RIP Gena Turgel...

RIP Gena Turgel, who has died in London aged 95 - a Holocaust survivor who shared a concentration camp with and comforted Anne Frank, who herself was born 89 years ago today and was given her first diary 76 years ago today. A privilege to speak to lifelong campaigner Gena ahead of last year's Holocaust Memorial Day...

January 27, 2017: A Holocaust survivor who survived a concentration camp gas chamber as a child fears the world is suffering a new neo-Nazi rise.
Gena Turgel, 91, told Metro that this year’s annual Holocaust Memorial Day today is shrouded by far-right insurgencies in Europe and across the Atlantic.
Mrs Turgel, who has lived in London since escaping Nazi Germany in 1945, saw two brothers shot dead by the Nazis and spent four years in three different concentration camps.
France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen is expected to contest the presidential run-off election later this year while hardline right-wing chiefs have come to prominence and power in Hungary, Serbia and Greece.
New US president Donald Trump has also been scrutinised over the white supremacist views expressed by some of his closest aides - and his backing from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
Mrs Turgel, now living in Stanmore in north-west London, said: ‘It’s terrible - I’m very surprised, but these people are criminals.
‘They should be arrested, for disturbing the lives of so many others.
‘They want to destroy the peace and happiness we’ve tried to build.
‘I can’t understand, after all we’ve been through, that children are growing up in this environment.’

She was 16 when the Nazis arrived in the Polish capital Krakow and forced her family to march 35km in freezing cold conditions to a new ghetto.
She spent time in three different concentration camps - Plaszov, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where she shatred a barrack with Anne Frank - including being subject to experiments ordered by Nazi eugenicist Josef Mengele.
She felt certain she was about to be killed when ushered into a Belsen cell, forced to strip naked and await the gas - only for Nazi guards to only spray water instead.
Mrs Turgel recalled: ‘I completely lost my voice in that moment - no words could come out.
‘I was sure I was about to be sent into a gas chamber to my death, only to somehow escape - I remained traumatised, but it felt like a miracle.’
She managed to hold out just in time for the camp’s eventual liberation by Allied forces.
She even fell in love with and married Norman Turgel, one of the intelligence officers who came in to Belsen to free her and fellow campmates.
Mrs Turgel, a supporter of the Holocaust Education Trust, urged people to heed the warnings from history against demonising minorities and pacifying demagogues.
She said: ‘It’s so important that we should never forget what happened - so many innocent people were lost.
‘I was a witness to the most systematic destruction of civilisation.
‘I just hope my testimony can serve as a memorial.’
She was given an MBE in 2000 for services to the Holocaust Foundation, educating children about genocide.