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Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who returned to his native Poland after World War II to give voice to fellow victims of the Nazis and their collaborators, warning the world in writings and speeches about the dangers of indifference to racial and ethnic injustice, died on Feb. 18 at his home in Warsaw. He was 98.<\/p>\n
His death was announced<\/a> by the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews<\/a>, which he had helped to establish and whose board he had chaired since 2009.<\/p>\n Speaking in 2020 at the 75th anniversary<\/a> of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, where he was shipped from the Lodz ghetto when he was a teenager, Mr. Turski sounded an alarm about what he called \u201ca huge rise in antisemitism.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAuschwitz did not fall from the sky,\u201d he said in a Polityka magazine podcast.<\/a> \u201cIt began with small forms of persecution of Jews. It happened; it means it can happen anywhere. That is why human rights and democratic constitutions must be defended.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe 11th Commandment is important: Don\u2019t be indifferent,\u201d he asserted. \u201cDo not be indifferent when you see historical lies. Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated. Do not be indifferent when power violates a social contract.\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cIf you are indifferent, before you know it another Auschwitz will come out of the blue for you or your descendants.\u201d<\/p>\n His father and younger brother were killed at Auschwitz, and he lost 37 other relatives in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell University, a son of Holocaust survivors and the author of \u201cBurning Psalms: Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz\u201d (2025), said Mr. Turski had exemplified \u201cthose members of the survivor generation who, instead of turning inward and wallowing as they might easily have done in their suffering, devoted himself to the future, to making sure that nothing like the horrors he and European Jewry experienced in the Holocaust would happen again to anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Only weeks before his death, Mr. Turski returned to the camp where he had been a slave laborer to attend a ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of its liberation, in January 1945, by the Soviet army.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe have always been a tiny minority,\u201d he said, referring to himself and his fellow survivors. \u201cAnd now only a handful remain.\u201d<\/p>\n For decades, Mr. Turski was a dominant sermonizer among them. He served as a firsthand witness to wartime atrocities as a columnist for the weekly Polityka magazine, which he went to work for in 1958; as chairman of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland from 1999 to 2011; and as the editor of three volumes of eyewitness accounts, titled \u201cJewish Fates: A Testimony of the Living\u201d (1996-2001).<\/p>\n \u201cMarian dedicated his life to ensuring that the world never forgets the horrors of the past,\u201d Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir and president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement this week. He described Mr. Turski as \u201ca man who led by example, choosing good over evil, dialogue over conflict and understanding over hostility.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Turski was born Mosze Turbowicz on June 26, 1926, in Druskininkai, a city that was part of Poland then and is now in Lithuania.<\/p>\n His father, Eliasz Turbowicz, a coal trader who came from a family of rabbis, had planned to emigrate to Palestine but remained in Europe because of a recurring lung ailment, a result of a wound sustained while serving in the Russian army during World War I. Mr. Turski\u2019s mother, Estera (Worobiejczyk) Turbowicz, was a clerk.<\/p>\n Mosze attended Jewish primary and secondary schools in Lodz, but once the Germans invaded in 1939, Jews were confined to the Lodz ghetto. He helped support his family by tutoring in Hebrew, Latin and Polish and working in a smokehouse, where he butchered horse meat. He also joined the Communist resistance.<\/p>\n Two weeks after his parents and younger brother were deported, in August 1944, he was shipped out on one of the last transports from Lodz. He figured his chances of surviving were better at Auschwitz-Birkenau than in the ghetto, which the Nazis were obliterating.<\/p>\n His mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany; she survived the war and died in 1988.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mosze\u2019s experience, too, was one of harrowing survival: deployed from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to do roadwork; forced to join a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp ahead of the Soviet advance; and sent to a camp at Theresienstadt, in occupied Czechoslovakia, where he caught typhus and shriveled to 70 pounds before the camp was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After the war, he returned to Poland as a committed Socialist. Given the antisemitism in the country, a Communist official suggested that he adopt a non-Jewish name; he chose Marian Turski. He earned a degree in history from the University of Wroclaw.<\/p>\n Joining the Polish Workers\u2019 Party, Mr. Turski became a committed Communist official, enforcing censorship, imposing crop quotas on farmers and presiding over a fraudulent referendum that consolidated Polish territory recovered from the German occupation \u2014 all, he would later say, in the interests of promoting Polish nationalism and socialism.<\/p>\n In 1965, while studying and lecturing in the United States on an eight-month State Department scholarship, he participated in a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Years later, when President Barack Obama, at a ceremony in Warsaw, asked Mr. Turski what had motivated him to march, he replied, \u201cSimply out of solidarity with all those who fought for their civil rights and against racial divisions.\u201d<\/p>\n In the late 1960s, he soured on Soviet communism because of the government\u2019s official policy of antisemitism and Moscow\u2019s opposition to political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. That \u201caccelerated my transition from being a Pole with Jewish origins to an awareness of being a Pole and a Jew simultaneously,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n