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By Root 12310 0

how these various people acted. Why this man would allow himself to become a vicious Kapo, who would be cruel to his fellow prisoners and cause many of them to die. Or why this other man or woman would do this or that brave thing, sometime lose their lives that another could live. Or give their bread or a little potato or thin nothing soup to someone starving, even though they were themselves starving. Or there would be people—men, women—who would kill or betray another prisoner just for a little food. People acted very different in the camp, some in a cowardly and selfish way, some bravely and beautifully—there was no rule. No. But such a terrible place was this Auschwitz, Stingo, terrible beyond all belief, that you really could not say that this person should have done a certain thing in a fine or noble fashion, as in the other world. If he or she done a noble thing, then you could admire them like any place else, but the Nazis were murderers and when they were not murdering they turned people into sick animals, so if what the people done was not so noble, or even was like animals, then you have to understand it, hating it maybe but pitying it at the same time, because you knew how easy it was for you to act like an animal too.”

Sophie paused for a few moments and locked her eyelids shut as if in savage meditation, then gazed once more out onto the baffling distances. “So there is one thing that is still a mystery to me. And that is why, since I know all this and I know the Nazis turned me into a sick animal like all the rest, I should feel so much guilt over all the things I done there. And over just being alive. This guilt is something I cannot get rid of and I think I never will.” She paused again, and then said, “I suppose it’s because...” But she hesitated, failing to round out her thought, and I heard a quaver in her voice—perhaps more because of exhaustion now than anything else—when she said, “I know I will never get rid of it. Never. And because I never get rid of it, maybe that’s the worst thing the Germans left me with.”

Finally she relaxed her grip on my hand and turned to me, looking me full in the face as she said, “I surrounded Höss’s boots with my arms. I pressed my cheek up against those cold leather boots as if they was made of fur or something warm and comforting. And do you know? I think maybe I even licked them with my tongue, licked those Nazi boots. And do you know something else? If Höss had give me a knife or a gun and told me to go kill somebody, a Jew, a Pole, it don’t matter, I would have done it without thinking, with joy even, if it mean seeing my little boy for only a single minute and holding him in my arms.

“Then I heard Höss say, ‘Get to your feet! Demonstrations like this offend me. Get up!’ But when I began to get up his voice got softer and he said, ‘Certainly you may see your son, Sophie.’ I realized that it was the first time he ever spoke my name. Then—oh Jesus Christ, Stingo, he actually embraced me again and I heard him say, ‘Sophie, Sophie, certainly you may see your little boy.’ He said, ‘Do you think I could deny you that? Glaubst du, dass ich ein Ungeheuer bin? Do you think I am some kind of monster?’ ”

Chapter Eleven

“SON THE NORTH BELIEVES it has a veritable patent on virtue,” my father said, gingerly stroking with a forefinger his shiny new black eye. “But of course, the North is wrong. Do you think the slums of Harlem truly represent an advance for the Negro over a peanut patch in Southampton County? Do you think the Negro is going to remain content in that insufferable squalor? Son, someday the North is going to sadly rue these hypocritical attempts at magnanimity, these clever and transparent gestures that go by the name of tolerance. Someday—mark my word—it will be clearly demonstrated that the North is every bit as steeped in prejudice as the South, if not more so. At least in the South the prejudice is out in the open. But up here...” He paused to touch his sore eye again. “I really shudder to think of the violence and hatred building up in these slums.