Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who became a journalist and historian in postwar Poland and co-founded Warsaw 's landmark Jewish history museum, died on Tuesday. He was A Polish Jew. Turski survived the Lodz ghetto, where he and his family were forced to live, two death marches and imprisonment at the Nazi German concentration camps Buchenwald and Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was in German-occupied Poland.
In all, he lost 39 relatives in the Holocaust. Unlike many Jewish survivors who left postwar Poland, Turski chose to remain. He was on the political left his entire life, and was a member of the communist party.
He was among a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors and spoke during observances last month marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. However, it was a stark warning about the dangers of indifference at the anniversary five years earlier that brought him international attention and raised his moral profile among his supporters. Many in Poland interpreted his words as a critique of the right-wing government in power at the time.
May his memory be honored! Turski was born on June 26, , as Mosze Turbowicz, and spent his childhood and teenage years in Lodz, where he attended a Hebrew language school. In , his parents and brother were deported to the German Nazi camp Auschwitz, and he arrived there two weeks later in one of the last transports. His father and brother died in the gas chambers, while his mother was sent to work at the Bergen Belsen camp in northern Germany, and Turski was dispatched to work on roads in the Auschwitz-Birkenau area before being sent on two death marches.
He was liberated at Terezin close to death from exhaustion and typhus. In September , he returned to Poland, a committed communist who rejected an offer to go to the West and wanted to help build a socialist Poland. He used his last time on the stage at last month's Auschwitz anniversary observance to warn of the dangers of hatred and to recall that the number of those murdered was always far greater than the smaller group of survivors.
