All those years of tension and waiting culminated in a few polite lines printed on a flimsy piece of paper. Suddenly, it occurred to me to ask what had followed the war’s end. The kaleidoscopic fragments of their lives shook out into a new pattern to decipher, and I began to wonder whether the fissures in my grandparents’ relationship might have come after, not during, the war.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IN THE GERIATRIC HOSPITAL, MY GRANDFATHER HAD to be sedated most days. Otherwise he’d run away, or become hysterical and barricade himself in his room, or scream for help long into the night.
During one of my phone calls to the hospital, a nurse inquired, “Was your grandfather a lawyer of some sort?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“Sometimes he recites things … it sounds like legal language. Like a trial. I just wondered. I wouldn’t bother you with it, only sometimes it’s rather gruesome.”
When I was younger, the Nuremberg Trials had been one of the few parts of his past about which my grandfather would talk freely—or so I thought. He showed me the pictures of him in General Telford Taylor’s memoir of the Trials. He made me laugh with his description of Henri Donnedieu de Vabres’s giant mustache, which the French judge used for cover as he whispered commentary on courtroom proceedings to my grandfather, who had been selected to facilitate the judges’ deliberations partway through Trial One. He told me about being inducted into the U.S. Army and receiving a uniform and better pay. He explained the system of lights the interpreters used: yellow to slow down the speakers, red to signal a technical breakdown or a problem at the interpreters’ desk. He took pride in the fact that he never leaked anything to the press. He recalled French prosecutor Fran?ois de Menthon’s kindness in helping to arrange his French citizenship—the first time in his life my grandfather had ever been a citizen of any country. He described how hard it was to interpret for G?ring and how he grew to see Speer as “le moins pire”—the least worst. He remembered some of the female interpreters refusing to translate obscenities. He told me about the tensions in the judges’ secret meetings; about their endless debates and disagreements; and about the Russians’ insistence that the Nazis had committed the Katyn Forest massacres, prompting Judge Donnedieu de Vabres—again under cover of his mustache—to lean toward him and breathe, “They’re liars.”
My grandfather (second from the right) in the interpreters’ section at the Nuremberg Trials, probably taken during the shooting of a publicity film that explained the innovative translation system and technologies the Trials employed.
So I thought I knew quite a bit about my grandfather’s first experiences as a professional interpreter. I had filed his role at the Trials under “proud accomplishment” and forgotten it in my quest to trace the story of my grandparents’ relationship, overlooking its importance because my grandmother hadn’t been there. All over again, I was awed by their ability to camouflage the very existence of their continued relationship: until now, it had never crossed my mind that they had been married at that time. Married but far apart from each other. What effects did this separation have on their lives?
Armand on his first visit to meet his new daughter, Angèle, during leave from the Nuremberg Trials in December 1945.
A photograph from a series of Anna with Angèle taken in 1946 and sent to Armand while he was working in Nuremberg.
I remembered a photo of my grandfather holding my mother as a baby, looking pleased and slightly surprised, as if she’d landed in his arms out of nowhere. Now I realized that the photograph must have been taken during one of his leaves from Trial One and that it documented meeting his daughter for the first time. Similar pictures of my grandmother, in which she observes her new baby with intense, almost ferocious, love, had been taken in Armand’s absence, as he worked in a corner of the courtroom in Nuremberg.
My grandfather’s refugee file ended with his departure for France, but my grandmother’s continued through 1949. I noticed my grandfather’s handwriting on one of its pages:
Armand Jacoubovitch
c/o Tribunal militaire international
20, place Vend?me—Paris
Nuremberg, 2 January 1946
Federal Department of Justice and Police
Police Division
Reference: refugee no. 7130 V?
Dear Sirs,
I thank you for renewing the refugee permit of my wife, Madame Anna Jacoubovitch-Münster, until 1 May 1946. I am particularly grateful for your efforts given the peculiar situation in which I currently find myself: my parents were deported in 1942, our property was pillaged in 1940 when the Germans entered Strasbourg, and, finally, our house was destroyed by bombing. I am therefore obliged to start over from nothing, and, since I am currently working in Nuremberg as an interpreter at the International Military Tribunal, I am unable to bring my wife and baby to France, as I possess neither furniture nor household linens, and you are certainly aware of how difficult it is to find housing in Paris at this time.
I therefore propose to bring my wife and my child to Paris upon my own return to the city; that is to say, once the Nuremberg trial is over, no doubt sometime in April.
Under the circumstances, I would be most obliged to you if you would kindly ask the Geneva Police to renew my wife and child’s residency permit, which currently runs only to 31 January.
If you could extend the permit to 1 May 1946, my wife would be able to avoid taking the steps that would otherwise be required for its renewal, steps that are rather difficult for her given that she is all alone and still nursing her baby.
Sincere regards,
A. Jacoubovitch