Leon feldhandler biography

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One of them was Aron Licht:

After a hard roll call we fall into bed (…) it fell to me to sleep next to Leon Feldhendler. The Sobibor revolt and the fear of similar revolts apparently influenced Himmler in his decision to order Friedrich Kruger, the supreme commander of the SS and police in the General-Government, to hasten the elimination of all the Jews still remaining in camps in the Lublin district. 

Although the uprising in Sobibor did not take place according to plan, in the end it was successful.

The German surveillance planes that circled overhead did not notice anything. The rest of the prisoners became panic-stricken. A strictly selected group, including Peczerski and Feldhendler, lured Germans to one of the sheds on any pretext and killed them there, seizing their weapons. too, joined the partisans. Everything was meticulously planned and the uprising began on October 14, 1943.

Leon Feldhendler, a man in his early thirties who had been chairman of the Jewish Council in Zolkiew, organized an underground organization at Sobibor to plan an escape.

In the second half of September, Soviet Jewish prisoners of war were brought to the camp from Minsk. The prisoners rushed into open combat.

These were all the SS people in the camp that day, save for one - Frantzel - who was called to the workshops but did not come. 

The operation in Camp 1 was run by Pechorsky, while Feldhendler commanded the operation in Camp 2. cit., pp.59-60; testimony of Blat, op.cit., pp. The searches, which began only in the morning hours, allowed enough time for many of the prisoners to slip away from the camp area.

But this is not their goal. The meticulously planned uprising began on October 14, 1943. The final chapter in the history of the Jewish community in Żółkiewka came to a close on October 16, 1942.

Furthermore, the Germans were mistaken in supposing that most of the escaped prisoners would head east to the Bug and therefore in stationing most of their forces at the Bug crossing points. A truck that had arrived from outside the camp appeared in Camp 2 and came to a halt near the building of the camp headquarters. Other prisoners who were still in the area of Camp 2 now fled toward Camp 4.

Only 61 of them survived the war.

Leon Feldhendler escaped and was initially hidden by the Polish population in the village of Maciejow Stary. With the control over the two most important institutions operating in the town during the occupation, he became the unquestioned leader of the Jewish community in Żółkiewka.

I went out with a few comrades from our barrack to the courtyard (…) a stocky Jew of medium height, about 40 years old, squatted down. Six days later, the leaders of the two groups – a young Red Army lieutenant named Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky and Lejba Felhendler – had a chance to meet. His work consisted of sorting through the belongings of those killed.

The family’s relocation to Żółkiewka was related to the head of the family’s run for the position of the town’s Chief Rabbi, which he became in January 1924.

On May 9, 1935, Lejba got married to Toba Wajnberg.