Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor, journalist, and historian who played a pivotal role in postwar Poland and co-founded Warsaw’s renowned Jewish history museum, has passed away. Turski was 98.
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The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews announced his death on Tuesday. “An authority of global importance, an advocate of Polish-Jewish understanding, a publicist, a historian. A Polish Jew. A person without whom our museum would not exist,” Zygmunt Stępiński, the museum’s director, wrote in a statement.
Turski endured unimaginable hardships during the Holocaust, surviving the Lodz ghetto, two brutal death marches, and imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Auschwitz-Birkenau, located in German-occupied Poland.
He lost 39 family members to the horrors of the Holocaust. Despite the impossibly harrowing ordeal, Turski chose to remain in postwar Poland.
Marian Turski Marched with Martin Luthor King in Selma
Born on June 26, 1926, as Mosze Turbowicz, Turski spent his early years in Lodz, where he attended a Hebrew language school, per ABC News.
In 1944, his parents and brother were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp by the German Nazis. Two weeks later, he arrived there as part of one of the final transports.
His father and brother perished in the gas chambers. Meanwhile, his mother was deported to the Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany. Turski was forced into labor, building roads in the Auschwitz-Birkenau area before enduring two brutal death marches.
He was ultimately liberated in Terezin, emaciated and gravely ill from exhaustion and typhus. Tursk returned to Poland in September 1945.
In 1956, while on a scholarship in the United States, he joined Martin Luther King Jr. in the Selma to Montgomery march to support civil rights for Black Americans, according to The Times of Israel.
by 1958, became the editor of the history section at the magazine Polityka. This role paved the way for his emergence as a prominent journalist and historian.
During last month’s Auschwitz anniversary observance, he took his final moments on stage to deliver a poignant warning about the dangers of hatred. He pointed out that the number of lives lost was far greater than the small group of survivors, highlighting the overwhelming scale of the tragedy.
“We have always been a tiny minority,” Turski said then. “And now only a handful remain.”