A breathtaking match between WWII German aerial photographs and today’s satellite imaging technologies has enabled archaeologists digging at the site of the Sobibor death camp to finally reveal the layout of the camp’s killing machinery.


The inquest is being led by Israeli archaeologist Yoram Haimi, assisted by a Polish colleague and local villagers, and an unusual partner – the Israeli Air Force.

Sobibor, in East Poland, was a death camp Nazi Germany would rather forget. The prisoners – Jews from France, Holland, USSR and Poland - revolted, killing several SS officers and escaping.  Retaliation was swift and brutal – machine gun fire from the “Wachman” camp guards had a heavy death toll.  Enraged by the revolt, the Nazis leveled the camp and planted the site with a dense forest, hoping that eternal oblivion would be the lot of Sobibor, where 250,000 Jews died.  Very few former prisoners survived the war.  

For decades, historians, archaeologists and geophysicists from Germany, Holland, Poland and the US tried, and failed, to decisively reconstruct the camp site. All that is left of Sobibor today is a memorial in the middle of a forest. At the heart of the memorial is an enormous grave containing the ashes of those who walked the Himmelstrasse – Road to Heaven - into the gas chambers.  

Using war-time aerial photographs of the camp taken by the German Luftwaffe and armed with advanced satellite imaging technologies, an Israeli Air Force unit guided archaeologist Yoram Haimi through the site, pointing out where various sections of the death camp once were.  After many decades, Haimi finally unearthed 17 pillars believed to have upheld the gas chambers of Sobibor.

Uvda (“Fact”) - the flagship prime time investigative show on Israel’s Channel 2 TV – follows Yoram Haimi on his inquest. For Haimi, this journey is by no means impersonal – members of his Moroccan Jewish family were deported from France to their deaths in Sobibor. A deeply emotional scene unfolds on camera with Yoram Haimi breaking out in tears while being led via his cell phone, by Israeli Air Force officers in Tel Aviv, step by step, from the monument over the mass grave to the site of Sobibor’s gas chamber. At the film’s closing, surrounded by his Polish colleagues and helpers, Yoram lights memorial candles for his family.  Moved by the scene, Polish manual workers hired for the dig vow to protect and preserve the site for posterity
The film, “Unearthing Sobibor,” presents a new method of telling and proving the horrors of World War II to current and future generations.  Piecing together the findings - broken vessels, wedding rings, dentures, documents – Yoram Haimi continues his detective archaeological mission to put together the puzzle of Sobibor.

The film was shot at the time when the Demjanjuk trial started in Germany. John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian POW who served as an SS Wachman (guard) at Sobibor, is now standing trial for complicity in the killing of 27,900 Jews who perished at Sobibor during his service there.  His trial is one of the last – if not the very last – Nazi trial ever to be held.

Already living memories are too few or too faint to be of service at the trial. This is the moment when history takes over from living memory. With archaeology the new weapon of Holocaust historians, Yoram Haimi and his work at Sobibor offer a striking counterpoint to the trial. The quest for truth and remembrance continues.

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