(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)April 21, 2015

MAHWAH, N.J. – On April 20, the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies sponsored a screening by Gary Hochman of a rough-cut of his documentary, Deadly Deception at Sobibor. The film details how archeologists Yoram Haimi (Israel) and Wojtek Mazurek (Poland), aided by local residents, have uncovered irrefutable evidence about the camp, including the revolt and mass escape of 1943.

Using a combination of the latest technology and painstaking excavation, the joint Israeli-Polish team discovered the remnants of the gas chamber and traces the walled corridor, dubbed by the SS as the Himmelfahrtstrasse (Street to Heaven), through which they herded Jews to their demise. The team also found a yellow Star of David, a small nametag of a murdered child from Amsterdam, and artifacts from a well or cistern indicating both the revolt and cover-up.

The film also shows corroborating testimony from a local Polish farmer, who vividly remembered the noxious smells emanating from the camp, and from Phillip Bialowitz, one of the few Jewish survivors still alive today, who was able to verify details about the camp’s operation and physical plan. Additionally, in his film, Hochman interviewed a retired U.S. Navy officer who has meticulously researched German aerial photographs that clearly show they had both erected a camp at Sobibor and attempted to hide its existence by demolishing it after the revolt.

Together with Belzec and Treblinka, Sobibor was one of the killing centers established under the so-called “Operation Reinhard,” the code name for the annihilation of the Jews residing in German-occupied Polish territory not annexed into the Third Reich. This diabolical plan was named after Reinhard Heydrich, the infamous chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), who died in June 1942 of wounds inflicted during an attack on a Prague street by Czech partisans. The “Operation Reinhard” camps were hidden in the remote east of Poland and had no other purpose than to kill Jews. At Sobibor alone, it is estimated that between April 1942 and October 1943 some 250,000 Jews, most of them from Poland, Holland and Slovakia, were put to death.

Gary Hochman is a senior producer at NET Television, Nebraska’s PBS affiliate, specializing in science programs. His productions are primarily for PBS and NOVA. In that capacity, Gary has travelled to all the globe’s five continents. Until his current project on Sobibor, his most challenging documentary was “NOVA: Antarctica’s Climate Secrets.” This program, shot on location in Antarctica, followed researchers from the U.S., New Zealand, Germany, and Italy as they explored, drilled and prospected to chart Antarctica’s history of climate conditions and aid in the forecasting of the earth’s global climate future.

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