Israel enters the novel as both the home of a crucial witness and the setting for a short, uneasy extension of the trial. The surviving mother remains there while her daughter comes to Germany to testify; when the court travels to Israel to depose the mother, Michael stays behind, unable to study and caught between memories of his former intimacy with Hanna and imagined scenes of her crimes. The visit thus joins legal fact-finding to the novel’s account of distance, memory, and the limits of witnessing.

The witness and the trial

The court’s journey to Israel follows the investigation into the deaths of several hundred women locked in a village church during a bombing and fire. Two prisoners survived: a mother and daughter. The daughter wrote and published in America a book about the camp and the westward march. She traveled to Germany for the trial, while the mother remained in Israel. The mother’s evidence mattered because she and her daughter had been inside the church and could testify to their own experience, but could not see what happened outside or identify every person responsible for the failure to open the doors. The prosecution and defense therefore planned to travel to Israel to depose her; Michael identifies that hearing as the only part of the trial he did not attend.

The case also involved the camp’s monthly selections. About sixty women were sent from Auschwitz to the satellite camp each month, and a roughly equal number were sent back, less those who had died. The women sent back were those no longer considered able to work, and the defendants knew that they would be killed. The church-fire charge raised a distinct evidentiary problem: the survivors could describe the fire and the locked doors from inside, while other witnesses were needed to establish who was outside and what they might have done. Israel’s role in the trial is therefore concrete but limited: it is where the court seeks the account of a survivor whose testimony can illuminate the catastrophe without resolving every question of responsibility.

The court’s journey

In June, the court flew to Israel for two weeks, although the hearing itself lasted only a few days. The judge and prosecutors combined their official business with visits to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the Negev, and the Red Sea. Michael considers the trip bizarre, even while acknowledging that its conduct, vacations, and expenses were apparently within the rules. His response marks a tension between formal propriety and the moral gravity of the proceedings: a journey made to hear a survivor’s testimony also takes on the character of a tour.

Michael had planned to use the two weeks to study, but could not concentrate on his professors or books. His mind repeatedly wandered into images. The contrast is important: while the court conducts a brief hearing in Israel, he experiences the trial not as a bounded legal schedule but as an intrusive return of scenes he cannot put in order. Israel is a place the court reaches; for Michael, the journey’s duration becomes a measure of his inability to keep the trial at a distance.

Memory at a distance

During his time away from the proceedings, Michael imagines Hanna beside the burning church, in a black uniform with a riding whip, and recalls her overseeing work and giving orders in the camp. He also imagines the church fire and its aftermath. These scenes are not presented as fresh eyewitness knowledge. They are images generated in his mind alongside remembered moments of intimacy: Hanna in the kitchen, by the bathtub, on her bicycle, in his father’s study, and listening to him read. The remembered lover and the imagined guard do not remain separate; the images merge, unsettling his confidence in his own memories.

Michael recognizes that his visions are crude, unfair clichés of the Hanna he knew, yet their force continues to undermine and mingle with his personal recollections. His account places a limit on what imaginative reconstruction can do: it can make absent violence mentally present, but it can also distort both the past and the person remembered. The hearing in Israel proceeds through testimony and legal procedure; Michael’s private version of the past is formed at a distance, through repetition and images he knows are inadequate.

Israel and the novel’s ethical frame

The trip brings together several kinds of distance: the physical distance between the German court and the mother in Israel, the gap between the survivors’ limited vantage point and the events outside the church, and Michael’s emotional separation from a trial in which the woman he loved is accused. The court can seek testimony, but the evidence remains bounded by what witnesses saw and could know. That boundary matters in a case where the defendants’ presence, the orders they may have received, and the possibility of intervention by villagers are not interchangeable questions.

The novel also sets the trial’s legal work against a wider postwar reckoning. Michael recalls how his generation treated the Nazi past as a lived moral burden: students challenged their parents’ generation for tolerating perpetrators after 1945, and public continuities in courts, government, and universities sustained shame. Yet assigning blame to others did not free him from his own entanglement. He had loved Hanna, and the finger he pointed at her seemed to turn back toward himself. Against that background, Israel is not a solution to the trial’s moral questions. It is the destination of a witness whose account is indispensable but incomplete, and the setting for a journey that exposes the distance between hearing evidence, understanding crime, and settling responsibility.