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Authors: Elie Wiesel
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too dry. You’re not a machine. Think of your passion for the stage. The courses you took. These are the tools you should use. Each person has to come alive, every sentence has to be effulgent, and everything has to revolve around the main character.”
“I see. You shouldn’t have …”
“Don’t take it badly. But on reading you, one has the impression that you’ve never heard of this crime, am I mistaken?”
“No, you’re right,” I say in a weak voice. “You’re always right. But I warned you that…”
“That you’re not the right man for the job. Yes, I know. You’re wrong. Trust me: you can do better and you will.”
“I’ll try, Professor.”
We both hang up at the same time.
“I should have listened to you,” I say to Alika, who is still half asleep. “I shouldn’t have agreed to it.”
“Agreed to what?”
I let her sleep.
First session.
Room number 12 in the New York County Criminal Court is packed. Photographers, reporters, lawyers, legal correspondents, the German consul. They all seem to know one another. Habitués, apparently. They all speak at the same time: the weather, the baseball and football games. The stock market. The latest gossip. I can’t make sense of it. I don’t know anyone. I don’t belong to their world. Estranged from myself, I sit quietly in my corner, pen and pad in hand, my eyes wandering around the setting where a man’s future will be hanging in the balance. Will he find freedom again? Will he lose it forever? Will he win back the right to happiness? Will he become a respectable member of the human family again, or remain one of humanity’s black sheep? And what about me, what am I doing here? Where do I fit in?
A murmur sweeps through the room. The defendant is brought in; he has been cast in the part of showing how man and act can coincide, and how society judges one of its own.
Flanked by two policemen and wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, and a blue tie, Werner projects the image of an elegant man whom fate has turned into a culprit. His features are drawn, his gestures slow, he has a fixed, lackluster gaze; he doesn’t acknowledge a single familiar face—his mind is elsewhere. He walks toward his seat accompanied by his two attorneys, Michael Redford, his court-appointed lawyer, and Peter Coles, a lawyer hired by the German consulate. As the leading man in a scene whose lines he doesn’t know, he makes a successful entrance: he is the focus of attention. It is from him that we expect the truth: the explanation for an irreversible act. Is he deliberately adopting an indifferent attitude to his surroundings, to what awaits him? Where do his thoughts lead him? To the scene of the crime, up there in the mountains? Or to his victim, to whom he will be bound to his dying day, no matter what happens? Was it precisely that bond he sought to establish by committing his crime?
“He’s so young,” someone whispers. “He doesn’t look like a murderer,” says another. A third person remembers that, after all, he’s German. Therefore? You can expect anything.
What is my first impression? Guilty or not guilty? How is one to know? How can one be positive? Yet it is possible he is guilty. Why not? There had been a quarrel, that’s certain.A brusque movement, entirely unpremeditated, and the young man could easily have pushed the old man, even if he later regretted it.
Suddenly my imagination becomes fired up. I see myself with him in another setting. In a train or a café. Two strangers. In the theater? I address him with one word: Why? And he replies: Who appointed you judge?
“Ladies and gentlemen, the court is in session!”
In unison, everyone in the room stands up. Tradition first: the law demands respect. As a result, the defendant is no longer the focus of attention. The presiding judge, Robert Gardner, in his black robe, vested with specific powers whose reach only the habitués understand, is now the focal point. Everyone stares at him
“I see. You shouldn’t have …”
“Don’t take it badly. But on reading you, one has the impression that you’ve never heard of this crime, am I mistaken?”
“No, you’re right,” I say in a weak voice. “You’re always right. But I warned you that…”
“That you’re not the right man for the job. Yes, I know. You’re wrong. Trust me: you can do better and you will.”
“I’ll try, Professor.”
We both hang up at the same time.
“I should have listened to you,” I say to Alika, who is still half asleep. “I shouldn’t have agreed to it.”
“Agreed to what?”
I let her sleep.
First session.
Room number 12 in the New York County Criminal Court is packed. Photographers, reporters, lawyers, legal correspondents, the German consul. They all seem to know one another. Habitués, apparently. They all speak at the same time: the weather, the baseball and football games. The stock market. The latest gossip. I can’t make sense of it. I don’t know anyone. I don’t belong to their world. Estranged from myself, I sit quietly in my corner, pen and pad in hand, my eyes wandering around the setting where a man’s future will be hanging in the balance. Will he find freedom again? Will he lose it forever? Will he win back the right to happiness? Will he become a respectable member of the human family again, or remain one of humanity’s black sheep? And what about me, what am I doing here? Where do I fit in?
A murmur sweeps through the room. The defendant is brought in; he has been cast in the part of showing how man and act can coincide, and how society judges one of its own.
Flanked by two policemen and wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, and a blue tie, Werner projects the image of an elegant man whom fate has turned into a culprit. His features are drawn, his gestures slow, he has a fixed, lackluster gaze; he doesn’t acknowledge a single familiar face—his mind is elsewhere. He walks toward his seat accompanied by his two attorneys, Michael Redford, his court-appointed lawyer, and Peter Coles, a lawyer hired by the German consulate. As the leading man in a scene whose lines he doesn’t know, he makes a successful entrance: he is the focus of attention. It is from him that we expect the truth: the explanation for an irreversible act. Is he deliberately adopting an indifferent attitude to his surroundings, to what awaits him? Where do his thoughts lead him? To the scene of the crime, up there in the mountains? Or to his victim, to whom he will be bound to his dying day, no matter what happens? Was it precisely that bond he sought to establish by committing his crime?
“He’s so young,” someone whispers. “He doesn’t look like a murderer,” says another. A third person remembers that, after all, he’s German. Therefore? You can expect anything.
What is my first impression? Guilty or not guilty? How is one to know? How can one be positive? Yet it is possible he is guilty. Why not? There had been a quarrel, that’s certain.A brusque movement, entirely unpremeditated, and the young man could easily have pushed the old man, even if he later regretted it.
Suddenly my imagination becomes fired up. I see myself with him in another setting. In a train or a café. Two strangers. In the theater? I address him with one word: Why? And he replies: Who appointed you judge?
“Ladies and gentlemen, the court is in session!”
In unison, everyone in the room stands up. Tradition first: the law demands respect. As a result, the defendant is no longer the focus of attention. The presiding judge, Robert Gardner, in his black robe, vested with specific powers whose reach only the habitués understand, is now the focal point. Everyone stares at him
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