Marian Turski

Marian Turski, a distinguished journalist and historian, is one of the last living Holocaust survivors. Having survived the Lodz ghetto and captivity in Auschwitz, he was finally liberated at Theresienstadt in 1945 after a gruelling death march from Buchenwald. Turski decided to stay in postwar communist Poland to work towards reconciliation between the various communities, mainly through his contributions as editor and journalist for the Polish weekly Polityka. The highly praised BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, for which he was closely consulted, was a television success around the world in 2005 and his book with heart-breaking testimonials of fellow survivors was translated as Polish Witnesses of the Shoah in 2007. As chairman of the Council of the Jewish Historical Institute, Turski is one of the founding fathers of the POLIN Museum of Polish Jews, which opened its doors in 2014. During the ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2020, Turski, a member of the International Auschwitz Council, gave a powerful speech in the presence of several heads of state that made headlines across the globe.