'How did this elderly Nazi live free, when my grandmother could not?'

This week a Nazi officer was convicted of 300,000 counts of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to four years in prison for his involvement as the “accountant of Auschwitz”.

Oskar Groening is now 94 years old. He was 23 when he counted and sorted the belongings of Jews brought to Auschwitz. The proceeds were used to fund the Nazi campaign.

And this week, I was again reminded of the gross – truly gross – injustice my grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, lived with for her entire life.

Each time one of these sentences make the news, I ask myself whether I feel rage towards these Nazis. Whether I think they deserve to live the last few years of their life in prison (where conditions would be better than those they created for my grandmother in Auschwitz). Whether I pity their stupid, youthful decision to blindly follow a sadistic cause.

I don’t know Groening. I don’t know whether he loved his job as a thief. I don’t know whether he realised his stupidity on his first day on the job. I don’t know if he gets a solid eight-hour guilt free sleep each, or if he has every night since 1945.

What I do know is that I’m angry at world leaders. Past and present. I’m angry at the promise they made on the discovery of the concentration camps. The same promise they swear each year at their respective days of remembrance to Holocaust survivors.

I’m angry because they failed to keep a simple promise that could’ve made my grandmother’s and other survivor’s lives that little bit more bearable.

My grandmother, Vera Reitzer, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944 when she was 23 years old. Her crime? She believed in the “wrong” religion. Judaism.

One of the first Nazi officers she met was the notorious 'Angel of Death', Dr Josef Mengele. As Jews lines up in Auschwitz, he determined who would go to the left, and who would go to the right. Giving no indication of which side meant what.

As my grandmother stepped forward with her sister and mother, Dr Mengele made a mistake that would save her 44-year-old mother, Marta, from certain death. “Three sisters,” he called them. They were all ushered into the same queue.

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As they were crammed into a room with the words “Gas Chamber” scrawled on the front, Dr Mengele gave his speech.

“My name is Dr Mengele and from now on I’m your god. If I decide that gas will come out from these showers, the gas will come out. If I decide the water should come out then water will come out.”

Water came out.

My grandmother told the Sunday Times, “It was so quiet, that if a fly would fly through, you’d think it was a bomb. Suddenly, water came out and for the first time in three days, we had water.”

After the sweet relief, the women had their hair shaved off. My grandmother lost her sister and mother in the chaos, only recognising her sister because of the red stubble left on her raw scalp. She soon heard her mother’s voice, “Vera, Vera, where are you?”.

It’s hard to image, but it is very hard to recognise someone you’ve known your whole life without hair. Especially when you are in the middle of the most traumatic event of your life.

My grandmother and her family lived in Auschwitz for eight months. She had one piece of clothing - an old dress. No underwear.

She once told me the only meal she got each day was a black liquid. How she was allowed to use the toilet only once a day, and did so with 300 other women. If she needed to go outside that single  one, she had to use her shoes.

They were also her soup bowl.

She experienced unimaginable torture. Beatings and whippings from SS soldiers. Cruel taunts: they told her if it got too much for her, to just run onto the electric fence. Like many did each night.

One of my grandmother's unbearable jobs was removing the dead bodies from the gas chambers and carrying them to the crematorium, where they were burned and turned into ash.

She was sent to a work camp, where she had to fill bombs with gun powder to help the Nazis and their army fight against the Allied Forces.

When she was rescued in 1945 by the Americans, she was responsible for speaking to them, being skilled in five languages. An SS officer asked her to spare his life. To tell the Americans how he was her father, and how he helped her. She translated this to the American’s. They didn’t believe him. They hung him on the spot.

I could continue to tell you of the horrors my grandmother and her family suffered. But you probably know them, thanks to people like my grandmother, who spent part of her life making sure every single person in South Africa knew the Holocaust was real. That the horrors were real. And that no one should ever forget, or let that happen ever again. That those involved, directly or on the sidelines, should be brought to justice.

People like Groening and Mengele didn’t just rob my grandmother of the years she spent in Auschwitz. Or the years before in ghettos and being fearful for her life while living in Europe.

They robbed her of a life without fear.

When my grandmother was liberated from the concentration and death camps by American soldiers, her mother, sister and husband who she met on the boat to Israel, all decided to never talk about those years.

She waited until her sons were 19 and 25 before telling them her story. She told the Sunday Times, “My mother never wanted us to talk about it. I wanted my sons to be normal and not to feel sorry for me.”

While she was happy to tell the world, she was always worried about what her family would think. After all, in hindsight, why didn’t more Jews head the warnings that Hitler was determined to kill every single Jew? It’s easy to think that now; we know the horrific details of what happened during the Holocaust, and we have easy access to information. But back then, no one believed it until they saw it.

Her trauma and silence only compounded her fears, when really, they didn’t need to. My father and I, despite not being religious, celebrate the Jewish New Year each year. Under the Jewish faith, the day of fasting - no water, no food - for 24 hours from sunset to sunset is about cleansing your soul of the year’s sins. For my dad and I, it’s a small token of respect and recognition to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, as well as to say thanks to those many who survived.

The Holocaust didn’t only live with my grandmother for her whole life.

My great grandmother, the one Dr Mengele mistook to be my grandmother’s sister, was the one to suggest my name – Aviva, a Hebrew name meaning 'spring'. While I was far too young to remember her, my mum (a Christian) tells me before she passed away, she was extremely worried she had make a huge mistake.

She pulled my mother aside and begged her to change my name. When my mum asked why, my great grandmother said that my name gave away part of my heritage. If the Nazi’s came back, if the Holocaust came back, I would never be able to hide the fact that I am part Jewish. I would be guaranteed to suffer the same horrors that she suffered from for her whole life.

To my great grandmother’s horror, my mum refused to change my name, saying that I would be safe. The Holocaust would never come back.

While my grandfather was the strong, silent type, he wasn’t immune from the impact of the Holocaust. One evening, while we were having dinner at my grandparent’s home, a lone candle sat burning on their mantel piece. My grandfather, noticing my interest, said that he lit it because it was his father’s birthday that day.

My grandfather wasn’t at home when the Nazi’s came for his family. They were all murdered. He couldn’t light a candle on the day of his father’s death, because he didn’t know when he died. He never got to say goodbye.

Before my grandmother passed away in 2006, 61 years after being liberated from Auschwitz, she wrote me a letter. In it she wrote many things, but one thing has never left me.

She wrote how sometimes she fell asleep in her lounge room while watching TV. When she woke, Dr Mengele would be standing in front of her. Ordering her to the left and right with his whip by his side.

What the Nazi’s did to her haunted her for her whole life. What they did to all the survivors has haunted them.

At Groening’s trial, many Holocaust survivors attended and gave testimony against the Nazis. As survivors of crime, they want justice, and some might have found it a relief. While some survivors say they’ve been able to forgive the Nazi’s, my grandmother said she never could. What they had done, what she had seen, was unforgivable.

The biggest problem I have with Groening’s trial is not the fact that he got four years for being complicit in destroying 300,000 lives (and the families who were forced to live without their loved ones). Or that he was technically on the sidelines of the attempted genocide.

It is that he is 94. He lived his life. He lived his whole life without being charged for his crime.

It took the world 71 years to find and punish a Nazi officer for the most well-known attempted genocide in history, all while world leaders promise to never forget and to seek justice for those who survived.

Sure, it may have provided some relief to the survivors who attended the trail, but many aren’t alive any more to see that justice.

Many, like my grandmother, don’t know about the justice done far too late on her behalf.

That is something I don’t know if I can forgive.

Avi Vince is the Managing Editor of The Motherish. You can find her over there talking about her pregnancy and her upcoming first-time parenting worries.

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