Last survivor of Treblinka Nazi death camp dies aged 93

Samuel Willenberg, the last survivor of Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, where 875,000 people were murdered, has died in Israel at the age of 93.

Only 67 people survived the camp, fleeing in a revolt, shortly before it was destroyed.

Treblinka, north-east of Warsaw) is notorious as the most vivid example of the ‘Final Solution,’ the Nazi plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

Unlike at other camps, where some Jews were assigned to forced labour before being killed, Jews brought to Treblinka were immediately gassed to death.

Only a few — mostly young, strong men, like Willenberg, who was 20 at the time — were spared from immediate death and assigned to maintenance work.

On August 2, 1943, a group of Jews stole 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 mine fields, or captured by Polish villagers, who returned them to Treblinka.

“The world cannot forget Treblinka,” Willenberg said in 2010.

He was shot in the leg, as he climbed over bodies piled at the barbed-wire fence. He 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.