Samuel Willenberg

Samuel Willenberg (Częstochowa, 1923 – Israel, 2016), known by the nom de guerre Igo, was a Holocaust survivor who became a sculptor and painter, and also a writer. He matters because he was one of the few prisoners at the Treblinka extermination camp to survive the August 1943 revolt, and because he was the last surviving participant in that uprising when he died.

Born into a family in which his father, a teacher and painter, earned extra money decorating synagogues, Willenberg grew up between Częstochowa and Warsaw. After the German invasion of 1939 he volunteered for the Polish Army, was wounded and captured by the Red Army, and then rejoined his family in Opatów, where they ended up in the ghetto. Deported to Treblinka in October 1942, he survived the arrival ramp by posing as a bricklayer, helped by a tip from a prisoner and by his father's paint-stained smock. Assigned to the Sonderkommando, he took part in the revolt of August 1943, escaped wounded in one leg, and reached Warsaw, where he joined the underground. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out, he fought with the Armia Krajowa.

After the war he served briefly in the Polish Army and in 1950 emigrated to Israel with his wife and mother. He worked as a surveyor and, after retiring, studied fine arts and graduated in sculpture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work, mostly in clay and bronze, centres on the Holocaust; a series of fifteen bronze casts of people and scenes from Treblinka, along with maps and drawings of the camp, were shown internationally. His memoir, Revolt in Treblinka, appeared between 1986 and 1991 in Hebrew, Polish and English.

His legacy lives on through his memoir, his role in youth visits to Poland, and the Holocaust monument to the victims of the Częstochowa Ghetto, unveiled in 2009. His daughter, architect Orit Willenberg-Giladi, was chosen in 2013 to design a Holocaust education centre on the Treblinka site.