Polish-born journalist and historian Marian Turski dies aged 98

The realisation that he had also suffered a form of amnesia after his terrible wartime experiences triggered his personal crusade against historic forgetfulness. He could recall some Holocaust experiences, such as his arrival at Auschwitz with his parents, and episodes from the death marches, but had unconsciously excised other memories that were too painful. A glance at his tattoo, however, was always a vivid reminder.

An encounter with a friend in 1965 who recalled that Turski had saved his life during a death march further reinforced the need to research these gaps in his memory. Turski also acknowledged the kindness of fellow prisoners who had saved his life in Auschwitz after he was knocked to the ground by a kapo, shattering his glasses. They had given up their meagre bread rations to buy him a new pair of spectacles on the black market. Without them he could not have followed orders and would certainly have been killed.

The vacuum of Jewish life in his homeland later inspired Turski to co-found the Polin Museum, which traces 1,000 years of Polish-Jewish history. It opened on April 19, 2013 on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the ghetto uprising, an event attended by the presidents of Poland and Israel.

As president of the International Auschwitz Committee, Turski interviewed many Polish Jews, telling his story and reminding the world of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

Calling on countries to foster harmony through conflict resolution, Turski saw it as his duty to confront neo-Nazis wherever he found them. Earlier this year he wrote an open letter to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to ban Holocaust denial from his social media platform.

Born Moshe Turbowicz in Druskininkai, in what was then Poland but now Lithuania, his mother was employed as a clerk and his father hailed from a rabbinical family and worked in the coal industry despite suffering from a lung injury sustained fighting in the First World War.

After Poland fell to the Nazis in 1940, he and his parents and younger brother were incarcerated in the Lodz ghetto, whose inhabitants were plagued by disease, starvation and the toll of forced labour. There he joined the communist resistance and helped sabotage Nazi factories. He also supported his family by teaching students Hebrew, Latin and Polish and by working in a meat house.

In 1944 his parents and brother were deported to Auschwitz. Two weeks later, the teenage Turski arrived there on one of the last transports from the ghetto. His father and brother were murdered in the gas chambers and his mother was sent to work at Bergen-Belsen. After enduring a period of forced labour at Auschwitz in 1945, he was one of 60,000 prisoners sent on a death march west to avoid approaching Soviet forces. Anyone who fell in the freezing conditions was shot. Survivors were sent to Buchenwald in cattle trucks.

“There were 36 dead bodies in my car… out of 120 (people),” he said. He was then sent on a second death march from Buchenwald to Terezin in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. He was liberated when he was on the point of death from typhus and exhaustion, and weighed just 70lb.

Turski was rare among Holocaust survivors, most of whom emigrated to the US, Britain or Mandated Palestine. He opted to return home where he hoped to build a socialist Poland. But he found some 90 per cent of the Jewish population had died in the Holocaust, including many of his extended family. His mother survived Bergen-Belsen and lived to her eighties.

After the war he joined the Polish Workers’ Party and became an election commissioner, having changed his name to the less Jewish-sounding Turski. He freely acknowledged his own role in the rigged 1946 referendum claimed by the communists as their victory.

He studied history at the University of Wroclaw and travelled to the US on a scholarship, joining Rev Martin Luther King Jr on the 1965 civil rights marches. Asked by the protesters whether another Auschwitz could happen in Germany, or elsewhere, he replied: “It could happen to you, too, if civil rights are violated, if minority rights are not respected and are abolished.”

In 1956 Turski became editor-in-chief of Sztandar Mlodych, the newspaper of the Union of Polish Youth. In 1958 he edited the moderately critical Polityka’s history section and was respected as an influential journalist and historian. But ten years later he faced a wake-up call as the communist government launched an antisemitic campaign and sent troops to take part in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

“The events of 1968,” he said, “accelerated my transition from being a Pole with Jewish origins to an awareness of being a Pole and a Jew simultaneously.”

Turski married fellow survivor and resistance worker Halina Paszkowska, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and became a sound engineer on Polish films such as Roman Polanski’s Oscar-nominated 1962 film debut Knife in the Water.

During Poland’s move towards democracy in the latter part of the 20th century, Turski began publishing testimony from Holocaust survivors, working with Poland’s Jewish Historical Institute, and other relevant organisations. More recently he reawakened Holocaust awareness in the face of an attempt by the Polish government to whitewash history using a law that made it a crime to accuse Poland of complicity in Nazi crimes such as Auschwitz.

The Polish chief rabbi Michael Schudrich paid tribute to Turski on his death. “Marian was our teacher, he was our moral voice and mentor,” he said. “He was steeped in Jewish wisdom and used it to guide us on how to face today’s problems.”

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said: “Mr Turski’s words had become a motto for us.”

Marian Turski is survived by his daughter Joanna Turska, two grandchildren and two great grandchildren. His wife Halina predeceased him in 2017.

GlORIA TESSLER

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Marian Turski: born June 26, 1926. died February 18, 2025