J UST AS Hanna’s insistent contradictions annoyed the judge, her willingness to admit things annoyed the other defendants. It was damaging for their defense, but also her own.
In fact the evidence itself was favorable to the defendants. The only evidence for the main count of the indictment was the testimony of the mother who had survived, her daughter, and the daughter’s book. A competent defense would have been able, without attacking the substance of the mother’s and daughter’s testimony, to cast reasonable doubt on whether these defendants were the actual ones who had done the selections. Witnesses’ testimony on this point was not precise, nor could it be; there had, after all, been a commandant, uniformed men, other female guards, and a whole hierarchy of responsibilities and order with which the prisoners had only been partially confronted and which, correspondingly, they could only partially understand. The same was true of the second count. Mother and daughter had both been locked inside the church, and could not testify as to what had happened outside. Certainly the defendants could not claim not to have been there. The other witnesses who had been living in the village then had spoken with them and remembered them. But these other witnesses had to be careful to avoid the charge that they themselves could have rescued the prisoners. If the defendants had been the only ones there—could the villagers not have overpowered the few women and unlocked the church doors themselves? Would they not have to fall in line with the defense, that the defendants had acted under a power of compulsion that also extended to them, the witnesses? That they had been forced by, or acted on the orders of, the troops who had either not yet fled or who, in the reasonable assumption of the guards, had left for a brief interval, perhaps to bring the wounded to the field hospital, and would be returning soon
When the other defendants’ lawyers realized that such strategies were being undone by Hanna’s voluntary concessions, they switched to another, which used her concessions to incriminate Hanna and exonerate the other defendants. The defense lawyers did this with professional objectivity. The other defendants backed them up with impassioned interjections.
You stated that you knew you were sending the prisoners to their deaths—that was only true of you, wasn’t it? You cannot know what your colleagues knew. Perhaps you can guess at it, but in the final analysis you cannot judge, is that not so?” Hanna was asked by one of the other defendants’ lawyers.
But we all knew . . .
Saying ‘we,’ ‘we all’ is easier than saying ‘I,’ ‘I alone,’ isn’t it? Isn’t it true that you and only you had special prisoners in the camp, young girls, first one for a period, and then another one
Hanna hesitated. “I don’t think I was the only one who . . .
You dirty liar! Your favorites—all that was just you, no one else!” Another of the accused, a coarse woman, not unlike a fat broody hen but with a spiteful tongue, was visibly worked up.
Is it possible that when you say ‘knew,’ the most you can actually do is assume, and that when you say ‘believe,’ you are actually just making things up?” The lawyer shook his head, as if disturbed by her acknowledgment of this. “And is it also true that once you were tired of your special prisoners, they all went back to Auschwitz with the next transport
Hanna did not answer.
That was your special, your personal selection, wasn’t it? You don’t want to remember, you want to hide behind something that everyone did, but . . .
Oh God!” The daughter, who had taken a seat in the public benches after being examined, covered her face with her hands. “How could I have forgotten?” The presiding judge asked if she wished to add anything to her testimony. She did not wait to be called to the front. She stood up and spoke from her seat among the spectators.
Yes, she had favorites, always one of the young ones who was weak and delicate, and she took them under her wing and made sure that they didn’t have to work, got them better barracks space and took care of them and fed them better, and in the evenings she had them brought to her. And the girls were never allowed to say what she did with them in the evening, and we assumed she was . . . also because they all ended up on the transports, as if she had had her fun with them and then had got bored. But it wasn’t like that at all, and one day one of them finally talked, and we learned that the girls read aloud to her, evening after evening after evening. That was better than if they . . . and better than working themselves to death on the building site. I must have thought it was better, or I couldn’t have forgotten it. But was it better?” She sat down.
Hanna turned around and looked at me. Her eyes found me at once, and I realized that she had known the whole time I was there. She just looked at me. Her face didn’t ask for anything, beg for anything, assure me of anything or promise anything. It simply presented itself. I saw how tense and exhausted she was. She had circles under her eyes, and on each cheek a line that ran from top to bottom that I’d never seen before, that weren’t yet deep, but already marked her like scars. When I turned red under her gaze, she turned away and back to the judges’ bench.
The presiding judge asked the lawyer who had cross-examined Hanna if he had any further questions for the defendant. He also asked Hanna’s lawyer. Ask her, I thought. Ask her if she chose the weak and delicate girls, because they could never have stood up to the work on the building site anyway, because they would have been sent on the next transport to Auschwitz in any case, and because she wanted to make that final month bearable. Say it, Hanna. Say you wanted to make their last month bearable. That that was the reason for choosing the delicate and the weak. That there was no other reason, and could not be.
But the lawyer did not ask Hanna, and she did not speak of her own accord.