Sophie's Choice - William Styron [95]
Unknown then to Sophie or to the world in general, Rudolf Höss, in the months preceding his trial and execution, had been composing a document which in its relatively brief compass tells as much as any single work about a mind swept away in the rapture of totalitarianism. Years were to pass before its translation into English (done excellently by Constantine FitzGibbon). Now bound into a volume called KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS—published by the Polish state museum maintained today at the camp—this anatomy of Höss’s psyche is available for examination by all those who might thirst for knowledge about the true nature of evil. Certainly it should be read throughout the world by professors of philosophy, ministers of the Gospel, rabbis, shamans, all historians, writers, politicians and diplomats, liberationists of whatever sex and persuasion, lawyers, judges, penologists, stand-up comedians, film directors, journalists, in short, anyone concerned remotely with affecting the consciousness of his fellow-man—and this would include our own beloved children, those incipient American leaders at the eighth-grade level, who should be required to study it along with The Catcher in the Rye, The Hobbit and the Constitution. For within these confessions it will be discovered that we really have no acquaintance with true evil; the evil portrayed in most novels and plays and movies is mediocre if not spurious, a shoddy concoction generally made up of violence, fantasy, neurotic terror and melodrama.
This “imaginary evil”—again to quote Simone Weil—“is romantic and varied, while real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Beyond doubt those words characterize Rudolf Höss and the workings of his mind, an organism so crushingly banal as to be a paradigm of the thesis eloquently stated by Hannah Arendt some years after his hanging. Höss was hardly a sadist, nor was he a violent man or even particularly menacing. He might even be said to have possessed a serviceable decency. Indeed, Jerzy Rawicz, the Polish editor of Höss’s autobiography, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, has the wisdom to rebuke his fellow prisoners for the depositions they had made charging Höss with beatings and torture. “Höss would never stoop to do such things,” Rawicz insists. “He had more important duties to perform.” The Commandant was a homebody, as we shall observe, but one dedicated blindly to duty and a cause; thus he became a mere servomechanism in which a moral vacuum had been so successfully sucked clean of every molecule of real qualm or scruple that his own descriptions of the unutterable crimes he perpetrated daily seem often to float outside and apart from evil, phantasms of cretinous innocence. Yet even this automaton was made of flesh, as you or I; he was brought up a Christian, nearly became a Catholic priest; twinges of conscience, even of remorse, attack him from time to time like the onset of some bizarre disease, and it is this frailty, the human response that stirs within the implacable and obedient robot, that helps make his memoirs so fascinating, so terrifying and educative.
A word about his early life will suffice. Born in 1900, in the same year and under the same sign as Thomas Wolfe (“Oh lost, and by the wind, grieved, Ghost...”), Höss was the son of a retired colonel in the German army. His father wanted him to be a seminarian, but the First World War broke out and when Höss was but a stripling of sixteen he joined the army. He participated in the fighting in the Near East—Turkey and Palestine—and at seventeen became the youngest noncommissioned officer in the German armed forces. After the war he joined a militant nationalist group and in 1922 met the