Marian Turski, Holocaust survivor who warned of the danger of indifference, dies at 98

Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who became a journalist and historian in postwar Poland and co-founded Warsaw’s landmark Jewish history museum, has died. He was 98.

The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews announces his death, describing him as a person of exceptional moral and intellectual qualities who always stood on the side “of minorities, the excluded, the wronged.”

“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,” the museum director, Zygmunt Stępiński, writes in a statement.

Turski survived the Lodz ghetto, where he and his family were forced to live, two death marches and imprisonment at the Nazi German concentration camps Buchenwald and Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was in German-occupied Poland. In all, he lost 39 relatives in the Holocaust.

Unlike many Jewish survivors who left postwar Poland, Turski chose to remain. He was on the political left his entire life, and was a member of the communist party. While on a scholarship to the United States in 1956, he marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr. in support of civil rights for Black Americans.

Turski was among a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors and spoke during observances last month marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.