I N THE SECOND week, the indictment was read out. It took a day and a half to read—a day and a half in the subjunctive. The first defendant is alleged to have . . . Furthermore she is alleged . . . In addition, she is alleged . . . Thus she comes under the necessary conditions of paragraph so-and-so, furthermore she is alleged to have committed this and that act . . . She is alleged to have acted illegally and culpably. Hanna was the fourth defendant.

The five accused women had been guards in a small camp near Cracow, a satellite camp for Auschwitz. They had been transferred there from Auschwitz in early 1944 to replace guards killed or injured in an explosion in the factory where the women in the camp worked. One count of the indictment involved their conduct at Auschwitz, but that was of minor significance compared with the other charges. I no longer remember it. Was it because it didn’t involve Hanna, but only the other women? Was it of minor importance in relation to the other counts, or minor, period? Did it simply seem inexcusable to have someone available for trial who had been in Auschwitz and not charge them about their conduct in Auschwitz?

Of course the five defendants had not been in charge of the camp. There was a commandant, plus special troops, and other female guards. Most of the troops and guards had not survived the bombing raid that put an end one night to the prisoners’ westward march. Some fled the same night, and vanished as surely as the commandant, who had made himself scarce as soon as the column of prisoners set off on the forced march to the west.

None of the prisoners should, by rights, have survived the night of the bombing. But two did survive, a mother and her daughter, and the daughter had written a book about the camp and the march west and............