CHAPTER EIGHT (1)
THE 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.