Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Jack Gold
• Written by Reginald Rose, based on the book by Richard Rashke
• starring
  • Alan Arkin
  • Joanna Pacula
  • Rutger Hauer
  • Hartmut Becker
  • Jack Shepherd

(Note: There are no humorous captions beneath the screencaps in this review. This is deliberate.)

There are those rare occasions in which the real world so far surpasses what we can imagine that any dramatic version needs no dressing-up. No melodrama, no adornment. You simply re-enact and point the camera. The burden of suspension of disbelief is no longer on the filmmaker, because these things happened. He simply tells the story, and plain simplicity is adequate, because the onus is now on the viewer to find a way to take what occurs on screen and somehow integrate it into what he imagines the real world to be like. If the Nazis had not existed, they would be completely unbelievable as fictitious villains; they were and are far beyond what any storyteller would craft from the whole cloth and ask his audience to accept.

This is not the kind of subject matter I usually deal with around here, I know; it’s too gutwrenchingly serious, too unmockable, for my habitual reviewing style. But Escape From Sobibor is now readily available as a dollar DVD, and I couldn’t leave it on the shelf while I went through a Rutger Hauer Video Binge. So now I’ve committed myself to saying something about a movie which portrays, in some small part, events whose monstrous enormity render all the words said about it trivial.

This particular small part concerns the Polish-based Nazi death camp of Sobibor, which was, on October 14, 1943, the site of the only successful camp revolt during World War 2. This information is given to us helpfully by narrator Howard K. Smith, who was a foreign correspondent during the war, and who is one of the few utterly false steps in the production. His is a newsy voice, appropriate for detailing a ballplayer’s batting average or calling our attention to the beautiful details in a nature documentary; it’s far too convivial for the events it presages. Thankfully, narration is heard only here and at the very end.

The camp at Sobibor is already well populated by the time our story opens, composed entirely of Jewish men and women whose trades have made them marginally valuable to their SS overseers. Leon (Alan Arkin) has somehow become a nominal leader, a man to whom almost every prisoner defers, though when a trio on gardening duty tell him their plan to escape today, Leon is powerless to stop them. He can only listen from afar to the gunshots as the three men make it past the barbed wire, and the explosions as they try to cross the minefield.

Working their trades for the Nazis is onerous enough, but the men of Sobibor have an even worse duty. They stand at the edge of the railroad and help the new arrivals off the train while Strauss plays gaily over the loudspeakers, remaining silent and downcast as men are separated from the women and children; as those with a useful skill such as seamstresses, shoemakers, tailors, and, in this case, goldsmiths, are called out; as those without any ability that the Nazis wish to exploit are calmly told that their stay in Sobibor will begin with a hot shower; as the lines of men and women march unsuspectingly to the showers which lead only to gas chambers and incinerators.

This latest trainload yields three seamstresses, Luka (Joanna Pacula), Bajle (Judith Sharp), and Naomi (Sara Sugarman); one shoemaker, Itzhak (Jack Shepherd), who anxiously waves goodbye to his wife and child as they are herded to the showers, and Schlomo (Simon Gregor) and hs younger brother Moses (Eli Nathenson), goldsmiths who bid their father and mother farewell in the same way.

Itzak finds out the truth that night, after learning his job duties, when he starts asking around for his family; Leon and his friend Samuel (Emil Wolk) tell him where the showers really lead. Schlomo and Moses have it even harder; Moses is ordered to pick up a gold coin from an SS officer who wants it worked into his whip handle, and in so doing enters the courtyard in which the newcomers are shepherded from the building in which they lose their possessions and come out naked, to the building from which they come out stacked carelessly on a cart.

The new women have no such attachments and no such revelation; but Naomi has managed to smuggle her baby into the sewing shed, and it isn’t long before their SS overseer finds out. He is first in a generous mood, and intends to spare the woman’s life as he takes the baby off to the showers; but when Naomi spits full in her face, he simply shoots first the mother and then the baby in the head, in the midst of the other seamstresses.

Leon has long entertained plans of escape, for maybe ten or twenty of the 600 prisoners. But the extent to which that plan would be disastrous is shown the following day, when two men bringing water for those on woodcutting detail manage to overpower their overseer and escape. The thirteen other woodcutters try to follow suit, but are caught by the barbed wire, and brought back to the camp center as an object lesson. There, they are sentenced to die. But not just them. Each of them is forced to choose another prisoner as their “partner in death,” or else the officers will simply shoot 50 Jews at random.

Realizing that a similar toll will be exacted if he and his group escaped, Leon backs away from such small-scale plans. The only escape plan he will now support is one that frees all of the prisoners of Sobibor. All six hundred of them.

As they’re beating their brains to come up with a plan that can get six hundred people past sixteen SS officers and 125 Ukrainian guards, the dynamic of the camp changes suddenly. A group of Russian solders is tossed into the camp, separated from their comrades-in-arms destined for a real P.O.W. camp because they’re Jewish. Their leader is Lt. Sasha Pechersky, as played by Rutger Hauer — quite possibly the single least intuitive casting of a Jewish role until Christopher Lambert played a Mossad agent in The Point Men. But he clicks immediately with Leon; Sasha will provide the tactical forethought and the muscle of his trained men, and Leon will provide the will and the drive among the prisoners. And the plan they eventually come up with is an audacious one: To have any chance of escape, they will have to quietly kill all sixteen SS officers within the space of one hour.

Originally, Escape From Sobibor was broadcast as a two-part miniseries, but the commonly-available versions are all the feature-length version, hovering just under two hours. Looking solely at the trimmed-down version, I can hazard a guess that all that was really cut were some interpersonal subplots among the prisoners. Schlomo and Bajle decide to gather them rosebuds while they may; Itzhak finds solace of a sort with a similarly-widowed prisoner. The most obviously cut subplot involves Sasha and Luka; to placate the guards’ suspicion as to why Sasha hangs out around the Polish Jews’ quarters every evening while planning, Leon assigns Luka to act as his “girlfriend.” She takes to the role with great sincerity, and because Sasha is also playing along, he doesn’t realize that Luka comes to inhabit her role more fully than he. It comes as a shock and a blow to her when she finds out that he’s only been going through the motions with her, that he has a wife and child back home in Russia to whom he is very devoted.

I don’t think it’s any great spoiler to tell you how the escape turns out; thanks to the necessary logistical complexity of silently killing sixteen men in an hour, things go awry, and it’s every man/woman for him/herself as they break down the gates and dash across the minefield, sporadically returning fire toward the disorganized Ukrainian guards. Of the 600 prisoners, the historical record shows that almost half died in the attempt. But that means that more than 300 made it to the woods, to safety, leaving the soldiers behind them without leadership and with severed telephone lines. Leon’s last charge to them before their mad dash is a familiar one: to “bear witness,” to let the world know what had happened there. It’s a heady charge, and one that forever remains elusive, because too many of us find it hard to countenance such inhumanity among people whom we would otherwise consider “ordinary.” Now that this movie is so readily and cheaply available, more people may possibly be recipients of that witness.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: I lost track in the first ten minutes, when the occupants of the first train were trooped off to the gas chambers
• breasts: the only scene with nudity showed the women and children being herded naked into the gas chambers, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop and count nipples in a scene like that
• explosions: 25
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0