Hartford Jewish Film Festival screening local filmmaker’s documentary about excavation of a Nazi extermination camp
“Deadly Deception at Sobibor,” a documentary by a North Haven filmmaker chronicling the excavation of the Nazi extermination camp in Poland, will be screened on Sunday at 1 p.m. as part of the 2023-24 Phyllis Hoffman Hartford Jewish Film Festival at the Mandell JCC in West Hartford.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with its director Gary Hochman. Hochman spent 40 years working for public broadcasting, mostly in Nebraska and primarily doing non-fiction documentaries. He moved to North Haven a couple of years ago. He says he is semi-retired but continues to work on his own film projects. This one has occupied him for the past 16 years.
Through his work on public television, Hochman became acquainted with the famed Jewish archaeologist and scholar Richard Freund from the University of Hartford. Freund, who died in 2022, had met Haimi, an Israeli archaeologist of Moroccan heritage who was excavating a forested area in Poland where Nazis had held mass executions in gas chambers. The documentary follows Haimi and other archaeologists, including Wojciech Mazurek of Poland and Ivar Schute from the Netherlands, as they recover physical evidence of Sobibor.
The existence of the area had been covered up even when it was in use. “There were no blueprints, no photos” of it from the 1940s, Hochman said. It was completely obscured by plant growth, yet “traces of a barbed wire fence pathway” were detected by the excavators and ultimately “everything the Nazis tried to hide, we unearthed.”
It is estimated that 250,000 Jewish people were executed at Sobibor.
“I understood from the beginning that this was about the hiding of the Holocaust by the Nazis,” Hochman said. “This needed to be uncovered and reported on. I wanted to show the investigation as it unfolded.”
The filmmaker said he made at least 10 trips of two to five weeks each between 2008 and 2017. He brought a director of photography with him on half the trips, and a couple of times he said he had an audio engineer.
Creating the documentary was “separate from my regular job,” he said. “My vacation time and my free time became this. I was able to preserve the investigation as it unfolded.”
The film emphasizes the human element of the excavation project and how it gives voice to those who died. There were some survivors of Sobibor, including two who went on to live in the New Haven area, but Hochman notes that “all the people who escaped never saw the mass graves or the gas chambers.” The documentarian refers to the film as a “testimony from beyond the grave.” It also shows the skill and passion of the archaeologists and how respectful they are toward the items they recover from the death camp’s victims.
“Deadly Deception at Sobibor” is gently narrated by actress, singer and playwright Tovah Feldshuh.
“Deadly Deception at Sobibor” has been shown in recent months at Jewish film festivals in Miami, Las Vegas and elsewhere, as well as at Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival.
The 2023-24 Phyllis Hoffman Hartford Jewish Film Festival began in October and continues through March at the Mandell JCC. Other screenings at the festival include “Seven Blessings” on Saturday, “Queen of the Deuce” on Feb. 17 at Real Art Ways, “Irena’s Vow” on Feb.18, “Encore: Remembering Gene Wilder” on Feb. 29, “Perfect Strangers” on March 2 and “Vishniac” and “The Catskills” on March 3.
Tickets for the Hartford Jewish Film Festival are $20, $15 in advance. For more information about the festival, go to hjff.eventive.org.
