Dan Turgel tells the story of his grandparents who met during the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in WW2.

The site of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in Northern Germany is a desolate place – a bleak reminder of the horrors of inhumanity and history’s darkest days. And, while the number of living survivors is dwindling, their stories live on.
 On the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation by Allied troops, more than 1,000 people travelled to Bergen-Belsen to remember.
 Among them were London Partner Dan Turgel and his family, whose connection to the camp is particularly poignant.
 Dan’s grandmother Gena Goldfinger was 16 when the war reached her home in Krakow, Poland.
 
Until then, she’d enjoyed a happy childhood as the youngest of nine children. But things changed abruptly when the Nazis stepped up their persecution of the Jewish community, closing schools, confiscating houses and executing people in the streets. 
 In the months that followed, Gena lost her father and many of her brothers and sisters both in the Krakow ghetto and in the concentration camps.
 
Gena and her mother survived three such camps, including Auschwitz, where she and her mother miraculously survived the gas chamber when a mechanism in the chamber failed.
 Remembering that miraculous escape, she recalled in her book I Light A Candle: 
“As we came outside, the women there said how wonderful it was to see us. They screamed with happiness. I didn’t understand what they meant. I said ‘What are you shouting about?', they replied ‘Don’t you know? You were in the gas chamber.’

GENA TURGEL

“I asked Norman whether he was expecting any special visitors,” she recalled. “He answered: ‘This is our engagement party’.”

Carousel title

xxxx xxxxx xx x xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xx xxxx xxxxxxx

5.

6.

3.

1.

4.

2.

that conquered all

Remembering a

Our Talent