The Reader by Bernhard Schlink Page B

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.” Hanna paused. “Then the screaming began and got worse and worse. If we had opened the doors and they had all come rushing out . . .”
    The judge waited a moment. “Were you afraid? Were you afraid the prisoners would overpower you?”
    “That they would . . . no, but how could we have restored order? There would have been chaos, and we had no way to handle that. And if they’d tried to escape . . .”
    Once again the judge waited, but Hanna didn’t finish the sentence. “Were you afraid that if they escaped, you would be arrested, convicted, shot?”
    “We couldn’t just let them escape! We were responsible for them . . . I mean, we had guarded them the whole time, in the camp and on the march, that was the point, that we had to guard them and not let them escape. That’s why we didn’t know what to do. We also had no idea how many of the women would survive the next few days. So many had died already, and the ones who were still alive were so weak . . .”
    Hanna realized that what she was saying wasn’t doing her case any good. But she couldn’t say anything else. She could only try to say what she was saying better, to describe it better and explain it. But the more she said, the worse it looked for her. Because she was at her wits’ end, she turned to the judge again.
    “What would you have done?”
    But this time she knew she would get no answer. She wasn’t expecting one. Nobody was. The judge shook his head silently.
    Not that it was impossible to imagine the confusion and helplessness Hanna described. The night, the cold, the snow, the fire, the screaming of the women in the church, the sudden departure of the people who had commanded and escorted the female guards—how could the situation have been easy? But could an acknowledgment that the situation had been hard be any mitigation for what the defendants had done or not done? As if it had been a car accident on a lonely road on a cold winter night, with injuries and totaled vehicles, and no one knowing what to do? Or as if it had been a conflict between two equally compelling duties that required action? That is how one could imagine what Hanna was describing, but nobody was willing to look at it in such terms.
    “Did you write the report?”
    “We all discussed what we should write. We didn’t want to hang any of the blame on the ones who had left. But we didn’t want to attract charges that we had done anything wrong either.”
    “So you’re saying you talked it through together. Who wrote it?”
    “You!” The other defendant pointed at Hanna.
    “No, I didn’t write it. Does it matter who did?”
    A prosecutor suggested that an expert be called to compare the handwriting in the report and the handwriting of the defendant Schmitz.
    “My handwriting? You want my handwriting? . . .”
    The judge, the prosecutor, and Hanna’s lawyer discussed whether a person’s handwriting retains its character over more than fifteen years and can be identified. Hanna listened and tried several times to say or ask something, and was becoming increasingly alarmed. Then she said, “You don’t have to call an expert. I admit I wrote the report.”

CHAPTER TEN
    I HAVE NO memory of the Friday seminar meetings. Even when I recall the trial, I cannot remember what topics we selected for scholarly discussion. What did we talk about? What did we want to know? What did the professor teach us?
    But I remember the Sundays. The days in court gave me a new hunger for the colors and smells of