Between July 1942 and October 1943, approximately 850,000 men, women and children, most of them Jews, were murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka, eastern Poland. Only Auschwitz claimed more victims, but nowhere matched Treblinka’s rate of extermination. There was just 67 known survivors of the camp, of whom Samuel Willenberg was the last.
He owed his life to chance. When the 19-year old Willenberg stumbled out of a freight wagon onto the unloading ramp at Treblinka, he was told at once to remove his shoes. This was to prevent those about to be gassed from running away. The Jewish prisoner who gave the order recognised him as being from his home town. “Tell them you’re a bricklayer,” he said quickly. The Germans needed skilled tradesmen to keep the camp running. Willenberg was wearing a paint-spattered smock belonging to his father, an artist, and was sent to a work detail. Within six hours, all the other 6,000 people who had arrived with him on the train were dead.
Willenberg was given the task of sorting the belongings of those who had been gassed. Amongst them he recognised the distinctive coat belonging to his five-year-old sister Tamara. Beside it, he recalled, “as if in a sister’s embrace”, was the skirt belonging to his other sibling, Itta. Among the sights to which he was exposed was the mass burning of corpses. “The sizzling, half burnt cadavers emitted grinding and crackling sounds,” he wrote later. “God must have been on holiday. I looked for Him, but there was only beautiful Polish sky.”
Increasingly worried that their crimes would be uncovered, the Nazis ordered that all traces of the camp be erased. The Jewish labourers knew that their days were numbered. In August 1943, Willenberg was among several hundred prisoners who attempted to escape. Using a duplicate key, they stole weapons, set fire to the camp and launched themselves at the wire fences. Most were killed, but Willenberg was able to clamber over their bodies to the woods.
As he ran, he was wounded in the leg and a friend, a Protestant priest, was also hit. He asked Willenberg to finish him. “I told him, ‘Turn your head towards the gas chambers, where your wife and daughters were killed’ — and I shot him. It was the only thing to do.”
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A friendly local dressed his wound and hid Willenberg for the night. After making his way to Warsaw, he was reunited with his parents, who asked him if he had seen his sisters. “I could never bring myself to tell her that I’d found their clothes,” he said. Willenberg’s mother was an Orthodox Christian who had converted to Judaism after marrying his father. He worked as a teacher as well as a painter of murals for synagogues. Samuel was often in trouble as a child. With a friend, he would jump on to trains passing their home in Czestochowa, southern Poland. “We wanted to go all the way to Vienna.”
When he was 16, the Germans invaded and he left school to fight them. He voluntarily boarded the train to Treblinka in despair after his sisters were taken — “it was a form of suicide”. After his escape, he took part in the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans. When the surviving population was being sent into captivity after the suppression of the revolt, he jumped from his prison train and went into hiding. Thereafter, he devoted himself to finding Jewish children who had been saved by Christian families.
In 1950, he emigrated to Israel, where he became chief surveyor to the ministry of construction. In retirement, he took up sculpture and became known for his pieces representing the Holocaust. He made more than 30 trips to Treblinka, of which little remains. He is survived by his wife, Ada, who had been in the Warsaw Ghetto. Their daughter, Orit, is an architect; her work includes Israel’s embassy in Berlin and a projected education centre at Treblinka.
“I live two lives,” said Willenberg. “One is here and now and the other is what happened there. It never leaves me.”
Samuel Willenberg, Holocaust survivor, was born on February 16, 1923. He died on February 19, 2016, aged 93