Gena Turgel’s story is one of remarkable fate. She was just sixteen years old when the Nazis invaded her hometown of Krakow, Poland. In the Holocaust, Gena lost her father and seven siblings, including her sister, Miriam, who was shot by the Nazis for smuggling food into Plaszow concentration camp. After spending two years as a prisoner in Plaszow, Gena was sent to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, she was forced into a gas chamber with hundreds of other prisoners. She was the only one to walk out alive. She hadn’t even realized what had happened to her—or that she had been in a gas chamber— until a woman she knew at Auschwitz explained it. She had no voice left and little energy. She survived testing by a Nazi doctor, a death march to Buchenwald, and imprisonment in Bergen-Belsen, before the concentration camps were finally liberated. While each story of survival is remarkable, living to share how you walked in and out of the gas chambers is something very few people in the Holocaust had the fortune of doing.
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