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By Root 12418 0

of excess labor; one could not shoot an expensively unproductive slave; one suffered with Old Sam when he grew superannuated and feeble, and let him die in peace. (This was not entirely the case. There is much evidence, for instance, that in the West Indies in the mid-1700s the European masters for a time felt no compunction about working slaves to death. In general, however, what I have said is applicable.) With National Socialism there came a sweeping away of leftover pieties. The Nazis, as Rubenstein points out, were the first slaveholders to fully abrogate any lingering humane sentiments regarding the essence of life itself; they were the first who “were able to turn human beings into instruments wholly responsive to their will even when told to lie down in their own graves and be shot.”

Those who arrived at Auschwitz were, through discriminating methods of cost accounting and other advanced formulations of input and output, expected to struggle through their existence for only a fixed segment of time: three months. Sophie became aware of this a day or two after her arrival when, herded together with several hundred of her fellow newcomers—Polish women of all ages for the most part, looking like a barnyard full of plucked and blowzy poultry in their castoff rags and their shining scalps freshly shorn of hair—there filtered through her traumatized consciousness the words of an SS functionary, one Hauptsturmführer Fritzch, as he articulated the design of this City of Woe and bade those who had just entered it to abandon all hope. “I remember his exact words,” Sophie told me. “He said, ‘You have come to a concentration camp, not to a sanatorium, and there is only one way out—up the chimney.’ He said, ‘Anyone who don’t like this can try hanging himself on the wires. If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.’ Then he said, ‘Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.’ ”

So then ultimately the Nazis had with consummate craft fashioned a death-in-life more terrible than death, and more calculatingly cruel because few of those doomed in the beginning—on that first day—could know that this bondage of torture, disease and starvation was only an evil simulacrum of life through which they would be voyaging irresistibly deathward. As Rubenstein concludes: “The camps were thus far more of a permanent threat to the human future than they would have been had they functioned solely as an exercise in mass killing. An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...”

Or as Sophie said, “Most of them when they first come there, if they had only known, they would have prayed for the gas.”

The stripping and searching of prisoners that invariably took place as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz seldom allowed inmates to retain any of their former possessions. Due to the chaotic and often slipshod nature of the process, however, there were occasions when a newcomer was lucky enough to hold on to some small personal treasure or article of clothing. Through a combination of her own ingenuity, for instance, and oversight on the part of one of the SS guards, Sophie managed to keep a much worn but still serviceable pair of leather boots which she had owned since her last days in Cracow. Inside one of the boots, built into the lining, was a small slitlike compartment, and on the day she stood waiting for the Commandant at the window of his attic the compartment contained a thumbed, smudged, badly wrinkled but legible pamphlet of some twelve pages and four thousand words upon the title page of which was written this legend: Die polnische Judenfrage: Hat der Nationalsozialismus die Antwort? That is, Poland’s Jewish Problem: Does National Socialism Have the Answer? It was probably Sophie’s most flagrant evasion (and one incorporating her strangest lie) that earlier she kept harping to me about the extraordinary liberality and tolerance of her upbringing, not only deceiving me, just as I’m sure she deceived