Until April! Poor Grandpa—that main trial had lasted until October 1946. Transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials are available online through the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, but I’d never taken the time to look at them. I clicked through until I came to January 2, curious to learn what my grandfather’s work had been like that day. I scanned the page, and the enormity of what I’d been missing hit me.
Car after car was filled, and the screaming of women and children and the cracking of whips and rifle shots resounded unceasingly. Since several families or groups had barricaded themselves in especially strong buildings and the doors could not be forced with crowbars or beams, the doors were now blown open with hand grenades. Since the ghetto was near the railroad tracks in Rovno, the younger people tried to get across the tracks and over a small river to get away from the ghetto area. As this stretch of country was beyond the range of the electric lights, it was illuminated by small rockets. All through the night these beaten, hounded, and wounded people moved along the lighted streets. Women carried their dead children in their arms, children pulled and dragged their dead parents by their arms and legs down the road toward the train. Again and again the cries, “Open the door! Open the door!” echoed through the ghetto.
I began shaking. That familiar, gruesome sorrow gripped me. I shut my computer and tried to breathe. All those words had come out of my grandfather’s mouth as he worked. How foolish I’d been. I’d never considered what impact this experience might have had on him.
When I next visited my grandfather, he seemed more at ease, despite the nurse’s reports. “This mission is quite dull, really,” he informed me in a low voice. “I’m hardly in the booth at all. I’ll be going home soon.”
“I see,” I replied, not quite sure how to tell him that wasn’t true. “Do you think about the Nuremberg Trials? Do you remember them?”
“Of course.”
“It must have been very difficult for you.”
“Well, interpreting is quite a difficult job,” he said, as if I had suggested he was mentally impaired. “Not everyone can do it.”
I wondered if this might be a personal jab, since I myself was working as an interpreter by then, but I doubted he remembered that. “I meant the content of the Trial,” I elaborated. “The things you were interpreting. Do you remember any of that? The nurse said …” I groped around for the right way to describe it “… she said you were having nightmares, and I wondered if it was about that.”
My grandfather was silent. “It’s like a black box. I carry it … I have it with me, but when I open it, there’s nothing inside.”
I began researching the Trials and my grandfather’s role in them. I learned from an interview my grandfather had given to the Berliner Zeitung in the mid-nineties that he broke down in the interpreters’ booth during G?ring’s testimony. In another account, I read that G?ring had criticized the interpreters directly; at one point, he supposedly barked, “You are shortening my life by several years.” I could find no record of his comment in the trial transcripts, but I wondered whether my grandfather had been the unlucky recipient of one of his barbs and whether it had contributed to his crumbling under the strain. Certainly, interpreters’ breakdowns were common during the trial, so common that they kept a team of substitutes waiting at all times. Armand and the other Jewish interpreter had been furloughed to the translators’ section when what they were hearing got to be too much for them.
Historians and eyewitnesses of the Trials agree that of all the defendants, G?ring was the most daunting: he spoke in long, tricky sentences and deliberately obfuscated, baiting the prosecutors, derailing direct examinations, and tearing through cross-examinations at a speed that often tripped up the interpreters or the cross-examiners themselves. I remembered my grandfather telling me stories to that effect, though at the time I’d thought they were amusing anecdotes: in German, verbs are conjugated partly at the end of sentences, and by the time G?ring arrived at the end of his sentences, he’d often forgotten how they’d begun. “Sometimes he didn’t make any sense,” I remembered my grandfather recounting, “and I had to tell the judges that the sentence was of no importance.” In his memoir of the trials, Richard Sonnenfeldt recalls, “At Nuremberg, as I anticipated meeting G?ring, I felt the Jewish refugee I had once been tugging at my sleeve,” and I thought, Grandpa still was a Jewish refugee at the time. What must it have been like for him, speaking for Hitler’s second-in-command?
I contacted Tomas Fitzel, the author of the article in the Berliner Zeitung, to see if he could give me any more information; he replied,
Unfortunately he broke off contact because I wrote that he had a breakdown when he had to translate for Goering. A colleague told me this information about him, not he himself. Perhaps he felt ashamed, but my intention was to talk about this extremely hard and sometime inhuman job he and his colleagues had to do.
In our interview, he wanted to say that because you had to be so concentrated on your work of translating, afterward you could not remember; it passed through you. But instead he used a wrong—or better—the right metaphor: the work had been like a filter. So the knowledge of the horrible testimonies was to a certain extent kept out. But in reality the filter was he himself, without being conscious that what he translated became something he kept in him.
I remember that I never thought before our interview of who he might be: a Jew, a victim, has his family been killed? The moment I rang the bell of his apartment in Geneva, I looked at his name and felt like I was reading it for the first time; I thought oh my God, how stupid I am.
If indeed my grandfather had a breakdown, he never mentioned it to anyone, and he went back to interpreting quite rapidly. But the content of the trial altered the rest of his life.
My grandfather was present when the films shot by the U.S. Army upon liberation of Nazi concentration camps were projected on November 29, 1945. The court was shown affidavits signed by the filmmakers attesting that the films had not been tampered with or altered in any way. That’s how unbelievable they were.
No one knew what to expect when the American prosecutor Thomas Dodd said, “This is by no means the entire proof which the prosecution will offer with respect to the subject of concentration camps, but this film which we offer represents in a brief and unforgettable form an explanation of what the words ‘concentration camp’ imply.”
It’s said even some of the defendants wept openly in the courtroom. Supposedly, one of the judges took to his bed for three days.
And my grandfather, alone in a wrecked city in former enemy territory, new to his job, shy around his colleagues, sitting awkwardly near the projection screen in his corner seat in the interpreters’ section? My grandfather can only have thought: