“It is not the punishment [of ex-officer Oskar Gröning] that is important, but that the representatives of justice in Germany should pronounce him guilty and declare that he was a murderer,” Pusztai- Fahidi told MTI over the phone from Germany where she is scheduled to appear before the court in Lüneburg, near Hamburg, on April 28.

The former SS guard, now aged 93, worked at the camp handling the belongings of the deportees and is accused for his actions between May and July 1944 during which time 437,000 inmates arrived at the camp from Hungary.

Ninety-year-old Pusztai-Fahidi said that participating in the trial was for her “terribly important” despite her age and the psychological and physical strains going with it.

“I never thought I would take part in the trial of an SS officer employed there, in Auschwitz- Birkenau,” she said.

She and her family members were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from Debrecen in eastern Hungary in 1944. She said as many as 49 of her relatives “have not survived the Holocaust.”

Source www.hungarymatters.hu

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