Sophie's Choice - William Styron [163]
Alas for the Professor, although he petitioned and canvassed and hustled, presenting himself to a dozen offices in as many days, his increasingly frenzied efforts came to naught. It must have been a wicked blow to him to get not a moment’s attention, to gain no bureaucratic ear. But the Professor had grievously miscalculated in still another way. Emotionally and intellectually he was the romantic inheritor of the Germanic culture of another century, of a time irreparably gone and fallen away, and thus he had no inkling of how impossible it would be to try to ingratiate himself in his antiquated costumery within the corridors of this stainless-steel, jackbooted, mammoth modern power, the first technocratic state, with its Regulierungen und Gesetzverordnungen, its electrified filing-card systems and classification procedures, its faceless chains of command and mechanical methods of data processing, decoding devices, telephonic scrambling, hot line to Berlin—all working with blinding speed and with no accommodation whatever for an obscure Polish teacher of law and his sheaf of documents, his snowfall of dandruff, flashing bicuspids, dopey-looking spats and a carnation in his lapel. The Professor was one of the first victims of the Nazi war machine to become a victim simply because he was not “programmed”—it was almost as uncomplicated as that. Almost, one might say, yet not quite, for the other important reason for his rejection was the fact that he was a Polack, a German word which has the same sneeringly contemptuous meaning in German as it has in English. Since he was a Polack and at the same time an academic, his overly anxious, beaming, avidly suppliant face was hardly more welcome around Gestapo headquarters than that of a typhoid carrier, but the Professor clearly did not know how far he was behind the times.
And although he could not have realized it as he scuttled about during those days of early fall, the clock was ticking remorselessly away toward his end. Under the indifferent eye of the Nazi Moloch he was another doomed cipher. So on the wet gray morning in November when Sophie, kneeling alone in St. Mary’s church, had that premonition she earlier described and leaped up and rushed back to the university—there to discover the glorious medieval courtyard cordoned off by German troops who held one hundred and eighty faculty members captive beneath their rifles and machine guns—the Professor and Kazik were among the unlucky ones shivering in the cold, hands clawing at the heavens. But she never laid eyes on them again. In the later, emended (and, I am convinced, truthful) version of her story she told me she felt no real bereavement over the seizure of her father and husband—she was by this time too alienated from both of them for it to affect her deeply—but she was forced to feel on another level shock that hammered at her bones, glacial fear and a devastating sense of loss. Her entire sense of self—of her identity—was unfastened. For if the Germans could commit this obscene assault on score upon score of defenseless and unsuspecting teachers, it was the forerunner of God only knew what horrors awaiting Poland in the coming years. And it was for that reason alone if for nothing else that she hurled herself sobbing into her mother’s arms. Her mother was genuinely shattered. A sweet, unthinking, submissive woman, she had retained a faithful love for her husband to the very end; through the dumbshow of the sorrow Sophie simulated for her benefit she could not help but grieve for her mother’s grief.
As for the Professor—sucked like a mere larva into the burial mound of KL Sachsenhausen, dismal clone of the insensate leviathan of human affliction