Gena Turgel, who was half of an oft-told love story born in the Holocaust and whose barracks mates at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp included Anne Frank, died on June 7. She was 95.
Turgel (pronounced tur-GELL) was imprisoned in several concentration camps after the Nazis invaded Poland and rousted her family from a comfortable home in Krakow. Most of her family members died but she and her mother survived to see the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany.
One of the liberating British soldiers, Sgt. Norman Turgel, saw her and was lovestruck — so much so that soon after meeting her he managed to arrange a dinner for her at the officers’ mess at his British camp. The lavish setting she encountered when she entered perplexed her.
“I turned ’round to this Sergeant Norman,” Turgel recalled in an oral history for Shalom TV, a Jewish cable channel. “I said: ‘Do we expect any special visitors? What am I doing here?’ So he says: ‘You are the special visitor. This is our engagement party’.”
They married six months later. Their love story became a favourite light-in-the-darkness tale for the news media — Turgel was “the Bride of Belsen” — but she took care over the years to make sure that the horrors she and millions of others experienced were recounted as well.