 In Judith Meisel’s last image of her mother, Mina, she is standing outside a gas chamber at the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland, awaiting the same fate that befell 65,000 other prisoners there. Now Meisel, 88, knows her assistance paid off: German authorities this month indicted two ex-guards on charges of being accessories to many of the murders at Stutthof, located near what is now the Polish city of Gdansk. Judy's mother died in the gas chamber at Stutthof concentration camp on the Baltic coast in late 1944 or early 1945. German prosecutors in recent years have pursued Nazi suspects under new legal reasoning that, even without evidence of a specific crime, they can be prosecuted if they helped camps operate. Both men served as guards at the Stutthof concentration camp, located near what is now the Polish city of Gdansk, Dortmund prosecutor Andreas Brendel told The Associated Press.
– Judith Meisel says that when she was a teenager in the Stutthof concentration camp in western Poland, other prisoners told her: "Don't let us die without you mentioning what happened to us." The 88-year-old Minnesota resident has not forgotten: Her testimony helped German authorities indict two former guards from the camp where 65,000 people, including Meisel's mother, died, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. She identified one former guard, 94-year-old Johann Rehbogen, as the young SS officer who would taunt female prisoners as they undressed. Prosecutors say the men can't be tied to specific murders, but their work as guards made the killings possible. Meisel—who escaped along with her sister when inmates were sent on a "death march" away from the camp in 1945—says she is willing to relive her horrific experiences to help prosecutors. "This process of seeking answers and finding justice for my mother gives new meaning to my life," she says. The two former guards have been charged as accessories to murder, the AP reports. They deny any knowledge of killings at the camp, where thousands were starved to death or froze. Prosecutors say prisoners were also gassed to death, shot, and killed with lethal injections. Authorities say Meisel and several other Stutthof survivors in the US could be called as witnesses if the former guards are deemed healthy enough to stand trial. (A pendant found at the Sobibor camp helped reunite a family.)