The Courage of Halina Strnad

At The Times of Israel,  Nazi-hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff  writes,  "I  think that it’s quite certain that while she was incarcerated in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, suffering from typhus, Halina Strnad never imagined that one day 76 years later, she would be sitting in Melbourne, Australia, and testifying via video against one of the guards in that camp, on trial in Hamburg. Yet 75 years and one day after the liberation of Auschwitz, an event marked with great solemnity in many countries throughout the world, that is precisely how she symbolically marked that anniversary.

Bruno Dey, a 93-year old German, is currently on trial for accessory to murder at the Hamburg district court. He served as a guard in Stutthof toward the end of the war, during the period that Halina and her mother were incarcerated there. Most of the time, his assignment was to man one of the camp’s watchtowers. His trial is the fifth of those mounted following a dramatic change in German prosecution policy, whereby anyone who served in a death camp and/or one with a gas chamber or a gas van can be convicted for accessory to murder, even if there is no evidence against them of having committed a specific crime against a specific victim motivated by racial hatred (which was the requirement for prosecution in Germany until about a decade ago)."