Stutthof trial
Concentration camp survivors: “You can’t forget your fear”
The presiding judge Dominik Groß on the way to the courtroom. Photo: Marcus Brandt/dpa Pool/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Constant hunger, lice and repeated beatings: These are Towa-Magda Rosenbaum’s memories of her imprisonment in Stutthof in 1944.
In the trial of a former secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp, a 97-year-old survivor of the camp reported constant beatings and hunger.
When leaving her barracks, she was beaten every day in 1944, said the Israeli Towa-Magda Rosenbaum over a video link in front of the Itzehoe district court. “You couldn’t get out without a punch.” The whole body burned for hours from being whipped by a block supervisor. “You can’t forget fear. The fear has remained throughout life, to this day, »said Rosenbaum in German.
The accused is 96-year-old Irmgard F. She is said to have worked as a civilian employee in the headquarters of the German concentration camp near Danzig from June 1943 to April 1945. The public prosecutor accuses her of having contributed to the systematic murder of more than 11,000 prisoners through her paperwork. Because he was only 18 to 19 years old at the time of the crime, the trial is taking place in front of a youth chamber.
After three months in Stutthof, she was sent to a satellite camp in Thorn (today Torun) in October 1944, Rosenbaum said. It was the worst there. They had to dig trenches, very difficult work. Most of the 3,000 female prisoners starved to death. “Hunger was always in our heads, early or late.”
In the morning you looked at the prisoners to your left and right. If the lice left the body, the person was dead. “We were jealous of the dead, they didn’t have to get up.” At the time of the liberation in January 1945, only 900 were still alive, said the Hungarian joint plaintiff. And many of these died a little later from illnesses.
According to Rosenbaum and her family, she was deported to Auschwitz in July 1944. There the SS doctor Josef Mengele separated her and her sister from their mother. “Take care of Magda!” were her mother’s last words. In August 1944 she and her sister came to Stutthof. It was difficult for the witness to give specific dates. She remembers that on her 20th birthday in Stutthof she sang a Hungarian birthday song and added a “not”: “I don’t want to be 20 again.”
In order to avoid being hit by the block supervisor, other prisoners climbed through a window in the barracks. But she was too weak for that. The block supervisor, who according to Rosenbaum was also a prisoner, believed: “If she’s worse for us, she’ll be more free.” Rosenbaum added, “Her name was Barbara, but she was a barbarian.”
In Stutthof she also heard: “We will be soap.” She only understood that later. Soap was made from human bodies, the 97-year-old said. When asked by the presiding judge whether she perceived, saw or heard that people were burned in Stutthof, Rosenbaum said: “No, only heard.” She also did not know about a gas chamber.
After the war she went back to Hungary with her sister. The family home was destroyed in a pogrom after their deportation. Nevertheless, they would have started again. She got married and had two children. Because Hungary became communist, she emigrated to Palestine (Israel) with her husband and children.