Читать книгу 155 - Hubertus Godeysen - Страница 5

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only truth." (Voltaire, 1785)

Prologue

"How wonderful life can be, even without a professional routine. I’m finally free!" I cried out with all my heart while cycling along the Mur river in the bright sunshine.

I remember this moment in June 2011 so well because that was the day I first became conscious of my new freedom. My husband and I, along with a married couple who were friends of ours, had begun a one-week bicycle tour of Styria starting from the Sticklerhütte in Lungau, Salzburg. It was the first vacation of my new life; I was still adjusting to being retired.

I had left my job with mixed feelings, which even the official parting expressions of thanks from my supervisors and colleagues could not dispel. They talked about my great dedication and a successful thirty-two years of work for the Salzburg judiciary. That also included the Kaprun case, which took over my life starting on November 11, 2000, the day of the disaster, and which I never felt I could regard as a success—quite the opposite. At the time I retired, the well-informed Salzburg journalist Sonja Wenger wrote, "According to well-meaning colleagues, she was shamelessly harassed. She was muzzled, constantly accused of violating public services law, and even accused of trying to manipulate those who were critical of the Kaprun proceedings."

Late in May of 2011, my colleagues held a small party to wish me goodbye. Now I was no longer up against a judiciary that offered only weak resistance to ever-growing political interference. When I first entered the judicial service with high ideals in 1971, there was still a different culture, one that allowed the administration of justice to proceed with more independence. Today, many of my colleagues are suffering from the creeping dismantlement of the separation of powers that has been evident in Austria for some time and is not only weakening the parliamentary system but also increasingly capturing the judiciary. I am particularly sorry to see party-political careerism on the rise among some of my colleagues.

Our group of four biked up a small hill, stopped, and enjoyed the expansive view. I got so wrapped up in the beautiful scenery that I fell behind the others. When I noticed they had moved on, I pedaled hard to catch up. But I had too much momentum on the way down and the handlebar swerved. I rammed into the bike ahead of me, fell over and lost consciousness. When I woke up again, I was sitting at the side of the road, felt a pain in my shoulder and saw scrapes on my arm. My husband and our friends had immediately called a taxi, which we were now waiting for. When it came, it took me to a nearby hospital, where I was very kindly received and examined. The doctor on duty diagnosed me with a fractured collarbone and a concussion and admitted me for inpatient care.

The next morning I woke up feeling dazed and was happy to see my husband and our friends sitting by my bedside. We were just talking about the unexpected end to our cycling tour when the door opened and another doctor came in.

"We’ve met before. Kaprun," he said.

I remembered him right away. As public prosecutor, I had noticed the man at the court proceedings several times. Along with many other relatives of the victims, he had followed the Kaprun trial in astonishment and disbelief and experienced the acquittals with a sense of helpless dismay.

"I lost my son in Kaprun," he said. "He wanted to become a doctor and follow in my footsteps. Now he’s dead."

With these words, the emotions of more than ten years of pent-up frustration and anger came flooding out of this despairing father. Along with everyone else the victims had left behind, he not only had to cope with the death of someone he loved, but also with the experience of standing by powerlessly during court proceedings. It seemed to him the defendants engaged devious lawyers and questionable expertise to evade responsibility and gain acquittal in the end. In his understandable anger at the Austrian judicial system, he heaped accusations on me. He accused me of approving of the acquittal of all the defendants and being in league with them. Then he ran out of the room.

When my husband, who is also a doctor, started getting upset, I held him back. "How would you have behaved if your son had died in Kaprun and the court let the people who have his death on their conscience go free? He doesn’t know anything about my struggle against the verdict. He just sees me as part of an unfair judicial system that covered up for the people who were responsible for the Kaprun disaster and suppressed the truth."

Images of Kaprun, which I preferred not to think about, came back to me then. I remembered November 11, 2000—the day of the worst disaster in the history of the modern Austrian Republic—as if it were yesterday. Once again, I saw the horror on the faces of parents and relatives as it dawned on them that their children and spouses would never come back. Then memories of the trial overwhelmed me and I saw incidents and scenes from the courtroom as if I were watching a film. Finally, I remembered the delivery of the verdict, which was burned into my mind forever.

Once again I lived through the moment when the bereaved families realized in disbelief that the judge had just declared all the defendants not guilty of the deaths of their loved ones. I had never seen a courtroom full of people collapse in shock, weep with despair, or run out in anger the way I did after that verdict. I had never experienced a verdict that attracted so much scorn, first in Salzburg, then worldwide.

I sat up in bed. My shoulder still hurt and so did my head. "I understand that man," I said. "He just made it clear to me that Kaprun is not over."

That experience in the hospital in Styria has not left me. Many touching experiences with relatives of the victims are also fresh in my mind. So is the unimaginable horror of this unforeseeable, violent intrusion into their lives.

It was only when I met the doctor at the Styrian hospital that I realized my matter-of-fact attitude could have given some relatives of the victims the impression that I cared very little or not at all, or even that I approved of the verdict. Neither of these is true, but I feel responsible for the fact that anyone might have seen it that way. So I would like to assure everyone that, after the legally binding conclusion of the Kaprun proceedings, further ones took place that were not open to the public and were not a focus of the victims’ families. In my view, the suspension of the proceedings against the experts and a failed motion for reconsideration prevented a complete and non-contradictory account of the Kaprun criminal case from coming to light, although German authorities did thoroughly discredit the Austrian expert reports. This has caused suffering for many and will continue to do so.

After much hesitation, I therefore decided to support the authors, Hubertus Godeysen and Hannes Uhl, in their research.

Dr. Eva Danninger-Soriat