Holocaust survivor Turgel dies at 95

Consoled Anne Frank in concentration camp

LONDON — 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 Thursday, Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said on Twitter. The news triggered tributes from 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.

After World War II, Turgel married one of Bergen-Belsen’s British liberators, Norman Turgel, earning the nickname “The Bride of Belsen.”

Turgel attended Britain’s annual Holocaust remembrance two months ago in a wheelchair with a blanket over her knees.

“My story is the story of one survivor, but it is also the story of 6 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 Feb. 1, 1923, Turgel had to move with her family in 1941 to a Jewish ghetto with only a sack of potatoes, some flour and a few belongings. One brother was shot by the Nazi 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 labor camp. In January 1945, Turgel and her mother were forced onto a death march from Auschwitz, leaving her remaining sister behind.

It was in a hospital at Bergen-Belsen, where Turgel, then 22, arrived in February, that she cared for Anne Frank as the 15-year-old girl was dying from typhus.

“I washed her face, gave her water to drink, and I can still see that face, her hair and how she looked,” Turgel once told the BBC.

“Gena dedicated her life to sharing her testimony to hundreds of thousands in schools across the country,” ”Her story was difficult to hear — and difficult for her to tell — but no one who heard her speak will ever forget,” Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said.

She is survived by her three children, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Paul Faith The Associated Press Holcaust survivor Gena Turgel in 2004 in London. Turgel, who comforted diarist Anne Frank at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp months before its liberation, has died at age 95.