The conviction of a former Nazi concentration camp typist dubbed the “Secretary of Evil” was a more hollow victory than a Hanukkah miracle for 95-year-old Aron Krell.
“It’s like a joke,” the Holocaust survivor said of the verdict against Irmgard Furchner, 97, in Germany — delivered more than 75 years after the end of the Holocaust.
“To me, it doesn’t mean anything. It can never undo what evil happened,” said the Upper East Side resident whose mother’s death at the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, Poland, left him with no living relatives.
Furchner, tried in a special juvenile court because she was a teenager working at the camp from 1943-45, was sentenced to a two-year suspended prison term for aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people as secretary to Stutthof’s commandant, Paul-Werner Hoppe.
Hoppe served a prison stint as an accessory to murder in the late 1950s for helming the office considered the “nerve center” for the camp’s evils.
“The German people want to cleanse themselves of the Holocaust, to clear their conscience for the world to see,” Krell asserted. “And it’s true that the people and government today are not responsible for what the Nazis did.
“However, what they did is look away.”
“I never forgive and never forget,” added Krell, who was born in Lodz, Poland, into an Orthodox middle-class family before the Holocaust wiped out every one of his relatives. “It’s good publicity for the German government, but it’s no consolation for me as a Holocaust survivor whose mother lost her life at Stutthof.”
A self-described “optimist,” Krell called Furchner’s conviction “…empty. It doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.” Having lost scores of aunts, uncles, and cousins, Krell said by the time his camp was liberated, “I was 17 and all alone in the world.”
Furchner, who famously fled her nursing home before the start of her trial in 2021, denied knowing about the atrocities at the camp.
Read Related Also: Gene Upshaw and Taylor Upshaw Michigan: Are They Related?
“She denied everything, but it’s not possible to deny,” said Asia Shindelman, 94, who survived the horrors of Stutthof as a 16-year-old, when she weighed just 80 pounds and suffered severe typhus. When the camp was liberated, Shindelman was sent to a military hospital for five months, fearing her leg would be amputated.
“I still have scars on my legs, but thank God I have my legs,” she said.
The scars themselves are a daily reminder that “I cannot forget it, and I will not forget it,” she declared.
As a witness in the trial, testifying by Zoom, Shindelman said she welcomes Furchner’s conviction, however late.
“[Furchner] lived a long, happy life in Germany. She was allowed to forget. Now at the end of her life, she understood what she was a part of,” Shindelman said.
The “Secretary of Evil” is a fitting moniker, added Shindelman, a grandmother of five who lives in Wayne, NJ.
“She prepared all the lists for who goes to the gas chambers, who can work. That office has nice big windows – she saw exactly what was going on,” she said, adding: “Not everybody would do such a job. She took that job.”
Surging antisemitism amid publicity about the “Secretary of Evil” trial is not lost on Krell.
“When I came to this country from Europe, I thought I escaped antisemitism,” he said.
“It’s sad to say that antisemitism is worse in the US than it is in Poland today,” Krell warned. “If we don’t catch it, it will spread.”
