sorting houses sifting through possessions of the dead. But everyone knew that being selected to work in the camp meant their lives were only on loan. No one left Sobibor alive.

This collection—harvest of a lifetime of brilliant reportage and reflection—brings together the most memorable biographical pieces John Hersey has written over the past fifty years. His subjects range from Sinclair Lewis, for whom the twenty-three-year-old Hersey was secretary, and the young John F. Kennedy as he related to Hersey the dramatic story of PT 109, to Private John Daniel Ramey and his efforts to overcome illiteracy with the help of the U.S. Army, and Jessica Kelley, an elderly widow trapped in a buckling tenement as the 1955 Connecticut floods raged outside.