The Reader 3.2

CHAPTER SEVEN （2） “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.