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By Root 12378 0

braking and accelerating movement of the train and constantly plunging into the laps of the seated ones. One or two quick-witted Resistance leaders took command. A scheme was worked out whereby sitters and standees regularly alternated positions; this helped, but nothing could help the effect of the stifling body heat of so many squeezed-together human beings, or the sour and fetid odor that persisted during the trip. Not quite torture, it was a limbo of desolating discomfort. Jan and Eva were the only children in the compartment; they took turns sitting on Sophie’s lap and the laps of others. At least one person vomited in the nearly lightless cell, and it was a muscular and desperate struggle to wriggle out of the compartment and down the jammed aisle to one of the toilets. “Better a boxcar,” Sophie remembered someone groaning, “at least you could stretch out.” But curiously, by the standards of those other hell-destined transports crisscrossing Europe at that time, stalled and sidetracked and delayed at a thousand inert junctures of space and time, her trip was not inordinately long: what should have been a morning’s journey, from six o’clock until noon, required not days but a mere thirty hours.

Possibly because (as she had confessed to me over and over again) so much of her behavior had always been governed by wishful thinking, she had drawn a certain amount of comfort from the fact that the Germans had thrust her and her fellow prisoners aboard this novel means of transport. It was by now common knowledge that the Nazis used railroad cars meant for freight and animals to ship people to the camps. Thus, once aboard with Jan and Eva, she swiftly rejected the logical idea which flitted through her head that her captors were using this classy if threadbare car simply because it was expedient and available (the makeshift boarded windows should have been evidence of that). Instead, she hit upon a somewhat more soothing notion that these almost loungelike facilities, where comfortable Poles and rich tourists had nodded and drowsed in prewar days, now indicated special privilege, now meant that she would be treated rather better than the 1,800 Jews from Malkinia in the forward part of the train, bottled up tight in their black cattle wagons where they had been sealed for several days. As it turned out, this was as foolish and as fanciful (and as ignoble, really) as the idea she had formed about the ghetto: that the mere presence of the Jews, and the preoccupation the Nazis had with their extermination, would somehow benefit her own security. And the safety of Jan and Eva.

The name Oświȩcim—Auschwitz—which had at first murmured its way through the compartment made her weak with fear, but she had no doubt whatever that that was where the train was going. A minuscule sliver of light, catching her eye, drew her attention to a tiny crack in the plywood board across the window, and during the first hour of the journey she was able to see enough by the dawn’s glow to tell their direction: south. Due south past the country villages that crowd around Warsaw in place of the usual suburban outskirts, due south past greening fields and copses crowded with birch trees, south in the direction of Cracow. Only Auschwitz, of all their plausible destinations, lay south, and she recalled the despair she felt when with her own eyes she verified where they were going. The reputation of Auschwitz was ominous, vile, terrifying. Although in the Gestapo prison rumors had tended to support Auschwitz as the place where they would eventually be shipped, she had hoped incessantly and prayed for a labor camp in Germany, where so many Poles had been transported and where, according to other rumor, conditions were less brutal, less harsh. But as Auschwitz loomed more and more inevitably and now, on the train, made itself inescapable, Sophie was smothered by the realization that she was victim of punishment by association, retribution through chance concurrence. She kept saying to herself: I don’t belong here. If she had not had the misfortune of being