A True Story of Trust, Betrayal and Love

December 1943. The Ninth Fortress, Lithuania.  Below zero temperatures. The Germans are losing the War and urgently covering their tracks.  63 prisoners are forced to burn tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, children (“dolls” as the Nazis refer to them).  

Inside the Fortress, on Christmas Eve, each Nazi guard receives a candle symbolizing the victory of light over dark. 

Outside, Alex Faitelson, a charismatic 22-year-old, leads all the prisoners out of the Fortress in a high-risk escape that no one has ever succeeded in making. Climbing through a small opening in a metal doorway, they run across the Fortress grounds, and scale the walls to freedom.  

NINTH FORTRESS is the extraordinary true story of how one young man, Alex Faitelson, quietly wins the trust of his deeply suspicious fellow prisoners, and his skeptical childhood friends, to pull off this audacious escape. 

A few weeks before, Alex, his young wife Sima, and six close school friends, aged between 17 and 25, are captured on their away to join the freedom fighters.  Sima escapes, but the others are sent to the Ninth Fortress, where the Germans are destroying all evidence of their genocide. As they enter the camp one thought dominates: they must escape. 

Alex’s friends suggest a plan to overcome a couple of guards, take their weapons, steal the transport truck and drive away. Alex is not convinced.  He wants to get everyone out.  He knows if they all escape there’s a greater chance someone will survive to tell the world what’s been going on.  No one believes Alex can persuade all the prisoners to his plan, and they’re concerned someone will inform the Nazis. But Alex convinces his friends to give him a few days to bring everyone on board.  

It does not go well. The Russians prisoners reject his suggestions. 

They need a new plan.  

One morning, the Nazis remove the sickest prisoners unable to work, take them to an adjacent courtyard, and shoot them.   The surviving Russians are incensed and immediately pledge their support to Alex. They take him to a hidden door leading to the outside that could serve as an escape.

There is urgency to their work: they must escape before the Germans find out, before they all become physically and mentally too weak, and before Alex’s best friend, Meishe, known to be betraying them to the Nazis, destroys their plan. 

On Christmas Eve Alex leads all 63 prisoners through the hatch, into the cold night air, and out of the Fortress.  

Most of the prisoners refuse to go back to the Kovno ghetto from where they came as they see it as escaping one prison to go to another. But Alex thinks it is better to hide in plain site and he returns with a handful of the escapees. They are welcomed home by the partisans in the ghetto, but most critically Alex can return to his new bride, Sima .

Alex and Sima Faitelson survived the war and were able to testify to the Nuremberg trials and tell the world their extraordinary story of trust, courage and an inspiring will to live.  

© Marc Jobst