A Testament to Bravery

     October 14, 1943: For the second time in this extended mass nightmare, the victims have a taste of victory.
     Today, though many may not know it, marks a model for bravery against oppression, for courage for one's people, for dedication to justice. Sixty nine years ago today, eleven SS officers were shot, not on the field of battle, by olive-swathed juveniles called by others "liberators," but at the scene of their own crimes, by two Jewish men with a ravenous taste for freedom. They meant to eradicate every one of their captors, slowly whittling down the path to liberty. Discovered, their plan foiled, they charged ahead, leading their six hundred fellow captives in a rush for their lives.
     Only three hundred survived, and by the end of the war only 50 or 75 of those remained. Mines and Germans had their way with the rest. But one can only despair to think how many of them would have survived had the uprising at the Sobibor death camp never occurred.
     The Sobibor uprising was no towering victory. Such percentages of casualty are not characteristic of our favorite historical victories - the Trentons, the Waterloos, the Agincourts, the Marathons. But in its own way, it is a triumph of history. In an era in which fear dominated, bravery dominated these. When others may have resigned to fate, these resisted their sentences. With all hope lost, these made their own. Sobibor and its heroes stand, then, not as a victory of great renown, but one of import nonetheless. There is no Arc de Triomphe for this battle. Rather, in a wintery corner of Eastern Europe, there is a desolate testament to bravery. The pilgrims of liberty will find it, and remember it. In the permafrost they will find a bullet, long crusted with the blood of the oppressor. And they will know that when push comes to shove, this is the cost of freedom. It is a reminder that those who seek will find, and those who remain ignorant will forever forget. And by this, it shall grow all the more powerful - the stark example in the Polish wastes that reserves itself for the would-be liberated.