3 - Sobibór, Generalgouvernement, Occupied Poland, 14 October 1943, 4:00 p.m.

Summary

A seventeen-year-old Jewish boy from Warsaw swings an axe and splits open the skull of a Schutzstaffel officer killing him instantly; with the help of a Soviet POW, he hides the body, cleans up the blood and waits for the next guard. His name is Yehuda Lerner and this happens on the afternoon of 14 October 1943 in Sobibór.

In May 1924 a formal ceremony at 85 Ulica Lubartowska, Lublin, marked the laying of the cornerstone of what would become one of the most important Talmudic academies in Eastern Europe. Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva would open in 1930; ten years later the Nazis ransacked the building, burnt the library and established the headquarters of the military police there. In the following months and years the entire Jewish community of Lublin was annihilated in the Holocaust. The Judenrat of Lublin was established in the winter of 1940 and one year later, on 24 March 1941, the ghetto was created in a designated area of the city. It was sealed with a barbed-wire fence at the end of that year and, despite the high mortality rate, its population continued to grow as a result of the continuous relocation of Jews from other regions of Poland. Sixty-three years after the liquidation of the ghetto in spring 1942 the building in Ulica Lubartowska was returned to the Jewish community of Poland and the former yeshiva was filmed by Leszek Wiśniewski in Uczniowie Widzącego z Lublina (Students of the Seer of Lublin, 2005). This documentary on the history of Polish Hasidism focuses on the figure of Hassidic Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak HaLevi Horowitz (1745–1815), the seer or visionary of Lublin, and bears witness to a void impossible to fill, to the catastrophe of Lublin's Jews. In Students of the Seer of Lublin, representatives of Hasidic communities from around the world and mainly from the United States and Western Europe, visit and pray in Lublin, the city which hosted one of the administrative headquarters of the Generalgouvernement (General Governorate for the Occupied Polish Region) and which was central to the plans of the Nazis both in relation to the extermination of the Jews and to the conquest of a Lebensraum (living space) in the East. It was from a building at 1 Ulica Spokojna that SS Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik ran the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec.