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By Root 12510 0

spawned years before at KL Dachau—his efforts to extricate himself were in vain. And it becomes all the more ironic since it is plain that the Germans had unwittingly imprisoned and doomed a man whom later they might have considered a major prophet—the eccentric Slavic philosopher whose vision of the “final solution” antedated that of Eichmann and his confederates (even perhaps of Adolf Hitler, the dreamer and conceiver of it all), and who had the message tangibly in his possession. “Ich habe meine Flugschrift,” he wrote piteously to Sophie’s mother in a smuggled note, the only communication they ever received, “I have my pamphlet. Ich verstehe nicht, warum... I cannot understand why I am unable to get through to the authorities here and make them see...”

The hold of mortal flesh, and of mortal love, is bewilderingly strong, never so fierce as when love is lodged in childhood memory: strolling along beside her, running his fingers through the tangles of her yellow hair, he had once taken her for a ride in a pony cart amid the summery morning fragrance and birdsong of the gardens below Wawel Castle. Sophie remembered this and could not smother a moment of scalding anguish when the news of his death came and she saw him falling, falling—protesting to the last that they had the wrong man—in a fusillade of hot bullets against a wall in Sachsenhausen.

Chapter Ten

DEEP IN THE GROUND and surrounded by thick stone walls, the basement of Höss’s house where Sophie slept was one of the very few places in the camp into which there never penetrated the smell of burning human flesh. This was one of the reasons that she sought its shelter as often as she could, despite the fact that the part of the basement reserved for her straw pallet was damp and ill-lit and stank of rot and mold. Somewhere behind the walls there was an incessant trickle of water in the pipes from the drains and toilets upstairs, and occasionally she was disturbed at night by the furry, shadowy visit of a rat. But all in all this dim purgatory was a far better place to be than any of the barracks—even the one where for the previous six months she had lived with several dozen other relatively privileged female prisoners who worked in the camp offices. Although spared in those confines most of the brutality and destitution which was the lot of the common inmate throughout the rest of the camp, there had been constant noise and no privacy, and she had suffered most from an almost continual lack of sleep. In addition, she had never been able to keep herself clean. Here, however, she shared her quarters with only a handful of prisoners. And of the several seraphic luxuries afforded by the basement, one was its proximity to a laundry room. Sophie made grateful use of these facilities; indeed, she would have been required to use them, since the mistress of the mansion, Hedwig Höss, possessed a Westphalian hausfrau’s phobia about dirt and made certain that any of the prisoners lodged beneath her roof keep clothing and person not merely clean but hygienic: potent antiseptics were prescribed for the laundry water and the prisoners domiciled in Haus Höss went around smelling of germicide. There was still another reason for this: Frau Kommandant was deathly, afraid of the camp’s contagions.

Another precious amenity which Sophie found and embraced in the cellar was sleep, or at least its possibility. Next to food and privacy, the lack of sleep was one of the camp’s leading and universal deficiencies; sought by all with a greed that approached lust, sleep allowed the only sure escape from ever-abiding torment, and strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely) usually brought pleasant dreams, for as Sophie observed to me once, people so close to madness would be driven utterly mad if, escaping a nightmare, they confronted still another in their slumber. So because of the quiet and isolation in the Höss basement Sophie had been able for the first time in months to sleep and to immerse herself in the tidal ebb and flow of dreams.

The basement had been partitioned into two