Sophie's Choice - William Styron [92]
“Tuberculosis,” Nathan said.
“Yes. She had tuberculosis years before in Cracow, but it went away. Then it come back in Warsaw, you know, with these very cold winters without heat and this terrible thing with almost no food to eat, everything going to the Germans. In fact, she was so sick that everyone thought she was dying. I was not living with her, she lived nearby. I thought if I could get this meat it might improve her condition, so on one Sunday I went out to this village in the country and bought a forbidden ham. Then I come back into the city and I was halted by two police from the Gestapo and they discovered the ham. They make me under arrest and bring me to the Gestapo prison in Warsaw. I was not allowed to go back to the place where I was living, and I never saw my mother again. Much later I learned that she died a few months after that.”
Where they sat it had become muggy and close, and while Sophie spoke Nathan had risen to open the window wide, letting a small fresh breeze bend and shake the yellow roses he had brought and filling the room with the sound of splashing rain. The mild drizzle had become a downpour, and a short way across the meadows of the park lightning seemed to rend some oak or elm with an instant’s white blaze, almost simultaneous with a crack of thunder. Nathan stood by the window, looking out at the sudden evening tempest, hands clasped behind him. “Go on,” he said, “I’m listening.”
“I spend a lot of days and nights in the Gestapo prison. Then I was deported by train to Auschwitz. It take two complete days and a night to arrive there, although in normal times the train is only six or seven hours. There were two separate camps at Auschwitz—the place called Auschwitz itself and the camp, a few kilometers away, called Birkenau. There was a difference between the camps that one must understood, since Auschwitz was used for slave labor and Birkenau was used for just one thing, and that was extermination. When I come off the train I was selected not to go to... to... not to Birkenau and the...” To Sophie’s chagrin, she felt the thin outer layer of her cool façade begin to shiver and crack, and her composure faltered; she was aware of a quirky quaver in her voice. She was stammering. But she quickly gained control of herself. “Not to go to Birkenau and the gas chambers, but to Auschwitz, for labor. This was because I was of the right age, also good health. I was at Auschwitz for twenty months. When I arrived everyone who was selected to be killed was sent to Birkenau, but very soon later Birkenau become the place where only Jews were killed. It was a place for the mass extermination of the Jews. There was still another place not far away, a vast usine where was made artificial—synthétique—caoutchouc, rubber. The prisoners at the Auschwitz camp worked there too, but mainly there was one purpose for the Auschwitz prisoners, which was to help in the extermination of les juifs at Birkenau. So the camp at Auschwitz become mostly composed of what the Germans called the Aryans, who worked to maintain the Birkenau crematoriums. To help murder Jews. But one must see that the Aryan prisoners was also supposed to die, finally. After their bodies and strength and santé was gone and they was inutiles, they would be made to die too, by shooting or with the gas at Birkenau.”
Sophie had not spoken for very long, but her diction was rapidly decomposing into French, she felt unaccountably and deeply fatigued beyond the fatigue of her illness—whatever it was—and decided to make her chronicle even more brief than she had intended.