Samuel Willenberg, the Last Surviving Treblinka Prisoner, Dies at 93

The Times of Israel reports:

Samuel Willenberg, the last surviving prisoner of Treblinka — who managed to escape the Nazi death camp in 1943 — has died at the age of 93.

Willenberg was born in 1923 in Częstochowa, in southern Poland, where his father Perec taught at a local Jewish school. His mother Maniefa converted from Christianity to Judaism following her marriage. He was 16 when World War II broke out with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

In 1941, Willenberg’s two sisters were arrested in Czestochowa, while his parents used false documents to escape the Nazi purge. At the age of 19, he was rounded up with the Jews during the liquidation of the ghetto in Opatow in southern Poland, and sent to Treblinka.

Acting on the advice of another Jewish prisoner, Willenberg posed as a bricklayer upon his arrival at the extermination camp. He was the only person from his transport not to perish in the gas chambers.

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