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Accused in court: The public prosecutor accuses her of complicity in murder in 11,380 cases
Photo: CHRISTIAN CHARISIUS / AFP
It takes a while until the technology is up and running and Asia Shindelman's warm voice fills the cool room.
Her face appears on three canvases in the negotiation room improvised by the Itzehoe district court in an otherwise empty building in the city's industrial park.
You can see a woman in a pink costume, 93 years old, her bleached hair teased, her lips painted pink, her nails varnished, she wears heavy gold earrings and looks friendly into the camera.
Asia Shindelman is sitting in her living room in New Jersey, with framed photos hanging on the wall behind her.
She wants to make her testimony as a witness in the trial against Irmgard Furchner via this video link.
At the same time in the same place
Irmgard Furchner sits in the courtroom next to her defense lawyers.
She is three years older than Asia Shindelman.
She, too, has made herself up, as on all the days of the negotiations before, and is now looking interested at the woman with whom she has something in common that Irmgard Furchner does not want to talk about so far: the two women were in the same place at the same time in their lives - in the concentration camp Stutthof, where around 65,000 prisoners had to die.
From cold, hunger and exhaustion or because they were hanged, shot, gassed or tortured to death.
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Irmgard Furchner was the camp commandant's secretary, Asia Shindelman one of the prisoners.
Asia Shindelman may have survived the hell of Stutthof, but she hasn't forgotten it.
Not even that it was people who built this hell and kept it going.
The public prosecutor's office is convinced that Irmgard Furchner, as secretary of the concentration camp commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe, contributed to maintaining the machinery of murder and - 78 years after the end of the war - charged her with complicity in murder in 11,380 cases.
An interpreter sits in a glass booth in the hall.
For Asia Shindelman, born in Lithuania in 1928, it is easier to describe her memories in Russian, says her lawyer Christoph Rückel.
And so she tells in Russian of a childhood "among loving, caring people", when her family spoke Yiddish at home.
Her father had "a big beauty salon in town," "we were well looked after."
"And then the killing started"
After the occupation by the Germans in 1940 that changed: »We Jews were no longer allowed to walk on the sidewalk, only on the street where the cars were driving.
We had to wear stars of David on our clothes.
We were forbidden to go shopping in grocery stores, we had to hand over radios and telephones. ”Asia Shindelman blinks at the camera.
"And then the killing started."
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Her family was brought to a barbed wire-fenced ghetto in August 1941, in which three families had to live in a single room.
Many died of hunger, cold, and disease, says Asia Shindelman.
Someone who once smuggled a pack of cigarettes into the ghetto was hanged in public - as a deterrent.
"That's how our life went there, if it was at all."
Irmgard Furchner has turned to the screen.
She seems to be listening.
On July 25, 1944, Asia Shindelman came to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig - together with her parents Sonia and Aron Levin, her two brothers, an uncle and her grandmother.
The journey lasted four days, squeezed into cattle wagons, in the sweltering heat, without water.
"Faster, out, you bloody Jews!"
Her arrival is burned into her: How armed SS men drove her out of the wagons, whips in hand, scary dogs barking.
Suddenly Asia Shindelman says in German what the Nazis shouted at the time: "Faster, get out, you cursed Jews!" A sign read: "Waldlager Stutthof."
When the interpreter translates, Asia Shindelman sits back in her New Jersey apartment.
She then appears thoughtful, as if the experience is running like a film in front of her eyes.
She describes how they were herded to tables in the camp that said "Registration".
“They took our names away from us, we got a number.” Asia Shindelman looks into the camera, she sees the courtroom from above, the dock with Irmgard Furchner, the judges with lay judges and the many lawyers who represent survivors like her.
"That was almost 80 years ago," says Asia Shindelman.
"I still know my number: 54138."
"The Germans could also kill us"
Her grandmother saw her for the last time on that first day in Stutthof, and she was murdered in the gas chamber.
Asia Shindelman came with her mother to a barrack full of three-story wooden cots, without bedding, toilets, water, soap or towels.
There was not enough space, Asia Shindelman and her mother had to sleep in a corner on the floor.
"The guards were allowed to do whatever they wanted to us: They threw people against the electric fence, they were killed instantly. Others threw them to dogs to eat or shot them directly." Asia Shindelman pauses briefly.
"The Germans could kill us too." At the daily roll call, they would have had to line up like soldiers, stand at attention, for hours.
"Anyone who fell over, the Germans gave the rest."
Irmgard Furchner has pulled the headphones out of her ear, she looks disinterested.
The presiding judge Dominik Groß steps in when she stuffs the button back into her ear.
It is now late afternoon.
What details did a concentration camp secretary know?
Your defense attorney, Wolf Molkentin, issued a statement prior to the questioning of Asia Shindelman, which he announced after the first part of the report by the historical expert. In it, Molkentin makes it clear that no conviction of his client can be based on the evidence so far. Rather, the historian Stefan Hördler reported on completely different lives: of women whose "greatest wish" was to work "in the regained eastern territories" or "as an SS overseer" in a concentration camp. However, this does not apply to Irmgard Furchner.
Molkentin said that the previous knowledge about the situation in Stutthof did not provide any answers to the question of Irmgard Furchner's criminal liability.
It is known that the National Socialists encrypted torture and murder with the code word »special tasks«;
According to the expert, they were not defined in writing.
She was "undoubtedly not involved"
So far, there is nothing to suggest that a secretary and stenographer like his client "was made a confidante in some other way," says Molkentin, noting that the systematic murders in the Stutthof camp were subject to special secrecy, were not the subject of correspondence and were also assigned to a parallel structure in the headquarters, in which Irmgard Furchner was "undoubtedly not involved."
On Tuesday, the ninth day of the trial, Asia Shindelman is to be questioned again.