Samuel Willenberg — The Last Survivor of Treblinka
Samuel Willenberg (1923–2016) was one of the very few men to escape Treblinka, the Nazi extermination camp designed explicitly for mass murder. Born in Częstochowa, Poland, he was the son of a Jewish mother and a father who had converted to Judaism. When the Germans invaded, he joined the Polish defense forces and was wounded during the September Campaign. His life, and the life of millions of Jews, changed irreversibly in the years that followed.
Deported to Treblinka in 1942, at the age of nineteen, Willenberg was pushed by fate into the small group of prisoners temporarily kept alive to perform forced labor. Almost all of his family perished there. He survived through sheer courage, resilience, and an unwavering refusal to surrender his humanity inside what he later described as “hell built by human hands.”
On August 2, 1943, during the prisoner uprising, Willenberg managed to escape the camp. He fled through forests under German fire and eventually reached Warsaw, where he joined the Polish resistance (Armia Krajowa). He participated in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, continuing the fight for freedom after having already witnessed the depths of absolute evil.
After the war, he emigrated to Israel, where he rebuilt his life with extraordinary dignity. He became an engineer, worked for the Ministry of Housing, and dedicated much of his time to educating younger generations about the Holocaust, ensuring that Treblinka’s victims would not be erased from memory.
In his later years, he turned to sculpture as a way to express the experiences that words could not contain. His bronze figures — prisoners, victims, fragments of life — remain among the most powerful artistic testimonies of the Holocaust. His memoir, Revolt in Treblinka, is considered one of the essential firsthand accounts of the camp’s reality.
Until his death in 2016, Samuel Willenberg was the last living survivor of Treblinka’s revolt, a man whose courage, lucidity, and generosity carried the memory of hundreds of thousands murdered there. Those who met him — as you had the honor to do — remember not only a witness of history, but a man of profound warmth, intelligence, and strength.
His life stands as one of the greatest acts of resistance: the refusal to let death have the last word.
