A former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has been captured after trying to flee before her trial in northern Germany.
Irmgard Furchner, 96, was due to stand trial for complicity in 11,000 murders, but she failed to turn up and the judge issued a warrant for her arrest.
The defendant was detained by police hours after disappearing from a nursing home in the town of Quickborn.
—BBC News, 30 September 2021
I picture this: a sour-faced old biddy, crabbed, wizened, but still proper, still appropriately arrayed, dressed and decent, her hands folded in her lap like a schoolmarm. Who would bother with her? Here in the day room, amongst the other residents, a dozen or so of them, all silent and still, their eyes on the television, their faces as expressionless as moons. Who would give her—in these, her preposterous final years, spent in this quiet, sad company—the least bit of attention?
And yet, attention is being given. Not by the residents, but by the employees. Confused glances. Furtive conversations. And sometimes remarks passed directly over her, by the Nigerian aides, as they help her out of bed and position her in her chair—comments clearly about her, though in that foreign, throaty language of theirs, but still impudent, brazen, like hors d’oeuvres handed rudely past another guest. Today especially, there is a hum of energy among the staff, a darting of eyes. The director, bald and fat-faced, came to her this morning and, enunciating as though to a child, told her that she would have visitors today. Men acting in an official capacity.
Some questions, Irmgard, he said. Matters of judicial interest, he said.
She’s not stupid. She has seen the television (what else is there to see?), grainy images of her long-ago self, followed by pictures of bones and bodies, and she understands that her past and present are no longer separate, time having lost its smoothness and become a kind of bunched-up fabric. She understands that she has committed the crime of enduring. There will be inquiries and accusations, young men in suits. She will listen as stories are told, the tellers weepy and agonized, or else heated and indignant.
I picture her sitting, stewing. Considering her options.
Well, poppycock, she finally says. And slowly, she stands up.
It is not without effort: the wobbly rise, the unassisted transfer to the walker, which, in its moment of mid-air freedom, feels as thrilling as a gymnast’s dismount. She is forbidden to move around unaided, and perhaps she believes she will be stopped. But there is also a bandit’s quickness to her actions, a surprising reserve of energy as she works her way down the aisle and out of the room. In the lobby, the front desk is unstaffed; the attendant has conceivably stolen away for a cigarette break (with a co-worker, perhaps? More jabbering in that unknown language of theirs?), and the few scattered residents, themselves chair-bound, seem as meaningless as topiaries. She makes for the main entrance. The lobby floor feels suddenly expansive, and there is a resentful ache in her legs, which are unaccustomed to sustained travel. And yet, it is with a self-certain momentum, a forward push that she no longer thought herself capable of, that she reaches the automatic door, and, like a disgruntled customer, exits the building.
I see her on the sidewalk, voyaging through town. Even in modest-sized Quickborn, she is out of place, a doddering oldster around whom the rest of the world speeds like a time-lapse film. But her progress is steady, and an ancient instinct drives her. There is a subway terminal ahead, the promise of Hamburg, and the sensation that she exists in the one true moment—that time itself is dependent on the quick, shaky thrust of her walker, and the step that follows it. Weighted with age, but possessed of a sudden exhilaration—a witness to her own freedom—she presses on.
2
Sometimes, though, in my imagining, she is frailer. Rising from the chair in the day room, Irmgard sways right and left, like a car buffeted by highway winds. And once fully up, she takes a long moment to steady herself, to feel for the point of un-tippiness. The transfer to the walker is terrifying; her arms shake so violently she fears she will spill the contraption over, and she can picture herself clinging to it pointlessly as it goes to ground, the way one holds to a falling ladder. Traversing the lobby, she is undetected only because she moves so slowly, rendering herself unrecognizable as a thing in motion.
Old is what she is. Watching her toddle toward the exit, I understand that this is the only meaningful fact. What else will matter, when the story goes public? A ninety-six-year-old on the lam, roaming goofily through the town, with the pathetic aim of reaching—what? Freedom? A place to lie low? There are no friends, no children. A long-ago husband now seems, in the distance of memory, less a person than a mythic shore on which she once lived. To age is to be emptied out, to see oneself dismantled, piece by piece. Why, then, should anything of her past remain? Why should she be accountable to it? Ancient wisdom tells us that a ship under repair, its every board and rivet replaced, its every inch redone, at some point ceases to be what it was, though we cannot tell the exact moment of transformation. Surely Irmgard, in her passage through the years, discarded the worst of herself. Surely her Nazism, initiated at age eighteen (as a secretary! Just a secretary!), trailed behind her vaporously for a while but then dissipated altogether. It is no longer her. This teetering woman with her tiny, undaring steps. Exiting the building once more, then trundling through the town, small-seeming against the wider world. She is not what she once was. How can I believe otherwise?
3
What’s frightening is the weight of circumstance, the crush of events. Looking at Irmgard—rising from her seat once more, pushing herself up determinedly, as fumbling as a preschooler—I wonder at the path that brought her, those many years ago, to Stutthof, to the secretary’s chair, to the service of the commandant. Screen-raised American that I am, a fan of old-timey newsreels, I see World War II as literally cartoonish: a map of Europe being washed with color as Nazism makes its way across. Did Irmgard feel washed over in the same way? Did she know she was being carried on fascism’s dark, inky wave? There would have been a moment when she learned the truth about her dictation pad, when she understood (with horror? Or possibly with a trill of excitement?) its condemnatory power. Transcribing the names of the doomed, she would have heard their cries. Her pen would have felt heavy with death. But could she have avoided it? Any of it?
She exits the building once again, this time buffeted by the automatic door as it loses its patience and slowly begins to close on her before she has cleared the threshold. She shoves at it with her walker, an ornery old broad who won’t be deterred. But I realize now how large the world would have been for her at eighteen, how impossible its weight. How ludicrous its gravity against what otherwise would have been her girlhood, and her choices. At this moment, and despite my best intentions, she has my sympathy.
4
Or else it’s simpler than that. To move willingly through life is to accept time’s connected moments, to know you live always, as yourself. Having killed, having sentenced the helpless, Irmgard is eternally a killer, and her remorselessness is plain. Look at her: slow but expert as she escapes the day room, as cool-headed as the soldiers she once knew. Crossing the lobby, she glimpses the aides in an alcove, yapping over cigarettes, their voices unmelodious, those jagged syllables. Die Neger, she thinks, repulsed. To have lived among them! To have every day been touched! And the bald, fat-faced director, der Jude, parading around, simpering, making his plans. She has hidden among them these many years, keeping herself concealed. When she finally reaches the main entrance and steps through, it is like stepping out of a falseness, shrugging off a cloak.
And with that, she is free of her prison. An escapee in enemy territory. One painstaking step after another, she journeys through the town, and the sight is frightening to me: the Nazi on the loose, dangerous not because she can harm, but because she is, she exists. Having been born more than a generation after the war, I know evil less by its atrocities than by its hideous ability to endure—to reappear years later, in a Panama hat, chatting amiably with a shopkeeper on the mainland. Seeing Irmgard now, I understand the simplicity of her story. She joined the camp, and she killed. Each clack of her typewriter left spatters of blood on the page. What remains, these many years later, is the set of her face, the hardened look of her as she drives forward, the subway station not far, the world almost hers, as long ago promised.
5
At times, I have watched her to the very end: the train platform, where, waiting for transport to Hamburg—standing stiffly, eyes ahead—she becomes aware of the police officer. He is some distance away, but looking at her with concern while he speaks importantly into his radio. When finally he starts toward her, she makes a break for it, turning and shuffling off in a jerky panic, no speedier than before but now nakedly on the run, her face alive with outrage. (Come and get me, copper! I like to imagine her yelling, caught up in the wild-eyed moment.) It’s a satisfying picture, even in its silliness: the officer striding cooly behind her, his outstretched hand traveling slowly to her shoulder, as though he were about to politely inform her that she just dropped a handkerchief. I will not disguise my pleasure at the sight of it.
For all her antics, the circumstances of Irmgard’s capture will surely fade from people’s memory, time tending to sand down the jagged edges of everything. What will be remembered, I tell myself, is the fact of her apprehension. It is left to me to witness the details. The officer’s unyielding hand when she tries, feebly but furiously, to shake it off. The arrival of additional constables, who confer gravely with one another, turning every so often to survey their prize. The bystanders, looking on from a distance, their arms crossed, their chins jutted. Their faces, like mine, cast in triumph.
6
A triumph of what possible sort? Rewatching Irmgard’s journey, I see that the silliness is all: a ninety-six-year-old woman making her plodding getaway, the authorities calling out after her like dog catchers. Am I alone in laughing? Is it not—if we are honest with ourselves—a hoot? The sight of her waddling down the street, this time in her nightie and slippers, so outrageous-looking that bystanders assume there is a sensible explanation. (Perhaps she’s a reality-show contestant? Or the world’s oldest sorority pledge?) Whatever satisfaction I hoped for is undone by witnessing this vaudeville. Irmgard is no Eichmann, the tale of whose seizure used to enthrall me: plucked from the streets of Argentina by Mossad agents, spirited to a safe house, and eventually smuggled out of the country aboard an El Al flight, in an adventure featuring fake documentation, clever disguise, and the applaudable work of an Israeli anesthetist. Ah, but such a rigamarole, and so self-serious! Irmgard’s story feels truer because it is nuttier, justice being perhaps the most useless of all pursuits, depending as it does on a belief in cosmic order. When I dare to look ahead, I see the full hilarity of her saga: the “medical investigation” that follows her recapture, in which a concerned physician puts to her the fatuous questions of his profession. (Why did you flee? I imagine him asking. Because I didn’t want to go to prison, comes her Willie Sutton-spirited answer.) The trial at last, in which she is regarded as a juvenile—a recognition of her age when she was at Stutthof—leading me to giddily picture her standing before the judge in a teenagery pose: hip cocked, eyes rolled heavenward, a mouthful of chewing gum being loudly processed.
Funny stuff, no? Comedy gold! Over and again I replay the footage, and each time I am entertained. No, more than entertained—I am delivered into hysterics, rendered helpless. I can think of nothing more sidesplitting. In my spasming laughter is contained Irmgard’s entire drama, and everything I can ever hope to know from it.
7
I have imagined her over and over, pictured her from every possible angle: seen her at her angriest, her most vulnerable, her most laughable. I cannot say what makes her flight so interesting, or what I hope to learn from it. She is the last of the wartime fugitives, and any lessons seem as rickety as Irmgard herself. Possibly I hoped that in watching her brash and harebrained escape, I would understand something about the world—its savagery and daffiness, its implausibilities, its bewildering paths and cockamamie turns, its grotesqueness. But does that lesson still need learning? Wasn’t there enough evidence already, centuries’ worth, accreting like debris? What further clues do I need? And why—despite this knowledge–do I continue to watch?
8
She exits the building, huffy as usual, but astonished by her success. Keep going, says a voice, and she does, suddenly finding herself in the world, larger and louder than she remembers it. I cannot know what she’s thinking, but for just a moment her face eases and her eyes are unfixed and she looks dreamily ahead, as if a future awaits. Her trial, a month later, will be highly uninteresting. Irmgard will speak briefly—I’m sorry for everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time. I can’t say anything else—and she’ll receive a two-year suspended sentence before being released, cast back to her nursing home, or possibly a different one. The specifics don’t matter. No longer alive in my imagination, she will practically cease to exist anywhere else. When she dies, in January 2025, her death will receive no public notice, and will not be reported on until the following April.
For now, she is on the move. As always, her steps are careful and deliberate, a negotiation with the cracked sidewalk. But each landing of the walker feels decisive, resolute, like a word spoken aloud. There, it says. There…There…There. I will watch her again, and hear the word often, its suggestion of complaint and victory. Irmgard’s eternal march, and its aghast and enthralled witness.
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