J UST AS Hanna’s insistent contradictions annoyed the judge, her willingness to admit things annoyed the other defendants. It was damaging for their defense, but also her own.

In fact the evidence itself was favorable to the defendants. The only evidence for the main count of the indictment was the testimony of the mother who had survived, her daughter, and the daughter’s book. A competent defense would have been able, without attacking the substance of the mother’s and daughter’s testimony, to cast reasonable doubt on whether these defendants were the actual ones who had done the selections. Witnesses’ testimony on this point was not precise, nor could it be; there had, after all, been a commandant, uniformed men, other female guards, and a whole hierarchy of responsibilities and order with which the prisoners had only been partially confronted and which, correspondingly, they could only partially understand. The same was true of the second count. Mother and daughter had both been locked inside the church, and could not testify as to what had happened outside. Certainly the defendants could not claim not to have been there. The other witnesses who had been living in the village then had spoken with them and remembered them. But these other witnesses had to be careful to avoid the charge that they themselves could have rescued the prisoners. If the defendants had been the only ones there—could the villagers not have overpowered the few women and unlocked the church doors themselves? Would they not have to fall in line with the defense, that the defendants had acted under a power of compulsion that also extended to them, the witnesses? That they had been forced by, or acted on the orders of, the troops who had either not yet fled or who, in the reasonable assumption of the guards, had left for a brief interval, perhaps to bring the wounded to the field hospital, and would be returning soon?

When the other defendants’ lawyers realized that such strategies were being undone by Hanna’s voluntary concessions, they switched to another, which used her concessions to incriminate Hanna and exonerate the other defendants. The defense lawyers did this with professional objectivity. The other defendants backed them up with impassioned interjections.

“You stated that you knew you were sending the prisoners to their deaths—that was only true of you, wasn’t it? You cannot know what your colleagues knew. Perhaps you can guess at it, but in the final analysis you cannot judge, is that not so?” Hanna was asked by one of the other defendants’ lawyers.

“But we all knew . . .”

“Saying ‘we,’ ‘we all’ is easier than saying ‘I,’ ‘I alone,’ isn’t it? Isn’t it true that you and only you had special prisoners in the camp, young girls, first one for a period, and then another one?”

Hanna hesitated. “I don’t think I was the only one who . . .”

“You dirty liar! Your favorites—all that was just you, no one else!” Another of the accused, a coarse woman, not unlike a fat broody hen but with a ............