The world lost one of its few remaining Holocaust survivors last month when Martin Turski died at age 98. As a teenager, Turski was shipped from Poland’s Lodz ghetto to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. His father and brother were killed there. Altogether 39 of his family members were murdered by the Nazis, but Turski miraculously survived, and he dedicated his adult life to warning the world about the danger of indifference to injustice. In 1965, just 20 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, he joined the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Why? In a 2020 interview, he warned: “The 11th Commandment is important: Don’t be indifferent… Do not be indifferent when you see historical lies. Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against. Do not be indifferent when power violates a social contract.”

Judith Kumin

Hopkinton