DEEP IN THE GROUND and surrounded by thick stone walls, the basement of Höss’s house where Sophie slept was one of the very few places in the camp into which there never penetrated the smell of burning human flesh. This was one of the reasons that she sought its shelter as often as she could, despite the fact that the part of the basement reserved for her straw pallet was damp and ill-lit and stank of rot and mold. Somewhere behind the walls there was an incessant trickle of water in the pipes from the drains and toilets upstairs, and occasionally she was disturbed at night by the furry, shadowy visit of a rat. But all in all this dim purgatory was a far better place to be than any of the barracks—even the one where for the previous six months she had lived with several dozen other relatively privileged female prisoners who worked in the camp offices. Although spared in those confines most of the brutality and destitution which was the lot of the common inmate throughout the rest of the camp, there had been constant noise and no privacy, and she had suffered most from an almost continual lack of sleep. In addition, she had never been able to keep herself clean. Here, however, she shared her quarters with only a handful of prisoners. And of the several seraphic luxuries afforded by the basement, one was its proximity to a laundry room. Sophie made grateful use of these facilities; indeed, she would have been required to use them, since the mistress of the mansion, Hedwig Höss, possessed a Westphalian hausfrau’s phobia about dirt and made certain that any of the prisoners lodged beneath her roof keep clothing and person not merely clean but hygienic: potent antiseptics were prescribed for the laundry water and the prisoners domiciled in Haus Höss went around smelling of germicide. There was still another reason for this: Frau Kommandant was deathly, afraid of the camp’s contagions.
Another precious amenity which Sophie found and embraced in the cellar was sleep, or at least its possibility. Next to food and privacy, the lack of sleep was one of the camp’s leading and universal deficiencies; sought by all with a greed that approached lust, sleep allowed the only sure escape from ever-abiding torment, and strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely) usually brought pleasant dreams, for as Sophie observed to me once, people so close to madness would be driven utterly mad if, escaping a nightmare, they confronted still another in their slumber. So because of the quiet and isolation in the Höss basement Sophie had been able for the first time in months to sleep and to immerse herself in the tidal ebb and flow of dreams.
The basement had been partitioned into two parts roughly down the center. Seven or eight male prisoners were quartered on the other side of the wooden wall; mostly Polish, they worked upstairs as handymen or as dishwashers in the kitchen, and a couple were gardeners. Except in passing, the men and women rarely mingled. Besides herself, there were three female prisoners on Sophie’s side of the partition. Two of these were Jewish dressmakers, middle-aged sisters from Liege. Living testimony of the easy expediency in which the Germans often indulged, the sisters had been spared the gas solely because of their energetic yet delicate artistry with needle and thread. They were the special favorites of Frau Höss, who together with her three daughters was the beneficiary of their talents; all day long they stitched and hemmed and refurbished much of the fancier clothing taken from Jews who had gone to the gas chambers. They had been in the house for many months and had grown complacent and plump, their sedentary labor allowing them to acquire a suetlike avoirdupois bizarre-looking amid this fellowship of emaciated flesh. Under Hedwig’s patronage they seemed to have lost all fear of the future, and appeared to Sophie perfectly good-humored and composed as they stitched away in a second-floor sunroom, peeling off labels and markers stamped Cohen and Lowenstein and Adamowitz from expensive furs and fabric freshly cleaned and only hours removed from the boxcars. They spoke little, and in a Belgian cadence Sophie found harsh and odd to the ear.
The other occupant of Sophie’s dungeon was an asthmatic woman named Lotte, also of middle years, a Jehovah’s Witness from Koblenz. Like the Jewish seamstresses, she was another of fortune’s darlings and had been saved from death by injection or some slow torture in the “hospital” in order to serve as governess to the Hösses’ two youngest children. A gaunt, slab-shaped creature with a prognathous jaw and enormous hands, she resembled outwardly some of the brutish female guards who had been sent to the camp from KL Ravensbrück, one of whom assaulted Sophie savagely early after her arrival. But Lotte had an amiable, generous disposition that refuted the look of menace. She had acted as a big sister, offering Sophie important advice as to how to behave in the mansion, along with several valuable observations concerning the Commandant and his ménage. She said in particular watch yourself around the housekeeper, Wilhelmine. A mean sort, Wilhelmine was a prisoner herself, a German who had served time for forgery. She lived in two rooms upstairs. Kiss her ass, Lotte advised Sophie, lick her ass good and you won’t have no trouble. As for Höss himself, he, too, liked to be flattered, but you had to be less obvious about it; he wasn’t anybody’s fool.
A simple soul, utterly devout, practically illiterate, Lotte seemed to weather the unholy winds of Auschwitz like a crude, sturdy ship, serene in her terrible faith. She did not try to proselytize, only intimating to Sophie that for the suffering of her own imprisonment she would find ample reward in Jehovah’s Kingdom. The rest, including Sophie, would certainly go to hell. But there was no vindictiveness in this pronouncement, any more than there was in the remarks Lotte made when—short of breath one morning, panting and pausing with Sophie on the first-floor landing as they ascended to their labors—she sniffed that ambient odor of the Birkenau funeral pyre and murmured that those Jews deserved it. They had earned the mess they were in. After all, wasn’t it the Jews who were Jehovah’s first betrayers? “Root of all evil, die Hebräer,” she wheezed.
On the brink of waking that morning of the day I have already begun to describe, the tenth day she had worked for the Commandant in his attic and the one upon which she had made up her mind to try to seduce him—or if not precisely to seduce him (ambiguous thought), then otherwise to bend him to her will and scheme—just before her eyes fluttered open in the cobwebbed gloom of the cellar, she was conscious of the harsh labor of Lotte’s asthmatic breathing from her pallet against the opposite wall. Then Sophie came awake with a jolt, through heavy eyelids perceiving the great heap of a body three feet away, recumbent beneath a moth-eaten woolen blanket. Sophie would have reached out to poke Lotte in the ribs as she had more than once before, but although the scrape of shuffling feet on the floor of the kitchen above told her it was morning, nearly time for all of them to be up and about, she thought: Let her sleep. Then like a swimmer plunging toward benevolent, amniotic depths, Sophie tried to fall back into that dream she had had just before she awakened.
She had been a little girl climbing, a dozen years before, in the Dolomites with her cousin Krystyna; chattering in French, they had been searching for edelweiss. Dark and misty peaks soared up around them. Baffling, like all dreams, touched with shadowy peril, the vision had also been almost unbearably sweet. Above them the milky-white flower had beckoned from the rocks and Krystyna, preceding her up a dizzying path, had called back, “Zosia, I’ll bring it down!” Then Krystyna seemed to slip and, in a shower of pebbles, to be on the edge of falling: the dream became murky with terror. Sophie prayed for Krystyna as she would for herself: Angel of God, guardian angel, stay by her side... She uttered the prayer over and over again. Angel, don’t let her fall! Suddenly the dream was flooded with alpine sunlight and Sophie looked up. Serene and triumphant, framed in a golden aureole of light, the child smiled down at Sophie, securely perched on a mossy promontory, clutching the sprig of edelweiss. “Zosia, je l’ai trouvé!” Krystyna cried. And in the dream her feeling of averted evil, of safety, of answered prayer and jubilant resurrection was so piercingly hurtful that when she came awake, hearing Lotte’s noise, her eyes stung with salty tears. Then her eyelids had closed again and her head had fallen back in a futile attempt to recapture her phantasmal joy when she felt Bronek roughly shaking her shoulder.
“I’ve got good grub for you ladies this morning,” Bronek said. Cued to the Germanic punctiliousness of the manse, he had arrived exactly on schedule. In a battered copper pan he carried the food, almost invariably leftovers from the Höss dinner table of the night before. It was always cold, this morning provender (as if to feed pets, the female cook left it in the pan each night by the kitchen door, from whence Bronek fetched it at daybreak), and usually consisted of a greasy potpourri of bones with bits of meat and gristle attached, crusts of bread (on propitious days smeared with a little margarine), vegetable remnants and sometimes a half-eaten apple or pear. By comparison with the food fed to the prisoners in the camp at large, this was a sumptuous meal; indeed, it was a banquet in terms of mere quantity, and since this breakfast was occasionally augmented, inexplicably, by such tidbits as canned sardines or a hunk of Polish sausage, it simply was assumed that the Commandant had seen to it that his household staff would not starve. Furthermore, although Sophie had to share her pan with Lotte, and the two Jewish sisters ate in the same way, face to face as over a kennel pail, they were each supplied with an aluminum spoon—an almost unheard-of daintiness for inmates anywhere else behind the wires.
Sophie heard Lotte wake with a groan, muttering disconnected syllabics, perhaps some matutinal invocation to Jehovah, in a sepulchral Rhenish accent. Bronek, thrusting the pan down between them, said, “Look there—what’s left of a pig’s shank, with meat on it still. Plenty of bread. Also some fine bits of cabbage. I knew you girls would get fed good the minute I heard yesterday that Schmauser was coming to dinner.” The handyman, pale and bald in the silvery filtering light, all angular limbs and joints like a mantis, switched from Polish to his crippled clownish German—this for Lotte’s benefit as he goosed her with his elbow. “Aufwecken, Lotte!” he whispered hoarsely. “Aufwecken, mein schöne Blume, mein kleine Engel!” Were Sophie ever disposed to laughter, this running by-play between Bronek and the elephantine governess, who plainly enjoyed his attentions, would have come as close as anything to providing her with comic relief.
“Come awake, my little Bible-worm,” Bronek persisted, and at this moment Lotte roused herself and sat up. Bleared with sleep, her slab of a face looked monstrous yet ethereally placid and benign, like one of those Easter Island effigies. Then without a moment’s hesitation she began to slurp up the food.
Sophie held back for a moment. She knew that Lotte, a godly soul, would take only her share, and so luxuriated in the space of time before she would eat her own portion. She salivated with pleasure at the sight of the slimy mess in the pan and blessed the name Schmauser. He was an SS Obergruppenführer, the equivalent of a lieutenant general and Höss’s superior from Wroclaw; his visit had been bruited about the house for days. And thus Bronek’s theory had proved to be accurate: get a real bigwig in the house, he had kept saying, and Höss will lay on such a fine feed that there will be enough left over so even the cockroaches will get sick.
“What’s it like out, Bronek?” said Lotte between mouthfuls of food. Like Sophie, she knew that he had a farmer’s nose for weather.
“Cool. Wind from the west. Sunny now and then. But lots of low clouds. They keep the air down. The air stinks now but it might get better. A lot of Jews going up the chimney. My darling Sophie, please eat.” He spoke the last in Polish, grinning, revealing pink gums in which the stubs of three or four teeth protruded like raw white slivers.
Bronek’s career at Auschwitz coincided with the history of the camp itself. By happenstance, he was one of its early novitiates, and had begun working in Haus Höss shortly after his incarceration. He was an ex-farmer from the vicinity of Miastko, in the far north. Most of his teeth had fallen out as a result of his involvement in a vitamin-deficiency experiment; like a rat or guinea pig, he had been systematically deprived of ascorbic acid and other essentials until the expected ruination in his mouth: it may have also made him a little daft. Whatever, he had been struck by the preternatural luck that came down on certain prisoners for no good reason at all, like a lightning bolt. Ordinarily, he would have been put away after such a trial, a useless husk sped into the night by a quick injection in the heart. But he possessed a farmer’s resilience and a really extraordinary vigor. Save for his destroyed teeth, he displayed almost none of the symptoms of scurvy—lassitude, weakness, weight loss, and so on—which were predicted under the circumstances. He remained as hardy as a billygoat, which brought him under the bemused scrutiny of the SS doctors and, in a roundabout way, to the attention of Höss. Asked to take a look at this phenomenon, Höss did so, and in their fleeting encounter something about Bronek—perhaps only the language he spoke, the droll garbled German of an uneducated Pole from Pomerania—caught the Commandant’s fancy. He moved Bronek into the protection of his house, where he had worked ever since, enjoying certain small privileges, leeway to wander through the premises picking up gossip, and that general exemption from constant surveillance that is granted a pet or favorite—and there are such favorites in all slave societies. He was an expert scrounger, and from time to time came up with the most remarkable surprises in the way of food, usually from mysterious sources. More important, Sophie learned, Bronek, despite his outward simple-mindedness, was in day-to-day touch with the camp itself, and was a trusted informant of one of the strongest Polish Resistance groups.
The two dressmakers stirred in the shadows across the floor. “Bonjour, mesdames,” Bronek called cheerily. “Your breakfast is coming.” He turned back to Sophie. “I also got you some figs,” he said, “real figs, imagine that!”
“Where did you get figs?” Sophie said. She felt startled delight as Bronek handed her this indescribable treasure; although dried and wrapped in cellophane, they had a marvelous warm heft in her palm, and lifting the package to her face, she saw the streaks of delectable juice congealed on the grayish-green skin, inhaled the distant voluptuous aroma, faded but still sweet, phantom fragrance of the mellow fruit. She had once tasted real figs years before in Italy. Her stomach responded with a joyous noise. She had never had the remotest prospect of any such luxury in months—no, years. Figs! “Bronek, I don’t believe it!” she exclaimed.
“Save them for later,” he said, giving another package to Lotte, “don’t eat them all at once. Eat this shit from up above first. It’s swill, but it’s the best swill you’ll have for a long time. Fit for the pigs I used to raise in Pomorze.”
Bronek was a non-stop talker. Sophie listened to the stream of chitchat while she greedily gnawed at the chill and stringy stump of pork. It was scorched, cartilaginous and vile. But her taste buds responded, as if slaked with ambrosia, to the small bursting pods and pockets of fat which her body clamored for. She could have gorged herself on any grease. Fancifully, her mind’s eye re-created the feast at which Bronek last night had scurried about as busboy: the lordly suckling pig, the dumplings, the steaming potatoes, cabbage with chestnuts, the jams and jellies and gravies, a rich custard for dessert, all sluiced down the SS gullets with the help of portly bottles of Bull’s Blood wine from Hungary, and served (when a dignitary as lofty as an Obergruppenführer was present) upon a superb Czarist silver service shipped back from some museum ransacked on the eastern front. Apropos of which, Sophie realized, Bronek was now speaking in the tones of one proud to be privy to portentous tidings. “They keep trying to look happy,” he said, “and for a while they seem to be. But then they get on the war, and it’s all misery. Like last night Schmauser said the Russians were getting ready to recapture Kiev. Lots of other bad news from the Russian front. Then it’s rotten news in Italy too, so said Schmauser. The British and the Americans are moving up there, everyone dying like lice.” Bronek rose from his crouch, moving with his other pan toward the two sisters. “But the real big news, ladies, is something you may not hardly believe, but it’s the truth—Rudi is leaving! Rudi is being transferred back to Berlin!”
In mid-swallow, gulping down the gristly meat, Sophie nearly choked on these words. Leaving? Höss leaving the camp! It couldn’t be true! She rose to a sitting position and clutched at Bronek’s sleeve. “Are you sure?” she demanded. “Bronek, are you sure of that?”
“All I’m telling you is what I heard Schmauser say to Rudi after the other officers had left. Said he’d done a fine job but that he was needed at Berlin Central Office. So he could get himself ready for immediate transfer.”
“What do you mean—immediate?” she persisted. “Today, next month, what?”
“I don’t know,” Bronek replied, “he just plainly meant soon.” His voice became tinged with foreboding. “Me, I’m not happy about it, I’ll tell you.” He paused somberly. “I mean, who knows who’ll take his place? Some sadist maybe, you know. Some gorilla! Then maybe Bronek too... ?” He rolled his eyes and drew his forefinger across his throat. “He could have had me put away, he could have given me a little gas, like the Jews—they were doing that then, you know—but he brought me here and treated me like a human being. Don’t think I won’t be sorry to see Rudi go.”
But Sophie, preoccupied, paid no more attention to Bronek. She was panicked by this news of Höss’s departure. It made her realize that she must act with urgency and dispatch if she was to persuade him to take notice of her and thus try to accomplish through him what she had set out to do. For the following hour or so, toiling alongside Lotte over the Höss household laundry (the prisoners in the house were spared the lethally grueling and interminable roll calls of the rest of the camp; luckily, Sophie was compelled only to wash the vast heaps of soiled clothing from upstairs—abnormally plenteous because of Frau Höss’s fixation about germs and filth), she fantasized all manner of little skits and playlets in which she and the Commandant had finally been drawn into some intimate connection whereby she was able to pour out the story that would lead to her redemption. But time had begun to work against her. Unless she moved immediately and perhaps even a little recklessly, he might be gone and all she planned to accomplish would come to nothing. Her anxiety was excruciating, and it was somehow irrationally mixed up with hunger.
She had secreted the package of figs in the loose inside hem of her striped smock. At a little before eight o’clock, nearly the time when she had to make her way up the four flights of stairs to the office in the attic, she could resist no longer the urge to eat some of the figs. She stole away to a large cubbyhole underneath the stairs where she would be out of sight of the other prisoners. And there she frantically broke open the cellophane. A film of tears misted her eyes as the tender small globes of fruit (slightly moist and deliciously textured in their chewy sweetness that mingled with archipelagos of minute seeds) slid richly down her throat, one by one; wild with delight, unashamed at her piggishness and the sugary saliva drooling over fingers and chin, she devoured them all. Her eyes were still misted over and she heard herself panting with pleasure. Then after standing there for a moment in the shadows to let the figs settle on her stomach and to compose her expression, she began to ascend slowly to the upper levels of the house. It was a climb of no more than a few minutes’ duration but one which was interrupted by two singularly memorable occurrences that seemed to fit with ghastly appropriateness into the hallucinatory fabric of her mornings, afternoons and nights at Haus Höss...
On separate landings—one on the floor above the basement and the other just below the attic—there were dormer windows that gave off on a western exposure, from which Sophie usually tried to avert her eyes, though not always successfully. This view contained some nondescript subjects—in the foreground a brown grassless drill field, a small wooden barracks, the electrified wires hemming in an incongruous stand of graceful poplars—but it also presented a glimpse of the railroad platform where the selections were made. Invariably, lines of boxcars stood waiting there, dun-colored backdrop to blurred, confounding tableaux of cruelty, mayhem and madness. The platform dwelt in the middle distance, too near to be ignored, too far away to be seen with clarity. It may have been, she later recounted, her own arrival there on that concrete quai and its associations for her, that caused her to shun the scene, to turn her eyes away, to blot out of her sight the fragmentary and flickering apparitions which from this vantage point registered only imperfectly, like the grainy shadow-shapes in an antique silent newsreel: a rifle butt raised skyward, dead bodies being yanked from boxcar doors, a papier-mâché human being bullied to the earth.
Sometimes she sensed that there was no violence at all, and got only a terrible impression of order, throngs of people moving in shambling docile parade out of sight. The platform was too distant for sound; the music of the loony-bin prisoner band which greeted each arriving train, the shouts of the guards, the barking of the dogs—all these were mute, though upon occasion it was impossible not to hear the crack of a pistol shot. Thus the drama seemed to be enacted in a charitable vacuum, from which were excluded the wails of grief, cries of terror and other noises of that infernal initiation. It was for this reason perhaps, Sophie thought as she climbed the steps, that she succumbed from time to time to an occasional irresistible peek—doing so now, seeing only the string of boxcars newly arrived, as yet unloaded. SS guards in swirls of steam surrounded the train. She knew from manifests which had been received by Höss the day before that this was the second of two trainloads containing 2,100 Jews from Greece.
Then, her curiosity satisfied, she turned away and opened the door to the salon through which she had to pass to reach the upper stairway. From the Stromberg Carlson phonograph a contralto voice enveloped the room in a lover’s hectic grievance, while Wilhelmine, the housekeeper, stood listening to it, audibly humming as she pawed through a stack of silken female underwear. She was alone. The room was flooded with sunlight.
Wilhelmine (Sophie noticed, trying to hurry through) was wearing one of her mistress’s hand-me-down robes, pink slippers with huge pink pompons, and her henna-dyed hair was in curlers. The face seemed aflame with rouge. The humming was extravagantly off-key. She turned as Sophie edged past, fixing her with a look that seemed not at all unpleasant, which was a difficult trick, since the face itself was the most unpleasant she had ever beheld. (Intrusive as it may appear now, and possibly lacking in graphic persuasion, I cannot resist repeating Sophie’s Manichean reflection of that summer and let it go at that: “If you ever write about this, Stingo, just say that this Wilhelmine was the only beautiful woman I ever saw—no, she was not beautiful really, but good-looking with these hard good looks that some streetwalkers have—the only good-looking woman that the evil inside her had caused this absolute ugliness. I can’t describe her any more than that. It was some kind of total ugliness. I look at her and the blood turn to ice inside me.”) “Guten Morgen,” Sophie whispered, pressing on. But Wilhelmine suddenly arrested her with a sharp “Wait!” German is a loud language anyway, the voice was like a shout.
Sophie turned to confront the housekeeper; oddly, although they had often seen each other, it was the first time they had ever spoken. Despite her unthreatening countenance now, the woman inspired apprehension; Sophie felt the pulse racing in both wrists, her mouth dried up instantly. “Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen,” mourned the querulous, lachrymal voice, the scratches on the shellac amplified, echoing from wall to wall. A sparkling galaxy of dust motes swam through the slanting early light, shimmering up and down across the lofty room crowded with its armoires and desks, its gilt sofas and cabinets and chairs. It’s not even a museum, thought Sophie, it’s a monstrous warehouse. Suddenly Sophie realized that the salon reeked heavily of disinfectant, like her own smock. The housekeeper was weirdly abrupt. “I want to give you something,” she cooed, smiling, fingering the stack of underwear. The filmy mound of silken underpants, looking freshly cleaned, rested on the surface of a marble-top commode inlaid with colored wood and ornamented in strips and scrolls of bronze; a huge and hulking thing, it would have grossly obtruded at Versailles, where in fact it may have been stolen from. “Bronek brought them last night straight from the cleaning unit,” she continued in her strident singsong. “Frau Höss likes to give a lot of them to the prisoners. I know you’re not issued underwear, and Lotte’s been complaining that those uniforms scratch so around the bottom.” Sophie let out her breath. With no chagrin, no shock, not even with revelation, the thought flew through her mind like a sparrow: They’re all from dead Jews. “They’re very, very clean. Some of these are made of marvelous sheer silk, I’ve seen nothing like them since the war began. What size do you wear? I’ll bet you don’t even know.” The eyes flashed indecently.
It had all happened too fast, this sudden gratuitous charity, for Sophie to make immediate sense of it, but soon she had an inkling and she was truly alarmed—alarmed as much by the way Wilhelmine had all but pounced upon her (for now she realized this is what she had done), lurking like a tarantula while she waited for her to emerge from the cellar, as by the precipitate offering of the rather ridiculous largess itself. “Doesn’t that fabric chafe around your bottom?” she heard Wilhelmine ask her now, mezza voce and with a slight quaver that made everything more insinuating and flirtatious than her suggestive eyes, or the words that had caused her at first to take warning: I’ll bet you don’t even know.
“Yes...” said Sophie, fiercely uneasy. “No! I don’t know.”
“Come,” she murmured, beckoning toward an alcove. It was a shadowy space sheltered behind a Pleyel concert grand piano. “Come, let’s try a pair on.” Sophie moved unresistingly forward, and felt the light touch of Wilhelmine’s fingers on the edge of her smock. “I’ve been so interested in you. I’ve heard you speaking to the Commandant. You speak marvelous German, just like a native. The Commandant says you are Polish, but I don’t really believe him, ha! You’re too beautiful to be Polish.” The words, vaguely feverish, spilled over one another as she maneuvered Sophie toward the nook in the wall, ominously filled with darkness. “All the Polish women here are so ordinary and plain, so lumpig, so trashy-looking. But you—you must be Swedish, aren’t you? Of Swedish blood? You look more Swedish than anything, and I hear there are many people of Swedish blood in the north of Poland. Here we are now, where no one can see us and we can try on a pair of these undies. So your nice bottom will stay all white and soft.”
Until this instant, hoping against hope, Sophie had said to herself that the woman’s advances just might be innocuous, but now, so close, the signs of her voracious letch—first her rapid breathing and then the ripe rosiness spreading like a rash over the bestially handsome face, half Valkyrie, half gutter trull—left no doubt about her intentions. They were clumsy bait, those silk panties. And in a spasm of strange mirth it flashed across Sophie’s mind that in this psychotically ordered and scheduled household the wretched woman could only have sex on the fly, so to speak, vertically in an alcove behind a mammoth grand piano during these fleetingly few, precious and unprogrammed minutes after breakfast when the children were just off to the garrison school and before the beginning of daily routine. All other hours of the day, down to the last clock-tick, were accounted for: voilà! for the desperate challenges, beneath a regulated SS roof, of a taste of Sapphic amour. “Schnell, schnell, meine Süsse!” Wilhelmine whispered, more insistently now. “Lift up your skirt a bit, darling... no, higher!”
The ogress lunged forward then and Sophie felt herself engulfed in pink flannel, rouged cheeks, henna hair—a reddish miasma stinking of French perfume. The housekeeper worked with the frenzy of a madwoman. She was busy with her hard sticky lupine tongue for only a second or two around Sophie’s ear, fondled her breasts urgently, manhandled her buttocks, drew back with an expression of lust so intense that it was like some terminal anguish, then set about her serious labors, slumping earthward in genuflection and squeezing Sophie’s hips roundabout with her arms. Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen... “Swedish kittycat... beautiful thing,” she mumbled. “Ah, bitte... higher!” Having made her decision moments before, Sophie was not about to resist or protest—in a kind of headlong autohypnosis she had placed herself beyond revulsion, realizing in any case that she was as helpless as a crippled moth—and let her thighs, submissively, be spread apart as the brutish muzzle and the bullethead of a tongue probed into what, with some dull distant satisfaction, she realized was her obdurate dryness, as parched and without juice as desert sand. She rocked on her heels and raised her arms lazily and resistlessly akimbo, mainly aware now of the woman frantically fingering herself, the flaming becurlered mop of hair bobbing beneath like a huge shredded poppy. Then there was a booming noise from the other end of the huge room, a door was flung open and Höss’s voice called, “Wilhelmine! Where are you? Frau Höss wants you in the bedroom.”
The Commandant, who should have been in his attic office, had become briefly unpinned from his schedule, and the fear which his unexpected presence caused down below was transmitted instantly to Sophie, who thought that Wilhelmine’s sudden spasmodic and agonizing clutch around her thighs might cause the two of them to topple and fall. Tongue and head slipped away. For moments her stricken adorer remained motionless as if paralyzed, the face rigid with fright. Then came blessed relief. Höss called again once, paused, cursed under his breath and quickly departed, stamping across the floor to the attic stairway. And the housekeeper fell apart from her, limp, flopped down in the shadows like a rag doll.
It was not until Sophie was on the stairs to the attic, moments later, that the reaction smote her, and she felt her legs go elastic and weak and she was forced to sit down. The mere fact of the assault was not what left her unstrung—it was nothing new, she had been nearly raped by a woman guard months before, shortly after her arrival—nor was it Wilhelmine’s response in her mad scramble for safety after Höss had gone upstairs (“You must not tell the Commandant,” she had said with a snarl, then repeated the same words as if imploring Sophie in abject fear, before scuttling out of the room. “He would kill us both!”). For a moment Sophie felt this compromising situation had in an obscure way given her an advantage over the housekeeper. Unless—unless (and the second thought caught her up short and made her sit tremblingly on the stairs) this convicted forger, who wielded so much power in the house, should seize upon that moment of thwarted venery as a way to get back at Sophie, work out her frustration by turning love into vengeance, run to the Commandant with some tale of wrongdoing (specifically, that it was the other prisoner who had initiated the seduction), and in this way shatter to bits the framework of Sophie’s all-too-unsubstantial future. She knew, in the light of Höss’s detestation of homosexuality, what would happen to her if such a scandal were fabricated, and suddenly felt—as had all her fellow trusty prisoners smothering in their fear-drenched limbo—the phantom needle squirting death into the center of her heart.
Squatting on the stairs, she bent forward and thrust her head into her hands. The confusion of thoughts roiling about in her mind caused her an anxiety she felt she could hardly bear. Was she better off now, after the episode with Wilhelmine, or was she in greater peril? She didn’t know. The clarion camp whistle—reedy, harmonic, more or less in B minor and reminding her always of some partly recaptured, sorrow-sick, blowzy chord from Tannhäuser—shattered the morning, signaling eight o’clock. She had never been late before to the attic but now she was going to be, and the thought of her tardiness and of the waiting Höss—who measured his days in milliseconds—filled her with terror. She rose to her feet and continued the climb upward, feeling feverish and unstrung. Too many things crushing down upon her all at once. Too many thoughts to sort out, too many swift shocks and apprehensions. If she didn’t take hold of herself, make every effort to keep her composure, she knew she might simply collapse today like a puppet that has performed its jerky dance on strings, then, abandoned by its master, falls into a lifeless heap. A small nagging soreness across her pubic bone reminded her of the housekeeper’s rummaging head.
Winded by the climb, she reached the landing on the floor beneath the Commandant’s attic, where a partly opened window gave out once more upon the westward view with its barren drill field sloping toward the melancholy stand of poplars, beyond which stood the countless boxcars in drab file, smeared with the dust of Serbia and the Hungarian plains. Since her encounter with Wilhelmine the boxcar doors had been thrown open by the guards, and now hundreds more of the condemned voyagers from Greece milled about on the platform. Despite her haste, Sophie was compelled to halt and watch for an instant, drawn by morbidity and dread in equal measure. The poplar trees and the horde of SS guards obscured most of the scene. She could not clearly see the faces of the Greek Jews. Nor could she tell what they wore: mostly she saw a dull gray. But the platform did give off glints and flickers of multicolored garments, greens and blues and reds, a swirl and flourish here and there of bright Mediterranean hue, piercing her with vivid longing for that land she had never seen except in books and in her fancy and summoning up instantly the child’s verse she remembered from the convent school—skinny Sister Barbara chanting in her comic pebbly Slavic French:
Ôque les îies de la Grèce sont belles!
Ô contempler la mer à l’ombre d’un haut figuier
et écouter tout autour les cris des hirondelles
voltigeant dans l’azur parmi les oliviers!
She thought she had long ago become used to the smell, at least resigned to it. But for the first time that day the sweet, pestilential stench of flesh consumed by fire assailed her nostrils with the ripe bluntness of an abattoir, so violently taking command of her senses that her eyes went out of focus and the throng on the distant platform—seeming for one last moment like some country festival viewed from afar—swam away from her vision. And involuntarily, with creeping horror and disgust, she raised her fingertips to her lips.
...la mer à l’ombre d’un haut figuier...
Thus, simultaneously with her awareness of where Bronek had obtained the fruit, the liquefied figs themselves came flooding up sourly in her throat, pouring out and spattering onto the floor between her feet. With a groan she thrust her head against the wall. She stood heaving and retching for long moments by the window. Then upon limp weak legs she sidled away from the mess she had made and fell to her hands and knees on the tiles, writhing in misery and riven by a feeling of strangeness and loss such as she had never known.
I’ll never forget what she told me about this: she realized that she could not remember her own name. “Oh God, help me!” she called aloud. “I don’t know what I am!” She remained for a while in that crouch, trembling as if in arctic cold.
Insanely, a cuckoo clock from the moon-faced daughter Emmi’s bedroom scant steps away sounded the hour in eight cuckoo cries. They were at least five minutes late, Sophie observed with grave interest, and odd satisfaction. And slowly she rose erect and proceeded to climb the last steps upward, into the lower vestibule where the framed photographs of Goebbels and Himmler were the only adornments on the wall, and upward further to the attic door, ajar, with the brotherhood’s holy motto engraved on the lintel: My Honor Is My Loyalty—beyond which Höss in his eyrie waited beneath the image of his lord and savior, waited in that celibate retreat of a calcimine purity so immaculate that even as Sophie approached, unsteadily, the very walls, it seemed, in the resplendent autumn morning were washed by a blindingly incandescent, almost sacramental light.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Kommandant,” she said.
Later during that day Sophie could not shake from her mind Bronek’s distressing news that Höss was to be transferred back to Berlin. It really meant that she would have to move with haste if she was to accomplish what she had set out to do. And so in the afternoon she resolved to make her advance and prayed silently for the poise—the necessary sang-froid—to carry it off. At one point—waiting for Höss to return to the attic, feeling her emotions subside to something like normal after the tumult provoked in her breast by that brief passage from Haydn’s Creation—she had been encouraged by some interesting new changes in the Commandant. His relaxed manner, for one thing, then his rather awkward but real attempt at conversation, followed by the insinuating touch of his hand on her shoulder (or was she reading too much into this?) when they had both gazed at the Arabian stallion: these seemed to her to signal cracks in that impregnable mask.
Then, too, there was the letter to Himmler he had dictated to her, regarding the condition of the Greek Jews. Never before had she transcribed any correspondence which was not somehow connected with Polish affairs and Polish language—those official letters to Berlin usually being the province of a poker-faced clerk Scharführer on the floor below who clumped upstairs at regular intervals to hammer out Höss’s messages to the various SS chief engineers and proconsuls. Now she reflected on the Himmler letter with mild belated wonder. Wouldn’t the mere fact that he had made her privy to such a sensitive matter indicate... what? Certainly, at least, that he had allowed her, for whatever reason, a confidentiality that few prisoners—even prisoners of her undoubted privileged status—could ever dream of, and her assurance of reaching through to him before the day was over grew stronger and stronger. She felt she might not even have to avail herself of the pamphlet (like father, like daughter) tucked away in one of her boots ever since the day she left Warsaw.
He ignored what she feared might be a distraction—her eyes, raw with weeping—as he stormed through the door. She heard “The Beer Barrel Polka” pounding rhythmically below. He was holding a letter, apparently delivered to his aide downstairs. The Commandant’s face was flushed with anger, a wormlike vein pulsed just below his cropped pate. “They know it’s compulsory that they write in German, these blasted people. But they constantly break the rules! Damn them to hell these Polish half-wits!” He handed her the letter. “What does it say?”
“ ‘Honored Commandant... ’ ” she began. In rapid translation Sophie told him that the message (characteristically sycophantic) was from a local subcontractor, a supplier of gravel to the German operators of the camp concrete factory, who said that he would be unable to transport the required amount of gravel in the required time, begging the Commandant’s indulgence, due to the extremely soggy condition of the ground around his quarry that had not only caused several cave-ins but also hampered and slowed down the operation of his equipment. Therefore, if the honored Commandant would have the forbearance (Sophie continued to read), the schedule of delivery would necessarily be altered in the following manner—But Höss broke in suddenly, fiercely impatient, lighting a cigarette from another in his fingers, coughing his croupy cough as he blurted out a hoarse “Enough!” The letter had plainly unstrung the Commandant. He pursed his lips in a caricature of a mouth drawn and puckered with tension, muttered “Verwünscht!”—then quickly ordered Sophie to make a translation of the letter for SS Hauptsturmführer Weitzmann, head of the camp building section, with this typed comment attached: “Builder Weitzmann: Build a fire under this piddler and get him moving.”
And at that exact instant—as he said the last words—Sophie saw the fearful headache attack Höss with prodigious speed, like a stroke of lightning that had found a conduit through the gravel merchant’s letter down to that crypt or labyrinth where migraine sets its fiery toxins loose beneath the cranium. The sweat poured forth, he pushed his hand to the side of his brow in a helpless fluttering little ballet of white-knuckled fingers, and his lips curled outward to reveal a phalanx of teeth grinding together in a fugue of pain. Sophie had observed this a few days before, a much milder attack; now it was his migraine again and a full-scale siege. In his pain Höss gave a thin whistle. “My pills,” he said, “for God’s sake, where are my pills!” Sophie went swiftly to the chair next to Höss’s cot upon which he kept the bottle of ergotamine he used to alleviate these attacks. She poured out a glass of water from a carafe and handed it and two tablets of ergotamine to the Commandant, who, gulping the medicine down, rolled his eyes at her with a queer half-wild gaze as if he were trying to express with those eyes alone the dimensions of his anguish. Then with a groan and with his hand clapped to his brow he sank down on the cot and lay sprawled out gazing at the white ceiling.
“Shall I call the doctor?” Sophie said. “The last time I remember he said to you—”
“Just be quiet,” he retorted. “I can’t bear anything now.” The voice was edged with a cowed, whimpering tone, rather like that of a hurt puppy.
During his last attack, five or six days before, he had ordered her quickly away to the cellar, as if he wanted no one, not even a prisoner, to be witness to his affliction. Now, however, he rolled over on his flank and lay there rigid and motionless except for the rise and fall of his chest beneath his shirt. Since he made no further sign to her, she went to work: she commenced typing a free translation from the contractor’s letter on her German machine, once more aware without shock or even much interest that the gravel dealer’s complaint (could a single such annoyance, she wondered idly, have triggered in itself the Commandant’s cataclysmic migraine?) meant another critical pause in the construction of the new crematorium at Birkenau. The work stoppage, or slowdown—that is, Höss’s apparent inability to orchestrate to his own satisfaction all the elements of supply and design and labor concerning this new oven-and-gas-chamber complex, the completion of which was two months overdue—remained the chief thorn in his side, and now was the obvious cause for all the nervousness and anxiety she had observed in him these past days. And if it was the reason, as she suspected, for his headache, could it be possible too that his failure to get the crematorium built on schedule was in some way linked to his sudden transfer back to Germany? She was typing the last line of the letter and at the same time puzzling over these questions when his voice broke in abruptly, startling her. And when she turned her eyes in his direction she realized with a curious mixture of hope and apprehension that he must have been eying her for many minutes from the cot where he lay. He beckoned to her and she rose and went to his side, but since he made no motion for her to sit down, she remained standing.
“It’s better,” he said in a subdued voice. “That ergotamine is a miracle. It not only reduces the pain but it subdues the nausea.”
“I’m glad, mein Kommandant,” Sophie replied. She felt her knees trembling and for some reason dared not look down into his face. Instead, she fixed her eyes on the most obvious and immediate object within view: the heroic Führer in scintillant steel armor, his gaze confident and serene beneath his falling forelock as he looked toward Valhalla and a thousand years’ questionless futurity. He seemed irreproachably benign. Suddenly remembering the figs she had thrown up hours before on the stairs, Sophie felt a stab of hunger in her stomach, and the weakness and trembling in her legs increased. For long moments Höss did not speak. She could not look at him. Was he now, in his silence, measuring her, appraising her? We’ll have a barrel of funfunfun, the voices clamorously chorused from below, the dreadful ersatz polka stuck now in its groove, repeating over and over a faint fat chord from an accordion.
“How did you come here?” Höss said finally.
She blurted the words out. “It was because of a łapanka, or as we German-speaking people say, ein Zusammentreiben—a roundup in Warsaw. It was early spring. I was on a railroad car in Warsaw when the Gestapo staged a roundup. They found me with some illegal meat, part of a ham—”
“No, no,” he interrupted, “not how you came to the camp. But how you got out of the women’s barracks. I mean, how you were placed in the stenographic pool. So many of the typists are civilians. Polish civilians. Not many prisoners are so fortunate as to find a stenographic billet. You may sit down.”
“Yes, I was most fortunate,” she said, seating herself. She sensed the relaxation in her own voice and she gazed at him. She noticed that he was still sweating desperately. Supine now, eyes half closed, he lay rigid and wet in a pool of sunlight. There was something oddly helpless-looking about the Commandant awash in ooze. His khaki shirt was drenched in sweat, a multitude of tiny sweat blisters adorned his face. But in truth he seemed no longer to be suffering such pain, although the initial torment had saturated him everywhere—even the damp blond spirals of belly-hair curling upward through a space between his shirt buttons—his neck, the blond hairs of his wrists. “I was really most fortunate. I think it must have been a stroke of fate.”
After a silence Höss said, “How do you mean, a stroke of fate?”
She decided instantly to risk it, to exploit the opening he had given her no matter how absurdly insinuating and reckless the words might sound. After these months and the momentary advantage she had been given, it would be more self-defeating to continue to play the torpid tongue-tied slave than to appear presumptuous, even if it involved the serious additional hazard of being thought actually insolent. So: Out with it, she thought. She said it then, although she tried to avoid any intensity, keeping the plaintive edge in her voice of one who has been unjustly abused. “Fate brought me to you,” she went on, not unaware of the melodrama of the utterance, “because I knew only you would understand.”
Again he said nothing. Below, “The Beer Barrel Polka” was replaced by a Liederkranz of Tyrolean yodelers. His silence disturbed her, and suddenly she felt that she was the subject of his most suspicious scrutiny. Maybe she was making a horrible mistake. The queasiness grew within her. Through Bronek (and her own observation) she knew that he hated Poles. What on earth made her think she might be an exception? Insulated by the closed windows from Birkenau’s smoldering stench, the warm room had a musty attic’s odor of plaster, brickdust and waterlogged timber. It was the first time she had really noticed the smell, and it was like a fungus in the nostrils. Amid the awkward silence between the two of them she heard the stitch and buzz of the imprisoned bluebottle flies, the soft popping sound as they bumped the ceiling. The noise of the shunting boxcars was dull, dim, almost inaudible.
“Understand what?” he said finally in a distant tone, giving her yet another small aperture through which she might try to implant a hook.
“That you would understand that a mistake has been made. That I am guilty of nothing. That is, I mean, that I am guilty of nothing truly serious. And that I should be set immediately free.”
There, she had done it, said it, swiftly and smoothly; with fiery fervor surprising even to her she had uttered the words which for days upon end she had rehearsed incessantly, wondering if she could muster the courage to get them past her lips. Now her heartbeat was so violent and wild that it pained her breastbone, but she took bright pride in the way in which she had managed to govern her voice. She also felt secure in the easy mellifluousness of her accent, attractively Viennese. The small triumph impelled her to go on. “I know you might think this foolish of me, mein Kommandant. I must admit that on the surface it sounds implausible. But I think that you will concede that in a place like this—so vast, involving such great numbers of people—there can be certain errors, certain grave mistakes.” She paused, listening to her heartbeat, wondering if he could hear it, yet conscious that her voice still had not broken. “Sir,” she continued, pressing a little on the note of entreaty, “I do hope you will believe me when I say that my imprisonment here is a terrible miscarriage of justice. As you see, I am Polish and indeed I was guilty of the crime I was charged with in Warsaw—smuggling food. But it was a small crime, don’t you see, I was trying only to feed my mother, who was very sick. I urge you to try to understand that this was nothing when measured against the nature of my background, my upbringing.” She hesitated, tumultuously agitated. Was she pushing too hard? Should she halt now and let him make the next move, or should she go on? She instantly decided: Get to the point, be brief but go on. “You see, sir, it is like this. I am originally from Cracow, where my family were passionate German partisans, for many years in the vanguard of those countless lovers of the Third Reich who admire National Socialism and the principles of the Fuhrer. My father was to the depths of his soul Judenfeindlich—”
Höss stopped her with a small groan. “Judenfeindlich,” he whispered in a drowsy voice. "Judenfeindlich. When will I cease hearing that word ‘anti-Semitic’? My God, I’m tired of that!” He let out a hoarse sigh. “Jews. Jews! Will I ever be done with Jews!”
Sophie retreated before his impatience, aware that her tactical maneuvering had rather misfired: she had gotten ahead of herself. Höss’s thought process, far from inept, was also as exhaustive and as unimaginatively single-minded as the snout of an anteater and brooked few deviations. When only a moment before he had asked “How did you come here?” and then specified that she explain just how, he meant precisely that, and now wanted no talk about fate, miscarriages of justice and matters Judenfeindlich. As if his words had blown down upon her like a north wind, she shifted her tack, thinking: Do as he says, then, tell him the absolute truth. Be brief, but tell the truth. He could find out easily enough anyway, if he wanted to.
“Then, sir, I will explain how I was put into the stenographic pool. It was because of an altercation I had with a Vertreterin in the women’s barracks when I first arrived last April. She was the assistant to the block leader. Quite honestly, I was terrified of her because...” She hesitated, a little wary of elaborating upon a sexual possibility which the shading of her voice, she knew, had already suggested. But Höss, eyes wide open now and level upon hers, anticipated what she was trying to say.
“Doubtless she was a lesbian,” he put in. His tone was tired, but acid and exasperated. “One of those whores—one of those scummy pigs from the Hamburg slums they stuck in Ravensbrück and that Headquarters got hold of and sent here in the mistaken idea that they would exercise discipline over you—over the female inmates. What a farce!” He paused. “She was a lesbian, wasn’t she? And she made advances toward you, am I right? It would be expected. You are a very beautiful young woman.” Again he paused while she absorbed this last observation. (Did it mean anything?) “I despise homosexuals,” he went on. “Imagining people performing those acts—animalistic practices—makes me sick. I could never stand even to look at one, male or female. But it is something which must be faced when people are in confinement.” Sophie blinked. Like a strip of film run at antic jerky speed through the projector, she saw that morning’s mad charade, saw Wilhelmine’s mop of flaming hair draw back from her groin, the famished damp lips parted in a petrified perfect O, eyes sparkling with terror; looking at the revulsion on Höss’s face, thinking of the housekeeper, she felt herself begin to suppress either a scream or a peal of laughter. “Unspeakable!” the Commandant added, curling his lips as if on some loathsome mouthful.
“They were not just advances, sir.” She felt herself flush. “She tried to rape me.” She could not recall ever having said the word “rape” in front of a man, and the flush grew warmer, then began to fade. “It was most unpleasant. I had not realized that a woman’s”—she hesitated—“a woman’s desire for another woman could be so—so violent. But I learned.”
“In confinement people behave differently, strangely. Tell me about it.” But before she could reply he had reached into the pocket of his jacket, draped over the other chair at the side of the cot, and took from it a tinfoil-wrapped chocolate bar. “It’s curious,” he said, the voice clinical, abstract, “these headaches. At first they fill me with terrible nausea. Then as soon as the medicine begins to take effect I find myself very hungry.” Stripping the foil from the chocolate, he extended the bar toward her. Hesitant at the outset, surprised—for it was the first such gesture on his part—she nervously broke off a piece and popped it into her mouth, knowing that she betrayed a greedy eagerness in the midst of her effort to be casual. No matter.
She proceeded with the account, talking rapidly as she watched Höss devour the rest of the chocolate, conscious that the so very recent assault on her cunt by the trusted housekeeper of the man to whom she was speaking allowed her a certain freshness of tone, even vivacity. “Yes, the woman was a prostitute and a lesbian. I don’t know where she was from in Germany—I think from the north, she spoke in Plattdeutsch—but she was a huge woman and she tried to rape me. She had had her eyes on me for days. One night in the latrine she approached me. She was not violent at first. She promised me food, soap, clothing, money, anything.” Sophie halted for a moment, her gaze fixed now on Höss’s violet-blue eyes, which were watchful, fascinated. “I was terribly hungry but—like you too, sir, I am repelled by homosexuals—I did not find it difficult to resist, to say no. I tried to push her away. Then this Vertreterin grew enraged and attacked me. I shouted at her loudly and began to plead with her—she had me against the wall and was doing things to me with her hands—and then the block leader came in.
“The block leader put a stop to this,” Sophie went on. “She sent the Vertreterin away and then told me to come to her room at the end of the barracks. She was not a bad sort—another prostitute, like you say, sir, but not a bad sort. Indeed, she was kindly for such... for such a person. She had overheard me shouting at the Vertreterin, she said, and she was surprised because all of us newcomers in the barracks were Polish and she wanted to know where I learned such excellent German. We talked for a while and I could tell that she liked me. I don’t think she was a lesbian. She was from Dortmund. She was charmed by my German. She hinted that she might be able to help me. She gave me a cup of coffee and then sent me away. I saw her several times after that and could tell that she had taken a liking to me. A couple of days later she told me to come to her room again, and one of your noncommissioned officers, sir, was there, Hauptscharführer Günther of the camp administration office. He interrogated me for some time, asking me about my various qualifications, and when I told him I could type and take expert shorthand in Polish and German, he informed me that perhaps I could be of some use at the typing pool. He had heard that there was a shortage of qualified help—certain language specialists. After a few days he came back and told me that I would be transferred. And so that is how I came to the...” Höss had finished eating the chocolate bar and now, stirring, rose up on his elbow, preparing to light one of his cigarettes. “I mean,” she concluded, “I worked in the stenographic section until about ten days ago, when I was told that I was needed for special work here. And here—"
“And here,” he interrupted, “here you are.” He gave a sigh. “You have had good luck.” And what he did then caused her electric amazement. He reached up with his free hand, and using the utmost delicacy, plucked a little something from the edge of her upper lip; it was, she realized, a crumb of the chocolate she had eaten, now held between his thumb and forefinger, and she watched with grave wonder as he moved his tar-stained fingers slowly toward his lips and deposited the tiny chestnut-brown flake into his mouth. She shut her eyes, so disturbed by the peculiar and grotesque communion of the gesture that her heart commenced pounding again and her brain was rocked with vertigo.
“What’s the matter?” she heard him say. “You’re white.”
“Nothing, mein Kommandant,” she replied. “I’m just a bit faint. It will go away.” She kept her eyes closed.
“What have I done wrong!” The voice was a cry, so loud that it frightened her, and she had barely opened her eyes when she saw him roll himself off the cot, stand abruptly erect and walk the few paces to the window. The sweat plastered the back of his shirt and she thought she saw his whole body tremble as he stood there. Sophie was utterly confounded, watching him, having thought that the by-play with the chocolate might have been the prelude to something more intimate. But perhaps it had been; he was now voicing his complaint as if he had known her for years. He struck his hand into his fist. “I can’t think what they imagine I’ve done wrong. Those people in Berlin, they’re impossible. They ask the superhuman from a mere human who has only done the best he has known how for three years. They’re unreasonable! They don’t know what it’s like to put up with contractors who can’t fulfill their schedules, lazy middlemen, suppliers who fall behind or simply never deliver. They’ve never dealt with idiot Poles! I’ve done my faithful best and this is the thanks I get. This pretense—that it’s a promotion! I get kicked upstairs to Oranienburg and I have to endure the intolerable embarrassment of seeing them put Liebehenschel in my place—Liebehenschel, that insufferable egotist with his bloated reputation for efficiency. The whole thing, it’s sickening. There’s not the slightest bit of gratitude left.” It was strange: there was more petulance in his voice than true anger or resentment.
Sophie rose from her chair and drew near him. She sensed another aperture chinking open ever so slightly. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “and forgive me for suggesting this if I am mistaken. But it may be a tribute to you instead. It may be that they fully understand your difficulties, your hardships, and how exhausted you have been made by your work. Forgive me again, but during these few days here in the office I could not help but notice the extraordinary strain you are constantly under, the amazing pressure...” How careful was her obsequious solicitude. She heard her voice trail off but meanwhile kept her eyes fixed on the back of his neck. “It may be that this is really in the nature of a reward for all your... your devotion.”
She fell silent and followed Höss’s gaze to the field below. On the capriciously changing wind the smoke from Birkenau had blown off and away, at least momentarily, and in the clear sunlight the great glorious white stallion romped again around the fenced rim of the paddock, tossing tail and mane in a small windstorm of dust. Even through the window they could hear the thudding collision of his galloping hoofs. From the Commandant’s throat came an aspirated whistle of air; he fumbled at his pocket for another cigarette.
“I wish you were right,” he said, “but I doubt it. If they just understood the magnitude, the complexity! They seem to have no knowledge of the incredible numbers involved in these Special Actions. The endless multitudes! These Jews, they come on and on from all the countries of Europe, countless thousands, millions, like the herring in the spring that swarm into Mecklenburg Bay. I never dreamed the earth contained so many of das Erwählte Volk.”
The Chosen People. His use of the phrase allowed her to press her initiative a little further, enlarging the opening where she was confident now she had secured a fragile but real hold. “Das Erwählte Volk—” her voice was edged with scorn as she echoed the Commandant—“the Chosen People, if you’ll permit me to say so, sir, may only at last be paying the just price for having arrogantly set themselves apart from the rest of the human race—for having posed as the only people worthy of salvation. I honestly do not see how they could expect to escape retribution when they have commited such a blasphemy for so many years in the sight of Christians.” (Suddenly the image of her father loomed, monstrous.) With anxiety she hesitated, then resumed, spinning out another of her lies, impelled forward like a splinter bobbingly afloat upon a rushing stream of fabrication and falsehood. “I am no longer Christian. Like you, sir, I have abandoned that pathetic faith with its pretexts and evasions. Yet it is easy to see why the Jews have inspired such hatred in Christians as well as in people like yourself—Gottgläubiger, as you said to me just this morning—righteous and idealistic people who are only striving for a new order in a new world. Jews have threatened this order, and it is only just now that they finally suffer for it. Good riddance, I say.”
He still remained standing with his back to her when he replied evenly, “You speak with a great deal of feeling in this matter. For a woman, you talk like one who has a certain amount of knowledge of the crimes of which Jews are capable. I’m curious about this. So few women have any informed knowledge or understanding about anything.”
“Yes, but I do, sir!” she said, watching him swivel his shoulders ever so slightly and look at her—now for the first time—with truly attentive concern. “I have had personal knowledge, also personal experience—”
“Such as what?”
Impetuously then—she knew it was a risk, a gamble—she bent down and fumblingly plucked the worn and faded pamphlet from the little crevice in her boot. “There!” she said, flourishing it in front of him, spreading out the title page. “I’ve kept this against the rules, I know I’ve taken a chance. But I want you to know that these few pages represent everything I stand for. I know from working with you that the ‘final solution’ has been a secret. But this is one of the earliest Polish documents suggesting a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem. I collaborated with my father—whom I mentioned to you before—in writing it. Naturally, I don’t expect you to read it in detail, filled with so many new worries and concerns as you are. But I do earnestly beg you at least to consider it... I know my difficulties are of no importance to you... but if you could only give it a glance... perhaps you could begin to see the entire injustice of my imprisonment here... I could also tell you more about my work in Warsaw on behalf of the Reich, when I revealed the hiding place of a number of Jews, intellectual Jews who had long been sought...”
She had begun to babble a bit; there was a disconnected quality in her speech which warned her to stop, and she did. She prayed that she would not become unstrung. Sweltering beneath her prisoner’s smock with the sweat of mingled hope and trepidation, she was aware that she had made a breach in his consciousness at last, implanted herself as fleshed reality within the scope of his perception. However imperfectly and momentarily, she had made contact; this she could tell by the look of absolute concentrated penetration he gave her when he took the pamphlet from between her fingers. Self-conscious, coquettish, she averted her eyes. And in fatuous recollection a Galician peasants’ saying came back to her: I am crawling into his ear.
“You maintain, then,” he said, “that you are innocent.” There was a distant amiability in his tone that filled her with encouragement.
“Sir, to repeat,” she answered quickly, “I freely admit my guilt of the minor charge which caused me to be sent here—the business about the little piece of meat. I am only asking that this misdemeanor be weighed against my record not only as a Polish sympathizer with National Socialism but as an active and involved campaigner in the sacred war against Jews and Jewry. That pamphlet in your hand, mein Kommandant, can easily be authenticated and will prove my point. I implore you—you who have the power to give clemency and freedom—to reconsider my imprisonment in the light of my past good works, and to return me to my life in Warsaw. It is such a little thing to ask of you, a fine and just man who possesses the power of mercy.”
Lotte had told Sophie that Höss was vulnerable to flattery, but she wondered now if she hadn’t overdone it—especially when she saw his eyes narrowing slightly and heard him say, “I’m curious about your passion. Your rage. Just what is it that causes you to hate the Jews with such... such intensity?”
This story, too, she had squirreled away for such a moment, relying on the theory that while a pragmatic mind like that of Höss might appreciate the venom of her Antisemitismus in the abstract, that same mind’s more primitive side would likely relish a touch of melodrama. “That document there, sir, contains my philosophical reasons—the ones I developed with my father at the university in Cracow. I want to emphasize that we would have expressed our enmity toward Jews even if our family had not suffered a terrible calamity.”
Impassively Höss smoked and waited for her to continue.
“The sexual profligacy of Jews is well known, one of their ugliest traits. My father, before he met an unfortunate accident... my father was a great admirer of Julius Streicher for this reason—he applauded the way in which Herr Streicher has satirized so instructively this degenerate trait in the Jewish character. And our family had a cruel reason to be able to accept the truth of Herr Streicher’s insights.” She stopped and glanced as if in wretched remembrance toward the floor. “I had a younger sister who went to the convent school in Cracow, she was just a grade behind my own. One evening about ten winters ago she was walking near the ghetto and was sexually assaulted by a Jew—it turned out that he was a butcher—who dragged her into an alley and ravished her repeatedly. Physically, my sister survived the attack by this Jew, but mentally she was destroyed. Two years later she committed suicide by drowning, the tragic child. Certainly this terrible deed validated once and for all the profundity of Julius Streicher’s understanding of what atrocities Jews are capable of.”
“Kompletter Unsinn!” Höss spat out the words. “That sounds to me like so much hogwash! Rot!"
Sophie had the sensation of one who, walking along a serene woodland path, feels herself suddenly without underpinnings, plunged into a murky hole. What had she said wrong? Inadvertently she gave a small wail. “I mean—” she began.
“Hogwash!” Höss repeated. “Streicher’s theories are the sheerest rot. I loathe his pornographic garbage. More than any single person he has done a disservice to the Party and the Reich, and to world opinion, with his rantings about Jews and their sexual proclivities. He knows nothing about such matters. Anyone who is acquainted with Jews will attest that, if anything, in the sexual area they are meek and inhibited, unaggressive, even pathologically repressed. What happened to your sister was doubtless an aberration.”
“It happened!” she lied, dismayed at her unforeseen little predicament. “I swear—”
He cut her off. “I don’t doubt that it took place, but it was a freak, an aberration. Jews are perpetrators of many forms of gross evil but they are not rapists. What Streicher has done in his newspaper all these years has brought only the greatest ridicule. Had he told the truth in a persistent way, portraying Jews as they really are—bent upon monopolizing and dominating the world economy, poisoning morality and culture, attempting through Bolshevism and other means to bring down civilized governments—he might have performed a necessary function. But this portrayal of the Yid as a diabolical debaucher with an enormous prick”—he used the colloquial Schwanz, which rather startled her, as did the gesture he made with his hands, measuring a meter-long organ in air—“is an unwarranted compliment to Jewish masculinity. Most Jewish males I have observed are contemptibly neuter. Sexless. Soft. Weichlich. And more disgusting for all of that.”
She had made a dumb tactical error in regard to Streicher (she knew she was dumb about National Socialism, but how could she have been expected to be able to gauge the extent of the jealousies and resentments, the squabbles and in-fighting and disaccord which reigned among the Party members of all ranks and categories?), yet actually, now it did not seem to matter: Höss, shrouded in the lavender fumes of his fortieth Ibar cigarette of that day, suddenly broke off his tirade against the Gauleiter of Nuremberg, gave the pamphlet a flat little tap with his fingertips and said something which made her heart feel like a hot ball of lead. “This document means nothing to me. Even if you were able to demonstrate in a convincing way your collaboration in the writing, it would prove very little. Only that you despise Jews. That does not impress me, inasmuch as it seems to me a very widespread sentiment.” His eyes became frosty and faraway, as if he were gazing at a point yards beyond the back of her bescarfed and frizzled skull. “Also, you seem to forget that you are a Pole, and therefore an enemy of the Reich who would remain an enemy even if you were not also judged guilty of a criminal act. Indeed, there are some in highest authority—the Reichsführer, for one—who consider you and your kind and your nation on a par with the Jews, Menschentiere, equally worthless, equally polluted in the racial sense, equally justifying righteous hatred. Poles living in the Fatherland are beginning to be marked with a P—an ominous sign for you people.” He hesitated for an instant. “I myself do not wholeheartedly share this specific view; however, to be honest, some of my dealings with your countrymen have caused me such bitterness and frustration that I have often felt that there is real cause for this absolute loathing. In the men especially. There is in them an ingrained loutishness. Most of the women are merely ugly.”
Sophie burst into tears, although it had nothing to do with his denunciations. She had not planned to weep—it was the last thing from her mind, a display of mawkish weakness—but she could not help it. The tears spilled forth and she thrust her face into her hands. All—all!—had failed; her precarious handhold had crumbled, and she felt as if she had been hurled down the mountainside. She had made no advance, no inroads at all. She was finished. Sobbing uncontrollably, she stood there with the sticky tears leaking through her fingers, sensing the approach of doom. She gazed into the darkness of her wet cupped hands and heard the strident Tyrolean minnesingers from the salon far below, a cackling barnyard of voices propelled upward on a choir of thumping tubas, trombones, harmonicas in soggy syncopation.
Und der Adam hat Liebe erfunden,
Und der Noah den Wein, ja!
Almost never shut, the attic door was closed then upon a squeak of hinges, slowly, gradually, as if by some reluctant force. She knew it could only have been Höss who closed the door and she was conscious of the sound of his boots as he returned toward her, then his fingers grasping her shoulder firmly even before she allowed herself to draw her hands away from her eyes and to look up. She forced herself to stop crying. The clamor beyond the intervening door was muffled.
Und der David hat Zither erschall...
“You’ve been flirting shamelessly with me,” she heard him say in an unsteady voice. She opened her eyes. His own eyes were distraught and the way in which they goggled about—seemingly out of control, at least for that brief moment—filled her with terror, especially since they gave her the impression somehow that he was about to raise his fist and strike her. But then with a great visceral heave he seemed to regain possession of himself, his gaze became normal or nearly so, and when next he spoke, his words were uttered with their ordinary soldierly steadiness. Even so, the manner of his breathing—rapid but deep—and a certain tremor about the lips betrayed to Sophie his inner distress, which still, with more terror, she could not help but identify as an extension of his rage at her. Rage at her for what in particular she could not fathom: for her foolish pamphlet, for being a flirt, for praising Streicher, for being born a dirty Pole, perhaps all of these. Then suddenly, to her astonishment, she realized that although his distress clearly partook of some vague and inchoate rage, it was not rage at her at all but at someone or something else. His clutch on her shoulder was hurting her. He made a nervous choking sound.
Then, relaxing his grasp, he blurted out something which, in its overlay of ethnic anxiety, she perceived to be a ludicrous replica of Wilhelmine’s own squeamish concern that morning. “It’s hard to believe you’re Polish, with your superb German and the way you look—the fair complexion of your skin and the lines of your face, so typically Aryan. It’s a finer face than that of most Slavic women. And yet you are what you say you are—a Pole.” Sophie now detected a tone both discontinuous and rambling enter his speech, as if his mind were prowling in evasive circles around the threatful core of whatever it was he was trying to express. “I don’t like flirts, you see, it is only a way of trying to insinuate yourself into my favor, to try and seek out a few rewards. I have always detested this quality in women, this crude use of sex—so dishonest, so transparent. You have made it very difficult for me, making me think foolish thoughts, distracting me from my proper duties. This flirtatiousness has been damnably annoying, and yet—and yet it can’t be all your fault, you’re an extremely attractive woman.
“A number of years ago when I would go from my farm up to Lübeck—I was quite young at the time—I saw a silent film version of Faust in which the woman who played Gretchen was unbelievably beautiful and made a deep impression on me. So fair, such a perfect fair face and lovely figure—I thought about her for days, weeks afterwards. She visited me in my dreams, obsessing me. Her name was Margarete Something, this actress, her last name escapes me now. I always thought of her simply as Margarete. Her voice too: I could only believe that if I could hear her speak, there would be such a purity in her German. Very much like yours. I saw the film a dozen times. I learned later that she died very young—of tuberculosis, I believe—and it saddened me terribly. Time passed and eventually I forgot about her—or at least she no longer obsessed me. I could never completely forget her.” Höss paused and squeezed her shoulder once more, hard, hurting her, and she thought with shock: Strange, with that pain he is really trying to express some tenderness... The yodelers below had fallen silent. Involuntarily she closed her eyes tightly, trying not to flinch from the pain and aware now—in the dark hollow of her consciousness—of the camp’s symphonic death sounds: of metal clangor, of the boxcars’ remote colliding booms and the faint keening of a locomotive whistle, mournful and shrill.
“I am very much conscious that in many ways I am not like most men of my calling—of men brought up in a military environment. I was never one of the fellows. I have always been aloof. Solitary. I never consorted with prostitutes. I went to a brothel only once in my life, when I was very young, in Constantinople. It was an experience that left me disgusted; I am made sick by the lewdness of whores. There is something about the pure and radiant beauty of a certain kind of woman—fair of skin and of hair, although if truly Aryan she can of course also be somewhat darker—that inspires me to idolize that beauty, to idolize it almost to the point of worship. That actress Margarete was one of these—then also a woman I knew in Munich for some years, a splendid person with whom I had a passionate relationship and a child out of wedlock. Basically I believe in monogamy. I’ve been unfaithful to my wife on very few occasions. But this woman, she... she was the most glorious example of this beauty—exquisite of feature and of pure Nordic blood. My attraction to her was of an intensity beyond anything so crude as mere sex, and its so-called pleasures. It had to do with a grander scheme of procreation. It was an exalted thing to deposit my seed within such a beautiful vessel. You inspire in me much the same desire.”
Sophie kept her eyes shut as the flow of his weird Nazi grammar, with its outlandishly overheated images and clumps of succulent Teutonic wordbloat, moved its way up through the tributaries of her mind, nearly drowning her reason. Then suddenly the mist from his sweaty torso reeked in her nostrils like rancid meat and she heard herself give a gasp at the very instant that he yanked her body up against his own. She had a sense of elbows, knees and a scratchy cheese-grater of stubble. As insistent in his ardor as his housekeeper, he was incomparably more awkward and his arms around her seemed multitudinous, like those of a huge mechanical fly. She held her breath while his hands at her back tried out some sort of massage. And his heart—his rampaging galloping heart! Never had she conceived that a single heart was capable of the riotous romantic thumping which moved against her like a drumbeat through the Commandant’s damp shirt. Trembling like a very sick man, he essayed nothing so bold as a kiss, although she was certain she sensed some protuberance—his tongue or nose—mooning restlessly around her bekerchiefed ear. Then an abrupt knock at the door caused him to break apart from her swiftly and he uttered a soft, miserable “Scheiss!”
It was his adjutant Scheffler again. Begging the Commandant’s pardon, Scheffler said, standing in the doorway, but Frau Höss—now on the landing below—had come upstairs with a question for the Commandant. She was going to the movies at the garrison recreation center and she wanted to know if she might take Iphigenie with her. Iphigenie, the older daughter, was recovering from a week-long case of die Grippe and Madame wished to find out whether, in the Commandant’s judgment, the girl was well enough to accompany her to the matinee. Or should she consult Dr. Schmidt? Höss snarled something in return which Sophie could not hear. But it was during this brief exchange that she had a desperate flash of intuition, sensing that the interruption with its jejune domestic flavor could only blot out forever the magic moment into which the Commandant, like some soul-eaten Tristan, had had the infirmity to allow himself to be lured. And when he turned again to face her she knew immediately that her presentiment was an accurate one, and that her cause was in its deepest peril yet.
“When he come back toward me,” Sophie said, “his face was even more twisted up and tormented than before. Again I have this strange feeling that he was going to hit me. But he didn’t. Instead, he come very close to me and said, ‘I long to have intercourse with you’—he used the word Verkehr, which have in German the same stupid formal sound as ‘intercourse’; he said, ‘Having intercourse with you would allow me to lose myself, I might find forgetfulness.’ But then suddenly his face changed. It was as if Frau Höss had changed everything around in a moment. His face became very calm and sort of impersonal, you know, and he said, ‘But I cannot and I will not, it is too much of a risk. It would be doomed to disaster.’ He turned away from me then, turned his back to me and walked to the window. I heard him say, ‘Also, pregnancy here would be out of the question.’ Stingo, I thought I might faint. I felt very weak from all my emotion and this tension; also, I guess, from hunger, from not eating anything since those figs I had vomited up that morning, and only the little piece of chocolate he had given me. He turned around again and spoke to me. He said, ‘If I were not leaving here, I would take the risk. Whatever your background is, I feel that in a spiritual way we could meet on common ground. I would risk a great deal to have relations with you.’ I thought he was going to touch or grab me again, but he didn’t. ‘But they have got rid of me,’ he said, ‘and I must go. And so you must go too. I am sending you back to Block Two where you came from. You will go tomorrow.’ Then he turned away again.
“I was terrified,” Sophie went on. “You see, I had tried to get close to him and I had failed, and now he was sending me away and all my hopes were destroyed. I tried to speak to him, but all I could feel was this choking in my throat and the words wouldn’t come. It was like he was going to cast me back into darkness and there was nothing I could do—nothing at all. I kept looking at him and I was trying to speak. That beautiful Arabian horse was still in the field down below and Höss was leaning against the window, gazing down at it. The smoke from Birkenau had lifted up. I heard him whisper something about his transfer to Berlin again. He spoke very bitterly. I remember he used words like ‘failure’ and ‘ingratitude,’ and once he said very clearly, ‘I know how well I have performed my duty.’ He didn’t say anything for a long while then, only kept looking at that horse, and finally I heard him say this, I am almost sure they were his exact words, ‘To escape the body of a man yet still dwell in Nature. To be that horse, to live within that beast. That would be freedom.’ ” She paused for an instant. “I have always remembered those words. They were just so...” And Sophie stopped speaking, her eyes glazed with memory, staring toward the phantasmagoric past as if in wonderment.
(“They were just so...”) What?
After Sophie told me all this, she broke off talking for a long time. She hid her eyes behind her fingers and bent her head downward toward the table, buried in somber reflection. She had throughout the long telling kept a firm grip on herself, but now the glistening wetness between her fingers told me how bitterly she had begun to weep. I let her cry in silence. We had been sitting for hours together that rainy August afternoon, our elbows propped against one of the Formica tables at the Maple Court. It was three days after the cataclysmic breakup between Sophie and Nathan that I described many pages ago. It may be recalled that when the two of them vanished I had been on my way for a visit with my father in Manhattan. (It was an important visit for me—and in fact I had decided to return to Virginia with him—and I want to describe it in some detail later.) From this get-together I had come back unhappily to the Pink Palace, expecting to find the same abandonment and ruination I remembered from that evening—certainly not anticipating the presence of Sophie, whom I discovered, miraculously, in the shambles of her room, stuffing her last odds and ends into a dilapidated suitcase. Meanwhile Nathan was nowhere in sight—I considered this a blessing—and after our rueful and sweet reunion Sophie and I hurried in the midst of an explosive summer downpour to the Maple Court. Needless to say, I was overjoyed to note that Sophie seemed as genuinely happy to see me as I was to be simply breathing her face and body once more. To the best of my knowledge, I had been, aside from Nathan and perhaps Blackstock, the only person in the world who could claim any real closeness to Sophie, and I sensed her clutching at my presence as if it were something actually life-giving.
She was still in what appeared to be a raw condition of shock over Nathan’s desertion of her (she said, not without a touch of grisly humor, that she had contemplated several times hurling herself from the window of the ratty Upper West Side hotel where she had languished those three days), but if grief over his parting had obviously eroded her spirit, it was this same grief, I sensed, that allowed her to open even wider the gates of her memory in a mighty cathartic cataract. But one small impression nags. Should I have become alarmed at something about Sophie which I had never once observed before? She had begun to drink, not heavily—what she drank did not even hesitantly slur her speech—but the three or four mild glasses of whiskey and water she downed during that gray wet afternoon comprised a surprising departure for one who, like Nathan, had been relatively abstemious. Perhaps I should have been more bothered or concerned by those shot glasses of Schenley’s at her elbow. At any rate, I stuck to my customary beer and only casually noted Sophie’s new inclination. I would doubtless have overlooked her drinking anyway, since when Sophie resumed talking (wiping her eyes and—in as straightforward and as emotionless a voice as anyone could manage under the circumstances—starting to wind up the chronicle of that day with Rudolf Franz Höss) she spoke of something which so rocked me with astonishment that I felt the entire outer surface of my face become enveloped by a tingling frost. I drew in my breath and my limbs grew as weak as reeds. And, dear reader, at least then I knew she was not lying...
“Stingo, my child was there at Auschwitz. Yes, I had a child. It was my little boy, Jan, that they have taken away from me on the day I came there. They have put him in this place called the Children’s Camp, he was only ten years old. I know it must be strange to you that all this time you’ve known me I have never told you about my child, but this is something I have never been able to tell to anyone. It is too difficult—too much for me to ever think about. Yes, I did tell Nathan about this once, many months ago. I told him very quickly and then after that I said that we must never once talk about this again. Or tell anyone else. So now I’m telling you only because you will not be able to understand about me and Höss unless you understood about Jan. And after this I will not talk any more about him, and you must never ask me questions. No, never again...
“Anyway, that afternoon when Höss was looking down from the window I spoke to him. I knew that I had to play my last card, reveal to him what au jour le jour I had buried even from myself—in my fear of dying of grief of it—do anything, beg, shout, scream for mercy, hoping only that I can somehow touch this man enough so that he would just show a bit of mercy—if not for me, then the only thing I had left on earth to live for. So I put my voice under control and said, ‘Herr Kommandant, I know I can’t ask much for myself and you must act according to the rules. But I beg of you to do one thing for me before you send me back. I have a young son in Camp D, where all the other boys are prisoners. His name is Jan Zawistowski, age ten. I have learned his number, I will give it to you. He was with me when I arrived but I have not seen him since six months. I yearn to see him. I am afraid for his health, with winter coming. I beg of you to consider some way in which he might be released. His health is frail and he is so very young.’ Höss didn’t reply to me, just looked straight at me without blinking. I had begun to break down a little and I felt myself going out of control. I reached out and touched his shirt, then clutched at it and said, ‘Please, if you have been impressed only the slightest bit by my presence, by my being, I beg of you to do this for me. Not to release me, just to release my little boy. There is a certain way you could do this, which I will tell you about... Please do this for me. Please. Please!’
“I knew then that I was once more only a worm in his life, a piece of Polish Dreck. He grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand away from his shirt and said, ‘That’s enough!’ I’ll never forget the frenzy in his voice when he said, ‘Ich kann es unmöglich tun!’ Which means ‘It’s out of the question for me to do that.’ He said, ‘It would be unlawful for me to release any prisoner without proper authority.’ Suddenly I realized I have touched some terrible nerve in him by even mentioning what I done. He said, ‘It’s outrageous, your suggestion! What do you take me for, some Dümmling you hope to be able to manipulate? Only because I expressed a special feeling for you? You think you could get me to contravene proper authority because I expressed some little affection?’ Then he said, ‘I find this disgusting!’
“Would it make sense to you, Stingo, if I said that I couldn’t help myself and I threw myself against him, threw my arms around his waist and begged him again, saying ‘Please’ over and over? But I could tell from the way his muscles become stiff and this trembling that ran through him that he was finished with me. Even so I couldn’t stop. I said, ‘Then at least let me see my little boy, let me visit him, let me see him just once, please do that one thing for me. Can’t you understand this? You have children of your own. Just allow me to see him, to hold him once in my arms before I go back into the camp.’ And when I said this, Stingo, I couldn’t help myself and I fell on my knees in front of him. I fell on my knees in front of him and pressed my face against his boots.”
Sophie halted, gazing again for long moments into that past which seemed now so totally, so irresistibly to have captured her; she took several sips of whiskey and swallowed once or twice abstractedly in a daze of recollection. And I realized that, as if seeking whatever semblance of present reality I was able to offer, she had taken hold of my hand in a numbing grip. “There have been so much talk about people in a place like Auschwitz and the way they acted there. In Sweden when I was in this refugee center, often a group of us who was there—at Auschwitz or at Birkenau, where I later was sent—would talk about how these various people acted. Why this man would allow himself to become a vicious Kapo, who would be cruel to his fellow prisoners and cause many of them to die. Or why this other man or woman would do this or that brave thing, sometime lose their lives that another could live. Or give their bread or a little potato or thin nothing soup to someone starving, even though they were themselves starving. Or there would be people—men, women—who would kill or betray another prisoner just for a little food. People acted very different in the camp, some in a cowardly and selfish way, some bravely and beautifully—there was no rule. No. But such a terrible place was this Auschwitz, Stingo, terrible beyond all belief, that you really could not say that this person should have done a certain thing in a fine or noble fashion, as in the other world. If he or she done a noble thing, then you could admire them like any place else, but the Nazis were murderers and when they were not murdering they turned people into sick animals, so if what the people done was not so noble, or even was like animals, then you have to understand it, hating it maybe but pitying it at the same time, because you knew how easy it was for you to act like an animal too.”
Sophie paused for a few moments and locked her eyelids shut as if in savage meditation, then gazed once more out onto the baffling distances. “So there is one thing that is still a mystery to me. And that is why, since I know all this and I know the Nazis turned me into a sick animal like all the rest, I should feel so much guilt over all the things I done there. And over just being alive. This guilt is something I cannot get rid of and I think I never will.” She paused again, and then said, “I suppose it’s because...” But she hesitated, failing to round out her thought, and I heard a quaver in her voice—perhaps more because of exhaustion now than anything else—when she said, “I know I will never get rid of it. Never. And because I never get rid of it, maybe that’s the worst thing the Germans left me with.”
Finally she relaxed her grip on my hand and turned to me, looking me full in the face as she said, “I surrounded Höss’s boots with my arms. I pressed my cheek up against those cold leather boots as if they was made of fur or something warm and comforting. And do you know? I think maybe I even licked them with my tongue, licked those Nazi boots. And do you know something else? If Höss had give me a knife or a gun and told me to go kill somebody, a Jew, a Pole, it don’t matter, I would have done it without thinking, with joy even, if it mean seeing my little boy for only a single minute and holding him in my arms.
“Then I heard Höss say, ‘Get to your feet! Demonstrations like this offend me. Get up!’ But when I began to get up his voice got softer and he said, ‘Certainly you may see your son, Sophie.’ I realized that it was the first time he ever spoke my name. Then—oh Jesus Christ, Stingo, he actually embraced me again and I heard him say, ‘Sophie, Sophie, certainly you may see your little boy.’ He said, ‘Do you think I could deny you that? Glaubst du, dass ich ein Ungeheuer bin? Do you think I am some kind of monster?’ ”