Abstract
In 2025, the Bloomsbury Advances in Translation series published a book by Peter Davies, Professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK, on court interpreting and the role of interpreters in interactions between the court and the witness. This book explores the work of interpreters during one of the most important trials of the 20th century, namely the First Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, which took place from December 20, 1963, to August 20, 1965, during which 25 members of the SS staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp were tried.
The witnesses’ testimonies and the trial itself were recorded on tape and then archived. Nowadays, the 454 volumes of files in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial archive, comprising 183 days of hearings, are stored at the Hessian Main State Archives in Wiesbaden, Germany. They include 430 hours of recordings of the testimony of 319 witnesses (including 181 survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp and 80 members of the camp staff, the SS, and the police) on 103 tapes. The recorded proceedings are digitalised and freely available online at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main https://www.auschwitz-prozess.de/. Since 2017, the recording of the main proceedings of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial has been included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
The graphic representation of tape reels on the cover of Davies’ book foreshadows its theme. This audio medium contains the authentic voices of witnesses, lawyers, and, above all, interpreters who, despite countless legal, linguistic, cultural, and especially ethical challenges, conveyed the truth about the Holocaust. The tapes and the voices of interpreters and witnesses are the central theme of this study.
These recordings show how specific ritualised communication takes place in the courtroom, where power relations, trust, cooperation, and often conflicts between the parties to the proceedings are unique and have far-reaching consequences. This includes consequences both for the interpreters’ work and for the interpreters themselves. Above all, as Davies writes in the Introduction, we can hear how the courtroom becomes “[a] scene for a dramatic negotiation about the quality and value of the voices of survivor-witnesses and how they are heard” (p. 5). In the Frankfurt courtroom, testimonies given in 11 languages (Czech, Dutch, English, French, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and Yiddish) were interpreted by 16 interpreters, often without certified status or professional experience in a situation of unequal context, hostile questioning, and institutional power. Davies’ study is therefore devoted to the work of interpreters, which constitutes “the vital contribution [. . .] to creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge about [Auschwitz and] the Holocaust” (p. 11). At the same time, it is a tribute to the survivor-witnesses who came to Frankfurt to give an account of what they had experienced and what they would certainly like to erase from their memory. Interpreters were needed to convey these testimonies.
Prior to the Frankfurt trial, between 1946 and 1948, a series of seven trials were held in Poland before the Supreme National Tribunal to try Nazi war criminals. The trial of Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, was held in Warsaw from 11 March until 2 April 1947. It was followed by the trial of 40 SS staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, the so-called First Auschwitz trial, held in Cracow, from 24 November until 22 December 1947. In a separate publication, I have explored the ways in which the Polish official policy framework for court interpreting had been developed in response to the problems of recruiting interpreters and establishing standards of trust, control, and institutional power in a multilingual legal setting (Tryuk, 2016).
The subject of Davies’ study is the (mis)communication in the courtroom, in which interpreters gave voice to the survivor-witnesses. The author explores the recorded and transcribed trial materials in order to show:
the courtroom and its rituals, as well as the asymmetrical model of communication in this setting; relationships of power, trust, and control, in particular the power exercised by the judicial institution over participants and their specific way of expression;
the multilingualism of the trial: witnesses not only used their native language, and, to a certain level, their knowledge of German, but often mixed languages in their way of speaking. The multilingualism of the courtroom, the conscious or unconscious mixing of languages, and the use of camp jargon, i.e., lagerspracha, as well as a specific Nazi variety of German (Klemperer, 2006), posed professional and ethical challenges for interpreters who undertook the difficult task of conveying testimonies in standard German legal language appropriate for the courtroom;
the role of interpreters in this complex communication situation and the ethical choices involved in interpreting. During the trial, the interpreters’ work was not only monitored by the court, the witnesses, and often by the assembled audience, but also subject to constant pressure. Physical and mental exhaustion became a constant feature of their work.
Davies’ study concerns the three-way communication between the court, the witness, and the interpreter and addresses the issues of agency of witnesses, the responsibility of interpreters, and the trust placed in their work by the survivor-witnesses and the court.
In legal translation, the standards of accuracy, impartiality, and confidentiality constitute a set of rules that translators must adhere to. However, the courtroom is also a place where different persons wish to show their authority, as they are in charge of various aspects of a complex communicative situation. Therefore, it is more appropriate to distinguish a different set of concepts specific to this setting: trust, power, and control. Davies’ study on the Frankfurt trial provides insights into how trust, between the court, the witnesses, and the interpreter, as well as the power and control exercised by the judicial institution, were resolved through cooperation between the participants, despite the conflicts that inevitably arose. In the courtroom, interpreters convey the ways of expressing of the witnesses, and at the same time, they must make them “compatible with the court’s assumptions, procedures, and discursive practices” (p. 24). Therefore, the key task of the interpreters who “mediate between [. . .] different ways of knowing, [is] to organize the discourse of witnesses in such a way it registers as valid testimony in court” (p. 30) and to reconcile the trust of witnesses and the court in the interpreter.
The issue of trust is at the heart of the author’s considerations, who problematises it as follows: [i]n order to gain the highest institutional acknowledgment of their work, interpreters have to work hard at accruing both “thick” and “thin” trust, that is, trust based on personal relationships versus trust based on institutional or bureaucratic procedures, for example, the approval of qualifications: they must fulfill professional obligations while also developing status and personal approval with significant individuals within the institution. (p. 77)
The interpreters had to find the right balance between these forms of trust in their activities in the Frankfurt courtroom.
The first part of the study (People and Languages) focuses on the main participants in the communication situation that was the Frankfurt trial, i.e., the witnesses, their languages, and their verbal and non-verbal modes of expression, their articulations, emotions, outbursts of anger, and the interpreters and their working conditions, including their remuneration, which was intended to demonstrate their professionalism and status. The author presents profiles of 11 interpreters appointed to interpret during the trial. He also draws attention to the anonymous language intermediaries who participated in various capacities and to varying degrees in the preparatory phase of the trial. Thanks to their work, the knowledge about the Holocaust became “visible and graspable” (p. 54).
The book devotes most of its space to the biography of court interpreter Wera Kapkajew, a lawyer by profession, born in Poland in 1918, who worked as an interpreter from and into Polish and Russian in this and subsequent trials in Frankfurt (see also Davies, 2022). As two-thirds of the witnesses summoned to Frankfurt came from Poland, Kapkajew became a very visible and active participant in the trial. Her work attracted the attention of the German and international press at the time, which assessed her actions in various ways, although not always positively. Thanks to her competence, empathy, and understanding of the physical and emotional difficulties experienced by witnesses, Kapkajew was able to establish relationships with them and with the court and gain “‘thick’ trust with the witness[es] [. . .] through her emotional responses, personal interest in the survivors, and shared national identity” (p. 91).
The complex nature of the work of court interpreters during trials of war criminals, including those that took place in recent times, is presented in the second part of the book (Methods). Davies stresses that interpreters in the courtroom do more than just translate words. They also speak on behalf of witnesses and convey their emotions, sense of loss, pain, trauma, and the complexities of memories of dramatic events and experiences. Thanks to their professional skills and their ethical and responsible approach to interpreting, witnesses can be seen and heard.
During the Frankfurt trial, it was decided that witnesses’ testimonies would be interpreted consecutively, although in earlier war crimes trials, starting with the Nuremberg trials and trials in Poland, simultaneous interpretation had been used. The choice of this mode of interpretation, as the author emphasises, “draws attention to the quality and immediacy of the speaking voice, which is estranged by the technology of simultaneous interpreting” (p. 98). Davies argues that consecutive interpreting highlights the act of translation itself, making shifts between languages and linguistic discontinuities clear to listeners. This mode lets the audience hear both the original speech and the interpreter’s version and enables them to judge the speaker’s sincerity, emotional state, and reliability, as well as to assess the interpreter’s performance (p. 98).
In Frankfurt, the court hearings were recorded on tape, and transcripts of the testimonies were then prepared. Davies’ analysis is based on these recordings and transcripts. For the purposes of his study, the author translated the analysed fragments of courtroom interactions into English. Considering the challenges posed by the multilingualism of the witnesses and their difficulties in expressing themselves in a coherent and comprehensible manner, often using a mixture of languages or camp jargon, the author’s decisions regarding the transcription and translation of the quoted statements deserve the highest praise.
The third central part of the work (Interpreting in the Frankfurt Courtroom) is devoted entirely to the interpreting aspect of the Frankfurt trial, court interpreting standards, institutional control of interpreters’ work, and the ethical challenges they faced. The author focuses on moments where issues arise with interpreting that illustrate the concerns of this study: insider-outsider status, relationships of trust between the participants, and the question of power and language ideologies.
As mentioned, the process was multilingual; therefore, the variety and hybridity of testimonies and the necessity to translate everything into a specific form of German legal discourse were one of the defining features of the Frankfurt trial. The role of the interpreter was to solve language and communication problems. Some witnesses from Poland spoke fluent German, others understood the judge’s questions but answered in Polish, and others switched languages and used camp jargon. A particular challenge for Kapkajew was translating the testimony of Simon Gotland, a Jew born in Poland who had been living in France for many years and spoke a peculiar mixture of tongues. His way of expression was characterised by emotion, anger, and frustration at his inability to convey his truth about the Holocaust. She supported him emotionally, sometimes added drama to his statements, asked questions, prompted him with forgotten words, and sometimes the witness addressed her directly. She never lost sight of the institutional structure of the court and the power relations at its centre, with the witness and herself at the heart of it all. She acted as a mediator between the worlds of the witness and the court and also as a person who made the testimony possible in the first place. At the same time, she provided the testimony in a form appropriate to the situation and institution. She was able to convey the “sound” of the First Frankfurt Trial (p. 131) with its different modes of speaking bearing a complex, political, ideological, and emotional load.
Trust in the interpreter, and through his or her actions, in the witness, is the central issue in any trial, also during a war crimes trial. The interpreter is under constant scrutiny by those involved in the interaction, during which “the linguistic rituals and spatial organization of the courtroom are designated to control and structure the dramatic exchange and clash of voices” (p. 150). In the part devoted to institutional norms and expectations of the court, Davies discusses numerous situations and provides multilingual examples in which interpreting, power hierarchies, language (mis)use, or (mis)communication become visible and need to be negotiated between participants and the interpreter.
In general, in the courtroom, the interpreter must convey the content of a testimony in a way that is appropriate to the situation and decides whether to interpret and how to interpret in an acceptable legal language. A witness may understand this differently. During the Frankfurt trial, Kapkajew created a discourse in accordance with court rules. Her approach to interpretation stemmed from a series of ethical decisions made while translating accounts of extreme suffering and violence. During that trial, when dramatic statements were full of emotion and expressions, she often needed to calm the witness down or even to silence him. In this difficult and complex communication, the court supervised the work of the interpreter, who endeavoured to “ensure that [the witnesses’] interests are represented and their voices are heard” (p. 169). Witnesses themselves, and sometimes the audience gathered in the courtroom, could provide support or critique to the interpreter. The witness monitored the interpreter, confirmed the words, or corrected her. Also, at times, Kapkajew took responsibility for errors, even when they originated with the witness (p. 189). In many cases, witnesses projected their anxiety about testifying onto the relationship with the interpreter. For example, this happened during the testimony of Polish witness Józef Kral, who recounted tortures he endured in the camp. He spoke slowly, clearly, with pauses, controlling the interpreter. This was particularly difficult for Kapkajew, and it created ethical dilemmas that could not be resolved by any institutional codes or simple direction to interpret “word for word.” Davies draws attention to decisions of interpreters to provide additional explanations or reproduce the witness’s statements in the third person as part of a responsible strategy adopted by the interpreter in order to protect the witness. However, this strategy may also serve the purpose of protecting oneself when recounting the unspeakable horrors of the camp (Tryuk, 2016).
For the most part, witnesses developed a positive working relationship with Kapkajew, as she provided opportunities to intervene in their interests. She understood the sardonic manner of expression used by some witnesses in difficult situations (p. 225) and went beyond her role as an interpreter, and in a few situations, she allowed herself some irony. However, when translating Nazi terminology used by the witness, such as Sortierung [sorting objects], she opted for the commonly understood, neutral German word Selektion [selection].
The last, fourth part of the study (The work of the Interpreter Wera Kapkajew) is devoted to an in-depth analysis of interpreting by Kapkajew of two testimonies of survivors, Anna Palarczyk and Simon Gotland.
Anna Palarczyk, a lawyer from Poland, spoke a standard, educated Polish language, while Simon Gotland from France used a mixture of languages (Polish, German, French, Yiddish, and some lagerszpracha). This analysis provides an opportunity to explore how the relationships and interactions between the interpreter, the witnesses, and the court developed during long interrogations. Kapkajew organised the testimony in such a way that it was usable and comprehensible to the court. She was the voice of Palarczyk; she “voiced the witness who was heard in the courtroom, even where she is not heard by the court” (p. 245).
While interpreting Simon Gotland’s testimonies, the interpreter adapted a different strategy towards the witness: she was not only his voice. She supported him, and at the same time, she disciplined his incoherent expression. She created a new form of coherence from his testimony that the court found useful. Gotland’s language was a mixture of languages with fragments in lagerszpracha, the only linguistic means to speak about the experience of the camp (Gramling, 2012; Kuhiwczak, 2007). As Davies notes, this exceptional witness had, an extraordinary story, told in a power language that needs to be listened to on his own terms. [. . .] His language use is therefore meaningful, not chaotic, characterized by richness, not deficit; just as much as the content of his narrative, his language use is his testimony (p. 271–272).
Kapkajew participated in discussions about the witness and his supposed incoherence; she also took on the key role of defining him as a monolingual witness.
Many years after the war, the survivors of the Holocaust shared their testimonies about deportations and imprisonment. These testimonies are of exceptional importance both for research on the Holocaust and for translation studies, as the archival material opens up new research perspectives on how these unique testimonies were translated. When translating survivors’ narratives, translators face many challenges. The language used by survivors not only says a lot about them but also documents the context and reflects the spirit of the times in which they lived and suffered. The risk of losing valuable information is therefore high. During a trial, as it was the case of the Frankfurt trial, the hearings conducted with the participation of an interpreter, also in the presence of other people in the courtroom, reveal numerous tensions and unequal relationships between the participants. From this point of view, interpreting testimony is such a demanding and responsible task. The respect for the truth, the pursuit of justice, and the transmission of the memory of the Holocaust in the interpretation of the testimonies can only be possible through a better understanding and trust between witnesses and interpreters. Davies convincingly demonstrates how it was possible during the Frankfurt trial and how the interpreters managed to ensure the witnesses that they and their testimonies would be heard.
Allow me to conclude on a personal note related to Davies’ study. I am the daughter of a survivor of Nazi concentration camps. I remember how, in the late 1960s, my father was looking at a photo album about a German company. Suddenly, he pointed at someone in the photo and said, “That’s my kapo.” He recognised him in a photo of a group of employees of that company. This man was never arrested, tried, or convicted. This is why this book is so important to understand the testimonies of survivor-witnesses in the post-war Germany, the value of the work of interpreters, and their contribution to the memory of the Holocaust.
