Auschwitz Survivor Gena Turgel Walked Out of Gas Chamber Alive

[Behind the Aegis]

(three videos embedded at the link, I can't figure out how to post them)

LONDON — Of all the stories of survival from the Auschwitz concentration camp, Gena Turgel's is one of the most astonishing.

--snip---

In the most notorious of all, Auschwitz-Birkeanau, she was herded naked into a gas chamber with hundreds of others.

Yet Turgel, who was 21 at the time, walked out alive.

She had no idea the Nazis had tried to kill her until a woman she knew said, "Don't you know what has just happened to you? You were in the gas chamber!"


--snip--

In Krakow's Jewish ghetto, she lost two brothers fighting the Nazis. She then was sent to Plaszow concentration camp where she survived for two-and-a-half years until she was marched to Auschwitz. She survived testing by the infamous Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele.

After two months, as the Red Army advanced towards Auschwitz, she was sent on a "death march," first to Buchenwald concentration camp and then to Belsen, where she shared a barracks with the dying Dutch teenager Anne Frank.


more: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/auschwitz-survivor-gena-turgel-walked-out-gas-chamber-alive-n293496

[shenmue]

1. ...

[sheshe2]

2. To cry in Auschwitz could have you shot

Every story of survival at Auschwitz is extraordinary but hers is perhaps unique.

"I wear a lot of perfume," she whispers. "The stench of the camps will always stay with me and I try to block it out." It's not the only physical reaction she has to her ordeal. Her 17-year-old sister Miriam used to sleep with her, on her left side. Miriam was shot by the Germans for smuggling food into Plaszov. She says she still feels a constant chill along her left arm.

The ghosts of the camp and her family — she lost seven siblings and her father — still haunt her. As we talk, tears come to her eyes, but she doesn't let them fall.

"To cry in Auschwitz could have you shot," she said. "We had to be strong, to block out everything."

I will cry for her now BtA. For the tears she could not.

[Behind the Aegis]

5. I can't even imagine.

How were more people not completely broken by this?

[JDPriestly]

3. K&R.

There is no equivalent in the entire history of the world to the Holocaust.

Inhuman horror.

There have been other genocides and injustices, but nothing so horrible as the Holocaust.

[Happyhippychick]

4. It's good to hear even one story of survival