They were brought to Poland by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), as a result of its contacts with the artist’s widow, Krystyna Willenberg.
IPN President Jarosław Szarek has described the works as an extraordinary testimony to German crimes, adding that they “present, in an almost photographic way, the reality of the Treblinka camp, that hell on earth.”
One of the most poignant sculptures, Szarek said, is that of Rut Dorfman, a 19-year-old girl, who had her hair cut by Willenberg before entering the gas chamber and who asked him how long it would take before she died.
According to Szarek, equally moving is a work depicting the outbreak of a revolt in Treblinka. On April 2, 1943, Jewish prisoners in Treblinka rebelled and set the camp on fire. Out of several hundred prisoners who escaped, only 70 managed to survive. Willenberg was one of them.
Willenberg was born in the Polish city of Częstochowa in 1923.
In 1942, despite possessing false documents identifying him as an Aryan, he was arrested and sent to Treblinka.
Upon arriving at the camp, he claimed to be a brick mason and thus succeeded in avoiding death in a gas chamber.
Having escaped from Treblinka, he fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the city’s Nazi occupiers, receiving several military distinctions for his valour.
In 1950 he left Poland for Israel with his family. There he worked for many years in the Ministry of Land Development.
After retiring, he enrolled in the People's University, where he studied painting, sculpture and art history.
In 1994 he was once again granted Polish citizenship.
His book Revolt in Treblinka, published in 1986 in Hebrew, has been translated into many languages, including Polish.
He died in 2016.
(mk/pk)