MILLICENT BELL
I felt as if we were sitting together for the last time around the round
table under the five-armed, five-candled brass chandelier, as if we were
eating our last meal off the old plates with the green vine-leaf border,
as if we would never talk to each other so intimately again. I felt as
if
[ were saying goodbye. [ was still there and already gone. [ was home–
sick for my mother and father and my brother and sisters, and I
longed to be with the woman .
427
There is Ii ttle talk and, despi te the intensification of intimacy, li ttle growth
of acquaintance in the ordinary sense between young Michael and "the
woman." He knows nothing much about Frau Schmitz's past, and only
after half a dozen visits does he learn that her first name is Hanna. They
have fights he does not understand. She makes him angry when, impatient
to see her, he boards her streetcar and she ignores him, continuing to joke
with the driver. He arouses her incomprehensible fury when they take a
four-day bike trip together. Having gone off to fetch breakfast while she is
still asleep, he returns to find her livid, and she thrashes him with her belt.
Only much later does he understand that she could not have read the note
he left on the night table, and thought herself abandoned. The middle-class
boy who probably has never met an illiterate person did not guess the real
reason she loves to have him read to her from the classic German literature
texts in his school bag-and that her shame compels her to conceal this
reason. In any case, he has already begun to betray her by pretending to
friends that they know him completely. Once, she comes to the public
swimming pool when he is there with pals, and he glimpses her watching
from a distance, but makes no sign. And then, she is gone without warn–
ing, her flat vacated, her new location unknown.
In the second half of the book the world and history enter. When
Berg sees Hanna again, it is seven years later in a courtroom. He is now a
law student, and he has dropped in to watch one of the many trials of
rank-and-file Nazi criminals belatedly taking place. Hanna appears among
the accused. She is being tried for her role as a guard in Auschwitz. As
the trial progresses it becomes plain that she had taken part in the selec–
tion of prisoners to be sent to the furnaces, though she sometimes
managed to give some of the younger, weaker girls another few weeks of
life; it is said that she made these "favorites" read to her in the evenings.
Then, when a barn in which some of the prisoners had been locked was
set on fire during a bombing, she and the other guards failed to open the
doors. Hanna responds to both charges-as the accused in such trials gen–
erally do-that the guards had no alternative. They had only done what
they had to.
