Hanna Schmitz learns to read and write

Hanna Schmitz learns to read and write during her imprisonment by borrowing books that Michael Berg reads aloud on cassette and following the recordings word by word. Her first short note to him, written after years of contact without personal conversation, is at once evidence of a new ability and a record of the effort it took to acquire it. Literacy changes her relation to Michael, to books, and to the past she begins to study, but the achievement carries the weight of how long it came too late.

The First Note and the Work of Writing

In the fourth year of Michael’s word-driven, wordless contact with Hanna, a note arrived thanking him for the last story. The sheet was lined paper torn from a notebook and cut smooth; the message occupied three lines at the top. Hanna had written in blue ballpoint, pressing so hard that the letters and even the address left impressions through the folded paper. The note was not simply a message. Its material marks made the difficulty of producing words palpable.

At first glance the handwriting could be mistaken for a child’s, but its awkwardness came from resistance rather than the unrestrained movement of a child learning to form letters. Hanna had to force each line into shape: strokes restarted before curves and loops, while letters varied in slant, height, and width. The physical unevenness registers the effort of a person making herself enter a system of written signs. Each letter is a small, separately won capacity, rather than a fluent skill taken for granted.

Michael’s first response was joy: Hanna could write. He had spent years reading about illiteracy and understood that it reaches beyond books, making ordinary tasks such as finding an address or choosing a meal difficult. Illiterate people can become dependent on familiar routines and prescribed patterns, while spending energy concealing what they cannot read or write. In his account, learning therefore marks movement from dependence toward independence, and from dependence toward liberation.

Learning Through the Recordings

Hanna’s route into literacy was closely bound to Michael’s recordings. She borrowed from the library the books he read on tape and followed the spoken text with the printed page, word by word and sentence by sentence. The cassette player repeatedly broke down under the strain of being switched on and off, rewound, and fast-forwarded. Its frequent repairs required permission, and that practical consequence eventually disclosed what Hanna was doing to the person who had to arrange them.

At first Hanna did not want to tell the person who helped her obtain the books about her effort. When she began writing as well and asked for a writing manual, she stopped concealing it. Her pride in succeeding had become strong enough for her to share her happiness. This progression—from private practice, through a request for instruction, to an open acknowledgment—shows that literacy was not a sudden revelation but a sustained undertaking supported by the books and recordings she had assembled.

The method joined listening to close attention on the page. Michael’s voice supplied the words, while Hanna’s repeated stopping and rewinding let her match what she heard to what she saw. The recordings had been sent without personal remarks or questions about her, and Michael continued to read even after she could read by herself. For him, reading aloud remained a way of speaking to her and being with her. Her new independence did not end the exchange; it gave her a way to take part in it on her own terms.

A Changing Hand and a Continuing Correspondence

After the first note, Hanna sent a steady succession of brief messages: thanks, requests for particular authors, judgments about poems and stories, and observations about prison. She wrote about the forsythia flowering in the yard, summer storms, and birds gathering to fly south. Her notes could direct Michael’s attention to details he might otherwise have missed. Her literary judgments, too, could be pointed and perceptive, even though she approached authors without knowing their historical periods and often assumed they were contemporaries.

Michael kept every note, and their sequence preserved the visible development of Hanna’s writing. At first she forced the letters toward a consistent slant and the correct proportions. Once she had gained control of those forms, her hand grew lighter and more confident. It never became fluid; instead, it acquired a severe beauty associated with the handwriting of people who have written little over a long life. The progression is not from awkwardness to effortless mastery, but from visible strain to a steadier, more assured hand.

The correspondence remained markedly unequal in form. Hanna sent written notes, while Michael never wrote back; he continued to send recordings, sometimes every week or two, sometimes only every three or four weeks. He did not establish a fixed schedule, and periods of vacation or busyness could delay the next cassette. Even when he spent a year in America, he sent tapes from there. The recordings persisted after Hanna could read independently because their function had become relational as well as instructional: they were his chosen means of speaking to her without entering ordinary written correspondence.

Reading Beyond the Lessons

Once she could read, Hanna turned to books about the concentration camps. She first requested a general bibliography and later asked for recommendations about women in the camps, both prisoners and guards. Michael’s contact sought a specialist bibliography from the Institute for Contemporary History. As soon as Hanna learned to read, she began reading about the camps; the new skill thus opened not only everyday communication and literature but also a difficult field of historical knowledge.

Her reading took place amid books on the victims, camp perpetrators, and the history of the camps. She also covered the space above her bed with quotations, poems, short articles, and recipes, which she copied or cut from newspapers and magazines. Many of the poems and pictures expressed delight in nature and a longing for it: woods in spring, flowered meadows, autumn foliage, a streamside pasture, and trees bearing ripe fruit. Literacy enabled her to gather and keep language and images that mattered to her, making reading a practice of selection as well as instruction.

Among those papers was a newspaper photograph of Michael receiving a school prize from his principal. Hanna must have made an effort to find and obtain a picture published long after she had left his city. The narrator wonders whether she had possessed it during the trial, but cannot establish that. The image nevertheless gives material form to a connection that the tape exchange had kept close and distant at once: Hanna could follow Michael’s voice and preserve traces of his life, while Michael did not understand how much she hoped he would write.

Achievement and the Cost of Delay

Seeing the pressure marks and irregular letters in Hanna’s first note made Michael proud, but it also made him sorry for her delayed and failed life. Her achievement did not erase the time in which reading and writing had been unavailable to her. The scene holds independence and loss together: the effort is real, the new capacity consequential, and the lateness itself impossible to undo. Michael cannot settle whether a long-delayed beginning is simply too late or whether late is still better than never.

The correspondence also exposes a limit in Michael’s way of being present. He had treated the tapes as a familiar arrangement that could continue indefinitely, and had never written to Hanna, although she was the only person from whom she received mail. She hoped for a letter and asked about its absence when the mail was distributed, not counting the parcels that contained his recordings as correspondence. Her newly acquired literacy made writing between them possible, but it did not by itself overcome the silence Michael maintained.

Hanna’s learning therefore has a double significance. It frees her from some of the dependence and concealment associated with illiteracy, and gives her access to literature, practical communication, and testimony about the camps. At the same time, the hard-won letters preserve the cost of arriving late: every improved line records both a new independence and years in which she could not write. Her literacy changes what she can do, but it cannot make the lost time, or the unreturned letter she wanted from Michael, disappear.