Thread by @Telegraph

Gena Turgel married the British soldier who helped free her from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Now her wedding gown is going on display at the @I_W_M

#LightTheDarkness

telegraph.co.uk/women/life/hol…

Less than six months after the camp was liberated, Gena married Norman Turgel in 1945

The British press covered their union with joyous headlines hailing the ‘Bride of Belsen’

Still recovering from starvation, Gena was overwhelmed by the beauty of the exquisite cream wedding gown.

It featured puff sleeves and a skirt decorated with flounces of gathered silk.

The dress was made by a local tailor out of a British Army parachute

The dress will go on permanent display at The Imperial War Museum for the first time this autumn, when its new £30 million Holocaust Galleries open to the public

Gena passed away aged 95 in 2018.

Her daughter Bernice, says:

“When she was asked to have it at the museum, she thought it was unbelievable. She was incredibly proud that people would see it and realise that out of the horrors something wonderful happened"

⭐ Gena was the youngest of nine children

⭐ She was also imprisoned at Auschwitz

⭐ She talked her way into working as an untrained nurse

⭐ She cared for Anne Frank as she died from typhus

Norman was a Jewish sergeant in the British Intelligence Corps.

Days after their first meeting, he invited Gena to a dinner in the officers’ mess, where she was astonished to see tables laid with fresh white tablecloths and flowers

In October 1945, they were married in Lübeck, at a synagogue that had survived because the Nazis had used it as a stable

The Turgels’ marriage remained a dizzying love story until Norman’s death in 1995, just two months shy of their golden wedding anniversary

“He thought he was the luckiest man alive...He would always bring her breakfast in bed on a tray. Even if he had to be up and get out to the office at 6am, he would squeeze her orange juice and make sure that she had grapefruit, toast and a cup of tea," Bernice says

Bernice remembers her father saying the smell of the camp “always lived with him.” Norman was the one who seized the notorious Josef Kramer, the ‘Beast of Belsen’, and mused: “Maybe it was fate, that a Jew should arrest one of the war’s worst concentration camp guards”

Gena spoke of how in the barracks of the concentration camp, her sister Miriam would sleep “on my left side, on my arm,” before she was shot. “From that moment to this,” she said in 1995, “my left side has always felt chilly, as if a part of my flesh had been cut away"

Gena devoted herself to telling “the story that six million others cannot tell” and gave hundreds of talks.

She was awarded an MBE and was described by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis as “the ultimate symbol of everything which is good and great in our world”

Her daughter, says, "She didn't want praise, she just wanted people to know and to understand what had happened to her family and to other families and how it wasn’t a figment of people’s imagination"

"And, with the anti-Semitism that’s going on now, she would just say: ‘Make sure it doesn’t happen again,’” Bernice says