Sophie's Choice - William Styron [180]
“Yes, but I do, sir!” she said, watching him swivel his shoulders ever so slightly and look at her—now for the first time—with truly attentive concern. “I have had personal knowledge, also personal experience—”
“Such as what?”
Impetuously then—she knew it was a risk, a gamble—she bent down and fumblingly plucked the worn and faded pamphlet from the little crevice in her boot. “There!” she said, flourishing it in front of him, spreading out the title page. “I’ve kept this against the rules, I know I’ve taken a chance. But I want you to know that these few pages represent everything I stand for. I know from working with you that the ‘final solution’ has been a secret. But this is one of the earliest Polish documents suggesting a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem. I collaborated with my father—whom I mentioned to you before—in writing it. Naturally, I don’t expect you to read it in detail, filled with so many new worries and concerns as you are. But I do earnestly beg you at least to consider it... I know my difficulties are of no importance to you... but if you could only give it a glance... perhaps you could begin to see the entire injustice of my imprisonment here... I could also tell you more about my work in Warsaw on behalf of the Reich, when I revealed the hiding place of a number of Jews, intellectual Jews who had long been sought...”
She had begun to babble a bit; there was a disconnected quality in her speech which warned her to stop, and she did. She prayed that she would not become unstrung. Sweltering beneath her prisoner’s smock with the sweat of mingled hope and trepidation, she was aware that she had made a breach in his consciousness at last, implanted herself as fleshed reality within the scope of his perception. However imperfectly and momentarily, she had made contact; this she could tell by the look of absolute concentrated penetration he gave her when he took the pamphlet from between her fingers. Self-conscious, coquettish, she averted her eyes. And in fatuous recollection a Galician peasants’ saying came back to her: I am crawling into his ear.
“You maintain, then,” he said, “that you are innocent.” There was a distant amiability in his tone that filled her with encouragement.
“Sir, to repeat,” she answered quickly, “I freely admit my guilt of the minor charge which caused me to be sent here—the business about the little piece of meat. I am only asking that this misdemeanor be weighed against my record not only as a Polish sympathizer with National Socialism but as an active and involved campaigner in the sacred war against Jews and Jewry. That pamphlet in your hand, mein Kommandant, can easily be authenticated and will prove my point. I implore you—you who have the power to give clemency and freedom—to reconsider my imprisonment in the light of my past good works, and to return me to my life in Warsaw. It is such a little thing to ask of you, a fine and just man who possesses the power of mercy.”
Lotte had told Sophie that Höss was vulnerable to flattery, but she wondered now if she hadn’t overdone it—especially when she saw his eyes narrowing slightly and heard him say, “I’m curious about your passion. Your rage. Just what is it that causes you to hate the Jews with such... such intensity?”
This story, too, she had squirreled away for such a moment, relying on the theory that while a pragmatic mind like that of Höss might appreciate the venom of her Antisemitismus in the abstract, that same mind’s more primitive side would likely relish a touch of melodrama. “That document there, sir, contains my philosophical reasons—the ones I developed with my father at the university in Cracow. I want to emphasize that we would have expressed our enmity toward Jews even if our family had not suffered a terrible calamity.”
Impassively Höss smoked and waited for her to continue.
“The sexual profligacy of Jews is well known,