During WWII, the death camp at Treblinka had an escape, causing the Commandant at a similar camp in Sobibor to vow (actually threaten) that his camp would never experience the same thing. But those who were its captives, the Jewish laborers that had been spared from the ovens, knew that they were on borrowed time and that their only hope was to escape… the only question was how to do it. On October 14, 1943, members of the camp’s underground resistance succeeded in covertly killing eleven German officers and a number of Ukrainian guards. Of the 600 inmates in the camp, roughly 300 escaped, although most were later re-captured and killed. The escape forced the Nazis to close the death camp, dismantling it and planting a forest.

The film is based on a real story that happened in 1943 in the Sobibor concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. The main character of the movie is the Soviet-Jewish soldier Alexander Pechersky, who at that time was serving in the Red Army as a lieutenant. In October 1943, he was captured by the Nazis and deported to the Sobibor concentration camp, where Jews were being exterminated in gas chambers. But, in just 3 weeks, Alexander was able to plan an international uprising of prisoners from Poland and Western Europe. This uprising resulted in being the only successful one throughout the war, which led to the largest escape of prisoners from a Nazi concentration camp.