The title indicates the place, day, month, year and hour of the one and only successful upraising in a nazi-extermination camp. On this Ocotber 14th, 1943 starting at 4 p.m. sharp the then 17-year-old Yehuda Lerner split the head of SS officer Greischuetz in two with an axe. Lerner`s deed marked the beginning of a revolt in which eleven SS-men were killed and several hundred inmates escaped. The sobibor camp where since spring 1942 a quater of a million people hab been gased, was abandoned.
In less than six weeks, the revolt was planned, prepared and organizied by a Jewish Soviet officer, Alexander Petscherski. He had been deported to Sobibor in early September together with other Jews, soldiers of the Red Army as well, was lucky not to be send to the gas chamber immediately like his comrades. He belonged to a group of sixty men urgently needed for hard labor and maintenance measures.
Lanzmann`s aim is not a historic reconstruction of the upraising but the story of Yehuda Lerner. lerner`s family was killed in Treblinka, he manged to escape from nine different camps. Sometimes with an astute smile he recalls how the prisoners managed to defeat the SS with its own means - their punctuality. The plan to order the SS-men, one after the other, to different baracks in a five minute tact, worked perfectly. At 15.55 the first SS-man was killed with an axe in a neighbouring barack, the second was killed by Lerner, the third five minutes later. His account ends with him falling asleep in the forest - a mere 1.500 feet away from the camp.