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By Root 12473 0

and its full force and meaning—and thus its full meaning as it informed the entire substance of the essay—was so horrible that she had to shove it into the back of her mind throughout the entire bone-chilling winter weekend during which she labored over her father’s impassioned screed. She found herself preoccupied about his rage should she misplace an accent, omit an umlaut. And she was still repressing the very meaning of Vernichtung until that moment in the drizzling dusk of Sunday when, hurrying with the bundle of typescript to meet her father and her husband, Casimir, in a café on the Market Square, she was smitten with horror at what he had said and written and what she, in her complicity, had done. “Vernichtung,” she said aloud. He means, she thought with stupid belatedness, they should all be murdered.

As Sophie herself implied, it would perhaps add gloss to her image if one could say that her realization of the hatred she bore toward her father not only coincided with but was motivated by her realization that he was an aspiring Jew-killer. But although the two awarenesses did merge together at almost the same moment, Sophie told me (and here I believed her, as I often did, for intuitive reasons) that she must have been emotionally ripe for the blinding revulsion she suddenly felt for her father, and that she very well may have reacted in the way she did had the Professor made no mention whatever of the approaching and wished-for slaughter. She told me she could never be sure. We are speaking here of central truths about Sophie, and I think it is testimony enough to the nature of her sensibilities that exposed for so many years to the rancorous, misshapen, discordant strains of her father’s obsession, and now immersed like a drowning creature in the very midst of the poisonous wellspring of his theology, she should have retained the human instinct to respond with the shock and horror that she did, clutching the atrocious bundle to her breast and hurrying through the misty crooked twilight streets of Cracow toward her revelation.

“That evening my father was waiting for me at one of the cafés on the Market Square. I remember it was very cold and damp, bits of sleet in the air, feeling like snow might come, you know. My husband, Kazik, was at the table with my father, waiting too. I was quite late because I worked all afternoon typing the manuscripts and it take much longer than I thought it would. I was terribly afraid that my father would be angry at my lateness. The whole thing have been done in such a hurry, you see. It was what I think you call a rush job, and the printer—the man who would print the pamphlet in German and Polish—was to meet my father at the café at a certain hour and pick up the manuscripts. Before this, my father had planned to spend time at his table there correcting the manuscripts. He was to correct the German typescript while Kazik checked over the one in Polish. That was the way it was supposed to be, but I was very late, and when I arrived there the printer had already come and was sitting with my father and Kazik. My father was very angry, and although I made my apologies, I could tell he was just furious, and he quickly take the manuscripts from me and order me to sit down. I sat down and I could feel something painful happen in my stomach I was so afraid of his rage. Strange, Stingo, how you remember certain details. I mean, just this: that my father was drinking tea and Kazik was drinking slivovitz brandy and the printer—this man that I had met before, named Roman Sienkiewicz; yes, just like the name of the famous writer—was drinking vodka. I’m sure I remember such a detail so clearly because of my father’s tea. I mean, you see, after working all afternoon I was just completely exhausted and all I wanted then was a cup of tea, like my father. But I would never order it myself, never! I remember looking at his teapot and his cup and just longing for hot tea like that. And if I had not been so late my father would have offered me tea but now he was furious with me and said nothing about