Village of a million spirits

the long version

On August 2, 1943 prisoners of the Treblinka concentration camp, armed with stolen guns and grenades, attacked their guards, set fire to the "factory of death," and fled into the neighboring forest. Treblinka was a secret camp, designed to hide from history what occurred inside its confines. The estimates of the number of people killed at Treblinka range from 600,000 to 1.2 million, and the discrepancy in the figures is itself evidence of the scarcity of available details. Of the six hundred prisoners who escaped only forty lived, but their survival insured that the horrors they witnessed and an account of their desperate revolt reached the outside world. Village of a Million Spirits is a fictionalized account of this story, told from the viewpoints of the Nazi guards, the victims, and residents of the surrounding countryside.