Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  It became, then, a question of precision, as she had whispered to Bronek the day before: secreting the radio beneath her smock, she would hurry downstairs and pass it along to him in the darkness of the cellar. Bronek in turn would hustle the little set quickly to his contact on the other side of the mansion gate. Meanwhile there would be an outcry. The cellar would be ransacked. Joining in the search, Bronek would limp about with gobbets of advice, exhibiting the collaborator’s odious zeal. The fury and commotion would yield nothing. The frightened prisoners would gradually relax. Somewhere in the garrison a pimply-faced Unterscharführer, frozen with terror, would hear himself accused of this reckless felony. A minor triumph in itself for the underground. And here in the depths of the camp, huddled dangerously in the dark around the precious little box, men and women would listen to the far faint sound of a Chopin polonaise, and to voices of exhortation and good tidings and support, and would feel the closest thing to a restoration of life.

  She knew she had to move swiftly now and take it, or be forever damned. And so she moved, heart rampaging, not shedding her fear—it clung to her like an evil companion—and sidled her way into the room. She had to walk only a few paces, but even as she did so, swaying, she sensed something wrong, sensed a ghastly error in tactics and timing: the moment she placed her hand on the cool plastic surface of the radio she had a premonition of disaster which filled the space of the room like a soundless scream. And she recalled later more than once how at that exact instant of contact with that longed-for little object, knowing her mistake (why was it instantly jumbled with a game of croquet?), she heard her father’s voice in some remote summer garden of her mind, almost exultant in its contempt: You do everything wrong. But she had the merest instant to reflect on this before hearing the other voice behind her, so unsurprising in its inevitability that even the cool, didactic, Germanic sense of Ordnung in the words themselves were no surprise: “Your business may take you up and down the hallway but you have no business in this room.” Sophie whirled about then and beheld Emmi.

  The girl was standing at the closet door. Sophie had never seen her so close at hand. She was clad in pale blue rayon panties; her precocious eleven-year-old breasts bulged in a bra of the same washed-out shade. Her face was very white and astonishingly round, like an underdone biscuit, crowned by a fringe of frizzy yellow hair; her features were both handsome and degenerate; trapped within that spherical frame the puffed prettiness of nose, mouth and eyes appeared to be painted on—at first, Sophie thought, on a doll, then as if on a balloon. On second thought she looked less depraved than... preinnocent? Unborn? Speechless, Sophie gazed at her, thinking: Papa was right about my wrongdoing, I mess up everything; here all I had to do was to investigate things first. She stammered, then found speech. “I’m sorry, gnädiges Fraulein, I was only—” But Emmi interrupted. “Don’t try to explain. You came in here to steal that radio. I saw you. I saw you almost pick it up.” Emmi’s face wore, or perhaps was incapable of, very little expression. With an aplomb that belied the fact of her near-nudity she slowly reached into her closet and drew on a robe of white terry cloth. Then she turned and said with bland matter-of-factness, “I’m going to report you to my father. He will have you punished.”

  “I was only going to look at it!” Sophie improvised. “I swear it! I’ve passed by here so many times. I’ve never seen a radio so... so small. So... so cunning! I couldn’t believe it really worked. I just wanted to see—”

  “You’re a liar,” said Emmi, “you were going to steal it. I could tell by the look on your face. You had an expression as if you were going to steal it, not just pick it up and look at it.”

  “You must believe me,” Sophie said, aware of the sob in the back of her throat, and feeling a hopeless infirm lassitude, legs heavy and cold. “I wouldn’t want to take your...” But she halted, struck by the idea that it didn’t matter. Now that she had so preposterously bungled the job, nothing seemed to matter. It only mattered, still, that on the next day she would see her little boy, and how could Emmi interfere with that?

  “You would want to take it,” the girl persisted, “it cost seventy Deutschmarks. You could listen to music on it, down in the cellar. You’re a dirty Polack and Polacks are thieves. My mother says that Polacks are worse thieves than Gypsies and dirtier too.” The nose puckered in the circular face. “You smell!”

  Sophie sensed darkness surging at the back of her eyes. She heard herself groan. Because of incalculable stress or hunger or grief or terror, or God knew what, her period had been delayed for at least a week (this had happened to her in the camp twice before), but now at her loins the wet warm downward-pulling sensation came in a rush; she felt the huge abnormal flood and at the same time was aware in her eyes of the spreading, irrepressible darkness. Emmi’s face, a lunar blur, became caught up in this web of darkness, and Sophie found herself falling, falling... Lulled as if amid sluggish waves of time she drowsed in a blessed stupor, awoke listlessly to the sound of a distant gathering ululation that blossomed in her ears, grew louder, becoming a savage roar. For the barest instant she dreamed that the roar was the roar of a polar bear and that she was floating on an iceberg, swept by frigid winds. Her nostrils burned.

  “Wake up,” said Emmi. The face, white as wax, hovered so close that she felt the child’s breath on her cheek. Sophie then knew that she was lying flat and supine on the floor while the girl crouched next to her, flourishing a phial of ammonia beneath her nose. The casement window had been flung open, letting the frosty wind fill the room. The shriek in her ears had been the camp whistle; she heard its distant voice now, decrescendo. At eye-level, next to Emmi’s bare knee, was a small plastic medical kit embellished with a green cross. “You fainted,” she said. “Don’t move. Keep your head horizontal for a minute so it will get the flow of blood. Sniff deeply. That cold air will help revive you. Meanwhile, remain still.” Recollection came sweeping back, and as it did Sophie had the feeling that she was the performer in a play from which the central act was missing: wasn’t it only a minute or so ago (it could not have been much longer) that the child had been raging at her like an urchin storm trooper, and could this really be the same creature who was now attending to her with what might pass for humane efficiency, if hardly angelic compassion? Had her collapse brought out in this frightening Mädel with her face like that of a swollen fetus the stifled impulses of a nurse? The question was answered just then, when Sophie groaned and stirred. “You must keep still!” Emmi commanded her. “I have a certificate in first aid—junior grade, first class. Do as I say, do you understand?”

  Sophie lay still. She wore no underwear and she wondered how extensively she had stained herself. The back of her smock felt soaked. Surprised at her own delicacy, under the circumstances, she also wondered if she had not at the same time soiled Emmi’s spotless floor. Something in the child’s manner enlarged her sense of helplessness, the feeling of being simultaneously ministered to and victimized. Sophie began to realize that Emmi had her father’s voice, utterly gelid and remote. And in her officious busy bossiness, so lacking in any quality of the tender as she prattled away (now she was smartly smacking Sophie’s cheeks, saying that the first-aid manual stated that smart smacks might help in reviving a victim of die Synkope, as she persisted, with medical precision, in calling a fainting spell), she seemed an Obersturmbannführer in microdimension, the SS spirit and essence—its true hypostasis—embedded in her very genes.

  But at last the barrage of slaps on Sophie’s cheeks created, apparently, a satisfactory rosiness, and the child ordered her patient to sit erect and lean against the bed. This Sophie did, slowly, suddenly grateful that she had fainted at the moment and in the way she had. For as she gazed toward the ceiling now through pupils gradually shrinking back to their normal focus, she was aware that Emmi had stood up and was regarding her with an expression resembling benignness, or at least a certain tolerant curiosity, as if there had been expelled from her mind her fury at Sophie for
being both a Polack and a thief; the nursing seizure appeared to have been cathartic, allowing her enough in the way of an exercise of authority to satisfy the most frustrated SS dwarfling, after which she now assumed once again the plump round outlines of a little girl. “I will say one thing,” Emmi murmured, “you’re very pretty. Wilhelmine said you must be Swedish.”

  “Tell me,” Sophie said in a gentle solicitous voice, aimlessly exploiting the lull, “tell me, what’s that design sewn onto your robe? It’s so attractive.”

  “It’s the insignia of my swimming championship. I was the champion in my class. The beginners. I was only eight. I wish we had swimming competition here, but we don’t. It’s the war. I have had to swim in the Sola, which I don’t like. The river’s filled with muck. I was a very fast swimmer in the beginners’ competition.”

  “Where was that, Emmi?”

  “At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.”

  Into her dresser drawer she pounced and filled the crook of one arm with a huge album that spilled out photographs and clippings. She lugged it to Sophie’s side, pausing only to switch on the radio. Cracklings and peeps disturbed the air. She made an adjustment and the static vanished, replaced by a far faint chorus of horns and trumpets, exultant, victorious, Handelian: a shiver flowed down Sophie’s backbone like a benediction of ice. “Das bin ich,” the girl began to say over and over again, pointing to herself in endlessly repeated postures of bathing costume encasing juvenile adipose flesh, mushroom-pale. Had the sun never shone in Dachau? Sophie wondered in somnolent sickish despair. “Das bin ich... und das bin ich,” Emmi continued in her childish drone, stabbing at the photographs with her button thumb, the rapt “me me me” uttered again and again in a half-whisper like an incantation. “I also began to learn diving,” she said. “Look here, this is me.”

  Sophie ceased looking at the pictures—all became a blur—and her eyes sought instead the window flung open against the October sky where the evening star hung, astonishingly, as bright as a blob of crystal. An agitation in the air, a sudden thickening of the light around the planet, heralded the onset of smoke, borne earthward by the circulation of cool night wind. For the first time since the morning Sophie smelled, ineluctable as a smotherer’s hand, the odor of burning human beings. Birkenau was consuming the last of the voyagers from Greece. Trumpets! The brazen triumphant hymnody poured out of the ether, hosannas, bleats of rams, angelic annunciations—making Sophie think of all the unborn mornings of her life. She began to weep and said, half aloud, “At least tomorrow I will see Jan. At least that.”

  “Why are you crying?” Emmi demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Sophie replied. And then she was about to say this: “Because I have a little boy in Camp D. And because your father, tomorrow, is going to let me see him. He is almost your age.” But instead she was brought up short by an abrupt voice on the radio, interrupting the choir of brass: “Ici Londres!” She listened to the voice, remote, spoken as if through tinfoil but for the moment clear, a transmission meant for the French but vaulting the Carpathians to make itself heard here on the twilit rim of this anus mundi. She blessed the unknown announcer as she would a cherished sweetheart, smitten with wonder at the tumbling rush of words: “L’ltalie a déclaré qu’un état de guerre existe contre l’Allemagne...” Though exactly how, or why, Sophie could not fathom, her instinct combined with a certain subtle jubilation in the voice from London (which, gazing straight at Emmi now, she knew the child could not understand) told her that this news spelled for the Reich real and lasting woe. It mattered not that Italy itself lay wasted. It was as if she had heard tidings of the Nazis’ sure, eventual ruin. And as she strained to hear the voice, fading out now into a fogbank of static, she continued to weep, aware that she wept for Jan, yes, but also for other things, mainly herself: for her failure to steal the radio and her certain knowledge that she could never retrieve the courage to try to steal it again. That preservative and maternal passion of hers which in Warsaw, only months before, Wanda had deemed so selfish, so indecent, was something that, brought to its cruelest trial, Sophie could not overcome—and she wept now, helplessly, in the shame of her dereliction. She placed quivering fingers in front of her eyes. “I’m crying because I’m so hungry,” she said to Emmi in a murmur, and this was at least in part the truth. She thought she might faint again.

  The stench became more powerful. A dim fire-glow was reflected from the night’s horizon. Emmi went to the window to close out either the cold or the pestilential air, or both. Following her with her eyes, Sophie caught sight of a sampler on the wall (the embroidery as florid as the German words), framed in shellacked and curlicued pine.

  Just as the Heavenly Father saved people

  from sin and from Hell,

  Hitler saves the German Volk

  from destruction.

  The window slammed shut. “That stink is of Jews burning,” Emmi said, turning back to her. “But I guess you know that. It’s forbidden to ever speak of it in this house, but you—you’re just a prisoner. The Jews are the chief enemy of our people. My sister Iphigenie and I have a jingle we made up about the Yids. It begins ‘Der Itzig—’ ”

  Sophie stifled a cry and blinded her sight with her hands. “Emmi, Emmi... ” she whispered. In her blindness she was overtaken, again, with the mad vision of the child as a fetus, yet fully grown, gigantic, a leviathan brainless and serene, silently stroking its way through the black, incomprehensible waters of Dachau and Auschwitz.

  “Emmi, Emmi!” she managed to say. “Why is the name of the Heavenly Father in this room?”

  It was, she said a long time after, one of the last religious thoughts she ever had.

  After that night—her final night as a prisoner-resident in the Commandant’s house—Sophie spent nearly fifteen more months at Auschwitz. As I have said before, because of her silence this long period of her incarceration remained (and still remains) largely a blank to me. But there are one or two things I can say for a certainty. When she left Haus Höss she was lucky enough to regain her status as a translator and typist in the general stenographic pool, and so remained among the small group of the relatively privileged; thus, while her life was wretched and her privations were often severe, she was for a long time spared the slow and inevitable sentence of death which was the lot of the multitude of prisoners. It was only during the last five months of her imprisonment, when the Russian forces approached from the east and the camp underwent a gradual dissolution, that Sophie endured the worst of her physical sufferings. It was then that she was transferred to the women’s camp at Birkenau and it was there that she experienced the starvation and diseases that brought her very close to death.

  During those long months she was almost completely untroubled or untouched by sexual desire. Illness and debilitation would account for this state, of course—especially during the unspeakable months at Birkenau—but she was certain it was also psychological: the pervasive smell and presence of death caused any generative urge to seem literally obscene, a travesty, and thus—as in the depths of illness—to remain at so low an ebb as to be virtually snuffed out. At least that was Sophie’s personal reaction, and she told me that she had sometimes wondered whether it might not have been this total absence of amorous feeling which threw into even sharper focus the dream she had that last night while sleeping in the basement of the Commandant’s house. Or perhaps, she thought, it was the dream that helped dampen all further desire. Like most people, Sophie rarely remembered dreams for long in vivid or significant detail, but this dream was so violently, unequivocally and pleasurably erotic, so blasphemous and frightening, and so altogether memorable, that much later she was able to believe (with a
touch of facetiousness which only the passage of time could permit) that it might have scared her away from thoughts of sex all by itself, quite aside from bad health and mortal despair...

  After leaving Emmi’s room she had made her way downstairs and then fallen into a heap on her pallet. She had sunk into almost instantaneous sleep, with only a moment’s anticipation of the coming day when she would finally see her son. And she was soon walking alone along a beach—a beach, in the manner of dreams, both familiar and strange. It was a sandy shore of the Baltic Sea, and something told her that it was the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. To the right of her was the shallow wind-swept Kiel Bay, dotted with sailing craft; on her left as she strolled north toward the distant coastal barrens of Denmark were sand dunes, and behind these a forest of pinetrees and evergreen shimmered in the noonday sun. Although she was clothed she sensed a nakedness, as if she were enveloped in a fabric of seductive transparency. She felt unashamedly provocative, conscious of her backside swaying amid the folds of her transparent skirt, attracting the eyes of the bathers umbrella-shrouded along the beach. Immediately the bathers were left behind. A path through the marsh grass made a junction with the beach; she continued past this place, aware now that a man was following her, and that his eyes were fastened on her hips and the extravagant swaying motion she felt compelled to make. The man came abreast of her, looked at her, and she returned his gaze. She could not possibly recognize the face, which was middle-aged, jovial, fair, very German, attractive—no, it was more than attractive, it made her melt with desire. But the man himself! Who was he? She struggled for an instant’s recognition (the voice, so familiar, purred “Guten Tag”) and in a flash she thought him to be a famous singer, a Heldentenor from the Berlin Opera. He smiled at her with clean white teeth, stroked her on the buttocks, uttered a few words that were at once barely comprehensible and flagrantly lewd, then disappeared. She smelled the warm sea breeze.