I found this book difficult to read. Not in the sense that it was poorly written, just that it was hard for me to really get into it. Part of this is because the English translation of the original Yiddish doesn't flow in the same way as books written in English. In the first couple of chapters, there are actually a couple of places that the translation was very jarring, and I had to re-read passages to try and make sense of them.
I had a sense of detachment throughout the first part of the story -- I never really became emotionally involved with Berek. When he essentially disappeared from the narrative during the uprising itself, I didn't miss him.
I found the latter part, during the trials, more interesting than the first part of the book. It wasn't until this point that I was able to really connect with Berek, and really see some of the emotional trauma he was undergoing during the trial.
All in all, it was a good read. I won't say 'enjoyable,' as very little Holocaust literature is flat-out enjoyable, but I was glad I read it. ( )

Sobibor is the story of 14 year old Berek Schlesinger, a Polish Jew, whose parents send him away from his shtetl to hide from the Nazis in the woods. He scrapes by getting a little help from a friendly elderly Pole and his wife and eventually reuniting with his beautiful cousin Rina who he had presumed dead and who he seems to love in a way that is distinctly uncousinly. While trying to reach Russia or at least some relative safety with partisans in the forest, Berek leaves Rina to find some water only to find her gone on his return. After he discovers that Nazis have taken her to the death camp Sobibor, he determines to go to the camp in search of her. There he is taken under the wing of a jeweler who is as close to indispensable to the Nazis as one can be inside a concetration camp, and Berek's life continues through his association with Kuriel the jeweler.

At this point, the book seems to break away from Berek's narrative entirely to chronicle the successful Sobibor uprising from the view of its leader Alexander Pechersky. I found this section to be much more captivating than the beginning of the book, but it was a little difficult to adjust to the abrupt turning away from the base of the plot. The book continues after this unexpected diversion to follow Berek after the war as he encounters former SS from the camp and uses his extensive knowledge of the atrocities in Sobibor and his feeling of responsibility to those who died to help convict the officers of war crimes.

Unlike several Holocaust novels I've read, Sobibor requires more base knowledge of the Holocaust to appreciate its nuance, despite its footnotes that clarify some of the more basic elements. I'll be the first to admit that I occasionally appreciated the nuance and the undertones that required some consideration to understand, but I also found myself baffled at some points and would have liked some more explicit explanation of events instead of subtle hinting at goings on.

"...What, you want to know, has happened to Kapo Shlok? Listen to this: On the way here, two stones fell from the sky; one, thrown by the Germans, broke the Kapo's backbone, and the other, thrown by the Jews, finished him off."

The book was slow to start but really hit its stride with the chronicle of the uprising. Lev's depiction of the uprising is brief yet powerful. In less than fifty pages, Lev brings Pechersky to life following his escape into memories while he is cramped in a cattle car traveling from Minsk to Sobibor but also establishing his character as a leader that people are inspired to follow in even the most dire situation.

In the dark, deep cellar prison in Minsk, it had been so crowded that only on the fifth day, when most of those who had been driven down there had already died, could they find room to lie down. Every time they opened the door to carry out the dead, the guard, himself a former POW, would ask, "Will it be long yet before all of you die?"

"Long!" a certain man would answer.

...Once the senior guard had said, "We're sick and tired of you already, but there's been no order to do away with you. Haven't you dragged this out long enough? Strangle one another and let there be an end to it!"

The same man who used to answer "Long!" cried out in the darkness, "You'll never live to see that day!"

The convicts hadn't elected that man as their leader - not all of them even knew his name. (...) He wasn't the leader, but everyone obeyed him.


Thankfully, the narrative keeps the fire it acquires during the account of the uprising as it follows Berek into the post-war period. Lev gives us an inside view of the trials of several high ranking SS murderers from Sobibor, but more interesting and thought-provoking are the brief encounters he has with the former torturers of Sobibor. Berek and his wife pass by Erich Bauer, the chief gas-master of the camp responsible for the deaths of thousands, in a crowded park in Germany. The encounter has the surreality of a meeting with a ghost. During one of the trials, through sheer happenstance, Berek comes upon the father and brother of two of the SS killed in the uprising who lament their son and brother being dead in Berek's hearing. Lev also captures the former commandant of Sobibor, Kurt Bolender, who charms restaurant guests as an immaculately groomed head waiter but soon finds himself desperately trying to prove he has a Jewish grandmother to somehow lessen the penalties he faces in his war crimes trial.

Sobibor while often confusing and on occasion awkwardly written, presents the Holocasut from a slightly different angle. Instead of focusing exclusively on the suffering that took place, Lev explores the uprising and the aftermath. This unique angle provides a lot of food for thought for any student of the Holocaust. It begs the question of why uprisings weren't more common and more successful. Was it having Pechersky as a leader that made it possible or were the Germans so lax in that camp at that time that the inmates had a rare window of opportunity to pursue an otherwise impossible course of action? How can thoughts of someone as the pinnacle of evil be reconciled with thoughts of the same person as someone's brother - someone's son? How long should the search for justice have gone on? Would it have been better for Jews like Berek to leave the past to the past and free themselves from the burden of pursuing justice or to spend countless years pursuing evil men who have since become weak and feeble and even a bit ridiculous in the extremity of their love for Hitler and his twisted ideals? Lev's narrative asks all these questions and provokes us to consider their answers while at the same time shining a bright light on a valiant and successful uprising that proved that what seemed impossible could be and was accomplished. ( )

A geode of a book, with a rough, dull surface hiding a beautiful yet uneven story within. This book was translated from Yiddish, and the tone and pacing are rough in English. The choice of what to footnote is odd - in the first section, words which are likely to be familiar to anyone reading this book are defined. Later, however, the footnotes provide information of the post-war lives of historical figures who appear, and these add depth to the story. Perhaps the latter were the author's notes, and the former the translator's? I found the middle section, which deals most directly with life in the camp leading up to the uprising, to be the most engaging; the first section sets it up, and the third, dealing with the trials of those in the camps, felt more unfocused and disjointed; I had trouble finishing it. ( )

It has taken me far longer than usual to finish this book. It was the most difficult book I have read on the Holocaust and I have read The Theory And Practice Of Hell and The Survivor among many others. It is not that the tale is more horrific than others. I think it is the voice of the book which gives it its poignancy.

I knew of the Sobibor camp and the escape but not in detail. The style of writing used by Mr. Lev is described as historical fiction. I have not heard of that before but it is apt. The book begins with the story of Berek, a fourteen or fifteen year old Jewish boy at the outbreak of WWII. On the run from the Nazis for awhile, he eventually comes to the Sobibor death camp. Through various fortuitous events he is not killed outright and participates in the escape, led by Alexander Pechersky. Berek also survives the escape which, in reality, few did.

The power of the book lies in the voice of young Berek. I could see the Polish forest where he hid, his friend Rina, the camp, etc. To use such a young voice to tell the tale was a brilliant decision by Lev. This is why it was so hard for me to read. After fifty years of study of the Holocaust it is this book which hurt the most to read.

There is a section on the escape told through the leaders. Alexander Pechersky was, after only a short while in Sobibor, the unelected leader of the escape and is revered still. The plan was well thought out and several hundred inmates got out of Sobibor. Unfortunately most of them perished in the surrounding forests or were shot by the camp guards while escaping. Such was the nature of the Nazi hold on Europe. Nevertheless the escape, in as far as it was known at the time, was a point of pride for all in the camps. It remains so today.

The third section of the book concerns Berek, now called Bernard, who has become a doctor and is obsessed with the capture and conviction of Nazi war criminals. The chapters which took place in Brazil were, for me, impossible to understand. I did some research after finishing the book and was able to verify the fate of Stangl and Wagner. I don't know why Berek was in Brazil as it seems he did nothing there. I suppose I could be missing something but I could not figure it out.

All in all if you want a poignant understanding of Europe and the death camps this is a good place to start. ( )

“Not all Holocaust memoirs deserve an audience.” So said David Goldberg, senior rabbi of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, London. [Review of Chasing Shadows: Memories of a vanished world by Hugo Gryn, “The Independent” (March 6, 2000), available at this link.] Though not advertised as a “documentary novel,” Michael Lev’s Sobibor is just that. Such books challenge readers to decide for themselves where the historically verifiable facts end and the fictive novel begins and to decide whether it makes any difference. Lev’s failure to integrate his factual story with his fictional one imposes the burden of doing so on his readers. The effort is magnified by Lev’s almost complete separation of the factual story line from the fictional one.

The first three chapters of Sobibor introduce Berek, a pre-teenage Polish boy being thrown out of his home by his parents in a desperate effort to save his life from the approaching German army. These chapters trace the journey of Berek and his cousin Rina, with whom he is infatuated, through the literal and metaphorical wilderness of wartime Poland. Alone together in a mythic forest, meeting Poles of varying sympathies, the two undertake a journey not unlike that recounted in factual wartime memoirs (such as Dov Freiberg’s To Survive Sobibor) and fiction (such as Jerzy Kosinski’s Painted Bird). [Indeed, the international furor over Kosinski’s purported depiction of Polish peasants is a perfect illustration of the dangers of conflating fact and fiction. Those who read the book as fact were infuriated; others defended the work from what they contended were improper readings of fiction.] After the children are separated by accident, Berek contrives to get himself sent to Sobibor after learning that Rina was captured and sent there.

Sobibor is less well-known in the West than other, more infamous, Nazi extermination camps. But just like Auschwitz or Treblinka, the sole purpose of the camp was systematic murder. Sobibor operated from only mid-1942 to late 1943, during which time its overseers sent an estimated quarter-million people to their deaths. What made it virtually unique among all concentration camps was the successful revolt of its prisoners in October 1943, just two months after the first and only other successful revolt at Treblinka.

Chapters 4 and 5 recount the uprising and its immediate aftermath (approximately half of the six hundred prisoners in camp escaped alive), through the story of Alexander Pechersky. Pechersky was the real-life leader of the rebellion and these chapters focus on his story to the near complete exclusion of everything that has gone before. The occasions when Lev brings Berek into the narrative in these chapters feel distinctly contrived: Berek’s and Pechersky’s stories have Sobibor in common, nothing else.

The final four chapters of the book, far more diffuse in narrative coherence, follow the now-adult Berek to the trials in Holland of several Germans who ran the camp. He travels to Brazil to consult, in his professional capacity as a physician, with Theresa Stangl, widow of camp commandant Franz Stangl and mistress of Gustav Wagner, his deputy. More philosophical than the first two-thirds of the book, this narrative seems more aimless. The story of Pechersky and the rebellion has disappeared but although the focus is entirely on Berek, the rationale or justification for his actions is missing. These chapters seem intended to tie the book together but any themes Lev intended to introduce have gone missing.

Lev uses footnotes throughout the book. Even if one overcomes the intrusiveness of the method, the notes vary enormously in helpfulness and detail. The most useful notes define or identify matters like geographical points, Yiddish sayings, Jewish foods, or the gradations of the officer corps within the German Army. Yet some things are identified while others are inexplicably left unannotated. Lev’s selections has to be questioned: does a reader of a book about the Holocaust need to a footnote explaining what a “yellow patch” signified or that “Third Reich” means the “Nazi German regime” or that “Führer” refers to Hitler? Lev often intrudes himself into the notes as well, informing readers, after defining judenrein [free of Jews], that this “…was a significant and declared goal of the Nazis”? Folkshul and peysekhdike aren’t defined at all, nor is Bogdan Khmelnitsky or his “Cossack rebellion” yet mentsch is defined twice—in two different ways.

Sometimes, the notes provide extensive detail for no apparent purpose: “Izak Rotenberg took part in the uprising…. He survived the Holocaust, and after the war, he lived and worked in Bat Yam, Israel. He thought that no further terrible things would happen in his life [how do we know what he thought?], but they did: In April 1994, at the construction site where he worked, two Arabs attacked him, severely injuring him. He died of his wounds.” Other notes introduce people who appear just once (such as Rotenberg or Helga Deen), for no apparent reason other than to lend a note of verisimilitude to the book or, worse still, to demonstrate that the author did his homework. There is neither rhyme nor reason to the use of notes, no consideration of their necessity, and no regular practice. In addition to being intrusive, Lev’s handling of the notes further muddies the fact/fiction duality of the book by introducing yet a third voice: the author’s own.

The jacket copy promises a “flowing, masterful read.” Sobibor is neither. The writing is choppy, the narrative line occasionally disjointed, and the three sections of the book do not cohere. Lev’s diction and syntax are often odd and the advertised “flow” is anything but smooth. “Berek’s eyes were squinting in the strong light and they were already tired from looking at headwaiter Kurt Wilhelm Falle, who always made his appearance in the dining hall with the dignified look of an artisan who knows his worth. His cuffs were blindingly white and his black sash sparkled.” At other times, the authorial voice intrudes: “It is possible that Berek forgot at that moment that talking to such people is worse than keeping quiet….”

Occasionally Lev’s writing is too lazy to deserve serious attention: “It could be that the birch tree that stood in its white shirt near a great, spreading oak tree was now dreaming a beautiful dream. No, apparently not a beautiful one—it was trembling. Was it the cold or was it afraid of someone?” Lev also can rely on purple prose: near the very end of the book, Lev gives Berek sentiments that are vividly out of place—if not for their overweening sentimentality than because of their nearly complete lack of connection with everything that has preceded them in this book: “The green Earth, the blue skies, the gleaming ocean—they were so wonderfully beautiful! So why should there be so little room on this planet for happiness and love?” Juvenile writing aside, the language is completely out of character. Nothing has so much as hinted that Berek even remotely entertains such thoughts. The Epilogue jars the reader yet again. Alexander Pechersky’s postwar thoughts and experiences are again the centerpiece and the book’s final paragraphs are an excerpt from a eulogy and a brief paragraph noting the naming of a street in his honor in Israel.

Lev is not well-served by his translator, Barnett Zumoff, an experienced translator from the Yiddish. Too often, Lev’s awkward composition and Zumoff’s shortcomings coincide: “Interesting—could his not letting himself be aroused from indifference, even in such a case, be explained by professional sangfroid or did he really have steel nerves?” Zumoff too often falls back on cliché (“Arkady was not one of those people who are born with a silver spoon in their mouths”), excessive literalness (“…it was now nighttime and one had to be careful of every step. Also, the moon had now disappeared. No one was shooting at her, after all, so why had she so suddenly gone into hiding? Had the clouds taken her prisoner? Where had so many of them come from? And such big black ones…” ), or simple clumsiness (“He came in, and as if he sensed in advance that some catastrophe was about to befall him, he stopped.”) Zumoff choice to provide a fairly literal translation hamstrings his ability to render a more fluid—and fluent—English version.

Notwithstanding these problems, Lev has created in Berek, a sympathetic character. Lesser characters, such as Grandpa Matsei and Kuriel, are nicely handled as well. But once Lev gets Berek to Sobibor and introduces the camp and its administration, Berek virtually disappears from the novel. Lev takes up what appears to be his real interest: Pechersky’s rebellion. This portion of the book, indeed, opens with all new characters, new story lines, and not even a mention of Berek or the other characters the reader has come to care about. Sadly, neither Pechersky nor the rebellion ever comes to life like Berek and the ostensible heart of the book is mechanical and uninteresting. Berek’s appearances in this section are contrived and disappointing and serve primarily to highlight the remarkable change in the book’s subject.

So too with the closing chapters. The first chapter in this section finds the adult Berek recalling time spent in Sobibor with Max van Dam, a “real” conscripted artist, kept alive by the Germans so long as he produced artwork to order. Lev introduced this promising and more philosophical subplot earlier but hadn’t pursued it. Here, he resurrects it momentarily—long enough to intrigue readers but far too briefly to satisfy them. Soon it is the 1960s and Berek is on the trail of war criminals, attending their trials in Amsterdam. The final three chapters are confusing at best. Nothing that precedes them prepares the reader and without any context, the end of the book seems detached from the two stories that precede it, those of Berek the child and of Sasha Pechersky and his revolt. Although having Berek close the circle by following (literally and figuratively) the fate of several of those who ran Sobibor to their ends, nothing in Berek’s story before this prepares us for his interest in doing so or his strange journey to Brazil.

Why did Lev feel compelled to tell this story? The mix of fact and fiction is confusing and leaves the reader uncertain of Lev’s intent. Had he wished to celebrate Pechersky and the rebellion, why devote so much care and space to the story of Berek? Had he wished to relate the two, why are the story lines so poorly integrated? Pechersky, the “real” hero, never comes alive. Lev—a Holocaust survivor himself (as a partisan in Russia, not a prisoner at Sobibor)—has plainly done significant research. Too often, though, he has simply plugged it into the story. Berek, the fictional vehicle, defies Lev’s weak writing to reach the reader and make him care. But the last chapters present a different character and diminish the book’s few achievements by relating a story that does not jibe with what preceded it. These final chapters do not explain Berek or his motivations, neither do they offer a coherent narrative to conclude what came before. Berek’s story grows weak, weaker, and finally—blessedly—ends, leaving the reader mystified and disappointed.

Lev has written two books: a coming-of-age novel and a barely fictionalized account of a real event, the first all-too-transparently the vehicle providing the context for the second. Neither is well written, neither is compelling. Those who wish to learn more about Sobibor would profit from Dov Freiberg’s first-person account, To Survive Sobibor. Those seeking a compelling novel about the Holocaust have many places to turn, including such superb works as Andre Schwarz-Bart’s Last of the Just, Imre Kertesz’s Fateless, or Ida Fink’s Journey. With books of that caliber so readily available, there is little reason to read Sobibor. ( )