Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

When the train got under way again and finally crossed that imaginary — but oh so graphically demarcated — line, and with a hoot that sounded triumphant and joyful to my ears, stormed into the clean and colourful-looking station on the other side of the border, it brought back to me the very feeling I had known twenty years earlier. I was free! I leaned out of the window. A young fellow in a white overall was selling Coca-Cola, bananas, oranges and chocolate, there was a banging of carriage doors and from below the window came the sound of German: the language which, twenty years before, had been associated with the unfreedom whose grip I had escaped; the paradoxical transformation gave me an uneasy feeling.

2

My host lived in a residential area not far from Finchley Road tube station. I was given a room with walls covered in sabres, épées and etchings, and a comfortable soft bed, and the view was a skyline of London roofs. On the bookshelf, my host had prepared a selection of books for me, which I would have read had my restlessness not urged me to make more effective use of my time. So I hurried around the galleries and museums, attended one of the Quarter Sessions where some far senior colleagues of mine were trying a case of street assault, squeezed among the tourists at Speakers’ Corner and watched the changing of the guard outside Buckingham Palace. I took a trip to Eton to see an old English school and I even managed to get into the gallery of the House of Lords and listen to learned oratory on issues whose meaning eluded me.

In all these things, which remarkably, surprisingly and for no apparent reason, had survived for centuries, I found something admirable, something of grandeur even. At the same time, I realised just how wretched were the conditions from which I had come. I came to realise the pitiful nature of a world in which people were forever exchanging one set of rulers for another, and with them their beliefs and their history, one in which past events were forever being amended and embellished, thus depriving people of the chance to develop a sense of humility or pride; a world which, for centuries, those who wished to preserve their beliefs had fled, leaving behind those who found it easy to conform; a world where laws often ceased to apply even before they could be used, where the achievements of past generations were usually reviled and praise was reserved solely for current events; a world where fresh beginnings were made time and again in the name of something better and lasting, while in fact nothing had lasted longer than a single part of a single generation’s lifetime; a world where everything that was pure, dignified, noble or exalted aroused suspicion. How could one live in such a world? To what could one appeal, to what values, to what language, to what law, to what judge? And all I had done so far had been to contribute to that unhappy state. Without having learnt anything of the world I was born into, without understanding how it was administered and run, I had striven to change it.

One evening, my host invited over some of his friends who wanted to meet me and learn something about my country.

Of the many guests, two fascinated me in particular. One was a journalist who kept steering the conversation back to the show trials and always had a handy quotation from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky or Mao, not to mention other prophets of revolution that I’d never heard of. The other was a hermit-like bachelor of law from Massachusetts named Allan Nagel. Allan was very interested in my wartime experiences, the concentration camps and my views on capital punishment.

I recall that the conversation initially turned on the recently concluded trial of a worker alleged to have murdered a woman, who had been found guilty by the jury although there had been no direct proof. At this point the others started a lengthy debate about the jury system. I was almost entirely unfamiliar with the matters under discussion. My concerns were of a different order, or even from another time. I started to feel embarrassed at my own ignorance. I went over to the window to escape their attention. A bowl of pistachio nuts stood on the window sill (it was the first time I’d ever tasted them), while outside cars passed by in a long confused line, and above them the lights of the neon advertisements constantly changed colour.

If juries were unjust, I heard the American say, that was just one more reason why their decisions should not justify the carrying out of the supreme penalty.

The journalist (the next day he brought me several copies of the journal he edited but I did not have time to read them and I was scared to take them back home as the very headlines were rather too forthright in their advocacy of world revolution and their condemnation of imperialism of all kinds) declared that so-called judicial verdicts had already taken the lives of countless of his comrades and he would therefore have every reason to favour abolition of the death penalty. However, in his view the controversy should not be side-tracked into the question of punishment. Instead we should be considering whether the unreliability or even mercenary character of the judiciary was not a reflection of the social system as a whole. And society’s imperfections could not be eliminated through moderation, only through revolutionary change. But could we deny the revolution the right to terror? Its enemies would stifle it before it had a chance to start putting things right.

At last the conversation had touched on an issue more familiar to me. When it came to the basis of revolutionary justice I knew a thing or two. Amazingly enough, though, I didn’t start to argue with the journalist (I think I was rather deterred by his demagogic eloquence, for which I was no match in a foreign language) and I asked the American if, in his view, the death penalty should not even apply to child killers, mass murderers or war criminals.

Why should anyone suffer punishment by death? he asked. After all, by executing the murderer we did not bring the victim back to life. And I was certainly aware that even the cruellest punishments did not deter future criminals. If that held true for common criminals, it was even more true for those we termed war criminals. After all, they committed their crimes in the name of a regime in whose victory they believed. That regime offered them not only impunity but also honour for their actions, which was dignified as service to the homeland or the ideal.

He had clearly given careful thought to the question and probably read rather more of the literature on it than I had. I, on the other hand, had seen old women and old men in threadbare coats, people with one foot in the grave, who had been dragged from remote villages and transported for days on end in trucks intended for potatoes or even cattle; they were being carried off to their deaths.

When, somewhere in the civilised world, a perverted murderer killed a child, it aroused widespread outrage and indignation — the crime was talked about for weeks on end. But what about when a murderer took hold of the entire machinery of a modern state, including the army and the police, and then used it to start such a campaign of killing that the number of victims surpassed the worst we were still able to imagine? Surely in such a case the crimes exceeded not only our powers of imagination, but also all usual considerations — all customary thinking about crime and punishment.

The American listened to me attentively. Then he said that he could understand my personal concern and my indignation, but that he unfortunately took a different view. Either we perceived all human actions in terms of circumstances and mutual relations and came to the conclusion that every human life was inviolable and every infringement of its inviolability a crime, or we would remain stuck in the vicious circle of murders and their retribution.