Sophie's Choice - William Styron [141]
Yet I cannot accept Steiner’s suggestion that silence is the answer, that it is best “not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate to the unspeakable.” Nor do I agree with the idea that “in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent.” I find a touch of piety in this, especially inasmuch as Steiner has not remained silent. And surely, almost cosmic in its incomprehensibility as it may appear, the embodiment of evil which Auschwitz has become remains impenetrable only so long as we shrink from trying to penetrate it, however inadequately; and Steiner himself adds immediately that the next best is “to try and understand.” I have thought that it might be possible to make a stab at understanding Auschwitz by trying to understand Sophie, who to say the least was a cluster of contradictions. Although she was not Jewish, she had suffered as much as any Jew who had survived the same afflictions, and—as I think will be made plain—had in certain profound ways suffered more than most. (It is surpassingly difficult for many Jews to see beyond the consecrated nature of the Nazis’ genocidal fury, and thus it seems to me less a flaw than a pardonable void in the moving meditation of Steiner, a Jew, that he makes only fleeting reference to the vast multitudes of non-Jews—the myriad Slavs and the Gypsies—who were swallowed up in the apparatus of the camps, perishing just as surely as the Jews, though sometimes only less methodically.)
If Sophie had been just a victim—helpless as a blown leaf, a human speck, volitionless, like so many multitudes of her fellow damned—she would have seemed merely pathetic, another wretched waif of the storm cast up in Brooklyn with no secrets which had to be unlocked. But the fact of the matter is that at Auschwitz (and this she came gradually to confess to me that summer) she had been a victim, yes, but both victim and accomplice, accessory—however haphazard and ambiguous and uncalculating her design—to the mass slaughter whose sickening vaporous residue spiraled skyward from the chimneys of Birkenau whenever she peered out across the parched autumnal meadows from the windows of the mansard roof of the house of her captor, Rudolf Höss. And therein lay one (although not the only one) of the prime causes of her devastating guilt—the guilt she concealed from Nathan and which, with no inkling of its nature or its actuality, he so often cruelly inflamed. For she could not wriggle out from beneath the suffocating knowledge that there had been this time in her life when she had played out the role, to its limit, of a fellow conspirator in crime. And this was the role of an obsessed and poisonous anti-Semite—a passionate, avid, tediously single-minded hater of Jews.
There were only two major events that took place during her stay at Auschwitz which Sophie ever spoke to me about, and neither of these did she ever mention to Nathan. The first of these—the day of her arrival at the camp—I have already referred to, but she did not speak to me of that until our final hours together. The second event, concerning her very brief relationship with Rudolf Höss that same year, and the circumstances leading up to it, she described to me during the hours of a rainy August afternoon at the Maple Court. Or, I should say, a rainy afternoon and an evening. For although she blurted out to me the episode with Höss in such feverish yet careful detail that it acquired for me the graphic, cinematic quality of something immediately observed, the memory and the emotional fatigue and strain it caused her made