Four years for 300,000 murders. It doesn’t seem like much.

But for Holocaust survivor Hedy Bohm, the sentence doesn’t matter so much as the verdict against Oskar Groening, the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz, who was found guilty as an accessory to murder for his role in the World War II death camp.

“As late as it comes, it’s not too late,” said the 87-year-old Toronto grandmother. “It’s still a comfort to know that the German justice system found him guilty while so many others, who were perhaps worse than he was, were let off over the past many decades.”

On Wednesday, a regional court in the northern German town of Lueneburg convicted the 94-year-old former junior SS squad leader as an accessory to the murders of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Jews, at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland more than 70 years ago.

The trial, which could be the last of its kind as so few Nazis survive, confirmed a new doctrine of German legal reasoning that holds even low-level guards at death camps responsible as an accessory to murders committed there, even without evidence of involvement in a specific death.

“Aiding and abetting in murder, that’s the hope for the future: establishing that precedent. They found him guilty on those grounds. And no matter what his role was — bookkeeping, standing at the ramp — the death factory couldn’t have been operating without people like him,” said Bohm, who travelled to Germany to testify at the trial about her experience as a teenager at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Bohm arrived at the death camp after being locked in a boxcar for three days with her family and thousands of other Jews. When the doors were opened, she was pushed down a ramp into a scene of absolute horror. Guards with rifles barked orders while German shepherds on leashes snapped at the long lines of starving arrivals, she said.

Men were sent one way and women the other. A guard stepped in front of her and separated her from her mother. She never saw her parents again.

“I think Groening lived a long life without any feelings of remorse, without really seeing what happened around him or acknowledging his own part in what happened in Auschwitz, until he heard personal stories of the survivors — my story,” Bohm told the Star. “I think that was the first time that it came home to him that these people who were coming in the boxcars were human beings and they had feelings and had ties to family.”

Groening has never denied his Nazi past and accepted “moral responsibility” for the Holocaust on the first day of his trial.

Bohm says participating in the trial helped her heal and that she doesn’t feel anger anymore.

“Being in Lueneburg, working with the German judges and lawyers on this team, was a life-changing experience for me. I dreaded for decades the idea of going to Germany. Even hearing the language took me back to the 16-year-old I was in Auschwitz. Through the kindness and the helpfulness of these people, there was this wonderful change that happened that lifted this terrible burden off my heart.”

For Bohm, the trial’s importance isn’t just for surviving Nazis, but for those who continue to commit atrocities around the world today.

“My hope is that this will be a precedent and it will establish a warning to people who now commit murder, who now are doing terrible, cruel things. A warning to them that they will be held responsible and that they will have to pay the piper,” she said.

“I’m hoping and praying that the new generation will learn to work against prejudice and anti-Semitism and all the sort of things that are demeaning to other human beings. Our hope is that they will be smarter than we were — and braver.”