A memorial marks the site of the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. Photo by Przemek Wierzchowski/EPA
June 3 (UPI) -- Semyon Rosenfeld, the last surviving member of a 1943 uprising at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland, died in Israel Monday. He was 96.
Rosenfeld, a Ukrainian native, was captured by German soldiers in 1941 after joining the Red Army the year before during World War II. He escaped Sobibor two years later during a prisoner uprising of about 300 inmates. He ultimately moved to Israel in 1990, and in recent years lived at a retirement community. He died Monday at a hospital in Rohovot.
At least 200,000 members of the Jewish faith were killed during the war at Sobibor, a camp near Wlodawa operated by the Nazi SS. During the revolt on Oct. 14, 1943, about 600 prisoners tried to escape and about half succeeded.
Rosenfeld's memoir The Revolt in Sobibor said he was one of 47 who survived the breakout and he rejoined the Red Army with a unit that helped liberate Berlin.
"It is our duty to remind and pass from generation to generation the story of the life and heroism of Semyon Rosenfeld and all his contemporaries," Isaac Herzog, chairman of the Jewish Federation, said. "The Amigur company of the Jewish Agency has been a home for Semyon for many years and the Jewish Agency as a whole takes part, this morning, in the family's sorrow."
Rosenfeld received the Ukrainian Order of Merit III degree in 2018 for bravery, and the Order of the Cavalier Cross from then-Polish president Bronislaw Komarowski in 2013.
"May his memory be a blessing," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted to Facebook Monday.
"We would be worthy of his death in our lives," added Yesh Atid Party leader Yair Lapid.
