Sophie's Choice (26 page)

Chapter 9

Of the many commentators on the Nazi concentration camps, few have written with greater insight and passion than the critic George Steiner. I came across Steiner's book of essays Language and Silence in the year of its publication, 1967--a year which had considerable significance for me, aside from the fairly trivial fact that it marked exactly two decades since that summer of mine in Brooklyn. God, how the time had passed since Sophie, and Nathan, and Leslie Lapidus! The domestic tragedy which I had struggled so to bring to parturition at Yetta Zimmerman's had long before been published (to a general acclaim far beyond my youthful hopes); I had written other works of fiction and a certain vaguely unenthusiastic and uncommitted amount of trendy sixties' journalism. However, my heart was still with the art of the novel--said to be moribund or even, Lord help us, dead as a smelt--and I was pleased that year of 1967 to be able to disprove its demise (to my personal satisfaction at least) by publishing a work which, in addition to fulfilling my own philosophical and aesthetic requirements as a novelist, found hundreds of thousands of readers--not all of them, as it turned out later, completely happy about the event. But this is another matter, and if I may be forgiven the indulgence, I will simply say that that year was, in general, a rewarding one for me. The small note of qualification arises out of the fact that--as is usual after a number of years spent hard at work on a complex creation--there was a gray spiritless letdown, a doldrum-heavy crisis of the will over what one should do next. Many writers feel this way after completing an ambitious work; it is like a little death, one wants to crawl back into some wet womb and become an egg. But duty called, and again, as I had so many times before, I thought of Sophie. For twenty years Sophie and Sophie's life--past life and of our time together--and Nathan and his and Sophie's appalling troubles and all the interconnected and progressively worsening circumstances which led that poor straw-haired Polish darling head-long into destruction had preyed on my memory like a repetitive and ineradicable tic. The landscape and the living figures of that summer, as in some umber-smeared snapshot found in the brittle black pages of an old album, had become more dusty and indistinct as time for me unspooled with negligent haste into my own middle age, yet that summer's agony still cried out for explanation. Thus in the last months of 1967 I began thinking in earnest about Sophie and Nathan's sorrowful destiny; I knew I would have to deal with it eventually, just as I had dealt those many years before, so successfully and expediently, with another young woman I had loved beyond hope--the doomed Maria Hunt. For various reasons, it turned out that several more years would pass before I began the story of Sophie as it has been set down here. But the preparation I went through at that time required that I torture myself by absorbing as much as I could find of the literature of l'univers concentrationnaire. And in reading George Steiner, I experienced the shock of recognition. "One of the things I cannot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective," Steiner writes, "is the time relation." Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. "Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox--Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be--that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, 'good time' and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?" Until I read this passage I had rather simple-mindedly thought that only I had entertained such speculation, that only I had become obsessed about the time relation--to the extent, for example, that I had attempted more or less successfully to pinpoint my own activities on the first day of April, 1943, the day when Sophie, entering Auschwitz, fell into the "slow hands of the living damnation." At some point late in 1947--only a relatively brief number of years removed from the beginning of Sophie's ordeal--I rummaged through my memory in an attempt to locate myself in time on the same day that Sophie walked through the gates of hell. The first day of April, 1943--April Fools' Day--had a mnemonic urgency for me, and after going through some of my father's letters to me, which handily corroborated my movements, I was able to come up with the absurd fact that on that afternoon, as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas. I was eating myself nearly sick with bananas, the reason being that in the coming hour I was to take a physical examination for entrance into the Marine Corps. At the age of seventeen, already over six feet tall but weighing only 122 pounds, I knew I had to put on three more pounds to satisfy the minimum weight requirements. Stomach grossly bulging like that of a starveling, naked on a set of scales in front of a brawny old recruiting sergeant who stared at my emaciated adolescent beanpole of a frame and uttered a sneering "Jesus Christ" (there was also a snotty joke about April Fools' Day), I squeaked past by scant ounces. On that day I had not heard of Auschwitz, nor of any concentration camp, nor of the mass destruction of the European Jews, nor even much about the Nazis. For me the enemy in that global war was the Japanese, and my ignorance of the anguish hovering like a noxious gray smog over places with names like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen was complete. But wasn't this true for most Americans, indeed most human beings who dwelt beyond the perimeter of the Nazi horror? "This notion of different orders of time simultaneous but in no effective analogy or communication," Steiner continues, "may be necessary to the rest of us, who were not there, who lived as if on another planet." Quite so-especially when (and the fact is often forgotten) for millions of Americans the embodiment of evil during that time was not the Nazis, despised and feared as they were, but the legions of Japanese soldiers who swarmed the jungles of the Pacific like astigmatic and rabid little apes and whose threat to the American mainland seemed far more dangerous, not to say more repulsive, given their yellowness and their filthy habits. But even if such narrowly focused animosity against an Oriental foe had not been real, most people could scarcely have known about the Nazi death camps, and this makes Steiner's ruminations all the more instructive. The nexus between these "different orders of time" is, of course--for those of us who were not there--someone who was there, and this brings me back to Sophie. To Sophie and, in particular, to Sophie's relation with SS Obersturmbannfûhrer Rudolf Franz Höss. I have spoken several times about Sophie's reticence concerning Auschwitz, her firm and generally unyielding silence about that fetid sinkhole of her past. Since she herself (as she once admitted to me) had so successfully anesthetized her mind against recurring images of her encampment in the abyss, it is small wonder that neither Nathan nor I ever gained much knowledge of what happened to her on a day-to-day basis (especially during the last months) aside from the quite obvious fact that she had come close to death from malnutrition and more than one contagion. Thus the jaded reader surfeited with our century's perdurable feast of atrocities will be spared here a detailed chronicle of the killings, gassings, beatings, tortures, criminal medical experiments, slow deprivations, excremental outrages, screaming madnesses and other entries into the historical account which have already been made by Tadeusz Borowski, Jean-François Steiner, Olga Lengyel, Eugen Kogon, André Schwarz-Bart, Elie Wiesel and Bruno Bettelheim, to name but a few of the most eloquent who have tried to limn the totally infernal in their heart's blood. My vision of Sophie's stay at Auschwitz is necessarily particularized, and perhaps a little distorted, though honestly so. Even if she had decided to reveal either to Nathan or me the gruesome minutiae of her twenty months at Auschwitz, I might be constrained to draw down the veil, for, as George Steiner remarks, it is not clear "that those who were not themselves fully involved should touch upon these agonies un-scathed." I have been haunted, I must confess, by an element of presumption in the sense of being an intruder upon the terrain of an experience so bestial, so inexplicable, so undetachably and rightfully the possession alone of those who suffered and died, or survived it. A survivor, Elie Wiesel, has written: "Novelists made free use of [the Holocaust] in their work... In so doing they cheapened [it], drained it of its substance. The Holocaust was now a hot topic, fashionable, guaranteed to gain attention and to achieve instant success..." I do not know how ultimately valid any of this is, but I am aware of the risk. Yet I cannot accept Steiner's suggestion that silence is the answer, that it is best "not to add to the trivia of literary, sociological debate to the unspeakable." Nor do I agree with the idea that "in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent." I find a touch of piety in this, especially inasmuch as Steiner has not remained silent. And surely, almost cosmic in its incomprehensibility as it may appear, the embodiment of evil which Auschwitz has become remains impenetrable only so long as we shrink from trying to penetrate it, however inadequately; and Steiner himself adds immediately that the next best is "to try and understand." I have thought that it might be possible to make a stab at understanding Auschwitz by trying to understand Sophie, who to say the least was a cluster of contradictions. Although she was not Jewish, she had suffered as much as any Jew who had survived the same afflictions, and--as I think will be made plain--had in certain profound ways suffered more than most. (It is surpassingly difficult for many Jews to see beyond the consecrated nature of the Nazis' genocidal fury, and thus it seems to me less a flaw than a pardonable void in the moving meditation of Steiner, a Jew, that he makes only fleeting reference to the vast multitudes of non-Jews--the myriad Slavs and the Gypsies--who were swallowed up in the apparatus of the camps, perishing just as surely as the Jews, though sometimes only less methodically.) If Sophie had been just a victim--helpless as a blown leaf, a human speck, volitionless, like so many multitudes of her fellow damned--she would have seemed merely pathetic, another wretched waif of the storm cast up in Brooklyn with no secrets which had to be unlocked. But the fact of the matter is that at Auschwitz (and this she came gradually to confess to me that summer) she had been a victim, yes, but both victim and accomplice, accessory--however haphazard and ambiguous and uncalculating her design--to the mass slaughter whose sickening vaporous residue spiraled skyward from the chimneys of Birkenau whenever she peered out across the parched autumnal meadows from the windows of the mansard roof of the house of her captor, Rudolf Höss. And therein lay one (although not the only one) of the prime causes of her devastating guilt--the guilt she concealed from Nathan and which, with no inkling of its nature or its actuality, he so often cruelly inflamed. For she could not wriggle out from beneath the suffocating knowledge that there had been this time in her life when she had played out the role, to its limit, of a fellow conspirator in crime. And this was the role of an obsessed and poisonous anti-Semite--a passionate, avid, tediously single-minded hater of Jews. There were only two major events that took place during her stay at Auschwitz which Sophie ever spoke to me about, and neither of these did she ever mention to Nathan. The first of these--the day of her arrival at the camp--I have already referred to, but she did not speak to me of that until our final hours together. The second event, concerning her very brief relationship with Rudolf Höss that same year, and the circumstances leading up to it, she described to me during the hours of a rainy August afternoon at the Maple Court. Or, I should say, a rainy afternoon and an evening. For although she blurted out to me the episode with Höss in such feverish yet careful detail that it acquired for me the graphic, cinematic quality of something immediately observed, the memory and the emotional fatigue and strain it caused her made her break off in helpless tears, and I had to piece together the rest of the tale later. The date of that encounter in Höss's joyless attic was--like her April Fools' Day debut--instantly memorable, and remains so still, for it was the birthday of three of my heroes: of my father, of the autumn-haunted Thomas Wolfe, and of wild Nat Turner, that fanatical black demon whose ghost had seared my imagination throughout my boyhood and youth. It was the third of October, and it was embedded in Sophie's own memory by virtue of the fact that it was the anniversary of her marriage to Casimir Zawistowski in Cracow. And what, I have asked myself (pursuing George Steiner's speculation upon the existence of some sinister metaphysical time warp), were the activities of old Stingo, buck private in the United States Marine Corps, at the moment when the terrible last dust--in a translucent curtain of powdery siftings so thick that, in Sophie's words, "you could taste it on the lips like sand"--of some 2,100 Jews from Athens and the Greek islands billowed across the vista upon which she had earlier fixed her gaze, obscuring the pastoral figures of serenely grazing sheep as completely as if a towering fogbank had swept in from the Vistula marshes? The answer is remarkably simple. I was writing a letter of birthday felicitations--the letter itself easily obtainable not so long ago from a father who has cherished my most vapid jottings (even when I was very young) in the assurance that I was destined for some future literary luminosity. I extract here the central paragraph, which followed an affectionate expression of greetings. I am profoundly appalled now by its
collegiate silliness, but I think it worth quoting in order to further emphasize the glaring and even, perhaps, terrifying incongruity. If one is historically minded enough, one can be charitable. Also, I was eighteen years old. Marine Detachment, U.S. Naval V-12 Training Unit Duke University, Durham, North Carolina October 3, 1943 ... anyway, Pop, tomorrow Duke is playing Tennessee and the atmosphere is pure (but restrained) hysteria. Obviously we have great hopes and by the time you get this it will be pretty much decided whether Duke will have a chance at the Conference championship and maybe a bowl bid, since if we knock over Tennessee--which is our strongest opponent--it will probably be clear sailing until the end of the season. Of course Georgia looks strong and a lot of people are laying money that they will come out #1 in the country. It's all a horse race, as they say, isn't it? Incidentally, have you heard the rumor that the Rose Bowl may be held again at Duke (whether we take the #1 spot or not) because the gov't. has a ban on big outdoor gatherings in Calif. Afraid of Jap sabotage apparently. Those little monkeys really loused up the works for a lot of Americans didn't they? Anyway it would be great fun if they had the Rose Bowl here, maybe you could come down from Va. for the big show whether Duke plays or not. I'm sure I must have told you that, due purely to an alphabetical coincidence (everything is alphabetical in the service), Pete Strohmyer and Chuckie Stutz are my roommates here. All of us learning to be hotshot Marine officers. Stutz was second team All-American from Auburn last year and I need not tell you who Strohmyer is, I'm sure. This room crawls with reporters and photographers like mice. [Early aptitude for metaphor] Maybe you saw Strohmyer's picture in Time magazine last week along with the article in which he was called easily the most spectacular broken fieldrunner at least since Tom Harmon and perhaps Red Grange. He's a hell of a nice guy too, Pop, and I don't guess it would be honest of me if I did not admit that I rather like basking in the reflected glory, especially since the young ladies who flock around Strohmyer are so numerous (and delightful) that there are always some left over for your son, Stingo, the male wallflower. After the Davidson game last week-end we all had quite a ball... The 2,100 Greek Jews who were being gassed and cremated at the time that these lines were composed did not, Sophie pointed out to me, make up anything like a record for a continuous act of mass extermination at Auschwitz; the slaughter of the Hungarian Jews in the following year--personally supervised by Höss, who returned to the camp after a number of months' absence to coordinate the liquidation, so eagerly awaited by Eichmann, in an operation christened Aktion Höss--involved multiple killings of much greater magnitude. But this mass murder was, for its moment in the evolution of Auschwitz-Birkenau, huge, one of the largest yet staged, complicated by logistical problems and considerations of space and disposal not until then encountered at such a complex level. Routinely, it was Höss's practice to report by military air express letters marked "streng geheim"-- "top secret"--to the Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler, on the general nature, physical condition and statistical composition of the "selections"--an almost daily occurrence (some days there were several) whereby those Jews arriving by train were separated into two categories: the fit, those healthy enough to labor for a while; and the unfit, who were immediately doomed. Because of extreme youth, extreme age, infirmity, the ravages of the journey or the aftereffects of previous sickness, relatively few of the Jews arriving at Auschwitz from any country were deemed able-bodied enough to work; at one point Höss reported to Eichmann that the average of those selected to survive for a time was between twenty-five and thirty percent. But for some reason the Greek Jews fared worse than the Jews from any other national group. Those Jews debarking from trains originating in Athens were found by the SS doctors in charge of the selections to be so debilitated that only a little more than one out of ten were sent to the right-hand side of the station ramp--the side assigned to those who were to live and work. Höss was puzzled by this phenomenon, deeply puzzled. In a communication addressed to Himmler on that third day of October--a day Sophie remembered as having the first brisk bite of autumn in it, despite the pervasive murky smoke and stench which so blunted one's perception of the change of season-- Höss theorized that there was one of four possible reasons, or perhaps a combination of the four, which caused the Greek Jews to be dragged off the cattle cars and boxcars in such a sorry state of deterioration, indeed with so many of the prisoners already dead or near death: bad nutrition at the point of origin; the extreme length of the journey combined with the poor condition of the railroads in Yugoslavia, through which the deportees had to pass; the abrupt change from the dry, hot Mediterranean climate to the damp and swampy atmosphere around the upper Vistula (although Höss added in an aside, uncharacteristic in its informality, that even this was puzzling, since, in terms of heat, at least in the summer, Auschwitz was "hotter than two hells"); and lastly, a trait of character, Ratlosigkeit, common to people of southern climes and therefore to those of weak moral fiber, which simply caused them to fail to withstand the shock of being uprooted and the attendant journey to an unknown destination. In their slovenliness they reminded him of the Gypsies, who, however, were conditioned to travel. Dictating his thoughts deliberately and slowly to Sophie in a somewhat harsh, flat, sibilant accent which she had earlier recognized as the voice of a North German from the Baltic region, he paused only to light cigarettes (he was a chain-smoker, and she noticed that the fingers of his right hand, small and even pudgy for such a rather gaunt person, were stained the hue of chestnut) and to brood thoughtfully for many seconds with his hand pressed lightly to his brow. He glanced up to ask politely if he was speaking too fast for her. "Nein, mein Kommandant." The venerable German shorthand method (Gabelsberger) which she had learned at the age of sixteen in Cracow, and had employed so often in the service of her father, had come back to her with remarkable ease after several years' disuse; her speed and skill surprised her, and she breathed a small prayer of thanks to her father, who, though in his grave at Sachsenhausen, had provided for her this measure of salvation. Part of her mind dwelled on her father--"Professor Biegañski," as she often thought of him, so formal and distant their relationship had always been--even as Höss, arrested in mid-phrase, sucked on his cigarette, coughed a phlegmy smoker's cough, and stood gazing out over the sere October meadow, his angular, tanned, not unhandsome face wreathed in blue tobacco fumes. The wind at the moment was blowing away from the chimneys of Birkenau, the air was clear. Although the weather outside had a touch of frost in it, here in the attic of the Commandant's house, beneath the sharply slanting roof, it was warm enough to be cozy, the rising heat trapped beneath the eaves and pleasantly augmented by still more heat pouring in from a brilliant early-afternoon sun. Several large bluebottle flies, imprisoned by the windowpanes, made soft gummy buzzings in the stillness or sailed out on tiny forays through the air, returned, buzzed fretfully, then fell still. There was also one or two vagrant, torpid wasps. The room was whitewashed with aseptic brightness, like that of a laboratory; it was dirt-free, spare, austere. It was Höss's private study, his sanctuary and hideaway, also the place where he executed his most personal, confidential and momentous work. Even the adored children, who swarmed at will through the other three floors of the house, were not permitted here. It was the lair of a bureaucrat with priestly sensibilities. Sparsely furnished, the room contained a plain pinewood table, a steel filing cabinet, four straight-backed chairs, a cot upon which Höss sometimes rested, seeking surcease from the migraine headaches that assailed him from time to time. There was a telephone, but it was usually cut off. On the table was some official stationery in neat stacks, an orderly collection of pens and pencils, a cumbersome black office typewriter with the emblazoned trademark of Adler. For the past week and a half Sophie had been seated for many hours daily, hammering out correspondence either on this typewriter or another, smaller one (kept when not used beneath the table) that had a Polish keyboard. Sometimes, as now, she sat on one of the other chairs and took dictation. Höss's delivery tended to run in quick spurts separated by nearly interminable pauses--pauses in which there was almost audible a thudding tread of thought, the clotted Gothic ratiocination--and during such hiatuses Sophie would stare at the walls, all unadorned save for that work of supremely grandiose Kitsch she had seen before, a multipasteled Adolf Hitler in heroic profile, clad like a Knight of the Grail in armor of Solingen stainless steel. Adorning this monkish cell, it might have been the portrait of Christ. Höss ruminated, scratching his rather peninsular jaw; Sophie waited. He had removed his officer's jacket, the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned. The silence here, high up, was ethereal, almost unreal. Only two intertwined sounds now intruded, and these faintly--a muffled noise embedded in the very ambience of Auschwitz and as rhythmic as the sea: the chuffing of locomotives and the remote rumble of shunting boxcars. "Es kann kein Zweifel sein--" he resumed, then stopped abruptly. " 'There can be no question--' no, that's too strong. I should say something less positive?" It was an ambiguous question mark. He spoke now, as he had once or twice before, with an odd inquisitive undertone in his voice, as if he might be wishing to solicit Sophie's opinion without compromising his authority by actually doing so. It was in effect a question addressed to both of them. In conversation Höss was extremely articulate. Yet his epistolary style, Sophie had observed, though workable and certainly not illiterate, fell often into clumsy, semi-opaque labyrinthine periods; it had the prosy, crippled rhythms of a man who was Armyeducated, a perennial adjutant. Höss went into one of his protracted pauses. "Aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach," Sophie suggested a little hesitantly, though with less hesitation than she might have demonstrated several days before. "That's much less positive." " 'In all probability,' " Höss repeated. "Yes, that's very good. It allows the Reichsführer more leeway to form his own judgment in the matter. Put that down then, followed by..." Sophie felt a glow of satisfaction, almost pleasure, at this last remark. She sensed a barrier being breached, ever so slightly, between them after so many hours in which his manner had been metallically impersonal, businesslike, the dictation delivered with the gelid unconcern of an automaton. Only once so far--and that briefly the day before--had he let down that barrier. She could not be sure, but she even thought she detected a trace of warmth in his voice now as if he were suddenly speaking to her, an identifiable human being, rather than to a slave laborer, eine schmutzige Polin, plucked out of the swarm of diseased and dying ants through incredible luck (or by the grace of God, she sometimes devoutly reflected) and by virtue of the fact that she was doubtless one of the very few prisoners, if not the only one, who, bilingual in Polish and German, was also proficient on the typewriter in both languages and knew Gabelsberger shorthand. It was in shorthand now that she completed Höss's penultimate paragraph to Himmler: "In all probability, then, a reassessment must be made of the transport problem of the Greek Jews should any further deportations from Athens be contemplated for the immediate future. The mechanism for Special Action at Birkenau having become severely taxed beyond all expectation, it is respectfully suggested that, in the specific matter of the Greek Jews, alternative destinations in the occupied territories of the East, such as KL Treblinka or KL Sobibór, be considered." Höss halted then, lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last. He was gazing, with a slight daydream cast, through the partially open casement window. Suddenly he made a little exclamation, loud enough that she thought something might be wrong. But a quick smile spread over his face, and she heard him gasp "Aaah!" as he leaned intently forward to peer down into the field adjoining the house. "Aaah!" he said again raptly, drawing in his breath, and then half whispered to her, "Quick! Come here!" She rose and stepped to his side, approaching very close to him, so close that she could feel the touch of his uniform, and followed his gaze down into the field. "Harlekin!" he exclaimed. "Isn't he beautiful!" A splendid chalk-white Arabian stallion was dashing in a long, mad, rapturous oval in the field below, all muscle and speed, grazing the surrounding paddock fence with a white tail held high that flowed behind him like a plume of smoke. He tossed his noble head with arrogant, insouciant pleasure, as if totally possessed by the fluid grace which sculpted and gave motion to his galloping forelegs and hindquarters and by the furiously healthy power energizing his being. Sophie had seen the stallion before, though never in such full poetic flight. It was a Polish horse, one of the prizes of war, and belonged to Höss. "Harlekin!" she heard him exclaim again, entranced by the sight. "Such a marvel!" The stallion galloped alone; there was not a human soul in sight. A few sheep were grazing. Beyond the field, crowding up against the horizon, were the bedraggled and nondescript scrubby woods, already beginning to turn the leaden hue of the Galician autumn. Several forlorn farmhouses dotted the rim of the forest. Bleak and drab as it was, Sophie preferred this view to the one from the other side of the room, which gave onto a busy, overpopulated prospect of the railroad ramp where the selections took place and the grimy dun brick barracks beyond, a scene crowned by the arched metalwork sign which from here read in the obverse: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Sophie felt a shiver pass through her as, simultaneously, her neck was brushed by a vagrant draft and Höss lightly touched the edge of her shoulder with his fingertips. He had never touched her before; she shivered again, though she felt the touch was impersonal. "Just look at Harlekin," he breathed in a whisper. The majestic animal sped