Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who returned to his local Poland after Global Warfare II to offer voice to fellow sufferers of the Nazis and their collaborators, caution the arena in writings and speeches concerning the risks of indifference to racial and ethnic injustice, died on Feb. 18 at his house in Warsaw. He used to be 98.
His demise used to be announced via the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which he had helped to determine and whose board he had chaired since 2009.
Talking in 2020 on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau focus camp in German-occupied Poland, the place he used to be shipped from the Lodz ghetto when he used to be a teen, Mr. Turski sounded an alarm about what he known as “an enormous upward thrust in antisemitism.”
“Auschwitz didn’t fall from the sky,” he said in a Polityka magazine podcast. “It all started with small sorts of persecution of Jews. It came about; it method it might probably occur anyplace. This is why human rights and democratic constitutions will have to be defended.”
“The eleventh Commandment is essential: Don’t be detached,” he asserted. “Don’t be detached whilst you see ancient lies. Don’t be detached when any minority is discriminated. Don’t be detached when energy violates a social contract.”
He added: “In case you are detached, ahead of you comprehend it any other Auschwitz will pop out of the blue for you or your descendants.”
His father and more youthful brother had been killed at Auschwitz, and he misplaced 37 different relations within the Holocaust.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an accessory legislation professor at Cornell College, a son of Holocaust survivors and the creator of “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz” (2025), stated Mr. Turski had exemplified “the ones participants of the survivor technology who, as a substitute of turning inward and wallowing as they may simply have accomplished of their struggling, trustworthy himself to the long run, to creating positive that not anything just like the horrors he and Eu Jewry skilled within the Holocaust would occur once more to any individual else.”
Simplest weeks ahead of his demise, Mr. Turski returned to the camp the place he have been a slave laborer to wait a rite commemorating the eightieth anniversary of its liberation, in January 1945, via the Soviet military.
“We have now all the time been a tiny minority,” he stated, relating to himself and his fellow survivors. “And now just a handful stay.”
For many years, Mr. Turski used to be a dominant sermonizer amongst them. He served as a firsthand witness to wartime atrocities as a columnist for the weekly Polityka mag, which he went to paintings for in 1958; as chairman of the Affiliation of the Jewish Historic Institute of Poland from 1999 to 2011; and because the editor of 3 volumes of eyewitness accounts, titled “Jewish Fates: A Testimony of the Dwelling” (1996-2001).
“Marian devoted his lifestyles to making sure that the arena by no means forgets the horrors of the previous,” Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics inheritor and president of the Global Jewish Congress, stated in a observation this week. He described Mr. Turski as “a person who led via instance, opting for just right over evil, discussion over struggle and working out over hostility.”
Mr. Turski used to be born Mosze Turbowicz on June 26, 1926, in Druskininkai, a town that used to be a part of Poland then and is now in Lithuania.
His father, Eliasz Turbowicz, a coal dealer who got here from a circle of relatives of rabbis, had deliberate to to migrate to Palestine however remained in Europe on account of a routine lung ailment, a results of a wound sustained whilst serving within the Russian military right through Global Warfare I. Mr. Turski’s mom, Estera (Worobiejczyk) Turbowicz, used to be a clerk.
Mosze attended Jewish number one and secondary faculties in Lodz, however as soon as the Germans invaded in 1939, Jews had been confined to the Lodz ghetto. He helped reinforce his circle of relatives via tutoring in Hebrew, Latin and Polish and dealing in a smokehouse, the place he butchered horse meat. He additionally joined the Communist resistance.
Two weeks after his oldsters and more youthful brother had been deported, in August 1944, he used to be shipped out on one of the vital ultimate transports from Lodz. He figured his possibilities of surviving had been higher at Auschwitz-Birkenau than within the ghetto, which the Nazis had been obliterating.
His mom used to be despatched to Bergen-Belsen, a focus camp in northern Germany; she survived the battle and died in 1988.
Mosze’s revel in, too, used to be certainly one of harrowing survival: deployed from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to do roadwork; compelled to enroll in a demise march to the Buchenwald focus camp forward of the Soviet advance; and despatched to a camp at Theresienstadt, in occupied Czechoslovakia, the place he stuck typhus and reduced in size to 70 kilos ahead of the camp used to be liberated via the Crimson Military in Might 1945.
After the battle, he returned to Poland as a dedicated Socialist. Given the antisemitism within the nation, a Communist legit prompt that he undertake a non-Jewish title; he selected Marian Turski. He earned some extent in historical past from the College of Wroclaw.
Becoming a member of the Polish Staff’ Celebration, Mr. Turski was a dedicated Communist legit, imposing censorship, implementing crop quotas on farmers and presiding over a fraudulent referendum that consolidated Polish territory recovered from the German career — all, he would later say, within the pursuits of marketing Polish nationalism and socialism.
In 1965, whilst finding out and lecturing in america on an eight-month State Division scholarship, he participated in a civil rights march from Selma to Bernard Law Montgomery, Ala., led via the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Years later, when President Barack Obama, at a rite in Warsaw, requested Mr. Turski what had motivated him to march, he spoke back, “Merely out of cohesion with all those that fought for his or her civil rights and in opposition to racial divisions.”
Within the overdue Nineteen Sixties, he soured on Soviet communism on account of the federal government’s legit coverage of antisemitism and Moscow’s opposition to political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. That “speeded up my transition from being a Pole with Jewish origins to an consciousness of being a Pole and a Jew concurrently,” he stated.
Whilst he suppressed his wartime memories for years, Mr. Turski returned to Auschwitz within the Seventies, a shuttle he would make greater than as soon as. In 2020, he advised Mark Zuckerberg, the manager government of Fb, to prohibit Holocaust deniers from that social media platform. Mr. Zuckerberg ultimately did in order that yr.
Mr. Turski’s spouse, Halina (Paszkowska) Turski, a fellow Holocaust survivor, had escaped the Warsaw ghetto, served as a messenger for the resistance and later labored as a valid engineer for filmmakers. She died in 2017. He’s survived via their daughter, Joanna Turski, a flutist; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
“Comfortable-spoken, an highbrow massive, he remained in Poland in order that his voice resonated as carefully as most likely to the abyss,” Professor Rosensaft, of Cornell, stated.
“He may just inform other people, ‘I’ve observed this,’” he added. “It’s now going to be our job — the next generations — to ensure the unique reminiscence of the survivors turns into ingrained in our awareness. We can’t mirror the voice of the survivors, however we will be able to ensure that the questions they requested, the warnings they raised, stay ingrained in our awareness.”
