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By Root 12537 0

ease after several years’ disuse; her speed and skill surprised her, and she breathed a small prayer of thanks to her father, who, though in his grave at Sachsenhausen, had provided for her this measure of salvation. Part of her mind dwelled on her father—“Professor Biegański,” as she often thought of him, so formal and distant their relationship had always been—even as Höss, arrested in mid-phrase, sucked on his cigarette, coughed a phlegmy smoker’s cough, and stood gazing out over the sere October meadow, his angular, tanned, not unhandsome face wreathed in blue tobacco fumes. The wind at the moment was blowing away from the chimneys of Birkenau, the air was clear. Although the weather outside had a touch of frost in it, here in the attic of the Commandant’s house, beneath the sharply slanting roof, it was warm enough to be cozy, the rising heat trapped beneath the eaves and pleasantly augmented by still more heat pouring in from a brilliant early-afternoon sun. Several large bluebottle flies, imprisoned by the windowpanes, made soft gummy buzzings in the stillness or sailed out on tiny forays through the air, returned, buzzed fretfully, then fell still. There were also one or two vagrant, torpid wasps. The room was whitewashed with aseptic brightness, like that of a laboratory; it was dirt-free, spare, austere. It was Höss’s private study, his sanctuary and hideaway, also the place where he executed his most personal, confidential and momentous work. Even the adored children, who swarmed at will through the other three floors of the house, were not permitted here. It was the lair of a bureaucrat with priestly sensibilities.

Sparsely furnished, the room contained a plain pinewood table, a steel filing cabinet, four straight-backed chairs, a cot upon which Höss sometimes rested, seeking surcease from the migraine headaches that assailed him from time to time. There was a telephone, but it was usually cut off. On the table was some official stationery in neat stacks, an orderly collection of pens and pencils, a cumbersome black office typewriter with the emblazoned trademark of Adler. For the past week and a half Sophie had been seated for many hours daily, hammering out correspondence either on this typewriter or another, smaller one (kept when not used beneath the table) that had a Polish keyboard. Sometimes, as now, she sat on one of the other chairs and took dictation. Höss’s delivery tended to run in quick spurts separated by nearly interminable pauses—pauses in which there was almost audible a thudding tread of thought, the clotted Gothic ratiocination—and during such hiatuses Sophie would stare at the walls, all unadorned save for that work of supremely grandiose Kitsch she had seen before, a multi-pasteled Adolf Hitler in heroic profile, clad like a Knight of the Grail in armor of Solingen stainless steel. Adorning this monkish cell, it might have been the portrait of Christ. Höss ruminated, scratching his rather peninsular jaw; Sophie waited. He had removed his officer’s jacket, the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned. The silence here, high up, was ethereal, almost unreal. Only two intertwined sounds now intruded, and these faintly—a muffled noise embedded in the very ambience of Auschwitz and as rhythmic as the sea: the chuffing of locomotives and the remote rumble of shunting boxcars.

“Es kann kein Zweifel sein—” he resumed, then stopped abruptly. “ ‘There can be no question—’ no, that’s too strong. I should say something less positive?” It was an ambiguous question mark. He spoke now, as he had once or twice before, with an odd inquisitive undertone in his voice, as if he might be wishing to solicit Sophie’s opinion without compromising his authority by actually doing so. It was in effect a question addressed to both of them. In conversation Höss was extremely articulate. Yet his epistolary style, Sophie had observed, though workable and certainly not illiterate, fell often into clumsy, semi-opaque labyrinthine periods; it had the prosy, crippled rhythms of a man who was Army-educated, a perennial adjutant.