Marian Turski, Who Refused to Forget the Holocaust, Dies at 98

New York Times

25-02-2025

Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who returned to his native Poland after World War II to give voice to fellow victims of the Nazis and their collaborators, warning the world in writings and speeches about the dangers of indifference to racial and ethnic injustice, died on Feb. 18 at his home in Warsaw. He was 98.
His death was announced by the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which he had helped to establish and whose board he had chaired since 2009.
Speaking in 2020 at the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, where he was shipped from the Lodz ghetto when he was a teenager, Mr. Turski sounded an alarm about what he called 'a huge rise in antisemitism.'
'Auschwitz did not fall from the sky,' he said in a Polityka magazine podcast. 'It began with small forms of persecution of Jews. It happened; it means it can happen anywhere. That is why human rights and democratic constitutions must be defended.'
'The 11th Commandment is important: Don't be indifferent,' he asserted. 'Do not be indifferent when you see historical lies. Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated. Do not be indifferent when power violates a social contract.'
He added: 'If you are indifferent, before you know it another Auschwitz will come out of the blue for you or your descendants.'
His father and younger brother were killed at Auschwitz, and he lost 37 other relatives in the Holocaust.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell University, a son of Holocaust survivors and the author of 'Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz' (2025), said Mr. Turski had exemplified 'those members of the survivor generation who, instead of turning inward and wallowing as they might easily have done in their suffering, devoted himself to the future, to making sure that nothing like the horrors he and European Jewry experienced in the Holocaust would happen again to anyone else.'
Only weeks before his death, Mr. Turski returned to the camp where he had been a slave laborer to attend a ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of its liberation, in January 1945, by the Soviet army.
'We have always been a tiny minority,' he said, referring to himself and his fellow survivors. 'And now only a handful remain.'
For decades, Mr. Turski was a dominant sermonizer among them. He served as a firsthand witness to wartime atrocities as a columnist for the weekly Polityka magazine, which he went to work for in 1958; as chairman of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland from 1999 to 2011; and as the editor of three volumes of eyewitness accounts, titled 'Jewish Fates: A Testimony of the Living' (1996-2001).
'Marian dedicated his life to ensuring that the world never forgets the horrors of the past,' Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir and president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement this week. He described Mr. Turski as 'a man who led by example, choosing good over evil, dialogue over conflict and understanding over hostility.'
Mr. Turski was born Mosze Turbowicz on June 26, 1926, in Druskininkai, a city that was part of Poland then and is now in Lithuania.
His father, Eliasz Turbowicz, a coal trader who came from a family of rabbis, had planned to emigrate to Palestine but remained in Europe because of a recurring lung ailment, a result of a wound sustained while serving in the Russian army during World War I. Mr. Turski's mother, Estera (Worobiejczyk) Turbowicz, was a clerk.
Mosze attended Jewish primary and secondary schools in Lodz, but once the Germans invaded in 1939, Jews were confined to the Lodz ghetto. He helped support his family by tutoring in Hebrew, Latin and Polish and working in a smokehouse, where he butchered horse meat. He also joined the Communist resistance.
Two weeks after his parents and younger brother were deported, in August 1944, he was shipped out on one of the last transports from Lodz. He figured his chances of surviving were better at Auschwitz-Birkenau than in the ghetto, which the Nazis were obliterating.
His mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany; she survived the war and died in 1988.
Mosze's experience, too, was one of harrowing survival: deployed from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to do roadwork; forced to join a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp ahead of the Soviet advance; and sent to a camp at Theresienstadt, in occupied Czechoslovakia, where he caught typhus and shriveled to 70 pounds before the camp was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945.
After the war, he returned to Poland as a committed Socialist. Given the antisemitism in the country, a Communist official suggested that he adopt a non-Jewish name; he chose Marian Turski. He earned a degree in history from the University of Wroclaw.
Joining the Polish Workers' Party, Mr. Turski became a committed Communist official, enforcing censorship, imposing crop quotas on farmers and presiding over a fraudulent referendum that consolidated Polish territory recovered from the German occupation — all, he would later say, in the interests of promoting Polish nationalism and socialism.
In 1965, while studying and lecturing in the United States on an eight-month State Department scholarship, he participated in a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Years later, when President Barack Obama, at a ceremony in Warsaw, asked Mr. Turski what had motivated him to march, he replied, 'Simply out of solidarity with all those who fought for their civil rights and against racial divisions.'
In the late 1960s, he soured on Soviet communism because of the government's official policy of antisemitism and Moscow's opposition to political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. That 'accelerated my transition from being a Pole with Jewish origins to an awareness of being a Pole and a Jew simultaneously,' he said.
While he suppressed his wartime memories for years, Mr. Turski returned to Auschwitz in the 1970s, a trip he would make more than once. In 2020, he urged Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, to ban Holocaust deniers from that social media platform. Mr. Zuckerberg eventually did so that year.
Mr. Turski's wife, Halina (Paszkowska) Turski, a fellow Holocaust survivor, had escaped the Warsaw ghetto, served as a messenger for the resistance and later worked as a sound engineer for filmmakers. She died in 2017. He is survived by their daughter, Joanna Turski, a flutist; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
'Soft-spoken, an intellectual giant, he remained in Poland so that his voice resonated as closely as possibly to the abyss,' Professor Rosensaft, of Cornell, said.
'He could tell people, 'I have seen this,'' he added. 'It is now going to be our task — the following generations — to make sure the authentic memory of the survivors becomes ingrained in our consciousness. We cannot replicate the voice of the survivors, but we can make sure that the questions they asked, the warnings they raised, remain ingrained in our consciousness.'