T HE GERMAN version of the book that the daughter had written about her time in the camps did not appear until after the trial. During the trial the manuscript was available, but to those directly involved. I had to read the book in English, an unfamiliar and laborious exercise at the time. And as always, the alien language, unmastered and struggled over, created a strange concatenation of distance and immediacy. I worked through the book with particular thoroughness and yet did not make it my own. It remained as alien as the language itself.
Years later I reread it and discovered that it is the book that creates distance. It does not invite one to identify with it and makes no one sympathetic, neither the mother nor the daughter, nor those who shared their fate in various camps and finally in Auschwitz and the satellite camp near Cracow. It never gives the barracks leaders, the female guards, or the uniformed security force clear enough faces or shapes for the reader to be able to relate to them, to judge their acts for better or worse. It exudes the very numbness I have tried to describe before. But even in her numbness the daughter did not lose the ability to observe and analyze. And she had not allowed herself to be corrupted either by self-pity or by the self-confidence she had obviously drawn from the fact that she had survived and not only come through the years in the camps but given literary form to them. She writes about herself and her pubescent, precocious, and, when necessary, cunning behavior with the same sobriety she uses to describe everything else.
Hanna is neither named in the book, nor is she recognizable or identifiable in any way. Sometimes I thought I recognized her in one of the guards, who was described as young, pretty, and conscientiously unscrupulous in the fulfillment of her duties, but I wasn’t sure. When I considered the other defendants, only Hanna could be the guard described. But there had been other guards. In one camp the daughter had known a guard who was called “Mare,” also young, beautiful, and diligent, but cruel and uncontrolled. The guard in the camp reminded her of that one. Had others drawn the same comparison? Did Hanna know about it? Did she remember it? Was that why she was upset when I compared her to a horse
The camp near Cracow was the last stop for mother and daughter after Auschwitz. It was a step forward; the work was hard, but easier, the food was better, and it was better to sleep six women to a room than a hundred to a barracks. And it was warmer; the women could forage for wood on the way from the factory to the camp, and bring it back with them. There was the fear of selections, but it wasn’t as bad as at Auschwitz. Sixty women were sent back each month, sixty out of around twelve hundred; that meant each prisoner had a life expectancy of twenty months, even if she only possessed average strength, and there was always the hope of being stronger than the average. Moreover, there was also the hope that the war would be over in less than twenty months.
The misery began when the camp was closed and the prisoners set off towards the west. It was winter, it was snowing, and the clothing in which the women had frozen in the factory and just managed to hold out in the camp was completely inadequate, but not as inadequate as what was on their feet, often rags and sheets of newspaper tied so as to stay on when they stood or walked around, but impossible to make withstand long marches in snow and ice. And the women did not just march; they were driven, and forced to run. “Death march?” asks the daughter in the book, and answers, “No, death trot, death gallop.” Many collapsed along the way; others never got to their feet again after nights spent in barns or leaning against a wall. After a week, almost half the women were dead.
The church made a better shelter than the barns and walls the women had had before. When they had passed abandoned farms and stayed overnight, the uniformed security force and the female guards had taken the living quarters for themselves. Here, in the almost deserted village, they could commandeer the priest’s house and still leave the prisoners something more than a barn or a wall. That they did it, and that the prisoners even got something warm to eat in the village seemed to promise an end to the misery. The women went to sleep. Shortly afterwards the bombs fell. As long as the steeple was the only thing burning, the fire could be heard in the church, but not seen. When the tip of the steeple collapsed and crashed down onto the rafters, it took several minutes for the glow of the fire to become visible. By then the flames were already licking downwards and setting clothes alight, collapsing burning beams set fire to the pews and pulpit, and soon the whole roof crashed into the nave and started a general conflagration.
The daughter thinks the women could have saved themselves if they had immediately gotten together to break down one of the doors. But by the time they realized what had happened and was going to happen, and that no one was coming to open the doors, it was too late. It was completely dark when the sound of the falling bombs woke them. For a while they heard nothing but an eerie, frightening noise in the steeple, and kept absolutely quiet, so as to hear the noise better and figure out what it was. That it was the crackling and snapping of a fire, that it was the glow of flames that flared up now and again behind the windows, that the crash above their heads signaled the spreading of the fire from the steeple to the roof—all this the women realized only once the rafters began to burn. They realized, they screamed in horror, screamed for help, threw themselves at the doors, shook them, beat at them, screamed.
When the burning roof crashed into the nave, the shell of the walls acted like a chimney. Most of the women did not suffocate, but burned to death in the brilliant roar of the flames. In the end, the fire even burned its glowing way through the ironclad church doors. But that was hours later.
Mother and daughter survived because the mother did the right thing for the wrong reasons. When the women began to panic, she couldn’t bear to be among them anymore. She fled to the gallery. She didn’t care that she was closer to the flames, she just wanted to be alone, away from the screaming, thrashing, burning women. The gallery was narrow, so narrow that it was barely touched by the burning beams. Mother and daughter stood pressed against the wall and saw and heard the raging of the fire. Next day they didn’t dare come down and out of the church. In the darkness of the following night, they were afraid of not finding the stairs and the way out. When they left the church in the dawn of the day after that, they met some of the villagers, who gaped at them in silent astonishment, but gave them clothing and food and let them walk on.
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