‘DON’T BE AFRAID TO LOOK AT ME’
‘LAST NAZI TRIAL’ PROVES CATHARTIC FOR CANADIANS
from Detmold, Germany She was no longer that terrified Jewish girl. After all these years, it was Hedy Bohm’s turn to issue a command.
The old SS guard sat in his wheelchair, head bowed, refusing to meet her eyes filled with pain. As one of the l ast Nazis brought to justice, 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning would never show the witnesses even the remotest sign that he was listening. Instead, his gaze was focused on his lap.
Finally, Bohm would stand for it no more. “Mr. Hanning, did you hear me?” asked the Holocaust survivor from Toronto. “Look at me. Don’t be afraid to look at me. I’m just another human being.” With startled eyes, he slowly raised his head and gazed at the dignified 88- year- old widow testifying against him. And then just as quickly, Hanning looked away. The message was waiting on her voice mail in the fall of 2014.
Thomas Walther, a former judge in Germany, had scoured the Internet for Holocaust survivors and tracked her down in Toronto. He had devised a new legal strategy to prosecute exNazis for their complicity in mass murder and needed her help to testify about her horrific experience at the trial of Oskar Groening, the so-called “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz.”
“At first my reaction was ‘Oh no, why would I put myself through that?’ ” recalls the retired shoe-store owner in her elegant apartment. Just the sound of the German language took her back to being a terrified 16-year-old on the railway platform; the language left her panicked and fighting to breathe.
It is only since 2007 that Bohm has agreed to speak to students about her past. With so few survivors still alive, she believes it’s her sacred duty. “Decades I spent trying not to remember,” she says with a shake of her head. “And now I have to keep on remembering.” But what Walther was asking was different. Could she travel across the ocean to face the former Nazis who were such an integral part of the killing machine that murdered her beloved parents so long ago?
After much deliberation, she finally realized she had no choice. “I could speak for those who can’t. I have to do it.” In April 2015, she testified against Groening. This year, Walther asked her to return to testify against Hanning. Also conscripted as co-plaintiffs in these groundbreaking trials were fellow Auschwitz survivors Max Eisen and Bill Glied of Toronto.
On Friday, Hanning was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. With other suspects too old and frail, many fear this was Germany’s final Nazi trial.
And so these survivors’ searing memories may be the last ever heard in a German courtroom. For Hungarian Jews, the Nazis’ Final Solution didn’t come searching for them until the final year of the war. But when it did, how it tore through their community with a vengeance. With defeat on the horizon, the ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau began operating 24 hours a day.
For all three survivors, their voyage into hell began the same: with no warning, the young teens were ordered to pack a bag, leave their homes and board cattle cars that would take them to “resettle” in the east.
On May 9, 1944, on the eve of the second Passover seder, the Jews in Eisen’s town of Moldava nad Bodvou, Czechoslovakia, were abruptly driven from their homes by Hungarian gendarmes and deported to a brickyard in Kassa. They were given five minutes to pack a satchel of necessities.
Glied was 13 when together with his parents and sister, he was driven from their home in Subotica in the former Yugoslavia and loaded on to a cattle car. “It never occurred to me — nor to them — what the end of that train ride would be.”
Two days and two nights. No sanitation for 90 people jammed in together. No food. No water. He has tried, all these years, to recall their conversations, to resurrect these last words they would have shared. But he cannot. Was Hanning there the day that train arrived? They don’t know and f or this new type of prosecution, it doesn’t matter. It was enough that the former SS-Unterscharführer worked t here between January 1943 and June 1944, an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 Jews — their parents, brothers and sisters among them.
Bohm convinced herself that her mother was in a similar camp, doing everything she could to stay alive so they could be reunited — and it was her job to do the same. “That was my reason to live.”
“I didn’t know,” she told Hanning, “that the road my mother followed was taking her to the crematorium, to be killed along with all the children, young mothers with babies in their arms and grandmothers I witnessed being led away by the Nazi soldiers.” Eisen, his father and uncle were assi gned to f arm labour, working 10 hours on 300 calories a day. “It was dehumanization by starvation. Your body is disappearing right in front of your eyes. You’re becoming a skeleton. People would kill for a crumb of bread.”
The date is etched in his memory. July 9, 1944, the day his father and uncle didn’t join the columns marched to the fields. When Eisen ran to their barracks that evening, they were nowhere to be found. Frantically calling out their names, the boy finally found them behind the barbed wire fence of the quarantine area where the “selected” were briefly warehoused.
“I had a few seconds to say goodbye,” Eisen recalls. “My father gave me a blessing and told me if I survived this, I should tell the world what happened.”
And so he has. Eisen is dedicated to educating others about the Holocaust and has just published a memoir, By Chance Alone.
Eisen faced Hanning and tried to explain the burden he will carry to his grave: the nightmare of his beloved mother, three siblings and aunt slowly suffocating from the poison gas as SS visitors watched through glass peepholes. “I can never forget; I can never forgive,” he vows. “It was hell on earth. It was the machine of the devil.” Glied and his father were sent to Germany to work as slave labourers at an underground airplane factory. As the war drew to a close, both contracted typhoid fever and his father died of the illness at Dachau concentration camp, just nine days before they were liberated.
Seven decades and witnessing Hanning’s conviction Friday has proved surprisingly cathartic. “Seeing that the Germans themselves want to make clear that this was a heinous crime, I think it was very important to me,” he sighs. “I hope that somehow or other, this will close a phase in my life, too, that I will not have to look at the past with such fear.”