Sophie's Choice - William Styron [313]
At last Sophie spoke again. “At Auschwitz the next year, as I told you, they seized Wanda and tortured her and they hung her up on a hook and let her strangle to death. After I heard that, I would think about her in so many ways, but mainly I would remember her on that night in Warsaw. I would see her in my mind after Feldshon and the other Jew had left to get the guns, sitting at the table with her face buried in her arms, completely worn-out and weeping. It’s strange, I never saw her cry before. I think she always considered it a weakness. But I remember leaning over next to her with my hand on her shoulder, watching her weep. She was so young, only my age. So brave.
“She was a lesbian, Stingo. It don’t matter any more what she was, it didn’t matter then. But I thought you might want to know, after me telling you so much about everything else. We slept together once or twice—I might as well tell you that too—but it didn’t mean much to either of us, I think. She knew deep down that I—well, I didn’t really respond to her that way and so she never pressed me to go on. Never got angry or anything. I loved her, though, because she was better than me, and so incredibly brave.
“So as I say, she foretold her own death, and my death, and the death of my children. She went to sleep with her head in her arms at the table. I didn’t want to disturb her right then, and I thought of what she had said about the children, and the pictures of those little frozen bodies—I was suddenly haunted and terrified in a way I’d never been before, even in the middle of the gloom that I’d experienced so many times, gloom like the taste of death. I went into the room where my children were sleeping. I was so overcome by what Wanda had said that I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do even as I was doing it—waking Jan and Eva and taking them both up in my arms next to me. So heavy they both were, waking and moaning and whispering, yet strangely light, I guess, because of my frantic desire to hold them both in my arms. And being filled with terror and despair over Wanda’s words about the future, knowing the truth of her words and not being able to deal with anything so monstrous, so immense.
“Beyond the window it was cold and black, no lights in Warsaw, a city cold and black beyond description, with nothing there except the darkness and freezing sleet in it, and the wind. I remember I opened the window and let in the ice and the wind. I can’t tell you how close I came to hurling myself with my children out into that darkness just then—or how many times since then I’ve cursed myself for not doing it.”
The car of the train which conveyed Sophie and her children and Wanda to Auschwitz (together with a mixed bag of Resistance members and other Poles trapped in the most recent roundup) was an unusual one. It was neither a boxcar nor the livestock car which the Germans normally employed in their transports. Amazing to say, it was an ancient but still serviceable wagons-lits carriage complete with carpeted aisle, compartments, lavatories and small lozenge-shaped metallic signs in Polish, French, Russian and German at each window, admonishing the passengers not to lean out. From its fittings—its badly worn but still comfortable seats, the ornate and now tarnished chandeliers—Sophie could tell that the venerable coach had once carried people first-class; save for a singular difference, it might have been one of those cars of her girlhood in which her father—always the stylish voyager—had taken the family to Vienna or Bozen or Berlin.
The difference—so ominous and oppressive as to make her gasp when she saw it—was that all the windows were securely boarded up. Another difference was that into each compartment made for six or eight persons the Germans had jammed as many as fifteen or sixteen bodies, together with whatever luggage had been brought along. Awash in dim light, thus compressed, half a dozen or more prisoners of both sexes stood upright or partly upright in the meager foot space, clinging together for support against the incessantly