In electrifying testimony, a Montreal woman who was born in Auschwitz told former SS guard Oskar Groening at his trial in Germany that she can never forgive him.
Angela Orosz-Richt, whose Hungarian mother gave birth to her on Dec. 21 or 22, 1944, at the death camp, was a witness for the prosecution of the 93-year-old who is charged with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.
“In memory of my father [Tibor Bein], who I never knew, and in memory of my mother [Vera], who had given birth to me in those indescribable conditions, beaten by SS men, surviving on less than 400 calories a day, for that and for everyone you helped murder, I cannot forgive you, Herr Groening,” she said.
Orosz-Richt weighed just one kilogram at birth and barely survived.
The trial, which opened in April, is being held in Lueneburg state court. Groening, who was an SS sergeant, has been dubbed the “accountant of Auschwitz” because his job was to make an inventory of the belongings confiscated from prisoners brought to the camp.
He has declared his “moral guilt” in being part of the functioning of the camp, but says he had no part in the killing.
Orosz-Richt, who returned to Auschwitz for the first time for the 70th anniversary of its liberation on Jan. 27, testified that she was at first reluctant to appear at the trial.
But she changed her mind in order to speak about the suffering of her family and the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, where more than 90 per cent of them were murdered.
Her testimony was given on June 2, her father’s birthday.
“I have a mission… To stand and point an accusing finger at those responsible for the inhumanity into which I was born. Those who helped, watched and profited from the terror. Those like you, Herr Groening.”
Orosz-Richt was accompanied to the court by one of her grandsons.
Her mother, she said, was from an educated and sophisticated Budapest family; her father was a prominent architect. She married Tibor, a lawyer, in March 1942, and was happy until the Nazi invasion in April 1944. They were deported to Auschwitz in May.
Her pregnant mother never got over the trauma of their arrival, being herded and beaten amid machine-gun-toting guards and barking dogs.
“Perhaps you remember her, Herr Groening. She was a light brown-haired beauty with greenish grey eyes,” Orosz-Richt addressed the defendant. “Perhaps you saw her standing in that line to be judged by the angel of death, Dr. Josef Mengele. I know you saw others join that line.”
She charged that Groening knew what was happening when prisoners were directed to the “showers,” that they were actually going to be gassed and die a horrible death “foaming [from the] mouth and bleeding from various body parts.”
Her parents were allowed to live, but they never saw each other again, and her father was “murdered by exhaustion. Forced to work until his dying breath.”
Her mother worked in a warehouse sorting prisoners’ belongings. “Those were the valuables you kept account of, Herr Groening, the bookkeeper of Auschwitz.”
Five months pregnant, her mother was forced to perform heavy labour outside the camp. Later, she was assigned to the kitchen, which Orosz-Richt believes is the only reason she, her unborn child, survived to birth.
At seven months, her mother was made “a human guinea pig” by Mengele’s team, she said. They tried sterilization experiments, injecting “caustic chemicals” into her cervix, which reached the fetus that became Orosz-Richt.
“Those experiments are the reason I do not have any brothers or sisters,” she said.
At eight months, an abortion was suggested by one of Mengele’s doctors, a sympathetic Hungarian woman.
“When you give birth, you don’t know how Mengele will react. If he is in a good mood, only your child will die. But if Mengele is in a bad mood, both of you are going to the gas chamber,” Orosz-Richt’s mother told her.
Her mother dreamed that night of her own mother begging her not to abort, telling her that the fetus is a child already and to trust in God.
Orosz-Richt is not sure of her exact birthday. Her mother only recalled that it was three days before the SS celebrated Christmas.
She gave birth in a bunk helped only by a fellow prisoner from Czechoslovakia. The fact that the baby girl was so small and couldn’t cry “was the only reason I survived,” Orosz-Richt said.
“Three hours after giving birth, my mother had to leave me alone and go outside for roll call,” standing for a long time in the cold.
Orosz-Richt believes she and Gyorgy Faludi, who was born the day of liberation are the only two who came into the world in Auschwitz who survived to that day.
Orosz-Richt was very sickly in her first year, weighing only three kilograms at 11 months, and little hope was given that she would recover fully. “The legacy of Auschwitz, of my mother’s starvation and abuse, never disappeared completely,” she stated. “I stand less than five feet tall today.”
She regrets there is no grave where she can visit her father, who died at 32, unlike Groening’s parents, she pointed out. Her mother died in Toronto at 71, still plagued by nightmares about Auschwitz on her deathbed.
“[My father’s] remains were burned and his ashes scattered around Auschwitz… [or] maybe shovelled into the forest or used as fertilizer on the surrounding fields,” she said.
