Last survivor of Nazi death camp Treblinka dies in Israel

Samuel Willenberg, the last survivor of Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, has died in Israel at the age of 93.

Willenberg was born in 1923 in Częstochowa, Poland to a Jewish father and a Christian mother who converted to Judaism and worked as a nurse. In October 1942, when he was 19, Willenberg was sent to Treblinka, where 875,000 people were systematically murdered.

Credit: Reuters


Only 67 people are known to have survived the camp, fleeing in a revolt shortly before it was destroyed.

Treblinka holds a notorious place in history as perhaps the most vivid example of the Final Solution, the Nazi plan to exterminate Europe's Jews. Unlike at other camps, where some Jews were assigned to forced labor before being killed, nearly all Jews brought to Treblinka were immediately gassed to death.

Only a select few -- mostly young, strong men like Willenberg, who was 20 at the time -- were spared from immediate death and assigned to maintenance work instead at the camp, located northeast of Warsaw. Willenberg was tasked with sorting the belongings of those sent to their deaths. He said he remembered learning the tragic fate of his two sisters, Ita and Tamara, by discovering their personal items in one of the piles.

On Aug. 2, 1943, a group of Jews stole some weapons, set fire to the camp and headed to the woods. Hundreds fled, but most were shot and killed by Nazi troops in the surrounding mine fields or captured by Polish villagers who returned them to Treblinka.

In 2014, Willenberg gave one of his last interviews to Israel Hayom reporter Yaakov Levitam.

"My jaw dropped listening to his stories; amazingly, he had recalled every detail, every name and every moment of horror and insanity," Levitam said. "He described in vivid colors how he had learned of the plan to rebel, how, in his flight, he had shot a Nazi guard and how he had survived on his own after the revolt while the Nazis were hunting down his friends who had run away in a different direction."

Willenberg said, "I survived against all odds and I promised myself that I will travel across the globe and tell my story for as long as I can, so that the young generation will never forget."

Willenberg told The Associated Press in a 2010 interview, "The world cannot forget Treblinka."

He described how he was shot in the leg as he climbed over bodies piled at the barbed wire fence and catapulted over. He kept running, ignoring dead friends in his path. He said his blue eyes and "non-Jewish" look allowed him to survive in the countryside before arriving in Warsaw and joining the Polish underground.

After the war. Willenberg moved to Israel and became a surveyor for the Housing Ministry. Later in life, he took up sculpting to describe his experiences in the Holocaust. His bronze statues depicted Jews standing on a train platform, a father removing his son's shoes before entering the gas chambers, a young girl having her head shaved, and prisoners removing bodies.

"I live two lives, one is here and now and the other is what happened there," Willenberg said. "It never leaves me. It stays in my head. It goes with me always."

Willenberg returned to Treblinka more than 30 times to tell his story to visiting groups. "I am the last person remaining to tell the story of what took place here [Treblinka]," Willenberg told an Israeli youth delegation visiting Poland in 2013. "When I am gone, I ask of you, kids, to continue to tell my story."

Willenberg described his survival as "chance, sheer chance."

The Nazis and their collaborators killed about 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. The death toll at Treblinka was second only to Auschwitz -- a prison camp in southern Poland where more than a million people died in gas chambers or from starvation, disease and forced labor.

Willenberg is survived by a daughter and grandchildren. His funeral will take place on Monday at 3 p.m. at Moshav Udim.

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