Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  “Feldshon glared back at Wanda and said, ‘I’m afraid I want to, but of course I can’t, being ready to die myself.’

  “I was getting worried about Wanda. I had never seen her so tired, I guess you would say unstrung. She had been working so hard, eating so little, going without sleep. Her voice would crack every now and then, and I saw her fingers tremble where she had them pressed against the table. She closed her eyes, clenched them shut, and shivered, swaying a little. I thought she might faint. Then she opened her eyes and spoke again. Her voice was hoarse and strained, filled with such grief. ‘You were speaking of Lord Jim, a book I happen to know. I think your comparison is a good one, but you somehow have forgotten the ending. I think you’ve forgotten how in the end the hero redeems himself for his betrayal, redeems himself through his own death. His own suffering and death. Is it too much to think that some of us Poles will be able to redeem the betrayal of you Jews by our countrymen? Even if our struggle doesn’t save you? No matter. Whether it does or doesn’t save you, I for one will be satisfied that we tried—through our suffering, and probably even our own deaths.’

  “After a moment Wanda said, ‘I haven’t wanted to offend you, Feldshon. You’re a brave man, that’s plain. You’ve risked your life getting here tonight. I know what your ordeal is. I’ve known ever since last summer when I saw the first photographs smuggled out of Treblinka. I was one of the first to see them, and like everyone else, I didn’t believe them at first. I believe them now. Your ordeal can’t be surpassed in horror. Every time I go near the ghetto I am reminded of rats in a barrel being shot at by a madman with a machine gun. That’s how I see your helplessness. But we Poles are helpless in our own way. We have more freedom than you Jews have—much more, more freedom of movement, more freedom from immediate danger—but we’re still under daily siege. Instead of being like rats in a barrel, we’re like rats in a burning building. We can move away from the flame, find cool spots, get down in the basement where it’s safe. A tiny few can even escape from the building. Every day many of us are burned alive, but it’s a big building and we are also saved by our very numbers. The fire can’t get us all, and then someday—maybe—the fire is going to burn out. If it does, there’ll be plenty of survivors. But the barrel—almost none of the rats in the barrel will live.’ Wanda took a deep breath and looked directly at Feldshon. ‘But let me ask you, Feldshon. How much concern can you expect the terrified rats in the building to have for the rats outside in the barrel—the rats whom they’ve never felt any kinship with, anyway?’

  “Feldshon just looked at Wanda. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her in minutes. He didn’t say anything.

  “Wanda looked at her watch then. ‘In exactly four minutes we’ll hear a whistle. That means the two of you get out of here and downstairs. The parcels will be waiting at the door.’ Then, after saying that, she went on, ‘Three days ago I was negotiating in the ghetto with one of your compatriots. I won’t mention his name, no need for that. I’ll just say that he’s a leader of one of those factions which violently opposes you and your own group. I think he’s a poet or a novelist. I liked him, all right, but I couldn’t stand a certain thing he said. It sounded so pretentious, this way he was speaking of Jews. He used the phrase “our precious heritage of suffering.” ’

  “At this point Feldshon broke in and said something that made us all laugh a little. Even Wanda smiled. He said, ‘That could only be Lewental. Moses Lewental. Such Schmalz.’

  “But then Wanda said, ’I despise the idea of suffering being precious. In this war everyone suffers—Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, all the others. Everyone’s a victim. The Jews are also the victims of victims, that’s the main difference. But none of the suffering is precious and all die shitty deaths. Before you go I want to show you some photographs. I was carrying them in my pocket when I was speaking to Lewental. I had just gotten hold of them. I wanted to show them to him, but for some reason I didn’t. I’ll show them to you.’

  “Just then the light went out, the little bulb simply flickered out. I felt this stab of fear in the middle of my heart. Sometimes it was just the electricity failing. Other times I knew that when the Germans laid an ambush they would stop the power to a building so they could trap people in their searchlights. We all stayed still for a moment. There was some light in a glow from the little fireplace. Then when Wanda was sure it was just a light failure she got a candle and lit it. I was still shivering, afraid, when Wanda threw several snapshots on the table beneath the candle and said, ‘Look at this.’

  “We all bent forward to look. At first I couldn’t make out what it was, just a jumble of sticks—a great mass of sticks like small tree limbs. Then I saw what it was—this unbearable sight, a boxcar full of dead children, scores of them, maybe a hundred, all of them in these stiff and jumbled positions that could only come from being frozen to death. The other photographs were the same—other boxcars with scores of children, all stiff and frozen.

  “ ‘These are not Jewish children,’ Wanda said, ‘these are little Polish children, none of them over twelve years old. They’re some of the little rats who didn’t make it in the burning building. These pictures were taken by Home Army members who broke into these boxcars on a siding somewhere between Zamość and Lublin. There are several hundred in these pictures, from one train alone. There were other trains that were put on sidings where the children either starved or froze to death, or both. This is just a sample. The others who died number in the thousands.’

  “No one spoke. I could just hear all of us breathing, but no one spoke. Finally Wanda began to talk, and for the first time her voice was truly choked and unsteady—you could almost feel the exhaustion in it, and the grief. ‘We still don’t know exactly where these children came from but we think we know who they are. It is believed that they are the rejected ones from the Germanization program, the Lebensborn program. We think they came from the region around Zamość. I’ve been told that they were among the thousands who were taken from their parents but not considered racially suitable and so consigned for disposal—meaning extermination—at Maidanek or Auschwitz. But they didn’t get there. In due time the train, like a lot of others, was diverted onto sidings where the children were allowed to die in the condition you see here. Others starved to death, still more suffocated in hermetically sealed cars. Thirty thousand Polish children have disappeared from the Zamość region alone. Thousands and thousands of these have died. This is mass murder too, Feldshon.’ She ran her hands over her eyes, then said, ‘I was going to tell you of the adults, the thousands of innocent men and women slaughtered in Zamość alone. But I won’t. I’m very tired, suddenly I feel very dizzy. These children are enough.’

  “Wanda was swaying a little. I remember catching her by the elbow and trying to pull her gently down, make her sit down. But she kept talking in the candlelight, in this flat monotonous voice now, as in a trance. ‘The Nazis hate you the most, Feldshon, and you will suffer the most by far, but they’re not going to stop with the Jews. Do you think when they finish with you Jews they’re going to dust off their hands and stop murdering and make their peace with the world? You underestimate their evil if you have such a delusion. Because once they finish you off they’re going to come and get me. Even though I’m half German. I imagine they will not let me off easy, before the end. Then they’re going to seize my pretty blond friend here and do with her what they’ve done to you. At the same time they will not spare her children, any more than they spared these little frozen ones you see right here.’ ”

  In the darkening shoebox of a room in Washington, D.C., Sophie and I, almost without our being aware of it, had exchanged places, so that it was I who lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling while she stood by the window where I had first placed myself, brooding over the distant fire. She fell silent for a while and I could see the side of her face, which was deep in remembrance, her gaze resting on the smoky horizon. Amid the silence I heard the clucking and
chortling of the pigeons on the ledge outside, a far-off blurred commotion where men struggled with the blaze. The church bell struck again: it was four.

  At last Sophie spoke again. “At Auschwitz the next year, as I told you, they seized Wanda and tortured her and they hung her up on a hook and let her strangle to death. After I heard that, I would think about her in so many ways, but mainly I would remember her on that night in Warsaw. I would see her in my mind after Feldshon and the other Jew had left to get the guns, sitting at the table with her face buried in her arms, completely worn-out and weeping. It’s strange, I never saw her cry before. I think she always considered it a weakness. But I remember leaning over next to her with my hand on her shoulder, watching her weep. She was so young, only my age. So brave.

  “She was a lesbian, Stingo. It don’t matter any more what she was, it didn’t matter then. But I thought you might want to know, after me telling you so much about everything else. We slept together once or twice—I might as well tell you that too—but it didn’t mean much to either of us, I think. She knew deep down that I—well, I didn’t really respond to her that way and so she never pressed me to go on. Never got angry or anything. I loved her, though, because she was better than me, and so incredibly brave.

  “So as I say, she foretold her own death, and my death, and the death of my children. She went to sleep with her head in her arms at the table. I didn’t want to disturb her right then, and I thought of what she had said about the children, and the pictures of those little frozen bodies—I was suddenly haunted and terrified in a way I’d never been before, even in the middle of the gloom that I’d experienced so many times, gloom like the taste of death. I went into the room where my children were sleeping. I was so overcome by what Wanda had said that I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do even as I was doing it—waking Jan and Eva and taking them both up in my arms next to me. So heavy they both were, waking and moaning and whispering, yet strangely light, I guess, because of my frantic desire to hold them both in my arms. And being filled with terror and despair over Wanda’s words about the future, knowing the truth of her words and not being able to deal with anything so monstrous, so immense.

  “Beyond the window it was cold and black, no lights in Warsaw, a city cold and black beyond description, with nothing there except the darkness and freezing sleet in it, and the wind. I remember I opened the window and let in the ice and the wind. I can’t tell you how close I came to hurling myself with my children out into that darkness just then—or how many times since then I’ve cursed myself for not doing it.”

  The car of the train which conveyed Sophie and her children and Wanda to Auschwitz (together with a mixed bag of Resistance members and other Poles trapped in the most recent roundup) was an unusual one. It was neither a boxcar nor the livestock car which the Germans normally employed in their transports. Amazing to say, it was an ancient but still serviceable wagons-lits carriage complete with carpeted aisle, compartments, lavatories and small lozenge-shaped metallic signs in Polish, French, Russian and German at each window, admonishing the passengers not to lean out. From its fittings—its badly worn but still comfortable seats, the ornate and now tarnished chandeliers—Sophie could tell that the venerable coach had once carried people first-class; save for a singular difference, it might have been one of those cars of her girlhood in which her father—always the stylish voyager—had taken the family to Vienna or Bozen or Berlin.

  The difference—so ominous and oppressive as to make her gasp when she saw it—was that all the windows were securely boarded up. Another difference was that into each compartment made for six or eight persons the Germans had jammed as many as fifteen or sixteen bodies, together with whatever luggage had been brought along. Awash in dim light, thus compressed, half a dozen or more prisoners of both sexes stood upright or partly upright in the meager foot space, clinging together for support against the incessantly braking and accelerating movement of the train and constantly plunging into the laps of the seated ones. One or two quick-witted Resistance leaders took command. A scheme was worked out whereby sitters and standees regularly alternated positions; this helped, but nothing could help the effect of the stifling body heat of so many squeezed-together human beings, or the sour and fetid odor that persisted during the trip. Not quite torture, it was a limbo of desolating discomfort. Jan and Eva were the only children in the compartment; they took turns sitting on Sophie’s lap and the laps of others. At least one person vomited in the nearly lightless cell, and it was a muscular and desperate struggle to wriggle out of the compartment and down the jammed aisle to one of the toilets. “Better a boxcar,” Sophie remembered someone groaning, “at least you could stretch out.” But curiously, by the standards of those other hell-destined transports crisscrossing Europe at that time, stalled and sidetracked and delayed at a thousand inert junctures of space and time, her trip was not inordinately long: what should have been a morning’s journey, from six o’clock until noon, required not days but a mere thirty hours.

  Possibly because (as she had confessed to me over and over again) so much of her behavior had always been governed by wishful thinking, she had drawn a certain amount of comfort from the fact that the Germans had thrust her and her fellow prisoners aboard this novel means of transport. It was by now common knowledge that the Nazis used railroad cars meant for freight and animals to ship people to the camps. Thus, once aboard with Jan and Eva, she swiftly rejected the logical idea which flitted through her head that her captors were using this classy if threadbare car simply because it was expedient and available (the makeshift boarded windows should have been evidence of that). Instead, she hit upon a somewhat more soothing notion that these almost loungelike facilities, where comfortable Poles and rich tourists had nodded and drowsed in prewar days, now indicated special privilege, now meant that she would be treated rather better than the 1,800 Jews from Malkinia in the forward part of the train, bottled up tight in their black cattle wagons where they had been sealed for several days. As it turned out, this was as foolish and as fanciful (and as ignoble, really) as the idea she had formed about the ghetto: that the mere presence of the Jews, and the preoccupation the Nazis had with their extermination, would somehow benefit her own security. And the safety of Jan and Eva.

  The name Oświȩcim—Auschwitz—which had at first murmured its way through the compartment made her weak with fear, but she had no doubt whatever that that was where the train was going. A minuscule sliver of light, catching her eye, drew her attention to a tiny crack in the plywood board across the window, and during the first hour of the journey she was able to see enough by the dawn’s glow to tell their direction: south. Due south past the country villages that crowd around Warsaw in place of the usual suburban outskirts, due south past greening fields and copses crowded with birch trees, south in the direction of Cracow. Only Auschwitz, of all their plausible destinations, lay south, and she recalled the despair she felt when with her own eyes she verified where they were going. The reputation of Auschwitz was ominous, vile, terrifying. Although in the Gestapo prison rumors had tended to support Auschwitz as the place where they would eventually be shipped, she had hoped incessantly and prayed for a labor camp in Germany, where so many Poles had been transported and where, according to other rumor, conditions were less brutal, less harsh. But as Auschwitz loomed more and more inevitably and now, on the train, made itself inescapable, Sophie was smothered by the realization that she was victim of punishment by association, retribution through chance concurrence. She kept saying to herself: I don’t belong here. If she had not had the misfortune of being taken prisoner at the same time as so many of the Home Army members (a stroke of bad luck further complicated by her connection with Wanda, and their common dwelling place, even though she had not lifted a finger to help the Resistance), she might have been adjudged guilty of the serious crime of meat smuggling but not of the infinitely more grave crime of subversion, and hence might not be headed for a destination so forbiddingly m
align. But among other ironies, she realized, was this one: she had not been judged guilty of anything, merely interrogated and forgotten. She had then been thrown in haphazardly among these partisans, where she was victim less of any specific retributive justice than of a general rage—a kind of berserk lust for complete domination and oppression which seized the Nazis whenever they scored a win over the Resistance, and which this time had even extended to the several hundred bedraggled Poles ensnared in that last savage roundup.

  Certain things about the trip she remembered with utter clarity. The stench, the airlessness, the endless shifting of positions—stand up, sit down, stand up again. At the moment of a sudden stop a box toppling down on her head, not stunning her, not hurting too much, but raising an egg-size bulge at the top of her skull. The view outside the crack, where spring sunlight darkened into drizzling rain: through the film of rain, birch trees still tormented by the past winter’s crushing snowfall, bent into shapes of white parabolic arches, strongbows, catapults, beautiful broken skeletons, whips. Lemon dots of forsythia everywhere. Delicate green fields blending into distant forests of spruce and larch and pine. Sunshine again. Jan’s books, which he tried to read in the feeble light as he sat on her lap: The Swiss Family Robinson in German; Polish editions of White Fang and Penrod and Sam. Eva’s two possessions, which she refused to park in the luggage rack but clutched fiercely as if any moment they might be wrested from her hands: the flute in its leather case and her mís—the one-eared, one-eyed teddy bear she had kept since the cradle.