NOVI SAD, Serbia — At 92, Elvira Fishl still sobs as she
recalls the long-ago “Great Raid,” a three-day killing spree
by occupying pro-Nazi troops that left about 1,300 people
dead — and her among the few survivors to bear witness.
“Suddenly, there were no other Jews left here,” she said. It was January of 1942,
and hundreds of people, including her beloved brother, were
rounded up in this northern Serbian city by Hungarian forces
allied with Germany, shot and thrown into the freezing Danube
River.
Seven decades later, it is not too late for the perpetrators to pay, she believes.
A Budapest court on Thursday will decided whether the trial of former Hungarian
gendarmerie captain Sandor Kepiro, who is charged
with taking part in one of the worst single
wartime massacres in the Balkans, can continue.
It is certain to be one of the last attempts
to bring to justice an alleged perpetrator of
Nazi-era war crimes.
Kepiro,
Fishl said, must be punished — no matter claims
that he cannot follow the hearings. The trial
of the 97-year-old was temporarily halted last
week over claims that he was partially deaf
and mentally incapable of following the court
proceedings, which had started a week earlier.
Prosecutors
said Kepiro was directly responsible for the
deaths of 36 Jews and Serbs, including 30 who
were put on a truck on his orders, taken away
and shot.
Kepiro,
who returned to Budapest in 1996 after living
for decades in Argentina, has acknowledged that
he participated in the raids, but denied any
responsibility in the killings.
“I am innocent
and I am here on trumped-up charges,” Kepiro
said in court. “This trial is a terrible thing.
There is no basis to this, everything is based
on lies.”
“Of course
he’s guilty — but he’s not alone,” Fishl countered
during an interview in her modest, one-story
house, decorated with black and white photos
of her lost relatives.
Occupying
troops went from house to house, claiming they
were looking for communist resistance fighters.
“We were
ordered not to leave our homes, keep curtains
down, not to look through the windows,” Fishl
said, wiping tears from her eyes.
“Dead people
were lying in the snow, it was a big snow and
minus 27 degrees,” she said. “God help us ...
they took away my 27-year-old brother, his wife
and her parents.”
“Suddenly,
there were no other Jews left here ... In our
neighborhood, a family had four sons, and they
killed all of them in front of their mother,”
she said.
She survived
only because she lived in a Hungarian-populated
Novi Sad neighborhood where Hungarian police
officers were less brutal, she said.
Ana Frenkel,
an activist of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
which tracked Kepiro down and listed him as
the world’s most wanted Nazi, said that after
the raid the Jewish population of Serbia’s second
largest city was reduced to some 200 people.
“Official
figures say that during the raid, 1,287 people
have been killed including 870 Jews,” Frenkel
said. “Today’s figures say nearly 4,000 people
have died.”
The presiding
judge has asked for a professional medical evaluation
of Kepiro’s ability to hear. In reply to a question
by the judge, Kepiro has said his “mind could
not grasp” what was being said in the courtroom.
“Kepiro
is a good actor who has perfectly learned his
part,” Frenkel said. “He certainly doesn’t hear
well, which is not strange for his age, but
he can follow the proceedings quite well.”
She said
that “the same scenario was seen” during the
trial in Germany of retired 91-year-old U.S.
autoworker John Demjanjuk for taking part in
the murder of tens of thousands of Jews as a
Nazi death camp guard. He was sentenced last
week to five years in prison, but was set free
pending his appeal because of his age.
“I don’t
have empathy for Kepiro’s 97 years, nor Demjanjuk’s
91,” Frenkel said.
“Both have
committed awful crimes, and both have to answer
for them,” she said. “Kepiro’s trial has to
send a very important message: Don’t do evil,
the day will come when you’ll be punished for
it,” Frenkel said.
Copyright
2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast,
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