Strut-Natzweiler Concentration Camp

Struthof, the concentration camp in Alsace that Michael visits during and later recalls after Hanna’s trial, becomes a test of whether physical presence can make historical atrocity comprehensible. He goes because photographs, testimony, and his own merging images of Hanna and the camps have left him with a thin, clichéd conception of the past. Yet at the site, the remains and explanatory information do not enable him to imagine the camp’s former life in concrete detail. His visit therefore does not bring emotional resolution: it leaves him confronting the limits of representation, the persistence of numbness, and the difficulty of understanding Hanna while condemning her crime.

Setting and First Visit

Michael decides to leave after the trial’s images of Hanna in the camp and of her earlier life have become entangled in his mind. He would have gone to Auschwitz immediately if he could, but obtaining a visa would take weeks. Instead, he chooses Struthof in Alsace because it is the nearest concentration camp and one he has never seen. He hopes that reality will displace the stock images through which he has so far imagined the camps.

The journey does not begin as a solemn pilgrimage. Michael hitchhikes, first riding with a truck driver who drinks beer and then with a Mercedes driver wearing white gloves. After Strasbourg, another driver takes him toward Schirmeck, a small town near the camp. Once Michael says where he is headed, the driver falls silent; later, he stops the car and orders Michael out. Michael continues on foot. With no cars passing in either direction, he hears birds, wind in the trees, and a stream before reaching the camp after a quarter of an hour.

The Site and Its Remains

When Michael returns years later, he sees the camp in winter. The grounds lie on a sloping mountain terrace overlooking the Vosges, bright with snow. Gray-blue wooden watchtowers and barracks stand against the white landscape; barbed wire remains at the entrance and around the grounds, beside the sign identifying the concentration camp. Snow covers the spaces where barracks once stood so completely that the terrain could be mistaken for a sledding slope beside cheerful holiday buildings. The scene’s ordinary, attractive appearance is inseparable from what the site was, yet does not make that past visible.

The camp is closed. As Michael walks through the snow, he remembers his first visit: steps between the foundations of former barracks, crematorium ovens displayed in another barrack, and cells in a separate one. He had tried to reconstruct the camp by studying a barrack, consulting an informational booklet to estimate its capacity, and imagining the crowding. He had learned that the steps were also used for roll call and tried to fill them, in his mind, with rows of prisoners. The effort failed, leaving him with a sense of shameful inadequacy rather than a convincing picture of the past.

Further down the hill, he notices a small white house across from a restaurant. A sign identifies it as a former gas chamber, but its ordinary doors and sandstone-framed windows make it look like a barn, shed, or servants’ quarters. Unsure whether he entered it on his first visit, Michael stays in his car, leaves the motor running, and looks at the building before driving on. Its unremarkable appearance offers no visible measure of what happened there.

Memory, Representation, and Numbness

The visit follows a trial during which Michael’s feelings have been numbed. He describes his emotional state through the image of an arm under anesthetic: the mind recognizes that a hand is pinching it, but sensation does not return simply because the blood begins to flow again. This detachment extends beyond the courtroom. He watches himself function at university and among his family and friends without feeling inwardly involved.

Michael also notices numbness spreading through the trial. The prosecutors struggle to sustain their initial response to the facts; judges and lay members, first visibly shocked by testimony, later return to ordinary expressions, whisper to one another, and sometimes grow impatient with a witness who loses the thread. Students who attend only weekly experience renewed horror each time, while Michael, present every day, observes them with detachment. He compares this habituation with accounts of survivors and perpetrators for whom camp life and killing became ordinary, while admitting his unease at placing perpetrators, victims, the dead, survivors, and their descendants in parallel.

The images that accompany the trial are not limited to the site. Michael sees Hanna in a black uniform near a burning church, but also remembers her in domestic and intimate settings: in the kitchen, beside the bathtub, on her bicycle, in his father’s study, and listening to him read. These memories collide with images of the camp and with fantasies that he knows are inadequate and unfair to the Hanna he knew. They nevertheless undermine his memories and merge with his imagined camps. The trial’s central difficulty thus follows him to Struthof: historical images and private recollections overlap, but neither makes the other easier to comprehend.

Michael reflects that, at the time, direct observation of the camps was scarce. Familiar images included the Auschwitz gate, wooden bunks, collected personal belongings, and photographs of corpses at Bergen-Belsen; some survivor testimony had appeared soon after the war and then disappeared from publishers’ lists until the 1980s. Later books and films, including the television series Holocaust and films such as Sophie’s Choice and Schindler’s List, made the camps more present in collective imagination, which could now supplement and embellish what people knew. In the earlier period Michael recalls, a few photographs and testimonies repeatedly returned until they hardened into clichés. His visit to Struthof adds another impression, but not the access to reality he had wanted.

Aftermath and Unresolved Judgment

After the first visit, Michael sits beneath the memorial above the camp and looks down over the grounds. What he finds within himself is emptiness, as though the search for an inward glimpse has discovered nothing. His return years later does not overturn that experience. On the way home he recognizes that his embarrassment about seeking a restaurant for lunch is not genuine feeling but an awareness of how people are expected to feel after visiting a concentration camp. He notices the distinction, then eats at a restaurant in a Vosges village whose name recalls Hanna’s way of calling him a child.

The journey leaves Michael with a moral conflict he cannot settle. He wants both to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it, but feels that attempting either task excludes the other: understanding seems to weaken the condemnation the crime demands, while condemnation leaves no room for understanding. Yet failing to understand Hanna feels like betraying her again. The camp visit gives him no solution. On the next day’s return journey, the city seems strange after his absence, but the world of the camps does not feel closer. His impressions of Struthof join his few existing images of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and freeze alongside them. Rather than replacing clichés with mastery, the location exposes how little seeing, remembering, and imagining can accomplish—and how the obligation to judge remains unresolved.