The church fire

The church fire was the killing of several hundred women prisoners who had been locked inside a village church during a bombing at the end of a forced march. The guards could have opened the doors but did not. The mother and daughter who survived became central witnesses in the subsequent trial, and the fire also became a measure of the distance between establishing individual guilt and confronting the society that had tolerated the perpetrators.

Background and Circumstances

The prisoners were among women held at a camp where selections took place each month. Around sixty women were sent from Auschwitz and a similar number returned, less those who had died in the meantime. Those no longer considered able to work in a munitions factory were sent back to Auschwitz, where they would be killed. The factory’s work had been disrupted by an earlier explosion, leaving prisoners to repair the damage through construction labor.

As the death march reached a village largely abandoned by its inhabitants, troops and guards locked several hundred prisoners inside a church. A few bombs fell, perhaps aimed at a nearby railway or factory, or released after a raid elsewhere. One struck the house where the troops and guards were sleeping, and another hit the church steeple. The bombing began a fire in the church, but the locked doors and the guards’ refusal to unlock them determined the prisoners’ fate.

The Fire and Its Survivors

The flames spread from the steeple to the roof, and burning rafters fell into the nave. The defendants could have unlocked the church doors but did not. As the fire took hold, the women tried to get out; the heavy doors remained closed. The church’s walls trapped the fire, and the roof’s collapse intensified the danger. The doors were eventually burned through, but only hours later, after the prisoners had died.

The mother and daughter survived by going to the gallery, where they remained pressed against a wall. The mother had fled there because she could no longer bear being among the other women, not because she had chosen the place as a refuge from the flames. Its narrowness meant that it was less affected by the burning beams. The survivors stayed in the church until they could find their way out, then encountered villagers who gave them clothing and food and allowed them to continue on their way.

Witnesses and the Trial

The surviving daughter later wrote a book about the camp and the westward march and published it in America. She came to Germany to testify at the trial; her mother remained in Israel, and the court, prosecutors, and defense lawyers traveled there to take her deposition. Their testimony and the daughter’s book were the main evidence for the charge concerning the camp selections. Their account of the church fire supported the second main charge, although neither woman could testify about what had happened outside the church.

Other witnesses from the village remembered speaking with the defendants, but their position complicated the case. They risked being asked why they had not rescued the prisoners themselves: if the defendants had been alone, villagers might have been able to overpower them and open the doors. The defense could also argue that the guards, like the villagers, had acted under compulsion or expected the troops to return. The trial therefore tested not only what the defendants had done, but what others present could have known or done.

Responsibility and Aftermath

The later trial took place in a seminar devoted to the Nazi past and the legal problems raised by prosecution of camp personnel. Its students debated whether it was enough that the relevant laws existed when the crimes were committed, or whether their interpretation and enforcement at the time also mattered. For the students, convictions of individual guards were necessary but did not exhaust responsibility: they also put on trial the generation that had served the perpetrators, failed to stop them, or tolerated them after 1945.

The fire’s place in the trial thus widened into a question about indifference and complicity. The narrator distinguishes killing under the ordinary explanation of orders from the executioner’s indifference to the people being killed. Later, the money Hanna left was designated for the daughter who had survived the church fire with her mother, with the daughter to decide what to do with it. That bequest connected the survivors to the aftermath of the fire, but it did not erase the distance between acknowledging the victims and answering for their deaths.