Sophie's Choice (53 page)

and said, 'Look at this.' "We all bent forward to look. At first I couldn't make out what it was, just a jumble of sticks--a great mass of sticks like small tree limbs. Then I saw what it was--this unbearable sight, a boxcar full of dead children, scores of them, maybe a hundred, all of them in these stiff and jumbled positions that could only come from being frozen to death. The other photographs were the same--other boxcars with scores of children, all stiff and frozen. " 'These are not Jewish children,' Wanda said, 'these are little Polish children, none of them over twelve years old. They're some of the little rats who didn't make it in the burning building. These pictures were taken by Home Army members who broke into these boxcars on a siding somewhere between Zamooeæ and Lublin. There are several hundred in these pictures, from one train alone. There were other trains that were put on sidings where the children either starved or froze to death, or both. This is just a sample. The others who died number in the thousands.' "No one spoke. I could just hear all of us breathing, but no one spoke. Finally Wanda began to talk, and for the first time her voice was truly choked and unsteady--you could almost feel the exhaustion in it, and the grief. 'We still don't know exactly where these children came from but we think we know who they are. It is believed that they are the rejected ones from the Germanization program, the Lebensborn program. We think they came from the region around Zamooeæ. I've been told that they were among the thousands who were taken from their parents but not considered racially suitable and so consigned for disposal--meaning extermination--at Maidanek or Auschwitz. But they didn't get there. In due time the train, like a lot of others, was diverted onto sidings where the children were allowed to die in the condition you see here. Others starved to death, still more suffocated in hermetically sealed cars. Thirty thousand Polish children have disappeared from the Zamooeæ region alone. Thousands and thousands of these have died. This is mass murder too, Feldshon.' She ran her hands over her eyes, then said, 'I was going to tell you of the adults, the thousands of innocent men and women slaughtered in Zamooeæ alone. But I won't. I'm very tired, suddenly I feel very dizzy. These children are enough.' "Wanda was swaying a little. I remember catching her by the elbow and trying to pull her gently down, make her sit down. But she kept talking in the candlelight, in this flat monotonous voice now, as in a trance. 'The Nazis hate you the most, Feldshon, and you will suffer the most by far, but they're not going to stop with the Jews. Do you think when they finish with you Jews they're going to dust off their hands and stop murdering and make their peace with the world? You underestimate their evil if you have such a delusion. Because once they finish you off they're going to come and get me. Even though I'm half German. I imagine they will not let me off easy, before the end. Then they're going to seize my pretty blond friend here and do with her what they've done to you. At the same time they will not spare her children, any more than they spared these little frozen ones you see right here.' " In the darkening shoebox of a room in Washington, D. C., Sophie and I, almost without our being aware of it, had exchanged places, so that it was I who lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling while she stood by the window where I had first placed myself, brooding over the distant fire. She fell silent for a while and I could see the side of her face, which was deep in remembrance, her gaze resting on the smoky horizon. Amid the silence I heard the clucking and chortling of the pigeons on the ledge outside, a far-off blurred commotion where men struggled with the blaze. The church bell struck again: it was four. At last Sophie spoke again. "At Auschwitz the next year, as I told you, they seized Wanda and tortured her and they hung her up on a hook and let her strangle to death. After I heard that, I would think about her in so many ways, but mainly I would remember her on that night in Warsaw. I would see her in my mind after Feldshon and the other Jew had left to get the guns, sitting at the table with her face buried in her arms, completely worn-out and weeping. It's strange, I never saw her cry before. I think she always considered it a weakness. But I remember leaning over next to her with my hand on her shoulder, watching her weep. She was so young, only my age. So brave. "She was a lesbian, Stingo. It don't matter any more what she was, it didn't matter then. But I thought you might want to know, after me telling you so much about everything else. We slept together once or twice--I might as well tell you that too--but it didn't mean much to either of us, I think. She knew deep down that I--well, I didn't really respond to her that way and so she never pressed me to go on. Never got angry or anything. I loved her, though, because she was better than me, and so incredibly brave. "So as I say, she foretold her own death, and my death, and the death of my children. She went to sleep with her head in her arms at the table. I didn't want to disturb her right then, and I thought of what she had said about the children, and the pictures of those little frozen bodies--I was suddenly haunted and terrified in a way I'd never been before, even in the middle of the gloom that I'd experienced so many times, gloom like the taste of death. I went into the room where my children were sleeping. I was so overcome by what Wanda had said that I did something that I knew I shouldn't do even as I was doing it--waking Jan and Eva and taking them both up in my arms next to me. So heavy they both were, waking and moaning and whispering, yet strangely light, I guess, because of my frantic desire to hold them both in my arms. And being filled with terror and despair over Wanda's words about the future, knowing the truth of her words and not being able to deal with anything so monstrous, so immense. "Beyond the window it was cold and black, no lights in Warsaw, a city cold and black beyond description, with nothing there except the darkness and freezing sleet in it, and the wind. I remember I opened the window and let in the ice and the wind. I can't tell you how close I came to hurling myself with my children out into that darkness just then--or how many times since then I've cursed myself for not doing it." The car of the train which conveyed Sophie and her children and Wanda to Auschwitz (together with a mixed bag of Resistance members and other Poles trapped in the most recent roundup) was an unusual one. It was neither a boxcar nor the livestock car which the Germans normally employed in their transports. Amazing to say, it was an ancient but still serviceable wagons-lits carriage complete with carpeted aisle, compartments, lavatories and small lozenge-shaped metallic signs in Polish, French, Russian and German at each window, admonishing the passengers not to lean out. From its fittings--its badly worn but still comfortable seats, the ornate and now tarnished chandeliers--Sophie could tell that the venerable coach had once carried people first-class; save for a singular difference, it might have been one of those cars of her girlhood in which her father--always the stylish voyager--had taken the family to Vienna or Bozen or Berlin. The difference--so ominous and oppressive as to make her gasp when she saw it--was that all the windows were securely boarded up. Another difference was that into each compartment made for six or eight persons the Germans had jammed as many as fifteen or sixteen bodies, together with whatever luggage had been brought along. Awash in dim light, thus compressed, half a dozen or more prisoners of both sexes stood upright or partly upright in the meager foot space, clinging together for support against the incessantly braking and accelerating movement of the train and constantly plunging into the laps of the seated ones. One or two quick-witted Resistance leaders took command. A scheme was worked out whereby sitters and standees regularly alternated positions; this helped, but nothing could help the effect of the stifling body heat of so many squeezed-together human beings, or the sour and fetid odor that persisted during the trip. Not quite torture, it was a limbo of desolating discomfort. Jan and Eva were the only children in the compartment; they took turns sitting on Sophie's lap and the laps of others. At least one person vomited in the nearly lightless cell, and it was a muscular and desperate struggle to wriggle out of the compartment and down the jammed aisle to one of the toilets. "Better a boxcar," Sophie remembered someone groaning, "at least you could stretch out." But curiously, by the standards of those other hell-destined transports crisscrossing Europe at that time, stalled and sidetracked and delayed at a thousand inert junctures of space and time, her trip was not inordinately long: what should have been a morning's journey, from six o'clock until noon, required not days but a mere thirty hours. Possibly because (as she had confessed to me over and over again) so much of her behavior had always been governed by wishful thinking, she had drawn a certain amount of comfort from the fact that the Germans had thrust her and her fellow prisoners aboard this novel means of transport. It was by now common knowledge that the Nazis used railroad cars meant for freight and animals to ship people to the camps. Thus, once aboard with Jan and Eva, she swiftly rejected the logical idea which flitted through her head that her captors were using this classy if threadbare car simply because it was expedient and available (the makeshift boarded windows should have been evidence of that). Instead, she hit upon a somewhat more soothing notion that these almost loungelike facilities, where comfortable Poles and rich tourists had nodded and drowsed in prewar days, now indicated special privilege, now meant that she would be treated rather better than the 1,800 Jews from Malkinia in the forward part of the train, bottled up tight in their black cattle wagons where they had been sealed for several days. As it turned out, this was as foolish and as fanciful (and as ignoble, really) as the idea she had formed about the ghetto: that the mere presence of the Jews, and the preoccupation the Nazis had with their extermination, would somehow benefit her own security. And the safety of Jan and Eva. The name Ooewiê cim--Auschwitz--which had at first murmured its way through the compartment made her weak with fear, but she had no doubt whatever that that was where the train was going. A minuscule sliver of light, catching her eye, drew her attention to a tiny crack in the plywood board across the window, and during the first hour of the journey she was able to see enough by the dawn's glow to tell their direction: south. Due south past the country villages that crowd around Warsaw in place of the usual suburban outskirts, due south past greening fields and copses crowded with birch trees, south in the direction of Cracow. Only Auschwitz, of all their plausible destinations, lay south, and she recalled the despair she felt when with her own eyes she verified where they were going. The reputation of Auschwitz was ominous, vile, terrifying. Although in the Gestapo prison rumors had tended to support Auschwitz as the place where they would eventually be shipped, she had hoped incessantly and prayed for a labor camp in Germany, where so many Poles had been transported and where, according to other rumor, conditions were less brutal, less harsh. But as Auschwitz loomed more and more inevitably and now, on the train, made itself inescapable, Sophie was smothered by the realization that she was victim of punishment by association, retribution through chance concurrence. She kept saying to herself: I don't belong here. If she had not had the misfortune of being taken prisoner at the same time as so many of the Home Army members (a stroke of bad luck further complicated by her connection with Wanda, and their common dwelling place, even though she had not lifted a finger to help the Resistance), she might have been adjudged guilty of the serious crime of meat smuggling but not of the infinitely more grave crime of subversion, and hence might not be headed for a destination so forbiddingly malign. But among other ironies, she realized, was this one: she had not been judged guilty of anything, merely interrogated and forgotten. She had then been thrown in haphazardly among these partisans, where she was victim less of any specific retributive justice than of a general rage--a kind of berserk lust for complete domination and oppression which seized the Nazis whenever they scored a win over the Resistance, and which this time had even extended to the several hundred bedraggled Poles ensnared in that last savage roundup. Certain things about the trip she remembered with utter clarity. The stench, the airlessness, the endless shifting of positions--stand up, sit down, stand up again. At the moment of a sudden stop a box toppling down on her head, not stunning her, not hurting too much, but raising an egg-size bulge at the top of her skull. The view outside the crack, where spring sunlight darkened into drizzling rain: through the film of rain, birch trees still tormented by the past winter's crushing snowfall, bent into shapes of white parabolic arches, strongbows, catapults, beautiful broken skeletons, whips. Lemon dots of forsythia everywhere. Delicate green fields blending into distant forests of spruce and larch and pine. Sunshine again. Jan's books, which he tried to read in the feeble light as he sat on her lap: The Swiss Family Robinson in German; Polish editions of White Fang and Penrod and Sam. Eva's two possessions, which she refused to park in the luggage rack but clutched fiercely as if any moment they might be wrested from her hands: the flute in its leather case and her mís--the one-eared, one-eyed teddy bear she had kept since the cradle. More rain outside, a torrent. Now the odor of vomit, pervasive, unextinguishable, cheesy. Fellow passengers: two frightened convent girls of sixteen or so, sobbing, sleeping, waking to murmur prayers to the Holy Virgin; Wiktor, a black-haired, intense, infuriated young Home Army member already plotting revolt or escape, ceaselessly scribbling messages on slips of paper to be passed to Wanda in another compartment; a fear-maddened shriveled old lady claiming to be the niece of Wieniawski, claiming the bundle of parchment she kept pressed close to her to be the original manuscript of his famous Polonaise, claiming some kind of immunity, dissolving into tears like the schoolgirls at Wiktor's snarled remark that the Nazis would wipe their asses on the worthless Polonaise. Hunger
pangs beginning. Nothing at all to eat. Another old woman--quite dead--laid out in the exterior aisle on the spot where her heart attack had felled her, her hands frozen around a crucifix and her chalk-white face already smudged by the boots and shoes of people treading over and around her. Through her crevice once more: Cracow at night, the familiar station, moonlit railroad yards where they lay stranded hour after hour. In the greenish moonglow an extraordinary sight: a German soldier standing in feldgrau uniform and with slung rifle, masturbating with steady beat in the half-light of the deserted yard, grinningly exhibiting himself to such curious or indifferent or bemused prisoners as might be looking through the peepholes. An hour's sleep, then the morning's brightness. Crossing the Vistula, murky and steaming. Two small towns she recognized as the train moved westward through the dusty pollen-gold morning: Skawina, Zator. Eva beginning to cry for the first time, torn by spasms of hunger. Hush, baby. A few more moments' drowse riven by a sun-flooded, splendid, heart-wrenching, manic dream: herself begowned and bediademed, seated at the keyboard before ten thousand onlookers, yet somehow--astoundingly--flying, flying, soaring to deliverance on the celestial measures of the Emperor Concerto. Eyelids fluttering apart. A slamming, braking stop. Auschwitz. They waited in the car during most of the rest of the day. At an early moment the generators ceased working; the bulbs went out in the compartment and what remaining light there was cast a milky pallor, filtering through the cracks in the plywood shutters. The distant sound of band music made its way into the compartment. There was a vibration of panic in the car; it was almost palpable, like the prickling of hair all over one's body, and in the near-darkness there came a surge of anxious whispering--hoarse, rising, but as incomprehensible as the rustle of an army of leaves. The convent girls began to wail in unison, beseeching the Holy Mother. Wiktor loudly told them to shut up, while at the same instant Sophie took courage from Wanda's voice, faint from the other end of the car, begging Resistance members and deportees alike to stay calm, stay quiet. It must have been early in the afternoon when word came regarding the hundreds upon hundreds of Jews from Malkinia in the forward cars. All Jews in vans came a note to Wiktor, a note which he read aloud in the gloom and which Sophie, too numb with fright to even clutch Jan and Eva close against her breast for consolation, immediately translated into: All the Jews have gone to the gas. Sophie joined with the convent girls in prayer. It was while she was praying that Eva began to wail loudly. The children had been brave during the trip, but now the little girl's hunger blossomed into real pain. She squealed in anguish while Sophie tried to rock and soothe her, but nothing seemed to work; the child's screams were for a moment more terrifying to Sophie than the word about the doomed Jews. But soon they stopped. Oddly, it was Jan who came to the rescue. He had a way with his sister and now he took over--at first shushing her in the words of some private language they shared, then pressing next to her with his book. In the pale light he began reading to her from the story of Penrod, about little boys' pranks in the leafy Elysian small-town marrow of America; he was able to laugh and giggle, and his thin soprano singsong cast a gentle spell, combining with Eva's exhaustion to lull her to sleep. Several hours passed. It was late afternoon. Finally another slip of paper was passed to Wiktor: AK first car in vans. This plainly meant one thing--that, like the Jews, the several hundred Home Army members in the car just forward had been transported to Birkenau and the crematoriums. Sophie stared straight ahead, composed her hands in her lap and prepared for death, feeling inexpressible terror but for the first time, too, tasting faintly the blessed bitter relief of acceptance. The old niece of Wieniawski had fallen into a comalike stupor, the Polonaise in crumpled disarray, rivulets of drool flowing from the corners of her lips. In trying to reconstruct that moment a long time later, Sophie wondered whether she might not then have become unconscious herself, for the next thing she remembered was her own daylight-dazzled presence outside on the ramp with Jan and Eva, and coming face to face with Hauptsturmführer Fritz Jemand von Niemand, doctor of medicine. Sophie did not know his name then, nor did she ever see him again. I have christened him Fritz Jemand von Niemand because it seems as good a name as any for an SS doctor--for one who appeared to Sophie as if from nowhere and vanished likewise forever from her sight, yet who left a few interesting traces of himself behind. One trace: the recollected impression of relative youth--thirty-five, forty--and the unwelcome good looks of a delicate and disturbing sort. Indeed, traces of Dr. Jemand von Niemand and his appearance and his voice and his manner and other attributes would remain with Sophie forever. The first words he said to her, for example: "Ich möchte mit dir schlafen." Which means, as bluntly and as unseductively as possible: "I'd like to get you into bed with me." Dreary loutish words, spoken from an intimidating vantage point, no finesse, no class, callow and cruel, an utterance one might expect from a B-grade movie Nazi Schweinhund. But these, according to Sophie, were the words he first said. Ugly talk for a doctor and a gentleman (perhaps even an aristocrat), although he was visibly, indisputably drunk, which might help explain such coarseness. Why Sophie, at first glance, thought he might be an aristocrat-- Prussian perhaps, or of Prussian origin--was because of his extremely close resemblance to a Junker officer, a friend of her father's, whom she had seen once as a girl of sixteen or so on a summer visit to Berlin. Very "Nordic"-looking, attractive in a thin-lipped, austere, unbending way, the young officer had treated her frostily during their brief meeting, almost to the point of contempt and boorishness; nonetheless, she could not help but be taken by his arresting handsomeness, by--surprisingly--something not really effeminate but rather silkily feminine about his face in repose. He looked a bit like a militarized Leslie Howard, whom she had had a mild crush on ever since The Petrified Forest. Despite the dislike he had inspired in her, and her satisfaction in not having to see this German officer again, she remembered thinking about him later rather disturbingly: If he had been a woman, he would have been a person I think I might have felt drawn to. But now here was his counterpart, almost his replica, standing in his slightly askew SS uniform on the dusty concrete platform at five in the afternoon, flushed with wine or brandy or schnapps and mouthing his unpatrician words in an indolently patrician, Berlin-accented voice: "I'd like to get you into bed with me." Sophie ignored what he was saying, but as he spoke she glimpsed one of those insignificant but ineffaceable details--another spectral trace of the doctor--that would always spring out in vivid trompe I'oeil from the confused surface of the day: a sprinkling of boiled-rice grains on the lapel of the SS tunic. There were only four or five of these; shiny with moisture still, they looked like maggots. She gave them her dazed scrutiny, and while doing so she realized for the first time that the piece of music being played just then by the welcoming prisoners' band--hopelessly off-key and disorganized, yet flaying her nerves with its erotic sorrow and turgid beat as it had even in the darkened car--was the Argentine tango "La Cumparsita." Why had she not been able to name it before? Ba-dum-ba-dum! "Du bist eine Polack," said the doctor. "Bist du auch eine Kommunistin?" Sophie placed one arm around Eva's shoulders, the other arm around Jan's waist, saying nothing. The doctor belched, then more sharply elaborated: "I know you're a Polack, but are you also another one of these filthy Communists?" And then in his fog he turned toward the next prisoners, seeming almost to forget Sophie. Why hadn't she played dumb? "Nicht sprecht Deutsch." It could have saved the moment. There was such a press of people. Had she not answered in German he might have let the three of them pass through. But there was the cold fact of her terror, and the terror caused her to behave unwisely. She knew now what blind and merciful ignorance had prevented very few Jews who arrived here from knowing, but which her association with Wanda and the others had caused her to know and to dread with fear beyond utterance: a selection. She and the children were undergoing at this very moment the ordeal she had heard about--rumored in Warsaw a score of times in whispers--but which had seemed at once so unbearable and unlikely to happen to her that she had thrust it out of her mind. But here she was, and here was the doctor. While over there--just beyond the roofs of the boxcars recently vacated by the death-bound Malkinia Jews--was Birkenau, and the doctor could select for its abyssal doors anyone whom he desired. This thought caused her such terror that instead of keeping her mouth shut she said, "Ich bin polnisch! In Krakow geboren!" Then she blurted helplessly, "I'm not Jewish! Or my children--they're not Jewish either." And added, "They are racially pure. They speak German." Finally she announced, "I'm a Christian. I'm a devout Catholic." The doctor turned again. His eyebrows arched and he looked at Sophie with inebriate, wet, fugitive eyes, unsmiling. He was now so close to her that she smelled plainly the alcoholic vapor--a rancid fragrance of barley or rye--and she was not strong enough to return his gaze. It was then that she knew she had said something wrong, perhaps fatally wrong. She averted her face for an instant, glancing at an adjoining line of prisoners shambling through the golgotha of their selection, and saw Eva's flute teacher Zaorski at the precise congealed instant of his doom--dispatched to the left and to Birkenau by an almost imperceptible nod of a doctor's head. Now, turning back, she heard Dr. Jemand von Niemand say, "So you're not a Communist. You're a believer." "Ja, mein Hauptmann. I believe in Christ." What folly! She sensed from his manner, his gaze--the new look in his eye of luminous intensity--that everything she was saying, far from helping her, from protecting her, was leading somehow to her swift undoing. She thought: Let me be struck dumb. The doctor was a little unsteady on his feet. He leaned over for a moment to an enlisted underling with a clipboard and murmured something, meanwhile absorbedly picking his nose. Eva, pressing heavily against Sophie's leg, began to cry. "So you believe in Christ the Redeemer?" the doctor said in a thick-tongued but oddly abstract voice, like that of a lecturer examining the delicately shaded facet of a proposition in logic. Then he said something which for an instant was totally mystifying: "Did He not say, 'Suffer the little children to come unto Me'?" He turned back to her, moving with the twitchy methodicalness of a drunk. Sophie, with an inanity poised on her tongue and choked with fear, was about to attempt a reply when the doctor said, "You may keep one of your children." "Bitte?" said Sophie. "You may keep one of your children," he repeated. "The other one will have to go. Which one will you keep?" "You mean, I have to choose?" "You're a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege--a choice." Her thought processes dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. "I can't choose! I can't choose!" She began to scream. Oh, how she recalled her own screams! Tormented angels never screeched so loudly above hell's pandemonium. "Ich kann nicht wählen!" she screamed. The doctor was aware of unwanted attention. "Shut up!" he ordered. "Hurry now and choose. Choose, goddamnit, or I'll send them both over there. Quick!" She could not believe any of this. She could not believe that she was now kneeling on the hurtful, abrading concrete, drawing her children toward her so smotheringly tight that she felt that their flesh might be engrafted to hers even through layers of clothes. Her disbelief was total, deranged. It was disbelief reflected in the eyes of the gaunt, waxy-skinned young Rottenführer, the doctor's aide, to whom she inexplicably found herself looking upward in supplication. He appeared stunned, and he returned her gaze with a wide-eyed baffled expression, as if to say: I can't understand this either. "Don't make me choose," she heard herself plead in a whisper, "I can't choose." "Send them both over there, then," the doctor said to the aide, "nach links." "Mama!" She heard Eva's thin but soaring cry at the instant that she thrust the child away from her and rose from the concrete with a clumsy stumbling motion. "Take the baby!" she called out. "Take my little girl!" At this point the aide--with a careful gentleness that Sophie would try without success to forget--tugged at Eva's hand and led her away into the waiting legion of the damned. She would forever retain a dim impression that the child had continued to look back, beseeching. But because she was now almost completely blinded by salty, thick, copious tears she was spared whatever expression Eva wore, and she was always grateful for that. For in the bleakest honesty of her heart she knew that she would never have been able to tolerate it, driven nearly mad as she was by her last glimpse of that vanishing small form. "She still had her mís--and her flute," Sophie said as she finished talking to me. "All these years I have never been able to bear those words. Or bear to speak them, in any language." Since Sophie told me this I have brooded often upon the enigma of Dr. Jemand von Niemand. At the very least he was a maverick, a sport; surely what he made Sophie do could not have been in the SS manual of regulations. The young Rottenführer's incredulity attested to that. The doctor must have waited a long time to come face to face with Sophie and her children, hoping to perpetrate his ingenious deed. And what, in the private misery of his heart, I think he most intensely lusted to do was to inflict upon Sophie, or someone like her--some tender and perishable Christian--a totally unpardonable sin. It is precisely because he had yearned with such passion to commit this terrible sin that I believe that the doctor was exceptional, perhaps unique, among his fellow SS automata: if he was not a good man or a bad man, he still retained a potential capacity for goodness, as well as evil, and his strivings were essentially religious. Why do I say religious? For one thing, perhaps because he was so attentive to Sophie's profession of faith. But I would risk speculating further on this because of a vignette which