Sophie's Choice - William Styron [247]
During most of the month of March, including the two-week period in which Sophie was lodged in the Gestapo jail, the transports of Jews from the Bialystok district to Auschwitz by way of Warsaw had temporarily ceased. This would probably explain why Sophie and the members of the Resistance—now numbering nearly 250 prisoners—were not themselves sent off immediately to the camp; the Germans, always efficiency-minded, were waiting to engraft their new captives to a more massive shipment of human flesh, and since no Jews were being deported from Warsaw, a delay must have seemed expedient. Another key matter—the interruption in the deportation of the Jews from the northeast—requires comment; this was most likely connected with the building of the Birkenau crematoriums. Since the camp’s inception the original crematorium at Auschwitz together with its gas chamber had served as the chief utility of mass death for the entire camp. Its earliest victims were Russian prisoners of war. It was a Polish structure: the barracks and buildings of Auschwitz made up the homely nucleus of a former cavalry installation when it was appropriated by the Germans. At one time this low rambling edifice with its slanted slate roof had been a storage warehouse for vegetables, and the Germans obviously found its architecture congenial to their purpose; the large underground grotto where turnips and potatoes had been piled high was perfectly suited to the asphyxiation of people en masse, just as the adjoining anterooms were so naturally fit for the installation of cremation ovens as to appear almost custom-made. All that was needed was the addition of a chimney, and the butchers were in business.
But the place was too limited for the hordes of the doomed which had begun to pour into the camp. Although several smallish temporary bunkers for extermination were thrown up in 1942, there was a crisis that arose in terms of facilities for killing and disposal which could only be remedied by the completion of the immense new crematoriums at Birkenau. The Germans—or rather, their Jewish and Gentile slaves—had been hard at work that winter. The first of these four gigantic incinerators was placed in operation a week after Sophie’s capture by the Gestapo, the second only eight days later—mere hours before her arrival at Auschwitz on the first of April. She left Warsaw on the thirtieth of March. On that day she and Jan and Eva and the nearly 250 members of the Resistance, including Wanda, were herded aboard a train containing 1,800 Jews sent down finally from Malkinia, a transit camp northeast of Warsaw where the remainder of the Jewish population from the Bialystok district had been held. Besides the Jews and the Home Army fighters on the train, there was a contingent of Poles—Warsaw citizens of both sexes, numbering around two hundred—who had been picked up by the Gestapo in one of their spasmodic but ruthless łapankas, the victims in this case being guilty of nothing more than the calamitous luck to be caught on the wrong street at the wrong hour. Or at most, the nature of the guilt of all of these was technical if not illusory.
Among the unfortunates was Stefan Zaorski, who lacked a work permit and had already confided to Sophie his premonition that he would get into serious trouble. Sophie was stunned when she learned that he, too, had been caught. She saw him from a distance at the jail and once caught a glimpse of him on the train, but she was never able to speak to him amid the steam and the press of bodies and the pandemonium.