Gena Turgel, a Holocaust survivor who comforted Anne Frank at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before the young diarist’s death and the camp’s liberation a month later, has died. She was 95.
Turgel died on Thursday, Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said on Twitter. The news triggered tributes from some of the people the Polish native touched in the decades she shared her World War II experiences, including witnessing the horrors of the Nazi camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen.
Turgel attended Britain’s annual Holocaust remembrance event two months ago, sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket draped over her knees.
“My story is the story of one survivor, but it is also the story of six million who perished,” she said at the event in London’s Hyde Park. “Maybe that’s why I was spared – so my testimony would serve as a memorial like that candle that I light, for the men, women and children who have no voice.”
Born in Krakow, Poland as Gena Goldfinger on February 1, 1923, Turgel and her family were forced to move into a Jewish ghetto in late 1941. One brother was shot by SS police and another disappeared after trying to escape, according to the Holocaust Educational Trust in London.
A sister of hers was shot while trying to smuggle food into a labour camp. In January 1945, Turgel and her mother were forced on to a death march from Auschwitz, leaving her remaining sister behind.
Read the article by Danica Kirka in The Area News.