On May 14, 2023, Sophia Engelsman-Huisman passed away quietly in Herzliya, Israel. She was 97 years old. Sophia Engelsman-Huisman was one of 18 Dutch survivors of the Sobibor extermination camp. And (presumably) the last survivor of the 34313 Jews deported from Westerbork to Sobibor.
On Feb. 26, 1943, Sophia was rounded up during the raid on the Jewish hospital “Megon Hatsedek” in Rotterdam and Sophia Huisman was forwarded to the Westerbork transit camp. Deportation to Sobibor followed on March 10, 1943. Thirteen women from this second transport survived the war.
Sophia was selected as an “Arbeitsjude” in Sobibor and was sent via the Majdanek and Lublin-Alter Flughafen camps as a forced laborer in the Milejow marmalade factory. Here she survived Aktion Erntefest, the November 3 and 4, 1943 mass murder of more than 43,000 Jews, following the Sobibor and Treblinka uprisings. The Germans forgot about the prisoners in Camp Milejow.
She was then transferred to Trawniki, where she was forced to clean the exterminated camp, pull gold teeth and molars from the shot Jews and burn the dead.
Because of the approaching Red Army, she went via Majdanek concentration camp on foot to Auschwitz, where she became number 13879. In Auschwitz, she worked in the Scheissekommando, which meant cleaning up all the poop in the camp. Then she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she met Anne Frank, according to a 1966 testimony at Yad Vashem.
On May 8, 1945, Sophia was liberated in Theresienstadt by the Red Army and quickly moved across the demarcation line to safety by the French. She was deathly ill with typhoid fever and weighed only 37 kilograms.
Through the Batafactories in Best, The Netherlands, she returned to Rotterdam, where she went to live with her uncle Jo, a brother of her father and his wife. In Rotterdam, she met the student Jaap Engelsman, who had survived the war in hiding. They had a relationship, which ended when Jaap suddenly disappeared because she had reported to the Haganah, a Zionist-Jewish paramilitary organization. This was disbanded in 1948, after which Jaap went to study in Jerusalem.
In August 1949, Sophia left for Israel via Marseilles on the ship the Galilah. On August 29, 1949, she arrived in Haifa. It was not much later in Jerusalem that Sophie and Jaap found each other again and married shortly thereafter. Sophie fulfilled her dream in Israel by becoming a midwife. In the 1950s Jaap and Sophia returned to The Netherlands because of Jaap’s work at the embassy and later at Unilever. Their four sons were born in the Netherlands. In 1959 the family returned permanently to Israel and she spent her remaining life working as an midwife. and attended the births of her 21 grandchildren and many great-grandchildren. In recent years she lived at the Beth Juliana care center.
May her memory be a blessing.
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