Turgel, an elegant woman with more than a hint of mischief in her blue eyes, survived not one or two, but three Nazi concentration camps.
In the most notorious of all, Auschwitz-Birkeanau, she was herded naked into a gas chamber with hundreds of others.
Yet Turgel, who was 21 at the time, walked out alive.
She had no idea the Nazis had tried to kill her until a woman she knew said, "Don't you know what has just happened to you? You were in the gas chamber!"
Turgel still looks amazed to have cheated death.
"I completely lost my voice," she said. "I just never realized I was in the gas chamber ... it must not have worked."
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ausch ... ve-n293496
We're painted the picture that Turgel was sent to a gas chamber, and the gas chamber miraculously malfunctioned that day or something. Nothing happened.
HOWEVER, what isn't mentioned in this recent article is something I found in a 2005 Daily Mail article in which Turgel mentions a critical detail:
"We were trembling. I didn't know where we were. Inside, it looked terrible. A woman came in that I recognised from a previous camp. She was very shocked I was there and went out again.
"We waited a while and then water came through the walls. It was wonderful. For many weeks we had had no water on our backs. We were all drinking it."
"As we came outside, the women there said how wonderful it was to see us. They screamed with happiness. I didn't understand what they meant. I said 'What are you shouting about?'
"They said 'Don't you know? You were in the gas chamber.' I lost my voice. I couldn't produce any saliva."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... amber.html
So, the idea of her stepping into a "gas chamber" and her miraculously surviving because the gas chamber didn't work is very misleading. She stepped into a room and received a shower, because the room wasn't a gas chamber, it was a shower room. It wasn't until she heard rumors of it being a gas chamber that she even thought it was.