On this day in 2016, writer and artist Samuel Willenberg passed away. He was a Holocaust survivor from Poland who served as a Sonderkommando, or a Nazi prisoner, at Treblinka and took part in its revolt in August 1943. Willenberg was born in Częstochowa, Poland. Prior to World War II, his father taught at the local Jewish school and had a knack for painting and the visual arts. In September 1939, Willenberg fled to Lublin and enlisted as a volunteer in the Polish army. A few days later, Soviet troops invaded the eastern part of Poland. On September 25, Willenberg was badly wounded following a confrontation with the Red Army, close to Chelm in eastern Poland, and subsequently captured. He successfully escaped captivity, fleeing the hospital where he was recovering for three months, and then headed back to central Poland where his family was staying. Towards the beginning of 1940, Willenberg traveled with his mother and two sisters to Opatów, Poland, to see their father who was contracting murals for the local synagogue. Their timing was terrible, with the establishment of the Opatów Ghetto beginning in the spring of 1941. From October 1941 to November 1943, the Nazis carried out Operation Reinhard, its secret mission to exterminate all Polish Jews located within the confines of German-occupied Poland. The Willenbergs were able to acquire fraudulent Aryan identification papers and flee back home to Częstochowa, Poland, where a ghetto had been established on April 9, 1941. At its height, the ghetto held around 40,000 prisoners. Willenberg’s two sisters were sent there while their mother, fearing for his safety, sent Samuel back to Opatów as she tried to save them. On October 20, 1942, Willenberg, along with 6,500 others, were forced on a train bound for Treblinka. Of the 6,000 prisoners he traveled with, Willenberg was the only one who escaped death that day. A prisoner of the Jewish Auffanglager (reception camp) advised him to act like a bricklayer as a way of demonstrating his work capabilities. Willenberg happened to be wearing clothing that was stained with paint which was originally his father’s, already the perfect outfit for forced labor. Willenberg’s official duties within the camp began with his assignment to the Kommando Rot with unpacking and sorting prisoner possessions. It was there that he identified his sisters’ clothing, an observation that confirmed their deaths for him. Shortly thereafter, he was reassigned given the number ‘937’ within the Sonderkommando. One of the prisoners’ many tasks, in addition to their main responsibility of disposing of dead Jews, after they had been gassed, was to make the camp and its activities less noticeable. This was achieved by lacing the barbed wire fences with tree branches. Willenberg took part in the famous Sonderkommando revolt at Treblinka on August 2, 1943, where he was joined by 200 to 300 of his colleagues. Willenberg spent 10 months at Treblinka. He was one of 67 people to survive and at the time of his death, was the last surviving member of the Sonderkommando revolt. He hurried back to Warsaw and miraculously found his father taking shelter on the German side. He joined the underground resistance movement, obtaining weapons for the Polish People’s Army. For such duties he assumed the name ‘Ignacy Popow’, his mother’s maiden name, and managed to escape the chaos of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, hiding on Natolińska Street in a safehouse. After the War, Willenberg served as a lieutenant in the Polish Army from 1945 to 1946. In 1947, he assisted a Jewish organization in Poland, searching for Jewish children who had previously been sheltered and kept safe, spared certain death in the camps by families of Polish gentiles. He went on to marry Ada Lubelczyk, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto by fleeing over a wall. Willenberg, along with his wife and mother, moved to Israel in 1950. After retiring as Chief Measurer at the Ministry of Reconstruction, and working as an engineer surveyor, Willenberg graduated from Hebrew University with a degree in fine arts, specializing in sculpture. He soon made a name for himself sculpting figures that represented memories from his time at Treblinka. His work has since been exhibited all over the world. From 1983 until the end of his life, he helped organize the trips of Israeli students to Poland for March of the Living.