It was like being a prisoner in the death camps who survives month after month and becomes accustomed to the life, while he registers with an objective eye the horror of the new arrivals: registers it with the same numbness that he brings to the murders and deaths themselves. All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life’s functions are reduced to a minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurrences. In the rare accounts by perpetrators, too, the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenery, the perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting a mental paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or drunk. The defendants seemed to me to be trapped still, and forever, in this drugged state, in a sense petrified in it.
Even then, when I was preoccupied by this general numbness, and by the fact that it had taken hold not only of the perpetrators and victims, but of all of us, judges and lay members of the court, prosecutors and recorders, who had to deal with these events now; when I likened perpetrators, victims, the dead, the living, survivors, and their descendants to each other, I didn’t feel good about it and I still don’t.
Can one see them all as linked in this way? When I began to make such comparisons in discussions, I always emphasized that the linkage was not meant to relativize the difference between being forced into the world of the death camps and entering it voluntarily, between enduring suffering and imposing it on others, and that this difference was of the greatest, most critical importance. But I met with shock and indignation when I said this not in reaction to the others’ objections, but before they had even had the chance to demur.
At the same time I ask myself, as I had already begun to ask myself back then: What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose? It was not that I had lost my eagerness to explore and cast light on things which had filled the seminar, once the trial got under way. But that some few would be convicted and punished while we of the second generation were silenced by revulsion, shame, and guilt-was that all there was to it now?
CHAPTER FIVE
I N THE SECOND week, the indictment was read out. It took a day and a half to read-a day and a half in the subjunctive. The first defendant is alleged to have… Furthermore she is alleged… In addition, she is alleged… Thus she comes under the necessary conditions of paragraph so-and-so, furthermore she is alleged to have committed this and that act… She is alleged to have acted illegally and culpably. Hanna was the fourth defendant.
The five accused women had been guards in a small camp near Cracow, a satellite camp for Auschwitz. They had been transferred there from Auschwitz in early 1944 to replace guards killed or injured in an explosion in the factory where the women in the camp worked. One count of the indictment involved their conduct at Auschwitz, but that was of minor significance compared with the other charges. I no longer remember it. Was it because it didn’t involve Hanna, but only the other women? Was it of minor importance in relation to the other counts, or minor, period? Did it simply seem inexcusable to have someone available for trial who had been in Auschwitz and not charge them about their conduct in Auschwitz?
Of course the five defendants had not been in charge of the camp. There was a commandant, plus special troops, and other female guards. Most of the troops and guards had not survived the bombing raid that put an end one night to the prisoners’ westward march. Some fled the same night, and vanished as surely as the commandant, who had made himself scarce as soon as the column of prisoners set off on the forced march to the west.
None of the prisoners should, by rights, have survived the night of the bombing. But two did survive, a mother and her daughter, and the daughter had written a book about the camp and the march west and published it in America. The police and prosecutors had tracked down not only the five defendants but several witnesses who had lived in the village which had taken the bombing hits that ended the death march. The most important witnesses were the daughter, who had come to Germany, and the mother, who had remained in Israel. To depose the mother the court, prosecutors, and defense lawyers were going to go to Israel -the only part of the trial I did not attend.
One main charge concerned selections in the camp. Each month around sixty new women were sent out from Auschwitz and the same number were sent back, minus those who had died in the meantime. It was clear to everyone that the women would be killed in Auschwitz; it was those who could no longer perform useful work in the factory who were sent back. The factory made munitions; the actual work was not difficult, but the women hardly ever got to do the actual work, because they had to do raw construction to repair the devastating damage caused by the explosion early in the year.
The other main charge involved the night of the bombing that ended everything. The troops and guards had locked the prisoners, several hundred women, in a church in a village that had been abandoned by most of its inhabitants. Only a few bombs fell, possibly intended for the nearby railroad or a factory, or maybe simply released because they were left over from a raid on a larger town. One of them hit the priest’s house in which the troops and guards were sleeping. Another landed on the church steeple. First the steeple burned, then the roof; then the blazing rafters collapsed into the nave, and the pews caught fire. The heavy doors were unbudgeable. The defendants could have unlocked them. They did not, and the women locked in the church burned to death.
CHAPTER SIX
T HE TRIAL could not have gone any worse for Hanna. She had already made a bad impression on the court during the preliminary questioning. After the indictment had been read out, she spoke up to say that something was incorrect; the presiding judge rebuked her irritably, telling her that she had had plenty of time before the trial to study the charges and register objections; now the trial was in progress and the evidence would show what was correct and incorrect. When the presiding judge proposed at the beginning of the actual testimony that the German version of the daughter’s book not be read into the record, as it had been prepared for publication by a German publisher and the manuscript made available to all participants in the trial, Hanna had to be argued into it by her lawyer under the exasperated eyes of the judge. She did not willingly agree. She also did not want to acknowledge that she had admitted, in an earlier deposition, to having had the key to the church. She had not had the key, no one had had the key, there had not been any one key to the church, but several keys to several different doors, and they had all been left outside in the locks. But the court record of her examination by the judge, approved and signed by her, read differently, and the fact that she asked why they were trying to hang something on her did not make matters any better. She didn’t ask loudly or arrogantly, but with determination, and, I think, in visible and audible confusion and helplessness, and the fact that she spoke of others trying to hang something on her did not mean she was claiming any miscarriage of justice by the court. But the presiding judge interpreted it that way and responded sharply. Hanna’s lawyer leapt to his feet and let loose, overeagerly; he was asked whether he was agreeing with his client’s accusations, and sat down again.