CHAPTER NINE (1)
“WHY DID you not unlock the doors?” The presiding judge put the question to one defendant after
another. One after the other, they gave the same answer. They couldn’t unlock the doors. Why? They
had been wounded when the bombs hit the priest’s house. Or they had
been in shock as a result of the bombardment. Or they had been busy after the bombs hit, with
the wounded guard contingent, pulling them out of the rubble, bandaging them, taking care of them.
They had not thought about the church, had not seen the fire in the church, had not
heard the screams from the church.
The judge made the same statement to one defendant after another. The record indicated otherwise.
This was deliberately phrased with caution. To say that the record found in the SS archives said
otherwise would be wrong. But it was true that it suggested something different. It listed the
names of those who had been killed in the priest’s house and those who had been wounded, those who
had brought the wounded to a field hospital in a truck, and those who had accompanied the truck in
a jeep. It indicated that the women guards had stayed behind to wait out the end of the fires, to
prevent any of them from spreading and to prevent any attempts to escape under the cover of the
flames. It referred to the death of the prisoners.
The fact that the names of the defendants appeared nowhere in the report suggested that the
defendants were among the female guards who had remained behind. That these guards had remained
behind to prevent attempts at escape indicated that the affair didn’t end with the rescue of the
wounded from the priest’s house and the departure of the transport to the field hospital. The
guards who remained behind, the report indicated, had allowed the fire to rage in the church and
had kept the church doors locked. Among the guards who remained behind, the report indicated, were
the defendants.
No, said one defendant after the other, that is not the way it was. The report was wrong. That much
was evident from the fact that it mentioned the obligation of the guards to prevent the fires from
spreading. How could they have carried out that responsibility? It was ridiculous, as was the other
responsibility of preventing attempted escapes under the cover of the fires. Attempted escapes? By
the time they no longer had to worry about their own people and could worry about the others, the
prisoners, there was no one left to escape. No, the report completely ignored what they had done
and achieved and suffered that night. How could such a false report have been filed? They didn’t
know.
Until it was the turn of the plump and vicious defendant. She knew. “Ask that one there!” She
pointed at Hanna. “She wrote the report. She’s the guilty one, she did it all, and she wanted to
use the report to cover it up and drag us into it.”
The judge asked Hanna. But it was his last question. His first was “Why did you not unlock the
doors?”
“We were . . . we had . . .” Hanna was groping for the answer. “We didn’t have any alternative.”
“You had no alternative?”
“Some of us were dead, and the others had left. They said they were taking the wounded to the field
hospital and would come back, but they knew they weren’t coming back, and so did we. Perhaps they
didn’t even go to the hospital, the wounded were not that badly hurt. We would have gone with them,
but they said they needed the room for the wounded, and anyway they didn’t . . . they weren’t keen
to have so many women along. I don’t know where they went.”
“What did you do?”
“We didn’t know what to do. It all happened so fast, with the priest’s house burning and the church
spire, and the men and the cart were there one minute and gone the next, and suddenly we were alone
with the women in the church. They left behind some weapons, but we didn’t know how to use them,
and even if we had, what good would it have done, since we were only a handful of women? How could
we have guarded all those women? A line like that is
very long, even if you keep it as tight together as possible, and to guard such a long column,
you need far more people than we had.”