THE last survivor of a Nazi death camp where 875,000 people were murdered has died in Israel at the age of 93.

    Samuel Willenberg was one of only 67 people believed to have survived the Treblinka camp, fleeing in a revolt shortly before it was destroyed.

    He had moved to Israel to work as a surveyor for the housing ministry and making sure the world never forgets about the atrocities at the camp in Poland had been his life’s work.

    Treblinka holds a notorious place in history as perhaps 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 labor before being killed, nearly all Jews brought to Treblinka were immediately gassed to death.

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

    On Aug. 2, 1943, a group of Jews stole some 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 an interview in 2010.

    He described how he was shot in the leg as he climbed over bodies piled at the barbed wire fence and catapulted over.

    He kept running, ignoring dead friends in his path, and said his blue eyes and “non-Jewish” look helped him survive in the countryside before arriving in Warsaw and joining the Polish underground.

    After the war Willenberg moved to Israel and became a surveyor for the Housing Ministry.

    Later in life, he took up sculpting to describe his experiences, making heartbreaking bronze statues depicting what Jews went through in the Holocaust.

    They showed Jews standing on a train platform, a father removing his son’s shoes before entering the gas chambers, a young girl having her head shaved, and prisoners removing bodies.

    “I live two lives, one is here and now and the other is what happened there,” Willenberg said.

    He added, “It never leaves me. It stays in my head. It goes with me always.”

    (SD-Agencies)