The conviction of a former Nazi concentration camp typist, dubbed the “Secretary of Evil”, was a hollower victory for 95-year-old Aron Krell than the miracle of Hanukkah.
“It’s like a joke,” said a Holocaust survivor of the decision against Irmgard Furchner, 97, in Germany – handed down greater than 75 years after the tip of the Holocaust.
“It means nothing to me. It might probably never undo what happened,” said the Upper East Side resident whose mother’s death in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk left him with no living relatives.
Furchner, who was tried in a special juvenile court because she was an adolescent working in the camp in 1943-45, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people as secretary to Stutthof commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe.
Hoppe served in prison as an adjunct to murder in the late Nineteen Fifties for running an office considered the camp’s “nerve center” for evil.
“The German people need to cleanse themselves of the Holocaust, to cleanse their conscience for the world to see,” assured Krell. “And it’s true that today’s people and government are usually not accountable for what the Nazis did.
“Nevertheless, what they did turned a blind eye.”
“I never forgive and I always remember,” added Krell, who was born in Lodz, Poland, to a middle-class orthodox family before the Holocaust worn out all his relatives. “It’s good publicity for the German government, however it’s no consolation to me as a Holocaust survivor whose mother lost her life in Stutthof.”
A self-proclaimed “optimist”, Krell called Furchner’s belief “…empty. It doesn’t equate to Bean Hill.” Having lost dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins, Krell said before liberating his camp: “I used to be 17 and alone in the world.”
Krell, who survived many Nazi camps – including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Mauthausen in Austria – previously told The Post that he considered today’s public trials of former Nazis to be “fiction”.
“What is the use of standing in court now? What punishment awaits them? What can be the sufferings? Nothing,” Krell, who wrote a 2008 memoir “Overcoming Evil” he told The Post before the beginning of the Furchner trial.
Meanwhile, Furchner, who famously escaped from a nursing home before her 2021 trial, denied knowing concerning the atrocities on the camp.
“She has denied every thing, however it can’t be denied,” said Asia Shindelman, 94, who endured the horrors of Stutthof as a 16-year-old when she weighed just 80 kilos and suffered from severe typhus. After the liberation of the camp, Shindelman ended up in a military hospital for five months, fearing that her leg can be amputated.
“I still have scars on my legs, but thank God I actually have them,” she said.
The scars themselves are a every day reminder that “I cannot and won’t forget this,” she declared.
As a witness in the trial, testifying via Zoom, Shindelman said she welcomed Furchner’s conviction, nevertheless late.
“[Furchner] lived happily ever after in Germany. She let me forget. Now, at the tip of her life, she understood what she was an element of,” Shindelman said.
“Secretary of Evil” is an apt nickname, added Shindelman, a grandmother of five who lives in Wayne, Recent Jersey.
“She prepared all of the lists of who goes to the gas chamber, who can work. This office has nice big windows – she could see exactly what was occurring,” she said, adding: “Not everyone would tackle a job like this. She took the job.
The rising anti-Semitism amid the publicity concerning the “Secretary of Evil” trial will not be lost on Krell.
“Once I got here to this country from Europe, I believed I had escaped anti-Semitism,” he said.
“It is gloomy to say that anti-Semitism in the US today is worse than in Poland,” warned Krell. “If we do not catch it, it should spread.”