Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures

Sobibor, 14 October, 1943, four p.m.: that is the place, date and time of a successful rebellion by prisoners in the Sobibor concentration camp. The story of this rebellion is told by Yehuda Lerner, who was then a young man. Lanzmann interviewed Lerner in 1979, while shooting his documentary Shoah. Now he has dedicated a whole film to the story of Lerner.The extensive, detailed questions and answers and the translations by the interpreter in between are included in full. Lerner describes in the minutest detail the exciting and almost incredible story of the rebellion and his previous almost miraculous escapes from no less than eight camps. Time after time he was arrested and taken to another prison instead of being executed, as he expected.The documentary puts paid to the general notion that the Jews did not know what to expect in the camps and that they allowed themselves to be led to the gas chambers without any form of resistance. Just as in Shoah, shots of the interview are juxtaposed with shots of Warsaw, Minsk and Sobibor today. At the end, Lanzmann reads a terrifying list of the number of Jews transported to Sobibor in 1942 and 1943.