Tribute to Samuel Willenberg, who passed away on Friday 19 February 2016
Samuel Willenberg died in Israel on Friday, February 19, 2016 at the age of 93. He was the last survivor of the Treblinka revolt still alive. The Shoah Memorial paid tribute to him.
At 19 years old, Samuel Willenberg, known as Samek and originally from Częstochowa in Poland, is deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. Young and robust, he is chosen upon his arrival in the camp to work on sorting the belongings of the exterminated prisoners. Later, he will be assigned to a group responsible for pruning the trees in the forest surrounding the camp. It is at this time that dreams of escape begin to obsess him.
In the camp, survival is organized among the prisoners. They manage to exchange some gold coins or diamonds extracted from the victims' pockets for food with the Ukrainian guards. At the announcement of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, the prisoners of Treblinka draw from their last strength to set up a revolt of unimaginable audacity and courage.
On August 2, 1943, the camp ignites. Only a small group of about 200 prisoners managed to escape by rushing under the electric fence despite the SS shots. Wounded in the leg, Samuel Willenberg manages to escape and begins a long solitary wandering through forests and plains, hiding to survive. He eventually returned to Warsaw to continue his fight against the Germans within the first Polish resistance movement, the Armija Krajova (AK). He will, however, as a Jew, continue to be wary of his new companions.
Holocaust survivor, Samuel Willenberg moved to Israel in 1950 and became a civil servant in the housing ministry. After more than fifty years of silence, he restores the inconceivable, the absurdity and the horror of Treblinka in a book entitled «Révolte à Treblinka» (Ramsay, 2004). This story is a beautiful tribute to the memory of the victims, such as his two sisters, their bravery and their suffering. Samuel Willenberg will maintain this memory by accompanying delegations to Treblinka, giving lectures, delivering his testimony and drawing and sculpting works related to its history.
In thirteen months, nearly 870,000 Jews were murdered in the Treblinka camp.
Also read: "Revolt in Treblinka"
