Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who returned to his native Poland after World Battle II to provide voice to fellow victims of the Nazis and their collaborators, warning the world in writings and speeches concerning the risks of indifference to racial and ethnic injustice, died on Feb. 18 at his residence in Warsaw. He was 98.
His loss of life was announced by 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 was shipped from the Lodz ghetto when he was a young person, Mr. Turski sounded an alarm about what he known as “an enormous rise in antisemitism.”
“Auschwitz didn’t fall from the sky,” he said in a Polityka magazine podcast. “It started with small types of persecution of Jews. It occurred; it means it will probably occur wherever. That’s the reason human rights and democratic constitutions have to be defended.”
“The eleventh Commandment is vital: Don’t be detached,” he asserted. “Don’t be detached while you see historic lies. Don’t be detached when any minority is discriminated. Don’t be detached when energy violates a social contract.”
He added: “If you’re detached, earlier than you realize it one other Auschwitz will come out of the blue for you or your descendants.”
His father and youthful brother have been killed at Auschwitz, and he misplaced 37 different relations within the Holocaust.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an adjunct legislation professor at Cornell College, a son of Holocaust survivors and the writer of “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz” (2025), stated Mr. Turski had exemplified “these members of the survivor technology who, as an alternative of turning inward and wallowing as they may simply have performed of their struggling, devoted himself to the longer term, to creating certain that nothing just like the horrors he and European Jewry skilled within the Holocaust would occur once more to anybody else.”
Solely weeks earlier than his loss of life, Mr. Turski returned to the camp the place he had been a slave laborer to attend a ceremony commemorating the eightieth anniversary of its liberation, in January 1945, by the Soviet military.
“We’ve all the time been a tiny minority,” he stated, referring to himself and his fellow survivors. “And now solely a handful stay.”
For many years, Mr. Turski was a dominant sermonizer amongst them. He served as a firsthand witness to wartime atrocities as a columnist for the weekly Polityka journal, which he went to work for in 1958; as chairman of the Affiliation of the Jewish Historic Institute of Poland from 1999 to 2011; and because the editor of three volumes of eyewitness accounts, titled “Jewish Fates: A Testimony of the Residing” (1996-2001).
“Marian devoted his life to making sure that the world by no means forgets the horrors of the previous,” Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics inheritor and president of the World Jewish Congress, stated in an announcement this week. He described Mr. Turski as “a person who led by instance, selecting good over evil, dialogue over battle and understanding over hostility.”
Mr. Turski was born Mosze Turbowicz on June 26, 1926, in Druskininkai, a metropolis that was a part of Poland then and is now in Lithuania.
His father, Eliasz Turbowicz, a coal dealer who got here from a household of rabbis, had deliberate to to migrate to Palestine however remained in Europe due to a recurring lung ailment, a results of a wound sustained whereas serving within the Russian military throughout World Battle I. Mr. Turski’s mom, Estera (Worobiejczyk) Turbowicz, was a clerk.
Mosze attended Jewish major and secondary colleges in Lodz, however as soon as the Germans invaded in 1939, Jews have been confined to the Lodz ghetto. He helped assist his household by 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 mother and father and youthful brother have been deported, in August 1944, he was shipped out on one of many final transports from Lodz. He figured his possibilities of surviving have been higher at Auschwitz-Birkenau than within the ghetto, which the Nazis have been obliterating.
His mom was despatched to Bergen-Belsen, a focus camp in northern Germany; she survived the conflict and died in 1988.
Mosze’s expertise, too, was considered one of harrowing survival: deployed from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to do roadwork; pressured to hitch a loss of life march to the Buchenwald focus camp forward of the Soviet advance; and despatched to a camp at Theresienstadt, in occupied Czechoslovakia, the place he caught typhus and shriveled to 70 kilos earlier than the camp was liberated by the Purple Military in Could 1945.
After the conflict, he returned to Poland as a dedicated Socialist. Given the antisemitism within the nation, a Communist official recommended that he undertake a non-Jewish title; he selected Marian Turski. He earned a level in historical past from the College of Wroclaw.
Becoming a member of the Polish Staff’ Occasion, Mr. Turski turned a dedicated Communist official, imposing 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, within the pursuits of selling Polish nationalism and socialism.
In 1965, whereas finding out and lecturing in the US on an eight-month State Division 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, requested Mr. Turski what had motivated him to march, he replied, “Merely out of solidarity with all those that fought for his or her civil rights and towards racial divisions.”
Within the late Nineteen Sixties, he soured on Soviet communism due to the federal government’s official coverage of antisemitism and Moscow’s opposition to political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. That “accelerated my transition from being a Pole with Jewish origins to an consciousness of being a Pole and a Jew concurrently,” he stated.
Whereas he suppressed his wartime memories for years, Mr. Turski returned to Auschwitz within the Seventies, a visit he would make greater than as soon as. In 2020, he urged Mark Zuckerberg, the chief govt of Fb, to ban Holocaust deniers from that social media platform. Mr. Zuckerberg finally 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 sound engineer for filmmakers. She died in 2017. He’s survived by their daughter, Joanna Turski, a flutist; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
“Gentle-spoken, an mental large, he remained in Poland in order that his voice resonated as intently as presumably to the abyss,” Professor Rosensaft, of Cornell, stated.
“He might inform folks, ‘I’ve seen this,’” he added. “It’s now going to be our process — the next generations — to verify the genuine reminiscence of the survivors turns into ingrained in our consciousness. We can’t replicate the voice of the survivors, however we are able to guarantee that the questions they requested, the warnings they raised, stay ingrained in our consciousness.”
