Witness at Nuremberg

Patricia van der Elst is a veteran interpreter living in Brussels. She was born Patricia Jordan in 1926, the only child of English parents living in Berlin. She grew up in Germany, England, and in French-speaking Switzerland, thus becoming trilingual. Soon after graduating from the School of Interpreters in Geneva she was hired to work at the war-crimes trials in Nuremberg.

"My memories of Germany before the war are something that people don't always understand. To me, Germans were quite normal people. It was only towards the end that some Germans were not normal, insofar as they were nasty Nazis.

"We had a lot of Jewish friends as well, in Berlin. Jews were used to 'difficult periods' all over the place: Poland, Russia, even England ages ago - so when they started being discriminated against, they thought it was just another one of those things to avoid. There were people who knew the war was coming - my father, for instance - but a lot of people thought the 'vexation' of Hitler would pass…

"I was sent to a German school. The Nazi ideology didn't impinge until about 1936. I remember it being explained to us that Jesus was not really a Jew, since Mary was 'not Jewish'. Mary was - allegedly - of Germanic descent - she belonged to some Germanic tribe which had worked its way down Italy and across the Mediterranean to Palestine!

"We had a couple of teachers who were Nazis. I remember one in particular, Fraulein Prestin. She was an elegant, interesting woman who could talk about anything: music, literature, everything. I only found out she was a Nazi when she wrote me a letter while I was on holiday, and she had just heard a speech by Hitler, and she was saying, oh, what a marvellous man he was. Later, I realised that there were a lot of people like that, who were intelligent and normal, but they went haywire when they allowed this man to invade their heads.

"I had two Jewish school friends. Luckily they left in 1938. Thank goodness the parents were wealthy enough to pay the ransome which they had to pay to get out.

"When the war broke out in 1939, my mother got a phone call to be on the train to Copenhagen by two o'clock. [Patricia's parents were now separated, though in contact.] So, a few panicky phone calls, friends came, my mother gave them the key to the flat, my father's secretary came and my mother gave her the fur coats in storage. Oh, yes, we left everything in Berlin. The fur coats too! But it's one of the reasons why I can really can go anywhere and leave everything behind me."

[Pat and her mother spent some time in London, living in Wimbledon. And then they went to Switzerland for the duration of the war, where her father had a consular job with the American FBI.]

"My father was one of those men who should never have married. His parents had tried to make a priest of him - he was a loner. My parents had an amicable separation, though. They didn't divorce because my father would have lost his job with the FBI. I never suffered from the fact that my parents were separated. Any rows they had were not within my hearing.

"Lausanne did get a bit boring. You couldn't move in or out of Switzerland. But I studied History, Literature and Languages at the university there. Then I went to the School of Interpreters, which was part of the University of Geneva. It was run by Professor Velleman, the Belgian who had founded it. He spoke 30 languages.

"The success rate at this school was one per cent. With interpreting, you can either do it, or you can't. It is almost like acting - it's putting on a performance. When I interpret for somebody, I am not myself: I am his mouthpiece. So if somebody advocates murdering all lawyers, and is advocating this with great sincerity and enthusiasm, I must sound equally enthusiastic. Though there are certain conferences I would not accept. I never wanted to work for the Communist Party - they talk in formulas, and it's all so dishonest. It's a thing of the past now, but it was a very serious issue for many years.

"Anyway, I got my degree in Geneva. I was then working for a Bulgarian general - a very funny man and very rich - who was scheming to put Grand Duke Cyril on the throne of Russia, when it was suggested to me that I should put my name forward to go to Nuremberg. The Americans were looking for interpreters. And so I did the test, and was I one of the six selected to go.

"Europe was awash with displaced people in 1946. And getting to Nuremberg by train --- there were many delays and upset timetables. When I arrived in Nuremberg - the whole place was flattened: only the Court House was left, and so was the Grand Hotel, where I was lodged. The Germans were utterly defeated. It was rather horrible.

"I was engaged to translate from French into English. Mostly they were French lawyers and French judges.

"When I got to the court-room, I saw all the Nazis in a row. It was very odd to see these people so close. Some of them were really terrible - Streicher, for instance. A dreadful man. And their behaviour in Nuremberg illustrated the attitudes they had to each other. You could see that by their body language.

"Goering was a highly educated and intelligent man. His one aberrant feature was that he adored Hitler. But Goering despised the other accused. He thought they were riff-raff - and they were. He was very fascinated by my friend Genia Rossoff, who was in the French booth interpreting from Russian. She was a redhead - he kept looking at her.

"Hess you could see was totally mad. I was in the court-room when he made his last speech. He spoke about the eyes that were following him all over the place. Clearly, mad.

"At Nuremberg we worked hard and we played hard and we drank a lot. I'm glad my parents didn't know what was going on!

"I was brought up with the idea that Nice Girls Don't, but I quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't what I believed. Once I left university there was no need for me to remain a Nice Girl. But whatever you do in your private life, you should be discreet. And being sexually liberated is one thing, but being promiscuous is another. I had a special boyfriend - a lawyer, much older than I was - so that was fun.

"Yet (for all the drinking and sex) people only wanted to stay there for a given amount of time. It was a strain. I was there for the last four months of the trial: I was 21 when I started - and ten years older when I left.

Pat worked for Unesco in Paris and finally came to Brussels, where she began working for what was then the Common Market, in the 1960s. She also married her Belgian husband and had two sons.

"I was involved with the Common Market when the U.K. were starting negotiations. I did French and German to English. I also did the interpreting for Heath and Geoffrey Ripon.

"At the beginning the British made a very good impression. But then they went native and began to waffle like everyone. They took on the Common Market culture. The EU is all horse-trading. Even that Buttiglione row was all about horse-trading between the left and the right. And there is an awful lot of incompetence. A lot of people don't know what they're talking about. And somebody like John Prescott - they can hardly speak their mother tongue.

"But for many political speeches now, you can fudge a lot of the stuff. You know what they're going to say. General culture, too, has declined over the years. Perhaps less among the French - they still make an effort to have some high culture in their background.

"There are so many different languages now that interpreting has to be done by double relay: everything from, say, Latvian or Rumanian into either French, German or English, and then relayed again. It can be reliable enough - it was done proficiently in the Supreme Soviet - but there is more room for error.

"Everything is harder as you get older. It is certainly harder to absorb new material. But you can also draw on your experience, and what you are good at doing, you can go on doing for a long time. I am not full-time any more - it's been decided, anyway, that older people should make room for younger colleagues. Fair enough. We have no monopoly.

"But I still enjoy doing some work. When words are used cleverly, that's when interpreting can be very difficult but also wonderfully rewarding ." The Oldie. February 2005. ENDS

The Oldie. May 2004