Samuel Willenberg

Biography

On the ramp at Treblinka a prisoner he met at the unloading whispered to him: say you are a bricklayer. It was 20 October 1942. Samuel Willenberg, a nineteen-year-old native of Częstochowa, had been brought there with some six and a half thousand people from the liquidated ghetto of Opatów. Chance helped him: he was wearing his father’s work smock, stained with paint. Of the whole transport, only he was left alive.

His father, Perec Willenberg, had taught at a Jewish school in Częstochowa before the war, painted pictures and decorated synagogues. His mother, Maniefa, née Popow, was Orthodox Christian and converted to Judaism after the wedding. The family lived in Częstochowa and then moved to Radość, near Warsaw.

He was sixteen when the war began. On 6 September 1939 he set off east, towards Lublin, and joined the Polish troops as a volunteer. On 25 September he was severely wounded in a skirmish with the Red Army near Chełm; three months later he escaped from hospital to Radość. In early 1940 the whole family went to Opatów, where his father was painting murals in the local synagogue. The ghetto caught them there. Samuel sold his father’s small pictures to peasants and for several months worked at a steelworks in Starachowice. In 1942 the Willenbergs obtained “Aryan” papers and returned to Częstochowa. His sisters Ita and Tamara were denounced to the Germans there. His mother tried to find and free them and sent Samuel back to Opatów, from where he was sent to Treblinka. In the camp he first sorted the belongings of the murdered, and among the clothes he recognised those of both his sisters. Later, now under the number 937, he ended up in a squad that wove branches into the barbed-wire fences to camouflage the grounds. On 2 August 1943 he took part in the prisoners’ revolt and, wounded in the leg, broke out of the camp with some two to three hundred others. It is hard to say exactly how many survived the war: estimates run from 68 to about 79. He made his way to Warsaw and found his father, who was hiding on the “Aryan” side. There he helped the underground, in particular obtaining weapons for the Polish People’s Army, and on his false identity card he entered his mother’s maiden name: Ignacy Popow.

The Warsaw Uprising found him in a hiding place on Natolińska Street. In his own account, on the first day he joined the Ruczaj battalion of the Home Army and fought in Śródmieście, near Marszałkowska Street and Savior Square. In early September 1944 he transferred to the Polish People’s Army, where he rose to the rank of cadet sergeant. After the capitulation he left the city with the civilian population, escaped from a train at Pruszków and hid near Błonie until the Soviet troops arrived.

In 1945–1946 he served in the Polish army with the rank of lieutenant. In 1947, on behalf of a Jewish organisation, he searched for Jewish children hidden by Polish families. In 1950 he emigrated to Israel with his wife, Ada, and his mother. There he trained as an engineer surveyor and for many years worked as chief measurer at the Ministry of Reconstruction.

He turned to art after retiring. He completed a course in sculpture in Jerusalem (at the Hebrew University or at the University of the Third Age; the accounts differ) and quickly became known for his work on the Holocaust. He worked mainly in clay, making figures, and made bronze casts. A series of fifteen bronzes with people and scenes from Treblinka, together with maps and drawings of the camp, was shown in exhibitions in several countries. From 1983 he helped organise trips of Israeli young people to Poland, the March of the Living.

His book “Revolt in Treblinka” appeared in 1986 in Hebrew, then in English (1989) and in Polish (1991, 2004, with a preface by Władysław Bartoszewski). In 2003 the Zachęta gallery in Warsaw showed his work, and in 2004 the Museum of Częstochowa exhibited his sculptures. In October 2009 a monument to the forty thousand victims of the Częstochowa ghetto, to his design, was unveiled in the city. Among his honours are Poland’s Virtuti Militari cross and the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit, presented by President Lech Kaczyński.

Willenberg died on 19 February 2016, the last surviving participant of the Treblinka revolt; his friend Kalman Taigman had died in 2012. He is buried in the cemetery of the moshav Udim.