Repeating: Recovered post, lost in our recent outage.
Originally posted February 19, 2025
We mourn the loss of Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who became a prominent historian, journalist and tireless fighter for human rights and social justice, who died in Warsaw on February 18, aged 98.
Turski was closely involved in the establishment of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. He served as chair of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland, and, as a survivor of the Łódź Ghetto and of the Nazi camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Terezin, he for many years held the position of chair or deputy chair of the International Auschwitz Committee and International Auschwitz Council.
Over the past few decades, he became a moral authority in Poland. In a speech five years ago marking 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, he urged people to observe an 11th commandment –“Do not be indifferent.”
“Do not be indifferent when any authority violates accepted and existing social contracts. Be faithful to the… Eleventh Commandment: Do not be indifferent. Because if you are, you will not even notice when you or your descendants suddenly see another Auschwitz fall from the sky.”
Born Moshe Turbowicz, Marian became a leftist anti-Nazi activist in the Łódź Ghetto, where he and his family were interned when he was 14. His father and brother were killed in Auschwitz, where he also was deported, and in 1945 he survived two death marches, from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, and then from Buchenwald to Terezin.
After liberation by the Red Army, he became a committed communist and changed his name to the “non-Jewish-sounding” Marian Turski at the will of the party. He became a noted journalist, helping found the weekly Polityka, and chose to remain in Poland after the state’s antisemitic campaign in 1968 forced 15,000 or more Jews to leave the country.
The 1968 events, however, had a strong impact on both his political views and his views about his Jewish identity.“That year, I felt absolutely freed from any loyalty towards these factions […] it was the end of my loyalty towards the official line (of the Communist Party), as well as a change in thinking about my Polish-Jewish identity. […]” he said in a 2015 documentary. “The year 1968 accelerated my transition from being a Pole with Jewish origins to an awareness of being a Pole and a Jew simultaneously.”
Turski remained silent about his Holocaust experience for decades, but he began to be vocal in the late 1980s and then took up activism about Holocaust memory and Jewish heritage after the fall of communism.
“Marian himself regretted some of the choices he had made, most likely his youthful blind faith in communism, even though he remained a leftist until the end of his days,” POLIN Museum director Zygmunt Stępiński said on the POLIN museum web site.
He did not erase the facts from his biography that became inconvenient over time—instead, like any respectable historian, he wanted to highlight the whole picture, not just fragments. His life—from early childhood, through miraculously surviving the Holocaust, his engagement in communism and eventual disillusionment with it, to his work for and on behalf of the Jewish community in Poland, helping to reach understanding with Poles, and striving for reconciliation with Germans—was a process in which every phase served a purpose.
Marian’s last major public appearance was this past January 27, at an event at Auschwitz marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. In that speech, he urged people today, amid raising antisemitism and world crises, to not be afraid, quoting Rabbi Nachum of Bratslav: “Our whole world, the world, our world, is akin to a very narrow bridge. But the most important thing is: Do not be afraid!”
Let’s not shy away from convincing ourselves that it is indeed possible to resolve problems between neighbors. For hundreds of years, on different continents, different nations, nationalities and ethnic groups lived side by side and among one another. Mutual prejudices, animosity and hatred led to armed conflicts between these neighboring nations and ethnic groups. These always ended with bloodshed. Fortunately, there are also positive examples, when two sides come to conclusion that there is no way other than reaching a compromise to ensure their children, grandchildren and future generations enjoy a safe and peaceful existence. I could quote two examples from Europe—Germans and French, Poles and Lithuanians. Let me repeat—let us not be afraid to convince ourselves that we need a vision of not only the present, but also of the future, of what’s going to happen in the decades to come.
JHE’s Ruth Ellen Gruber met Marian Turski in the early 1980s when she was a journalist in Poland. Their last meeting was in September 2024 in Warsaw.
Read a full biography of Turski on Virtual Shtetl