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By Root 12458 0

strained to hear the voice, fading out now into a fogbank of static, she continued to weep, aware that she wept for Jan, yes, but also for other things, mainly herself: for her failure to steal the radio and her certain knowledge that she could never retrieve the courage to try to steal it again. That preservative and maternal passion of hers which in Warsaw, only months before, Wanda had deemed so selfish, so indecent, was something that, brought to its cruelest trial, Sophie could not overcome—and she wept now, helplessly, in the shame of her dereliction. She placed quivering fingers in front of her eyes. “I’m crying because I’m so hungry,” she said to Emmi in a murmur, and this was at least in part the truth. She thought she might faint again.

The stench became more powerful. A dim fire-glow was reflected from the night’s horizon. Emmi went to the window to close out either the cold or the pestilential air, or both. Following her with her eyes, Sophie caught sight of a sampler on the wall (the embroidery as florid as the German words), framed in shellacked and curlicued pine.

Just as the Heavenly Father saved people

from sin and from Hell,

Hitler saves the German Volk

from destruction.

The window slammed shut. “That stink is of Jews burning,” Emmi said, turning back to her. “But I guess you know that. It’s forbidden to ever speak of it in this house, but you—you’re just a prisoner. The Jews are the chief enemy of our people. My sister Iphigenie and I have a jingle we made up about the Yids. It begins ‘Der Itzig—’ ”

Sophie stifled a cry and blinded her sight with her hands. “Emmi, Emmi... ” she whispered. In her blindness she was overtaken, again, with the mad vision of the child as a fetus, yet fully grown, gigantic, a leviathan brainless and serene, silently stroking its way through the black, incomprehensible waters of Dachau and Auschwitz.

“Emmi, Emmi!” she managed to say. “Why is the name of the Heavenly Father in this room?”

It was, she said a long time after, one of the last religious thoughts she ever had.

After that night—her final night as a prisoner-resident in the Commandant’s house—Sophie spent nearly fifteen more months at Auschwitz. As I have said before, because of her silence this long period of her incarceration remained (and still remains) largely a blank to me. But there are one or two things I can say for a certainty. When she left Haus Höss she was lucky enough to regain her status as a translator and typist in the general stenographic pool, and so remained among the small group of the relatively privileged; thus, while her life was wretched and her privations were often severe, she was for a long time spared the slow and inevitable sentence of death which was the lot of the multitude of prisoners. It was only during the last five months of her imprisonment, when the Russian forces approached from the east and the camp underwent a gradual dissolution, that Sophie endured the worst of her physical sufferings. It was then that she was transferred to the women’s camp at Birkenau and it was there that she experienced the starvation and diseases that brought her very close to death.

During those long months she was almost completely untroubled or untouched by sexual desire. Illness and debilitation would account for this state, of course—especially during the unspeakable months at Birkenau—but she was certain it was also psychological: the pervasive smell and presence of death caused any generative urge to seem literally obscene, a travesty, and thus—as in the depths of illness—to remain at so low an ebb as to be virtually snuffed out. At least that was Sophie’s personal reaction, and she told me that she had sometimes wondered whether it might not have been this total absence of amorous feeling which threw into even sharper focus the dream she had that last night while sleeping in the basement of the Commandant’s house. Or perhaps, she thought, it was the dream that helped dampen all further desire. Like most people, Sophie rarely remembered dreams for long in vivid or significant detail, but