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By Root 12512 0

in the tens of thousands, and the overwhelming majority of these—renamed Karl or Liesel or Heinrich or Trudi and swallowed up in the embrace of the Reich—never saw their real families again. Also, countless children who passed initial screenings but who later failed to meet more rigorous racial tests were exterminated—some at Auschwitz. The program, of course, was meant to be secret, like most of Hitler’s squalid schemes, but such iniquity could scarcely be kept completely in the dark. In late 1942 the fair-haired handsome five-year-old son of a woman friend of Sophie’s, living in an adjoining apartment in her bomb-blasted building in Warsaw, was spirited away and never again seen. Although the Nazis had taken some pains to throw a smoke screen around the crime, it was clear to everyone, including Sophie, who the culprits were. What bemused Sophie at a later date was how this concept of Lebensborn—which in Warsaw so horrified her and sickened her with fear that she often hid her son, Jan, in a closet at the sound of heavy footfalls on the stairway—became at Auschwitz something she dreamed about and most feverishly desired. It was urged upon her by a friend and fellow prisoner—about whom more later—and it came to mean to her the only way in which to save Jan’s life.

That afternoon with Rudolf Höss, she told me, she had had every intention of broaching the notion of the Lebensborn program to the Commandant. She would have had to make her try in a clever, roundabout manner, but it was possible. In the days before their confrontation she had reasoned with considerable logic that Lebensborn might be the only way to free Jan from the Children’s Camp. It made special sense, since Jan had been reared bilingual in Polish and German, like herself. She then told me something she had kept from me before. Gaining the Commandant’s confidence, she planned to suggest to him that he could use his immense authority to have a lovely blond German-speaking Polish boy with Caucasian freckles and cornflower-blue eyes and the chiseled profile of a fledgling Luftwaffe pilot painlessly transferred from the Children’s Camp to some nearby bureaucratic unit in Cracow or Katowice or Wroclaw or wherever, which would then arrange for his transport to shelter and safety in Germany. She would not have to know the child’s destination; she would even forswear any need for knowledge of his whereabouts or his future so long as she could be sure that he was secure somewhere in the heart of the Reich, where he would probably survive, rather than remaining at Auschwitz, where he would certainly perish. But of course, that afternoon everything had gone haywire. In her confusion and panic she had made a direct plea to Höss for Jan’s freedom, and because of his unpredicted reaction to this plea—his rage—she found herself completely off balance, unable to speak to him of Lebensborn even if she had had the wits to remember it. Yet all was not quite lost. In order to be given the opportunity to propose to Höss this nearly unspeakable means for her son’s salvation, she had to wait—and that in itself involved a strange, harrowing scene the next day.

But she was not able to tell me all this at once. That afternoon in the Maple Court, after describing to me how she fell on her knees in front of the Commandant, she suddenly broke off, and turning her eyes directly away from me toward the window, remained silent for a long time. Then she abruptly excused herself and disappeared for some minutes into the ladies’ room. The jukebox suddenly: the Andrews Sisters again. I looked up at the flyspecked plastic clock celebrating Carstairs whiskey: it was almost five-thirty, and I realized with a small shock that Sophie had been talking to me nearly the whole afternoon. I had never heard of Rudolf Höss before that day, but through her understated, simple eloquence she had caused him to exist as vividly as any apparition that had stalked my most neurotic dreams. But it was plain that she could not go on talking about such a man and such a past indefinitely, hence this firmly defined