Sophie's Choice - William Styron [248]
Although Sophie was extremely open with me about her life in Warsaw and her capture and her stay in the jail, she became curiously reticent about her actual deportation to Auschwitz and her arrival there. I thought at first it had to do with too much horror, and I was right, but I would only later learn the real reason for this silence, this evasiveness—certainly I thought little enough about it at the time. If the foregoing paragraphs with their accumulation of statistics seem, then, to have an abstract or static quality, it is for the reason that I have had to try to re-create, these many years afterward, a larger background to the events in which Sophie and the others were helpless participants, using data which could scarcely have been available to anyone except the professionally concerned in that long-ago year just following the war’s end.
I have brooded a lot since then. I have often wondered what might have dwelt in Professor Biegański’s thoughts had he lived to know that the fate of his daughter but especially his grandchildren was ancillary to, yet inextricably bound up with, the accomplishment of the dream he shared with his National Socialist idols: the liquidation of the Jews. Despite his worship of the Reich, he was a proud Pole. He also must have been exceptionally astute about matters pertaining to power. It is hard to understand how he could have been blind to the fact that the great death-happening wrought upon the European Jews by the Nazis would descend like a smothering fog around his compatriots—a people loathed with such ferocity that only the precedence of an even more urgent loathing accorded the Jews was a rampart against their own eventual obliteration. It was that detestation of Poles, of course, which doomed the Professor himself. But his obsession must have blinded him to many things, and it is an irony that—even if the Poles and other Slavs were not next on the list of people to be annihilated—he should have failed to foresee how such sublime hatred could only gather into its destroying core, like metal splinters sucked toward some almighty magnet, countless thousands of victims who did not wear the yellow badge. Sophie told me once—as she went on to reveal certain bits of her life in Cracow which she had previously withheld—that whatever the Professor’s grim authoritarian disdain for her, his adoration of his two little grandchildren had been melting, genuine, complete. It is impossible to speculate on the reaction of this tormented man had he survived to see Jan and Eva fall into that black pit which his imagination had fashioned for the Jews.
I will always remember Sophie’s tattoo. That nasty little excrescence, attached like a ridge of minute bruised tooth-bites to her forearm, was the single detail of her appearance which—on the night when I first saw her at the Pink Palace—instantly conveyed to my mind the mistaken idea that she was a Jew. In the vague and uninformed mythology of the day, Jewish survivors and this pathetic marking were indissolubly tied together. But if I had known then of the metamorphosis which the camp underwent during the terrible fortnight I have dwelt upon, I would have understood that the tattoo had an important and direct connection with Sophie’s being branded like a Jew though she herself was not Jewish. It was this... She and her fellow