Sophie's Choice - William Styron [162]
At the moment all Poland felt potentially oppressed. Moreover, the Professor had made some basic miscalculations, so grossly off kilter as to call into question his guiding judgment. It was not only his sordid insertion of the issue of Vernichtung—even the most hidebound of the teachers had no stomach for such a notion, presented in whatever Swiftian mode of corrosive ridicule—but it was that Third Reich worship and pan-Germanic rapture of his which at this late date would make him blind and deaf to his colleagues’ own throbbing, heartfelt patriotism. Sophie eventually saw that only a few years before, during Poland’s Fascist resurgence, her father might have gained some converts; now with the Wehrmacht edging ponderously eastward, these Teutonic screams for Gdansk, the Germans provoking incidents along all the borders, how could it be other than a sublime foolishness to ask whether National Socialism had the answer to anything except Polish destruction? The upshot of the matter was that while the Professor and his pamphlet were generally ignored in the accelerating chaos, he also received a couple of unexpected nasty licks. Two young graduate students, members of the Polish army reserve, roughed him up badly in a university vestibule, breaking a finger, and one night Sophie recalled something shattering the dining-room window—a large paving block painted with a spidery black swastika.
But as a patriot he hardly deserved that, and at least one small thing might be said on the Professor’s behalf. He did not (and of this Sophie said she was certain) create his sermon with the idea in mind specifically to curry favor with the Nazis. The piece had been written from the particular viewpoint of Polish culture, and besides, the Professor was by his own lights too principled a thinker, a man too committed to the broader philosophical truths for it to have entered his mind that he might eventually try to make the pamphlet serve as an instrument of his personal advancement, not to speak of his corporeal salvation. (As a matter of fact, the exigencies of the approaching conflict prevented the essay from appearing in Germany in any form.) Nor was Professor Biegański a true quisling, a collaborator in the now accepted sense of the word, since when the country was invaded that September and Cracow, virtually unharmed, became the seat of government for all Poland, it was not with the intent to betray his fatherland that he sought to offer his services to the Governor General, Hitler’s friend Hans Frank (and a distinguished lawyer like the Professor himself), but only as an advisor and expert in a field where Poles and Germans had a mutual adversary and a profound common interest—die Judenfrage, There was doubtless even a certain idealism in his effort.
Loathing her father now, loathing his lackey—her husband—almost as much, Sophie would slip by their murmuring shapes in the house hallway as the Professor, suavely tailored in his frock coat, his glamorous graying locks beautifully barbered and fragrant of Kölnischwasser, prepared to sally forth on his morning supplicatory rounds. But he must not have washed his scalp. She recalled the dandruff on his splendid shoulders. His murmurings combined fretfulness and hope. His voice had an odd hiss. Surely today, even though the Governor General had refused to see him the day before—surely today (especially with his exquisite command of German) he would be greeted cordially by the head of the Einsatzgruppe der Sicherheitspolizei, with whom he had an entree in the form