Gena Turgel, who has died aged 95, survived the Jewish ghetto in Krakow and imprisonment in four concentration camps; she dedicated the rest of her life to telling the story of the six million who perished, “for younger people to know that this must never be allowed to happen again”.
The youngest of nine children – five boys and four girls – she was born Gena Goldfinger in Krakow, Poland, on February 1 1923. Her parents, Samuel and Estera Goldfinger, owned a textile business and Gena initially enjoyed a comfortable middle-class upbringing. In 1932, however, Samuel died after a long period of ill health – the result of injuries he had sustained while serving with the Austrian army in the First World War.
The German occupation of Poland put an end to Gena’s ambitions to study medicine. Within the first week of the war, Jewish schools closed. The Nazis came to the family home and demanded the keys to the business. In 1941 Gena, Estera and Gena’s siblings were forced into Krakow’s Jewish ghetto, where they shared a kitchen and bathroom with two other families. Gena’s brother Janek escaped into the sewers and was never seen again. Another brother was shot and killed in the ghetto, and in 1942 Gena’s sister Miriam and Miriam’s husband were both killed as they tried to smuggle food into Plaszów concentration camp.
In December 1944 Estera, Gena and Gena’s sister Hela left Plaszów on a forced march for Auschwitz, a journey of around three weeks. Upon arrival Gena was directed to the “shower room”, supposedly to be disinfected. “There must have been about a hundred of us squashed into the stone-walled room,” she recalled. “We stood there for an hour or so, and nothing happened.” It was only when they emerged and the women working outside embraced them in joy and disbelief that they realised the “shower room” was in fact a gas chamber.
Quite why they survived that day remains a mystery, though Gena theorised that a clerk whom she had known from a previous camp may have managed to intervene. In the event, she and her mother remained at Auschwitz for less than a month before they were moved again, first to Buchenwald and then to Bergen-Belsen. Hela had been subjected to brutal “medical” experiments by her captors and was too frail to leave Auschwitz; she died in the camp hospital.
By this time the war was nearing its end and Bergen-Belsen was in chaos, devastated by typhus and appallingly overcrowded. Deciding that work offered the best chance of survival, Gena volunteered herself as a nurse. In her spare moments she looked after her mother and helped to care for another prisoner,the 15-year-old Anne Frank, who was dying of typhus. “I washed her face, gave her water to drink and I can still see that face, her hair and how she looked,” she once told the BBC.
On April 15 1945, British troops reached Bergen-Belsen. Among the first to enter the death camp was a Jewish sergeant, Norman Turgel, who arrested the camp’s commandant Josef Kramer on April 16. He and Gena could both speak German, and a friendship developed. A few days after the camp’s liberation he invited her to dine with him. She arrived at the military mess to find a white tablecloth and fresh flowers set out for her: this, Norman, told her, was their “engagement party”.
They married six months later at a synagogue in Lübeck. Gena, wearing a dress made from recycled parachute silk, was dubbed “the bride of Belsen” by the British press, and Norman was granted leave to bring his new wife and her mother back to England.
They settled in north London, Norman taking a job in his father’s import and export business, but their experiences in Poland stayed with them. Though Estera would live for another three decades, she suffered from agoraphobia and would hoard food in her bedroom. As part of her own attempt to come to terms with everything that had befallen them, Gena Turgel set herself three goals: to learn the British way of life, to master English, and to write her memoirs. In 1987 she achieved the last aim with the publication of I Light a Candle by Grafton Books. For many years she gave lectures in schools about her experiences, and was a prominent figure at National Holocaust Memorial Day events. In 2005 she led the Queen to her seat during a ceremony at Westminster Hall to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
She was appointed MBE for services to the Holocaust Foundation in 2001.
Norman died in 1995, just a few months before their golden wedding anniversary. Their three children survive her.
Gena Turgel, born February 1 1923, died June 7 2018
