After the Death of a Treblinka Revolt Survivor, Honoring Another Still Among Us

Earlier this week, we wrote about Samuel Willenberg, who fought in the 1943 Treblinka prisoners’ revolt, escaped, and, after the Holocaust, lived in Israel, where he died last Friday at the age of 93. Quite a fighter—he also took part in the 1944 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

While Willenberg was widely cited at the time of his death as the last remaining survivor of the Treblinka revolt, the Auschwitz Memorial alerted us to a Times of Israel story reporting that 89-year-old Leon “Poldek” Rytz, who lives in the southern Swedish city of Borås, also survived the 1943 uprising at Treblinka:

“When I arrived to [Treblinka] by train, a man by the name of Jozef Kaufman, who was a friend of my father before the war, recognized me and pulled me out of the line of people leaving the train. He told me, ‘If you go with them, you will be dead within 24 hours,’” recounts Rytz.



Kaufman, 45, told the teen he would take care of him and he should stay with him. Kaufman, whom Rytz describes as “a big strong man,” was tasked with loading murdered inmates’ clothes onto the emptied trains’ wagons. Kaufman was given relatively free rein of the camp along with extra food rations, “as he had an agreement with the camp commandant Franz Stangl to collect and deliver all valuables he found in the prisoners’ luggage and clothes to Franz Stangl every evening,” says Rytz.



Some time after Rytz’s arrival, Kaufman told him that they must escape Treblinka to survive. No easy task, with Nazi guards and “cruel” Ukrainian and Lithuanian soldiers, who “killed people in the line just if they stopped,” says Rytz.



While packing the train cars one day, Kaufman pulled the guard on duty into one of the wagons, where he strangled him and took his bayonet. Kaufman pushed Rytz, along with another inmate, with him into another wagon filled with murdered inmates’ belongings, just before the train left the camp.



The three hid among the clothes as the train left Treblinka. Later, in seeing the approaching forest, Kaufman used the bayonet he had taken from the Ukrainian guard and opened the wagon’s lock. The three prisoners jumped from the moving train. Kaufman and Rytz ran into the woods; the third prisoner did not survive the fall.

In June 2015, Rytz was named city ambassador of Borås, where he has made his home for 70 years. The city issued a description of his life, post-Holocaust (translated from Swedish by Google, edited/condensed by me):

Leon was still young, only 17 years old, when the war was over. He ended up in Lübeck, Germany after the war, and one evening he met members of Lotta Svärd in a theater. Their mission was to retrieve survivors of the war. In 1945, he came to Sweden. Borås became his new home.



He learned Swedish and started working in the textile industry, and a few years later, he began studying at the Textile Institute in Borås. After graduation he got a job through a friend at the Oscar Jacobson company. He later started his own company in the same industry.



Today, Leon is 86 and lives in Borås with his wife Esther. He has three children and seven grandchildren. He works with textiles and safeguards his health by playing golf and running. When he has time, in addition to his work, he lectures around the country.

Check out a video from the Borås ambassador ceremony here.

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