Semion Rosenfeld, the last known survivor of the Sobibor extermination camp and the uprising that occurred there, died today at the age of 96 in Israel. Born in Ukraine, he was a soldier in the Soviet army and one of about 50 camp inmates who survived the uprising against the Germans.
From May 1942 to the summer of 1943, approximately 250,000 Jews, who had been deported from eastern Poland, but also from the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, were murdered in the Sobibor camp in Poland. On October 14, 1943, an uprising broke out in the camp. Almost 300 prisoners, including Semyon Rosenfeld, then 21 years old, managed to escape.
Almost 170 of them were captured by the Nazis and shot. But Semyon Rosenfeld escaped and returned to fight with the Red Army. About 50 inmates of the camp survived to the end of the war, according to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The Germans then razed Sobibor to obliterate all traces of this camp.
SOURCE:APE-ME