Leon feldhandler biography

Leon Feldhendler (Lejb Feldhendler) ( – 6 April ), was a Polish-Jewish resistance fighter known for his role in organizing, with Alexander Pechersky, the prisoner uprising at the Sobibor extermination camp. Prior to his deportation to Sobibor, Feldhendler had been head of the Judenrat (Ger. "Jewish Council") in his village of Żółkiewka, Lublin Voivodeship, in German-occupied Poland.

Role in Sobibor Uprising

In the spring of , Feldhendler led a small group of Sobibor prisoners formulating an escape plan.

Their initial plan had been to poison camp guards and seize their weapons, but the SS discovered the poison and shot five Jews in retaliation. Other plans included setting the camp on fire and escaping in the resulting confusion, but the mining of the camp perimeter by the SS in the summer of rendered the plan impractical.

The arrival in a transport of Soviet POWs of Red Army officer Alexander Pechersky in late September gave new impetus to the escape plans.

A seasoned soldier, Pechersky soon assumed the leadership of the group of would-be escapees and, with Feldhendler as his deputy, the group formed a plan that involved killing the camp's SS personnel, sending the Soviet POWs to raid the arsenal and then fighting their way out the camp's front gate.

The uprising, which took place on October 14, , was detected in its early stages after a guard discovered the body of an SS officer killed by the prisoners. Nevertheless, about Jews managed to make it outside of the camp in the ensuing melee. Eighty were killed in the escape and immediate aftermath. were soon recaptured and killed, as were all the remaining inhabitants of the camp who had chosen to stay.

Some escapees joined the partisans.

Of these, ninety died in combat or were killed by local collaborators or anti-Semites. Sixty-two Jews from Sobibor survived the war, including nine who had escaped earlier.

Murdered in Lublin

Feldhendler was among those who survived the war, hiding in Lublin until the end of German occupation in July However, on April 2, , he was shot through the closed door of his flat as he got up to investigate a commotion in an outer room.

Feldhendler and his wife managed to escape through another door and made their way to Lublin's Św.

Wincentego á Paulo hospital, where he underwent surgery but died four days later. According to most of the older publications, Feldhendler was killed by right-wing Polish nationalists, sometimes identified as the Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, an anti-Communist and anti-Semitic paramilitary organization which formed part of the Polish resistance.

However, at least one recent paper, citing the incomplete treatment of the event by earlier historians and the scant documentary record, has called into question this version of events. Feldhendler's killing was one of at least murders of Jews in the Lublin district between the summer of and the fall of

Feldhendler in culture

In the made-for-TV film Escape from Sobibor he was played by Alan Arkin.

The final period of his life in Lublin is described in the novel Wyjątkowo długa linia by Hanna Krall which was nominated for the Nike Award.

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