Gena Turgel, 1923–2018

Every April 15, Gena Turgel’s husband would send her roses to mark the day she was liberated from the Nazis’ Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. It was also the anniversary of their first meeting. Gena, who volunteered as a nurse at Bergen-Belsen’s hospital as a means of survival, was sterilizing equipment when British tanks rolled into the camp. Among the liberators was a British Jewish officer, Sgt. Norman Turgel, who was instantly smitten with the 22-year-old Polish Jew. After speaking with Gena about medical supplies, Sgt. Turgel invited her to dinner at the officers’ mess. She arrived to find a white tablecloth laid out with flowers. Six months later, they were married, her wedding dress made from British parachute silk. “My story is the story of one survivor,” said Gena, who dedicated her life to educating people about the Holocaust, “but it is also the story of 6 million who perished.”

Gena Goldfinger was born into a middle-class family in Krakow, Poland, the youngest of nine children, said the Associated Press. After the Nazis invaded in 1939, her family was forced into a Jewish ghetto “with only a sack of potatoes, some flour, and a few belongings.” One brother was shot by the Nazi SS; another disappeared after trying to escape. In 1942, the family was relocated to the Plaszow concentration camp. One of her sisters was shot for trying to smuggle food into the camp; another died after Nazi doctors injected her with gasoline. With her mother, she was sent on a forced march to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, before being transferred to Bergen-Belsen. There, she nursed the 15-year-old diarist Anne Frank, who was dying of typhus, said USA Today. “I washed her face, gave her water to drink,” she said. “I can still see that face, her hair, and how she looked.”

Turgel’s story “became a favorite light-in-the-darkness tale for the news media,” with the press dubbing her “the Bride of Belsen,” said The New York Times. But she made sure that the horrors she experienced were recounted alongside her remarkable love story. Settling in London, Turgel spent the rest of her life working with Holocaust educational groups, publishing an acclaimed memoir, I Light a Candle, in 1987. “I can only ever tell a fragment of my story,” she said, “because there wouldn’t be enough ink to write about it all.” ■