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Holocaust survivor in 100-year-old Nazi trial: "Be brave and apologize"

SS man Josef Schutz, a guard at the Sachsenhausen camp, was charged with aiding and abetting the murder of 3,518 people.

Emil Farkash, a Holocaust survivor living in Haifa and a prisoner in the camp, testified at the trial: "The Nazi regime you voluntarily supported was not strong enough to defeat us."

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• holocaust

• Nazis

• Extermination camps

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Friday, 05 November 2021, 02:00

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In the video: Holocaust survivor Emil Farkash testifies against a Nazi sentry in a German court (Photo: Reuters)

Emil Farkash, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, testified today (Thursday) at the trial of Josef Schutz, a 100-year-old Nazi who served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany.

Farkash, who lives in Haifa, turned to the elderly SS man and told him: "The Nazi regime that you voluntarily supported was not strong enough to defeat us."

Schutz, who entered the court with the help of a treadmill, was charged with aiding and abetting the murder of 3,518 people between 1942-1945.

The hearings, which began today in the German city of Neuropin, will last two and a half hours each day, due to Schutz's health condition.

The indictment against him states that Schutz "contributed to brutal murders by helping to create unbearably difficult living conditions in the camp," including shooting prisoners and starving them.

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Farkash and his brother survived, but his sister and two other brothers died in the camps.

Farkash (Photo: Reuters)

Sachsenausen concentration camp (Photo: Reuters)

"Hold on, be strong"

Farkash was 13 when he was deported from his hometown, Zilina in Slovakia. He came to Sachsenhausen in 1944. The camp was inhabited mainly by political prisoners, and also by Jews. In Sachsenhausen, "Cyclone B" gas was used to kill prisoners. In the camp, Farkash dealt with the removal of old rubber insulation rubber bands for the Siemens company. He recounted how he would get up at 5:00 in the morning and wash himself in the snow, even though he was malnourished. He was also a victim, he said, of brutally beating rifle butts. Thanks to his athletic skills he was also employed in running new shoes to soften them for the Nazis.

The elderly survivor said that before the deportation, his mother, him and his brother said: "Hold on, be strong, see you again." He and his brother did survive, but his sister and two other brothers died in the camps. At the end of the war, Farkash managed to find his father and mother in Prague.

Schutz followed the descriptions of the former prisoner during the trial, but did not make eye contact with him.

Farkash turned to him during the hearing and told him: "I came to see you from Haifa. You are 100. Is your dark past worth so much that you can not apologize for the suffering you have caused me? Be brave at least now."

Schutz did not comment.

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