Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures

The title of the film refers to the exact place, day, month, year and hour of the most successful uprising ever to be mounted in a Nazi extermination camp. Yehuda Lerner was 16 years old on that afternoon, when he used an axe to split the skull of an SS guard. Before Sobibor, Lerner had managed to escape from eight other concentration camps where he was imprisoned. The film consists of material from Claude Lanzmann’s interviews with Lerner in 1979. Lerner describes the uprising in detail, from the planning, which was led by a Jewish prisoner who had been an officer in the Red Army, to the actual revolt itself, the success of which depended on the famed German penchant for punctuality. SOBIBOR combines the Lerner interviews with footage shot in 2001 of the places that he talks about. Claude Lanzmann said, "The Sobibor uprising had to be more than just one episode in Shoah. It deserved its own film. The revolt was, in fact, a paradigmatic example of what I have called in another context the reappropriation of force and violence by the Jews".