Holocaust survivor and educator known as the bride of Belsen who tended to a dying Anne Frank and lectured Prince Harry
The Times
Norman and Gena Turgel met when he helped to liberate Bergen-Belsen; within six months she married him, wearing a dress made from the silk of a parachute
Prince Harry was about 13 when he and his friends filed into a classroom at Eton College to hear Gena Turgel, the “bride of Belsen”, give, in a thick, mittel-European accent, her first-hand account of the Holocaust and warn that it must not be allowed to happen again. What she told the elite of British education was much the same as she had told school-children, students and thousands of others over the previous half century.
When the Germans arrived in her home town of Cracow, southern Poland in September 1939, “they had lists of influential Jewish families, and among them was our family”. Willek, the brother to whom she was closest in age and affection, was shot by Nazi guards as he was moving a wardrobe; her older brother Herman, who ran a jewellery shop, was shot with a machine-gun with his wife and three children; Miriam, her sister, was part of a group killed for smuggling food into a concentration camp; Hela, another sister, died after being injected with petrol as part of a human experiment.
By autumn 1941 what was left of her family had been moved into the ghetto. “We heard about Auschwitz: we knew that [Jewish families] went there,” she said. “But we didn’t know to what extent, because no one came back to tell us.” On March 1, 1942, they were taken away in cattle trucks.
Their first concentration camp was Plaszow. Amon Göth, the commandant, played by Ralph Fiennes in the film Schindler’s List (1993), used prisoners for shooting practice. “He walked over to the men and said to one, ‘You haven’t shaved today’, and shot him down. Then, ‘You look too stupid’, and shot him down. ‘You look too clever’ and ‘You have shaved today’. In a morning he could have shot 50 or more people,” she said.
Gena arrived at Auschwitz in December 1944, aged 21, where Josef Mengele himself directed her group into the showers. “We were naked,” she said. “After a little while water came through and we showered ourselves. When we walked out of there the women who were working outside embraced us and shouted, ‘Oh, we thought we would never see you again’. I asked them why. They said, ‘Don’t you know where you’ve been? That was a gas chamber.” Whether by accident or design, the Zyklon B gas was not used that day.
In January 1945 Gena was sent on a “death march” towards Germany, stopping en route at Buchenwald concentration camp. As the prisoners marched, gasping with thirst, locals would taunt them by pouring buckets of water at their feet. But on another occasion two young girls risked their lives to smuggle cigarettes to the prisoners.
They eventually arrived at Bergen-Belsen, where Gena saw “walking skeletons, bodies everywhere . . . Children’s bodies, with parts of their flesh missing.” She retained her sanity by volunteering to nurse wounded German soldiers. Meanwhile in her barrack room she was fighting to keep her mother alive while helping to tend to a dying Anne Frank, who “was delirious, burning up with typhus”.
When the British arrived, on the afternoon of April 15, 1945, Gena was sterilising instruments in the camp’s hospital. She recalled the tanks, trucks and loudspeakers — and the piles of uniforms that were discarded by Nazi guards trying to escape into the woods. “Of course, it was too late for so many,” she told The Times in 2014. “But I wept tears of joy. It was like music.” Asked by her liberators if she could speak English, she replied with the only words she knew: “The sky is blue and the sun is shining.”
Among the first to enter Bergen- Belsen was Norman Turgel, a young Jewish soldier working for British military intelligence. The Nazis were eager to negotiate, and the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, “the beast of Belsen”, met the British truck at the gate. Astonished, Turgel saw him casually shoot two skeletal camp inmates who had strayed to the fence. They arrested Kramer and eventually he was hanged.
Norman Turgel took an instant shine to the emaciated young Gena — “very thin but very beautiful and dignified,” he later recalled. Two weeks later he invited her to dinner at the officers’ mess, where he surprised her by announcing: “This is our engagement party.”
They were married six months later in Lübeck, where local people cleared out a synagogue that had been used as a stable by the Nazis. Her wedding dress, made from the silk of a British parachute, is now in the Imperial War Museum. When she gave her first interviews, in the Eighties, the newspapers called her “the bride of Belsen”.
Gena Turgel spoke to thousands of schoolchildren about her experiences during the Holocaust, but said she could “only tell a fragment” of her storyPAUL FAITH/PA
“We were the happiest couple,” Gena told The Times. “But who could forget those atrocities? To see the bodies lying in their thousands . . . bodies of children, bodies you couldn’t distinguish were men or women, the walking skeletons, it’s impossible for anyone to comprehend.”
She was born Gena Goldfinger in 1923 in Cracow, the youngest of five boys and four girls, and was educated at a Protestant evangelical school. Her affluent parents, Samuel and Estera, owned a textile business just round the corner from the family home. Her father died when she was nine, from wounds suffered as a high-ranking communications officer with the Austrian army during the First World War. Estera, who would help local people with their literacy, was Austrian, so Gena grew up speaking German. With the rise of Nazism, Estera made plans to move the family to Chicago, where they had a cousin, but it was too late.
After their wedding Gena and Norman returned to Britain, where they worked in his family’s import and export business. Six months later Norman’s father sponsored Estera to join the family in the UK. She lived with them until her death 29 years later, aged 99.
Gena, meanwhile, began her mission to educate the world about the Holocaust, through talks, interviews and writing, including her powerful book I Light a Candle (1987). Latterly she worked with the Holocaust Educational Trust.
Norman died in 1995, six weeks before their golden wedding anniversary, the couple never having spent a night of their married lives apart. She is survived by their three children — Hilary, a charity volunteer, Bernice, who runs a clothing and accessory business, and Harris, who is a finance manager — as well as eight grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren, who all enjoyed her apple strudel and cheesecake at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.
How Gena Turgel’s tale of mass murder and the systematic destruction of a civilisation was received by the future Duke of Sussex and his friends at Eton, we do not know. But she knew that she had to keep repeating what she could of her account. “I can only ever tell a fragment of my story,” she said, “because there wouldn’t be enough ink to write about it all. I only hope that my family’s future, everybody’s future, will be without hate.”
Gena Turgel, MBE, author and educator, was born on February 1, 1923. She died on June 7, 2018, aged 95
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