The rule at the ICC is first person.
Renata learned this her second day, when the senior interpreter corrected her mid-sentence. Not “she says she was in the kitchen.” Just “I was in the kitchen.” The court requires it. The interpreter vanishes. Becomes the witness’s mouth.
Fifteen years. She has been four hundred people.
She doesn’t count, actually. The number comes from the admin office, when they run the statistics for the annual report: four hundred and eleven witness sessions, Polish-to-English and English-to-Polish, with occasional Belarusian and Ukrainian. Renata Kowalska, Staff Interpreter, Courtroom Three. The statistics don’t capture what she knows, which is that after four hundred people she can no longer hear the differences between them.
Not the content. The content varies—murders, displacements, a man in Courtroom Three last Tuesday describing how his brother was loaded onto a truck, the specific detail of mud on the tailgate. The content is distinct. What has become the same is the sound. Her sound. Every testimony arrives through the particular way she breathes before a subordinate clause, the rhythm she’s carried since childhood of ending sentences a quarter-tone lower than where they started.
She can hear it now. She couldn’t, the first five years. The professional training insists that interpretation is transparency—a window, not a wall. She believed this. Then she reviewed a recording of herself interpreting two different witnesses in the same week, one a sixty-year-old woman from Mariupol and the other a twenty-three-year-old conscript from Lviv, and the cadence was identical. The pacing, the pauses, the way grief became measured in her mouth. She’d given them both the same voice. Hers.
She reported this to her supervisor. Dr. Bakker listened carefully, nodded, and said: “Yes. That’s interpretation.”
What he meant, Renata thinks now, was: the window is the wall. This is known. This has always been known. The policy is first person anyway because the alternative—acknowledging the interpreter as a participant—would make every trial a different trial. The fiction of transparency is structural. It holds the building up.
She’s thought about quitting. Not often. Twice, maybe. Both times after marathon sessions where the testimony was bad enough that she carried it home in her mouth, the words still there in the shower, and she thought: whose memory is this? She saw the kitchen with the blood on the linoleum. She was there when the soldiers came. She, Renata, from Katowice, who has never been to Bucha, was there, because the first-person rule puts her there, and the memory doesn’t fully go back when the session ends.
This is what she’s learned: each testimony deposits something. Not the content—the content fades, thank God. What deposits is something smaller. A rhythm. A way of pausing before the worst part. A tendency to start with the weather, because witnesses almost always start with the weather, as if the sky’s indifference is the first thing they need to establish. These deposits accumulate. They shape the channel. So the next testimony that comes through is already shaped by all the previous ones, the way a riverbed shapes the water that is also shaping the riverbed.
And then Elżbieta Motyka comes in.
Renata reads the witness sheet: Polish national, born 1951, Opole Voivodeship. Rural, probably. The lawyers prep the interpreters for dialect issues—sometimes the witnesses speak a regional Polish that requires adjustment. The sheet says: “May use Silesian expressions.”
Silesian. Renata’s mother spoke Silesian. Spoke it and was told not to—the schoolteachers in Katowice called it incorrect Polish, peasant Polish, not-really-Polish. Her mother stopped speaking it in public by twenty-five and spoke it only at home, only to Renata, only before bed. A language for the dark. Renata hasn’t heard it since she was twelve, since the funeral, since the house in Katowice was sold and the dialect went with it.
Mrs. Motyka takes the stand. She’s small. Her hands are folded on the table like she’s waiting for a meal she doesn’t expect. The lawyer asks the first question and Mrs. Motyka begins to speak, and Renata—
It isn’t Silesian, exactly. It’s Polish with Silesian underneath. The vowels are rounder. The consonants are softer in places standard Polish keeps them hard. And there are words—frelka for a young girl, gryfny for something beautiful—that don’t have Polish equivalents, that exist only in the dialect, that Renata hasn’t heard since her mother’s mouth.
Renata begins to interpret. First person. “I lived on Kolejowa Street. The house had a red roof.”
But the words aren’t coming from the place they usually come from. The usual place is professional—the trained channel, the fifteen-year riverbed, smooth and efficient. What’s happening now is that something underneath is answering. The Silesian words arrive and they don’t enter the professional channel. They enter somewhere older. Somewhere that doesn’t have the cadence of four hundred previous witnesses.
She hears herself say: “I lived on Kolejowa Street. The house had a red roof. My daughter was seven.”
The cadence is different. She can hear it. She sounds—not like herself. Not like the four-hundred-witness Renata. Like someone younger. The vowels are rounder than her professional vowels. The pauses are in different places—not before the subordinate clause, where she’s trained to breathe, but after the subject, the way her mother used to pause, as if the person needed to be named and then held for a moment before the sentence could continue.
She doesn’t stop. Can’t. The testimony continues and she continues and the sound coming out of her is not quite Renata Kowalska, Staff Interpreter, Courtroom Three. Something older is in the room.
The lawyers don’t notice. The judges don’t notice. Dr. Bakker, monitoring from the glass booth, notes nothing unusual. The transcript will show standard English. The record won’t carry whatever is happening in Renata’s throat.
Mrs. Motyka describes the soldiers coming. Renata says: “I was in the kitchen. I heard the trucks.” And the I is—who? The professional first person, the one the court insists on? Or the twelve-year-old in Katowice, hearing her mother’s sounds come back through a stranger’s testimony about soldiers she never saw?
The session ends at 4:15. Renata takes the tram home. She sits by the window and watches The Hague go past—flat, Dutch, relentlessly orderly—and she realizes she’s pressing her tongue against the back of her teeth the way you do before saying ślōnski, the word for the language itself, the word her mother said like a door closing softly.
At home she does what she isn’t supposed to do: she opens the session recording on her laptop. She has access because of a bureaucratic oversight that has persisted for nine years, and she has never used it before now.
She plays the testimony. She hears herself—Mrs. Motyka’s words in her voice. The English is clean. Professional. If she hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t know anything had happened. But she was there. And she can hear, underneath the professional English, the places where the cadence broke. A pause after “my daughter” that’s a quarter-beat too long. A rise in pitch on “beautiful” that isn’t her usual rise. Small things. Visible only because she knows where to look.
She plays it again. The second time, she’s listening for the breaks, which means she hears them differently. She’s hearing her memory of hearing them, not the recording itself.
She plays it a third time. Each pass is further from what happened in Courtroom Three. Each pass is closer to her. But her keeps changing.
She closes the laptop. Outside, the tram passes again, its bell thin in the April dark. She sits in the kitchen of her rented apartment and she can feel, very precisely, that she is different than she was this morning, and that she cannot locate the difference, and that tomorrow she will go back to Courtroom Three and the first-person rule will be waiting, and she will step into it, and whatever Mrs. Motyka deposited will be part of the channel now, and the next witness will come through a Renata that includes a seventy-five-year-old woman from Opole who used a word for beautiful that doesn’t exist in standard Polish, and the testimony will be subtly different because of this, and no one will be able to measure the difference, and Renata will not be sure if what she’s feeling is the old language coming back or the new architecture absorbing it, and this not-knowing is the only thing she has that the transcript doesn’t.