Four men were loudly playing cards at the next table. The door opened and a little old man came in without greeting anyone. He wore short pants and had a wooden leg. He ordered a beer at the bar. He sat facing away from the neighboring table, so that all they saw was his back and the back of his overly enlarged, bald skull. The card players laid down their cards, reached into the ashtrays, picked up the butts, took aim, and hit him. The man at the bar flapped his hands behind his head as if swatting away flies. The innkeeper set his beer in front of him. No one said a word.

I couldn’t stand it. I jumped up and went over to the next table. “Stop it!” I was shaking with outrage. At that moment, the man half hobbled, half hopped over and began fumbling with his leg; suddenly he was holding the wooden leg in both hands. He brought it crashing down onto the table so that the glasses and ashtrays danced, and fell into an empty chair, laughing a squeaky, toothless laugh as the others laughed in a beery rumble along with him. “Stop it!” they laughed, pointing at me. “Stop it!”

During the night the wind howled around the house. I was not cold, and the noise of the wind and the creaking of the tree in front of the house and the occasional banging of a shutter were not enough to have kept me awake. But I became more and more inwardly restless, until my whole body began to shiver. I felt afraid, not in anticipation that something bad was going to happen, but in a physical way. I lay there, listening to the wind, feeling relieved every time it weakened and died down, but dreading its renewed assaults and not knowing how I would get out of bed next day, hitchhike back, continue my studies, and one day have a career and a wife and children.

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks-understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.

The next day was another beautiful summer day. Hitchhiking was easy, and I got back in a few hours. I walked through the city as though I had been away for a long time; the streets and buildings and people looked strange to me. But that didn’t mean the other world of the concentration camps felt any closer. My impressions of Struthof joined my few already existing images of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and froze along with them.

I DID GO to the presiding judge after all. I couldn’t make myself visit Hanna. But neither could I endure doing nothing.

Why didn’t I manage to speak to Hanna? She had left me, deceived me, was not the person I had taken her for or imagined her to be. And who had I been for her? The little reader she used, the little bedmate with whom she’d had her fun? Would she have sent me to the gas chamber if she hadn’t been able to leave me, but wanted to get rid of me?

Why did I find it unendurable to do nothing? I told myself I had to prevent a miscarriage of justice. I had to make sure justice was done, despite Hanna’s lifelong lie, justice both for and against Hanna, so to speak. But I wasn’t really concerned with justice. I couldn’t leave Hanna the way she was, or wanted to be. I had to meddle with her, have some kind of influence and effect on her, if not directly then indirectly.

The judge knew about our seminar group and was happy to invite me to come and talk after a session in court. I knocked, was invited in, greeted, and offered the chair in front of his desk. He was sitting in his shirtsleeves behind it. His robe hung over the back and arms of his chair; he had sat down in the robe and then slipped out of it. He seemed relaxed, a man who had finished his day’s work and was content. Without the irritated expression he hid behind during the trial, he had a nice, intelligent, harmless civil servant’s face.

He made general easy chitchat, asking me about this and that: what our seminar group thought of the trial, what our professor intended to do with the trial record, which semester we were in, which semester I was in, why I was studying law and when I planned to take my exams. He told me I must be sure to register for the exams on time.

I answered all his questions. Then I listened while he talked about his studies and his exams. He had done everything the right way. He had taken the right classes and seminars at the right time and had passed his final exams with the right degree of success. He liked being a lawyer and a judge, and if he had to do it all again he would do it the same way.

The window was open. In the parking lot, doors were being slammed and engines turned on. I listened to the cars until their noise was swallowed up in the roar of the traffic. Then children came to play and yell in the emptied parking lot. Sometimes a word came through quite clearly: a name, an insult, a call.

The judge stood up and said goodbye. He told me I could come again if I had any other questions, or if I wanted advice on my studies. And he would like to know our seminar group’s evaluation and analysis of the trial.

I walked through the empty parking lot. One of the bigger boys told me how I could walk to the railroad station. Our car pool had driven back right after the session, and I had to take the train. It was a slow rush-hour train that stopped at every station; people got on and off. I sat at the window, surrounded by ever-changing passengers, conversations, smells. Outside, houses passed by, and roads, cars, trees, distant mountains, castles, and quarries. I took it all in and felt nothing. I was no longer upset at having been left, deceived, and used by Hanna. I no longer had to meddle with her. I felt the numbness with which I had followed the horrors of the trial settling over the emotions and thoughts of the past few weeks. It would be too much to say I was happy about this. But I felt it was right. It allowed me to return to and continue to live my everyday life.

T HE VERDICT was handed down at the end of June. Hanna was sentenced to life. The others received terms in jail.

The courtroom was as full as it had been at the beginning of the trial. People from the justice system, students from my university and the local one, a class of schoolchildren, domestic and foreign journalists, and the people who always find their way into courtrooms. It was loud. At first, no one noticed when the defendants were brought in. But then the spectators fell silent. The first to stop talking were those sitting up front near the defendants. They nudged their neighbors and turned around to those sitting behind them. “Look,” they whispered, and those who looked fell silent too and nudged their neighbors and turned to those sitting behind them and whispered, “Look!” Until eventually the whole courtroom was silent.

I don’t know if Hanna knew how she looked, or maybe she wanted to look like that. She was wearing a black suit and a white blouse, and the cut of the suit and the tie that went with the blouse made her look as if she were in uniform. I have never seen the uniform of the women who worked for the SS. But I believed, and the spectators all believed, that before us we were seeing that uniform, and the woman who had worked for the SS in it, and all the crimes Hanna was accused of doing.

The spectators began to whisper again. Many were audibly outraged. They felt that Hanna was ridiculing the trial, the verdict, and themselves, they who had come to hear the verdict read out. They became more vociferous, and some of them began calling out what they thought of Hanna. But then the court entered the courtroom and after an irritated glance at Hanna, the judge announced the verdict. Hanna listened standing up, straight-backed, and absolutely motionless. She sat down during the reading of the reasons for the verdict. I did not take my eyes off her head and neck.