Final survivor of Treblinka Nazi concentration camp has died

THE last survivor of Treblinka, a Nazi concentration camp in southern Poland during the Second World War, has died in Israel at the age of 93.

Samuel Willenburg, who was one of a reduced group of prisoners kept alive to be used for maintenance work at the concentration camp, escaped and managed to reach Warsaw in 1943 where he joined the Polish underground.

After the war, Willenburg moved to Israel where he worked as a surveyor and had taken part in a number of memorials and documentaries on the horror of Treblinka, which is believed to have had a death toll of 875,000, second only to Auschwitz.

“I live two lives, one is here and now and the other is what happened there,” he said in 2010. “It never leaves me. It stays in my head. It goes with me always. The world cannot forget Treblinka.”

Willenburg is survived by a daughter and grandchildren.