Samuel Willenberg: Last survivor of the Treblinka Nazi death camp who served in the Polish underground

'I live two lives, one is here and now and the other is what happened there'

Willenberg visits the Museum of Struggle and Martyrdom in Treblinka in 2013 (EPA)

Samuel Willenberg, who has died in Israel at the age of 93, was the last survivor of Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in which 875,000 people were systematically murdered. 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. His two sisters were killed there; he described his survival as “chance, sheer chance.” Unlike other camps, where some Jews were assigned to forced labour before being killed, nearly all Jews brought to Treblinka were immediately gassed. Only a select few – mostly young, strong men like Willenberg, who was 20 at the time – were spared immediate death and assigned to maintenance work.

On 2 August 1943, a group of prisoners 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 minefields or captured by Polish villagers who returned them to Treblinka. “The world cannot forget Treblinka,” Willenberg said in an interview in 2010.

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 he arrived in Warsaw and joined the Polish underground, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising.

In the immediate post-war years helped find Jewish children rescued from the Holocaust by non-Jewish Polish families, then in 1950 he moved to Israel, where he became a surveyor for the Housing Ministry. Later in life, he took up sculpting, graduating from the University of the Third Age in Jerusalem, in order to describe his experiences. 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.

Willenberg received Poland’s highest national honours, including the Cross of Merit with Swords, the Cross of Valour, the Warsaw Cross of the Uprising, the Polish Army Medal and the Order of Merit. “I live two lives, one is here and now and the other is what happened there,” he said. “It never leaves me. It stays in my head. It goes with me always.”

Samuel Willenberg, Holocaust survivor and sculptor: born Czestochowa, Poland 16 February 1923; married Ada (one daughter); died Ulim, Israel 19 February 2016.