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Posted by
Rohit Singh

Jan 24
Did anyone ever survive the Nazi gas chambers?
Rarely, some people managed to survive the gas chambers and were not killed immediately afterwards. One such person is Gena Turgel and her story is more than astonishing. She survived three Nazi concentration camps and in Auschwitz-Birkenau was forced naked into the gas chambers.

Gena and Norman

She was 16 when her hometown of Krakow, Poland, was bombed by the Luftwaffe on September 1, 1939, the first day of the war. Norman had relatives in Chicago, but the family delayed putting plans to move there into action, and Poland was quickly conquered by the Germans.

In the Jewish ghetto of Krakow Gena lost two brothers fighting against the Nazis. She was then sent to Plaszow concentration camp, where she survived for two and a half years until her transfer to Auschwitz. There she survived numerous experiments conducted by Nazi "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele.

The most surprising part of her story is that she did not realize she was in a gas chamber until another prisoner told her. "Do you know what just happened? You were in a gas chamber!". said Gena: "I never realized I was in the gas chamber... It must not have worked.

The "Krema 1" gas chamber at Auschwitz.

Here is how she described his path to the gas chamber,

"We went into that room with the stone floor and holes in the ceiling. We were shivering, it was very cold, and we were waiting and waiting."

In Auschwitz, "the water was undrinkable and we lived mainly on beet soup," she wrote. "Everywhere we went the horrible stench of the crematoria followed us."

The time spent in Auschwitz left its consequences. Since then, Gena wore her perfume to forget the smell of the camp.

After two months in Auschwitz, as the Red Army advanced toward Auschwitz, she was sent on a "death march," first to Buchenwald concentration camp and then to Belsen, where she shared a barrack with Anne Frank and offered herself as a nurse because of her knowledge of German. When Belsen was liberated by the British, she showed a young army officer, Norman Turgel, the hospital where she worked.

In October 1945, she and Sergeant Turgel were married in Lübeck, Germany, in a synagogue that the Germans had used as a stable during the war. She was 21 years old at the time.

Mr. Turgel died in 1995. Mrs. Turgel is survived by her three children, eight grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. Gena Turgel died on June 7, 2018 at her home in England at the age of 95.

This story is true, but you don’t have to trust me: feel free to do your research on the internet.

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