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By Root 12508 0

Gentiles acquired a classification which paradoxically removed them from the immediately death-bound. A revealing bureaucratic matter is involved here. The tattooing of “Aryan” prisoners was introduced only in the latter part of March, and Sophie must have been among the first of the non-Jewish arrivals to receive the marking. If initially it would seem puzzling, the redefined policy is easy to explain: it had to do with the cranking up of the dynamo of death. With the “final solution” now accomplished and Jews consigned in satisfying multitudes to the new gas chambers, there would be no longer any need for their numeration. It was Himmler’s order that all Jews would die without exception. Taking their place in the camp, now Judenrein, would be the Aryans, tattooed for identification—slaves dying by stagnant slow degrees their other kind of death. Thus Sophie’s tattoo. (Or such were the outlines of the original plan. But as so often happened, the plan changed yet again; the orders were countermanded. There was a conflict between the lust for murder and the need for work. Upon the arrival at the camp of the German Jews late that winter, it was decreed that all able-bodied prisoners—men and women—would be assigned to slave labor. So in the society of the walking dead of which Sophie became a part, Jews and non-Jews were mingled.)

And then there was April Fools’ Day. Fishy jokes. Poisson d’avril. In Polish, like the Latin: Prima Aprilis. Each time that day has rolled around, ticking off the years during these recent domestic decades, it has been my association of the date with Sophie which has given me a twinge of real anguish when I have been exposed to those small, sweet, silly tricks perpetrated by my children (“April fool, Daddy!”); the gentle paterfamilias, usually so forbearing, has turned cross as a skunk. I hate April Fools’ Day as I hate the Judeo-Christian God. That is the day which marked the end of Sophie’s journey, and for me somehow the bad joke has been less attached to that rather pedestrian concidence than to the fact that only four days later an order to Rudolf Höss from Berlin directed that no more captives who were not Jewish would be sent to the gas.

For a long time Sophie refused to supply me with any details about her arrival, or perhaps her equilibrium simply could not let her do so—and perhaps that is just as well. But even before I learned the full truth concerning what happened to her, I was able to re-create a smudged view of the events of that day—a day which the records describe as being prematurely warm and greenly burgeoning with spring, ferns unfolding, the forsythia in early bud, the air sunshiny and clear. The 1,800 Jews were expeditiously loaded into vans and driven to Birkenau, an operation which occupied the two hours just past noon. There were, as I say, no selections; fit and healthy men, women, children—all died. Shortly after that, as if seized by the same desire to make a clean sweep of whatever victims were at hand, the SS officers on the ramp consigned a carload (that is, two hundred) of the Resistance members to the gas chambers. They, too, departed in vans, leaving behind them perhaps fifty of their comrades, including Wanda.

There now came a curious interruption in the proceedings, and a wait which lasted well through the afternoon. On the two still-occupied cars, besides the leftovers from the Resistance group there remained Sophie and Jan and Eva and the bedraggled mob of Poles who had been captured in the last Warsaw roundup. The delay stretched out through several more hours, until nearly dusk. On the ramp the SS men—the officers, the learned physicians, the guards—seemed to be milling about in an anxious sweat of indecision. Orders from Berlin? Counterorders? One can only speculate upon their nervousness. It doesn’t matter. Finally it became clear that the SS had decided to continue their work, but this time on terms of selection. The officiating noncommissioned officers ordered everybody out, down, made them form lines. Then the doctors took over. The selection process