Holocaust survivor Gena Turgel, consoler of Anne Frank, dies

LONDON — Gena Turgel, a Holocaust survivor who comforted diarist Anne Frank at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp months before its liberation, has died. She was 95.

Britain's chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said Turgel died Thursday.

Britain's Holocaust Educational Trust says Turgel dedicated her life to sharing her story of surviving the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, Poland and the German Nazi camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen.

It was in a hospital at Bergen-Belsen that Turgel cared for Anne Frank as the teenager was dying of typhus. She once told the BBC: "I washed her face, gave her water to drink, and I can still see that face, her hair and how she looked."

After World War II, Turgel married one of the camp's British liberators, Norman Turgel, earning the nickname "The Bride of Belsen."