Sophie's Choice - William Styron [161]
Imagine, if you will, a land in which carpetbaggers swarmed not for a decade or so but for millennia and you will come to understand just one aspect of a Poland stomped upon with metronomic tedium and regularity by the French, the Swedes, the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and possessed by even such greedy incubuses as the Turks. Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories. Pride in ancestry and family name, and also, one must remember, in a largely factitious aristocracy, or nobility. The names Radziwill and Ravenel are pronounced with the same intense albeit slightly hollow hauteur. In defeat both Poland and the American South bred a frenzied nationalism. Yet, indeed, even leaving aside these most powerful resemblances, which are very real and which find their origin in similar historical fountains (there should be added: an entrenched religious hegemony, authoritarian and puritanical in spirit), one discovers more superficial yet sparkling cultural correspondences: the passion for horseflesh and military titles, domination over women (along with a sulky-sly lechery), a tradition of storytelling, addiction to the blessings of firewater. And being the butt of mean jokes.
Finally there is a sinister zone of likeness between Poland and the American South which, although anything but superficial, causes the two cultures to blend so perfectly together as to seem almost one in their shared extravagance—and that has to do with the matter of race, which in both worlds has produced centuries-long, all-encompassing nightmare spells of schizophrenia. In Poland and the South the abiding presence of race has created at the same instant cruelty and compassion, bigotry and understanding, enmity and fellowship, exploitation and sacrifice, searing hatred and hopeless love. While it may be said that the darker and uglier of these opposing conditions has usually carried the day, there must also be recorded in the name of truth a long chronicle in which decency and honor were at moments able to controvert the absolute dominion of the reigning evil, more often than not against rather large odds, whether in Poznan or Yazoo City.
Thus when Sophie originally spun out her fairy tale regarding her father’s hazardous mission to protect some Jews of Lublin, she surely must have known that she was not asking me to believe the impossible; that Poles on numberless occasions in the near and distant past risked their lives to save Jews from whatever oppressor is a simple matter of fact beyond argument, and even though at that time I had small information about such things, I was not inclined to doubt Sophie, who, struggling with the demon of her own schizoid conscience, chose to throw upon the Professor a falsely beneficent, even heroic light. But if Poles by the thousands have sheltered Jews, hidden Jews, laid down their lives for Jews, they have also at times, in the agony of their conjugate discord, persecuted them with undeviating savagery; it was within this continuum of the Polish spirit that Professor Biegański properly belonged, and it was there that Sophie had eventually to reinstate him for my benefit, in order to interpret the happenings at Auschwitz...
The subsequent history of the Professor’s pamphlet is well worth recording. Obeying her father to the end, Sophie together with Kazik did spread the pamphlet around in the university hallways, but it turned out to be a decisive flop. In the first place, the members of the faculty, like everyone else in Cracow, were too preoccupied with their apprehension over the coming war—then only months away—to be much concerned with the Biegański message. Hell was beginning to erupt. The Germans were demanding