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By Root 12332 0

the enormity of their existence had been for Nathan, as for so many Americans, part of a drama too far away, too abstract, too foreign (and thus too hard to comprehend) to register fully on the mind. But then almost overnight there had come this change in him, this swift turnabout; the newsreel scene of the Warsaw ghetto had smitten him terribly, for one thing, and this was followed almost immediately by a Herald Tribune series which caught his eye: an investigative analysis “in depth” of one of the more satanic exposes coughed up by the Nuremberg tribunal, in which the full scope of the extermination of the Jews at Treblinka—almost unimaginable simply in its spilling forth of sheer statistical evidence—was revealed.

Full revelation had been slow yet certain. The first news of the camp atrocities had been made public, of course, in the spring of 1945, just as the European war ended; it was now a year and half later, but the rainshower of poisonous detail, the agglomeration of facts, piling up at Nuremberg and at trials elsewhere like mountainous unmentionable dungheaps, began to tell more than the consciousness of many could bear, even more than those numbing early newsclips of bulldozed cordwood cadavers suggested. As she watched Nathan, Sophie felt she was regarding a person in the grip of a delayed realization, as in one of the later phases of shock. Until now he simply had not allowed himself to believe. But now he believed, all right. He had made up for lost time by absorbing everything available on the camps, on Nuremberg, on the war, on anti-Semitism and the slaughter of the European Jews (many recent nights that were supposed to be movie or concert evenings for Sophie and Nathan had been sacrificed to Nathan’s restless prowls through the main Brooklyn branch of the New York Public Library, where in the periodical room he scratched notes by the dozen on Nuremberg revelations he had missed and where he borrowed volumes with titles like The Jew and Human Sacrifice, The New Poland and the Jews and The Promise Hitler Kept), and with his astonishing retentiveness, made himself an expert on the Nazi saga and the Jew, as he had in so many other areas of knowledge. Wasn’t it possible, he asked Sophie once—and, he added, speaking as a cellular biologist—that on the level of human behavior the Nazi phenomenon was analogous to a huge and crucial colony of cells going morally berserk, creating the same kind of danger to the body of humanity as does a virulently malignant tumor in a single human body? He asked her such questions at odd times all during that late summer and fall, and behaved like a soul quite troubled and possessed.

“Like many of his fellow Nazi leaders, Hermann Goring affected a love of art,” said H.V. Kaltenborn in his elderly, cricket’s voice, “but it was a love that went on a rampage in typical Nazi fashion. It was Goring who was responsible more than anyone in the German high command for the looting of art museums and private collections in countries like Holland, Belgium, France, Austria, Poland...” Sophie wanted to stop up her ears. Couldn’t that war, those years, be stuffed into some black closet of the mind and be forgotten? Thinking to divert Nathan again, she called, “It’s wonderful about your experiment, darling. Don’t you want to start to celebrate?”

No answer. The crickety voice still poured out its dry, bleak epitaph. Well, at least, thought Sophie, reflecting on Nathan’s obsession, she had no worry about her being drawn into that nasty web. As with so many other things having to do with her feelings, he had been decent and considerate about that. It was one point upon which she was obdurately firm: she had made it clear to him that she would not and could not speak of her experiences in the camp. Almost everything she had ever told him had crept out in meager detail on that single sweetly remembered evening, in this very room, on the day they had met. Just those few words from her made up the extent of his knowledge. Thereafter she did not have to tell him about her unwillingness to mention this