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  Life   More Features  10 Jun 2018  Holocaust survivor Gena Turgel, consoler of Anne Frank, dies

Holocaust survivor Gena Turgel, consoler of Anne Frank, dies

AP
Published : Jun 10, 2018, 10:48 am IST
Updated : Jun 10, 2018, 10:48 am IST

It was in a hospital at Bergen-Belsen that Turgel cared for Anne Frank as the teenager was dying of typhus.

 Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, left, meets Holocaust survivor Gena Turgel during a service to remember victims of the Holocaust in Westminster Central Hall in London on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.  (Photo: AP)
  Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, left, meets Holocaust survivor Gena Turgel during a service to remember victims of the Holocaust in Westminster Central Hall in London on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. (Photo: AP)

LONDON: Gena Turgel, a Holocaust survivor who comforted diarist Anne Frank at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp months before its liberation, has died. She was 95.

Britain's chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said Turgel died Thursday. Britain's Holocaust Educational Trust says Turgel dedicated her life to sharing her story of surviving the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, Poland and the German Nazi camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen.

It was in a hospital at Bergen-Belsen that Turgel cared for Anne Frank as the teenager was dying of typhus. She once told the BBC: "I washed her face, gave her water to drink, and I can still see that face, her hair and how she looked."

After World War II, Turgel married one of the camp's British liberators, Norman Turgel, earning the nickname "The Bride of Belsen".

Tags: gena turgel, holocaust, anne frank, auschwitz