Nazi camp typist, 96, should have trouble sleeping at night, survivor tells court
Jewish man testifies in trial of stenographer who says she knew nothing about killing of 11,000 people
A 96-YEAR-OLD former typist at a Nazi concentration camp is indirectly guilty of the atrocities perpetrated there, a Jewish survivor said yesterday after testifying at her trial.
Irmgard Furchner should have trouble sleeping at night, Josef Salomonovic told the court in Itzehoe, near Hamburg, as he gave harrowing testimony of his experiences.
Mr Salomonovic, 83, told how he was six years old when his father kissed him goodbye for the last time before he was murdered with a lethal injection to the heart in Stutthof concentration camp in what is now Poland.
“Maybe she has trouble sleeping at night. I know I do,” he said, when asked by a prosecutor if he had any message for Ms Furchner.
Mr Salomonovic was the first survivor to testify at the trial of Ms Furchner, who is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 11,412 people at Stutthof between 1943 and 1945.
Ms Furchner refused to appear at the first hearing of her trial in September and briefly absconded before being arrested.
She was 18 years old when she started working as a typist and stenographer for the camp commandant.
She worked in an office outside the main camp and claims she knew nothing about the systematic killing that took place inside.
Mr Salomonovic dismissed that claim, telling reporters after the hearing that she was indirectly guilty even if all she did was to stamp his father’s death certificate.
He held up a picture of his father to Ms Furchner as he testified, and told the court that he was testifying for his family. “It is not easy to go over all this again,” he said. “It’s a moral duty. It’s not pleasant.”
He told the court how as a child he had seen his mother stripped of her clothes and possessions by the Nazis. They shaved her head and he did not recognise her.
He described how he had survived eight concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and said that Stutthof had been the worst.
‘It is not easy to go over all this again. It’s a moral duty. It’s not pleasant’
It was there that he was separated from his father and sent to Auschwitz because he could not work.
“I was classified as a parasite. Everyone who couldn’t work was a parasite,” he told the court.
“I got into the cattle wagon and, of course, I didn’t know we were going to Auschwitz or that this was the last time I would see my father. He kissed me.”
Mr Salomonovic survived together with his mother, Dora, and an elder brother, Michael.
“My mother said: ‘I have two requests. Can you bring my son from the men’s camp to me in the women’s camp?’ And then the miracle happened.
“And then they brought my brother too,” he said.
The family were from what is now the Czech Republic. They were sent to the concentration camps because they were Jewish.
“The worst was the hunger and the cold,” Mr Salomonovic said, recalling how he would crouch between his mother’s legs to keep himself warm. He recalled thinking that he was about to die towards the end of the war, when he was sent to work in a munitions factory in Dresden.
At one point in the factory, an SS officer had reached for his gun and said: “This filth has to go.”
Mr Salomonovic said: “That meant I should be shot. But then there was the bombing in Dresden and that’s why I’m still alive.”
The trial continues.