Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

May 11, 2018

With a New Film, Russia Seeks to Change Its Own Narrative about the Holocaust

Sobibor.

When Benjamin Netanyahu visited Moscow in January to discuss pressing security issues, he and Vladimir Putin attended a screening of the film Sobibor, which is now being show in theaters in Europe and Russia. Funded and promoted by the Russian Ministry of Culture, the movie is based on a group of prisoners’ successful escape from the titular death camp in 1943, led by a Jewish Red Army officer. Its production comes as part of a general effort by the Kremlin to seize on Sobibór as a symbol of Russia’s connection to the Holocaust—breaking with the old Soviet model of papering over the Shoah’s distinctiveness—as Izabella Tabarovsky writes:

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