Semyon Rosenfeld, the last survivor of the uprising at the Nazi death camp at Sobibor, Poland, has died at Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot, Israel, at the age of 96. Rosenfeld is survived by two sons and five grandchildren.
In 1940, at age 18, Rosenfeld enlisted in the Soviet army. While he was fighting the Nazis, his entire family was murdered and buried in a mass grave near the Ukrainian village where they had lived.
In 1941 Rosenfeld was taken captive by the Germans and sent to a concentration camp in Minsk. In 1943, the camp at Minsk was dismantled and the prisoners were sent to the death camps at Majdanek and Sobibor in Poland.
On Oct. 14, 1943, Jewish laborers at the camp shot and killed 11 SS officers and three Nazi prison guards. After the uprising, 300 prisoners escaped the camps and fled to the surrounding forest. Only 50 survived.
With the help of friends, Rosenfeld escaped the forest and was able to continue fighting the Nazis. When the war was over, Rosenfeld returned to his native Ukraine, where he married and started a family. In 1990, he made aliyah to Israel.
Between April 1942 and October 1943, some 250,000 Jews met their deaths at Sobibor. The Germans razed the camp at the end of 1943 and planted a forest to help obscure their genocidal acts.
Chairman of the Jewish Agency Isaac Herzog expressed "great sadness" at the news of Rosenfeld's passing.
"Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, he became a hero. Semyon fought the Nazis as a member of the Soviet Army and was later sent to the Sobibor death camp as a prisoner of war. There, he saw death daily until the famous uprising.
"We have an obligation to remember and pass on to future generations the story of Semyon Rosenfeld's life and heroism, as well as that of everyone of his generation, of whom fewer and fewer remain," Herzog said.
Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said, "Even when Semyon was taken prisoner and, because he was Jewish, sent to the Sobibor death camp, he took part in an uprising that today still serves as a symbol of Jewish heroism. Only a few survived the uprising and escape from Sobibor, and now that the last eyewitnesses are gone, the responsibility to tell the story of their heroism falls on us. We are committed to continuing our commemorative activity for the sake of the victims, the survivors, and humanity as a whole."
