Sophie's Choice - William Styron [319]
“She still had her mís—and her flute,” Sophie said as she finished talking to me. “All these years I have never been able to bear those words. Or bear to speak them, in any language.”
Since Sophie told me this I have brooded often upon the enigma of Dr. Jemand von Niemand. At the very least he was a maverick, a sport; surely what he made Sophie do could not have been in the SS manual of regulations. The young Rottenführer’s incredulity attested to that. The doctor must have waited a long time to come face to face with Sophie and her children, hoping to perpetrate his ingenious deed. And what, in the private misery of his heart, I think he most intensely lusted to do was to inflict upon Sophie, or someone like her—some tender and perishable Christian—a totally unpardonable sin. It is precisely because he had yearned with such passion to commit this terrible sin that I believe that the doctor was exceptional, perhaps unique, among his fellow SS automata: if he was not a good man or a bad man, he still retained a potential capacity for goodness, as well as evil, and his strivings were essentially religious.
Why do I say religious? For one thing, perhaps because he was so attentive to Sophie’s profession of faith. But I would risk speculating further on this because of a vignette which Sophie added to her story a short while later. She said that during the chaotic days immediately after her arrival she was in such shock—so torn to fragments by what happened on the ramp, and by Jan’s disappearance into the Children’s Camp—that she was barely able to hold on to her reason. But in her barracks one day she could not help paying attention to a conversation between two German Jewish women, new prisoners who had managed to live through the selection. It was plain from their physical description that the doctor of whom they were speaking—the one who had been responsible for their own survival—was the one who had sent Eva to the gas chamber. What Sophie had remembered most vividly was this: one of the women, who was from the Charlottenburg part of Berlin, said that she distinctly remembered the doctor from her youth. He had not recognized her on the ramp. She in turn had not known him well, although he had been a neighbor. The two related things she did recall about him—aside from his striking good looks—the two things she had not been able to forget about him, for some reason, were that he was a steadfast churchgoer and that he had always planned to enter the ministry. A mercenary father forced him into medicine.
Other of Sophie’s recollections point to the doctor as a religious person. Or at least as a failed believer seeking redemption, groping for renewed faith. For example, as a hint—his drunkenness. All that we can deduce from the record indicates that in the pursuit of their jobs SS officers, including doctors, were almost monkish in their decorum, sobriety and devotion to the rules. While the demands of butchery at its most primitive level—mainly in the neighborhood of the crematoriums—caused a great deal of alcohol to be consumed, this bloody work was in general the job of enlisted men, who were allowed (and indeed often needed) to numb themselves to their activities. Besides being spared these particular chores, officers in the SS, like officers everywhere, were expected to maintain a dignified comportment, especially when going about their duties. Why, then, did Sophie have the rare experience of meeting a doctor like Jemand von Niemand in his plastered condition, cross-eyed with booze and so unkempt that he still bore on his lapel grains of greasy rice from a probably long and sodden repast? This must have been for the doctor a very dangerous posture.
I have always assumed that when he encountered Sophie, Dr. Jemand von Niemand was undergoing the crisis of his life: cracking apart like bamboo, disintegrating at the very