Witness to Nuremberg: The Many Lives of the Man who Translated at the Nazi War Trials by Richard W. Sonnenfeldt

Author:Richard W. Sonnenfeldt [Sonnenfeldt, Richard W.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

VI

England

I KNEW LESS THAN A HUNDRED WORDS OF ENGLISH when Mother, Helmut, and I landed at Folkestone after crossing the Channel from Ostend in Belgium. I had barely learned to roll my tongue for English arrs, replacing the German errrrhs. And there was that problem with English w’s, for vitsch there is no equivalent in German.

From Folkestone we took a train to Faversham in Kent, where we transferred to another local train. On those trains we had upholstered seats, not wooden benches as in the third-class coaches we knew in Germany. The carriages were painted bright green and shiny black, as was the locomotive, which looked so different from the grimy German locomotives. It even had some gold stripes on its sides and around the smokestack. The carriages had brass handles on the doors. It was a very cheery train. I was amazed how fast it started and rolled through the countryside, which looked like a park, so different from the drab potato, rye, and asparagus fields near Gardelegen. The English cows were brown and white and fat instead of the lean black-andwhite animals I was used to; there were sheep and goats grazing and horses galloping about in neat, hedged-in fields. The railway stations were so clean, some with flowers. It all had a vacation like feeling. In 1938, rural Kent was lovely with green leas, whitewashed stone farmhouses, neat fences, and chest-high hedges. On that first day of my new freedom in England, the morning skies were blue with fleecy white clouds. I had arrived in a wonderful New World.

A driver, who spoke with an accent I later learned to recognize as “Kent,” met us and took us to the New Herrlingen School, at Bunce Court in Otterden, near Lenham. The winding roads with tall hedges on each side led us to the front of a three-story brick manor house with many windows, dozens of chimneys, and a lovely rose garden in front. This was the main house of the school.

A boy my age took me to a two-room hut between the power shed and the chauffeur’s lodging. In the past, these huts must have been the quarters of servants employed by the lord of this manor. In our hut were four boys in two rooms. I was to share mine with Gaby Adler, a German boy who had been at the school for several years and spoke fluent English. Peter Morley and another boy shared the other room in these accommodations, which were primitive but very private. My brother was assigned a cot in a dormitory in the big house with the younger boys. They were chaperoned by a teacher and her husband, who worked in the carpentry shop.

In Prussia where I grew up, the English were regarded with awe. Perhaps that was because Germany had never won a war against England, which had prevailed against the French and the Spanish and had been a partner in the coalition that defeated Germany in World War I. In 1938, Britain still had a world empire, something Germany had aspired to but had never attained.

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