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By Root 12476 0

She said, “Only, I did not die. I suppose I had more good fortune than others. For a time I have a more favored position than many of the other prisoners, because of my knowledge of German and Russian, especially German. This give me an advantage, you see, because for this time I eat better and was clothed a little better and I had more strength. It give me this extra strength to survive. But this situation did not last too long, really, and in the end I was like all the rest. I starved and because I starved I had le scorbut—scurvy I think it is in English—and then I had typhus and also la scarlatine. Scarlet fever, I think. As I say, I was there for twenty months, but I survived. If I had been there twenty months and one day, I know I would be dead.” She paused. “Now you say I have anemia, and I think you must be right. Because after I was made free from that place there was a doctor, a Red Cross doctor, who told me to be careful because I might develop such a thing. Anemia, I mean.” She sensed her exhausted voice trailing off in a sigh. “But I forgot about that. I had so many other things sick with my body that I just forgot about that.”

For a long while they were both silent as they listened to the gusting wind and the throbbing patter of the rain. Washed by the storm, the air poured in cool breaths through the open window, bearing from the park an odor of drenched soil, fresh and clean. The wind diminished and the thunder grumbled off eastward toward the far reaches of Long Island. Soon there was only a fitful dripping sound from the darkness outside, and a gentle breeze, and the distant slick murmur of tires on wet streets. “You need sleep,” he said, “and I will go.” But she later recalled that he did not go, at least then. The last part of The Marriage of Figaro was playing on the radio, and together they listened to it without speaking—Sophie stretched out now on her bed, Nathan sitting on the chair beside her—while summer moths swooped and flickered around the dim lightbulb hovering above them. She closed her eyes and drowsed, passing across the threshold of some outlandish but untroubled dream in which the gay redemptive music mingled in soft confusion with a fragrance of grass and rain. Once she felt against her cheek, with movement as light and delicate as a moth’s wing, the touch of his fingertips in a moment’s gentle tracery, but it was only for a second or two—and then she felt nothing. And slept.

But now it again becomes necessary to mention that Sophie was not quite straightforward in her recital of past events, even granted that it was her intention to present a very abbreviated account. I would learn this later, when she confessed to me that she left out many crucial facts in the story she told Nathan. She did not actually lie (as she did about one or two important aspects of her life in the account she gave me concerning the early years in Cracow). Nor did she fabricate something or distort anything important; it is easy to substantiate nearly everything she told Nathan that evening. Her brief observation on the function of Auschwitz-Birkenau—while of course greatly oversimplified—is basically an accurate one, and she neither exaggerated nor underestimated the nature of her various diseases. About all the rest, there is no reason to doubt anything: her mother and her mother’s illness and death, the sequence about the smuggled meat and her own arrest by the Germans followed by her swift deportation to Auschwitz. Why, then, did she leave out certain elements and details that anyone might reasonably have expected her to include? Fatigue and depression that night, certainly. Then in the long run there may have been multiple reasons, but the word “guilt,” I discovered that summer, was often dominant in her vocabulary, and it is now clear to me that a hideous sense of guilt always chiefly governed the reassessments she was forced to make of her past. I also came to see that she tended to view her own recent history through a filter of self-loathing—apparently not a rare phenomenon among those who had undergone