The flute. The enchanted flute. In a city of destroyed or tuneless pianos it would seem a fine instrument for a child’s first leap into music. Eva was mad for the flute, and after four months or so Zaorski had begun to dote on the little girl, amazed at her natural gift, fussed over her as if she were a prodigy (which she might have been), another Landowska, another Paderewski, another Polish offering to music’s pantheon—and finally even refused the trifling amount that Sophie was able to pay. Zaorski popped up now down on the street, appearing as if from nowhere, astonishingly, like a blond genie—a half-starved-looking, limping, florid-faced, broomstraw-haired man with jittery concern in his pale eyes. The woolen sweater he wore, a sooty green, was a mosaic of moth holes. Sophie, startled, leaned forward against the window. The generous, neurotic man had obviously followed Eva, or rather, chased as well as he could after the children, hurrying these many blocks out of some preoccupation or reason which Sophie could not possibly divine. Then all of a sudden his mission became clear. Ever the passionate pedagogue, he had hobbled after Eva in order to correct, or explain, or elaborate on something he had taught her in her most recent lesson—a matter of fingering or phrasing—what? Sophie didn’t know, but she was both touched and amused.
She pushed the window open slightly in order to call down to the group, now huddled near the entrance of the building next door. Eva wore her yellow hair in pigtails. She had lost her front teeth. How, Sophie wondered, could she play a flute? Zaorski had made Eva open her leather case and remove the flute; he flourished it aloft in front of the child, not blowing on it but merely demonstrating some soundless arpeggio with his fingers. Then he put his lips to the instrument and blew several notes. For a long moment Sophie was unable to hear. Huge shadows swept across the wintry heavens. Overhead a squadron of Luftwaffe bombers droned deafeningly eastward toward Russia, flying very low—five, ten, then twenty monster machines spreading their vulturous shapes against the sky. They came late every afternoon as if on schedule, shaking the house with clattering vibrations. Wanda’s voice was drowned out in their roar.
When the planes had passed, Sophie looked down and was able to hear Eva play, but only for the barest instant. The music was familiar but unnameable—Handel, Pergolesi, Gluck?—an intricate sweet trill of piercing nostalgia and miraculous symmetry. A dozen notes in all, no more, they struck antiphonal bells deep within Sophie’s soul. They spoke of all she had been, of all she longed to be—and all she wished for her children, in whatever future God willed. Her heart swooned in those depths; she grew faint, unsteady, and she felt herself in the grip of an aching, devouring love. And at the same time joy—joy that was inexplicably both delicious and despairing—swept across her skin in a cool blaze.
But the small, perfect piping—almost as soon as it had begun—had evaporated on the air. “Wonderful, Eva!” she heard Zaorski’s voice. “Just right!” And she saw the teacher give first Eva then Jan a tender pat on the head before turning and moving jerkily up the street toward his basement. Jan tugged at one of Eva’s pigtails and she gave a yell. “Stop it, Jan!” Then the children rushed into the hallway downstairs.
“You must come to a decision!” she heard Wanda say insistently.
For a time Sophie was silent. At last, with the sound of the children’s tumbling, ascending footsteps in her ears, she replied softly, “I have already made my choice, as I told you. I will not get involved. I mean this! Schluss!” Her voice rose on this word and she found herself wondering why she had spoken it in German. “Schluss—aus! That’s final!”
During the five months or so before Sophie was taken prisoner the Nazis had made a vigorous effort to ensure that the north of Poland would become Judenrein—cleansed of Jews. Beginning in November, 1942, and extending through the following January, a program of deportation was instituted whereby the many thousands of Jews living in the northeastern district of Bialystok were jammed onto trains and shipped to concentration camps throughout the country. Funneled down into the railway complex in Warsaw, the majority of these Jews from the north eventually found themselves at Auschwitz. Meanwhile, in Warsaw itself there had come a lull in the action against the Jews—at least in terms of gross deportations. That the deportations from Warsaw had already been extensive may be seen from some twilight statistics. Before the German invasion of Poland in 1939 Warsaw’s Jewish population was in the neighborhood of 450,000—next to New York, the largest concentration of Jews to be found in any city on earth. Only three years later the Jews living in Warsaw numbered 70,000; most of the others perished not only at Auschwitz but at Sobibór, Belzec, Chelmno, Maidanek and, above all, Treblinka. This last camp was located in wild country at an advantageously short distance from Warsaw, and unlike Auschwitz, which to a large extent was involved in slave labor, became a place totally consecrated to extermination. It was plainly not chance that the huge “resettlements” from the Warsaw ghetto which occurred in July and August of 1942, and which left that quarter a ghostly shell, were coincident with the establishment of the bucolic hideaway of Treblinka and its gas chambers.
In any case, of the 70,000 Jews who stayed in the city, approximately half were living “legally” in the ravaged ghetto (even as Sophie languished in the Gestapo jail many of these were preparing for martyrs’ deaths in the April uprising only a few weeks away). Most of the remaining 35,000—clandestine denizens of the so-called interghetto—dwelt in despair amid the ruins like hunted animals. It was not enough that they were pursued by the Nazis: they endured unending fear of betrayal by hoodlum “Jew-catchers”—Jozef’s prey—and other venal Poles like his lady American Lit. prof; it even happened (and more than once) that their exposure came about through the contortionate artifices of fellow Jews. Ghastly, as Wanda said to Sophie over and over, that Jozef’s own betrayal and murder somehow marked the breakthrough which the Nazis were anticipating. This shattered segment of the Home Army—God, how sad! But after all, she had added, it could hardly have been unexpected. So it was really because of the Jews that they all ended up simmering in the same big kettle. It is a significant fact that the membership included some consecrated Jews. And there is this: although the Home Army, like members of the Resistance elsewhere in Europe, had other concerns besides the succor and safekeeping of the Jews (as indeed there were one or two partisan factions in Poland that remained malignantly anti-Semitic), such help, generally speaking, was still high on their list of priorities; thus it is safe to say that it was at least partly because of their efforts in behalf of some of these incessantly stalked, mortally endangered Jews that dozens upon dozens of members of the underground were rapidly corralled, and that Sophie too—Sophie the stainless, the inaccessible, the uninvolved—was adventitiously ensnared.
During most of the month of March, including the two-week period in which Sophie was lodged in the Gestapo jail, the transports of Jews from the Bialystok district to Auschwitz by way of Warsaw had temporarily ceased. This would probably explain why Sophie and the members of the Resistance—now numbering nearly 250 prisoners—were not themselves sent off immediately to the camp; the Germans, always efficiency-minded, were waiting to engraft their new captives to a more massive shipment of human flesh, and since no Jews were being deported from Warsaw, a delay must have seemed expedient. Another key matter—the interruption in the deportation of the Jews from the northeast—requires comment; this was most likely connected with the building of the Birkenau crematoriums. Since the camp’s inception the original crematorium at Auschwitz together with its gas chamber had served as the chief utility of mass death for the entire camp. Its earliest victims were Russian prisoners of war. It was a Polish structure: the barracks and buildings of Auschwitz made up the homely nucleus of a former cavalry installation when it was appropriated by the Germans. At one time this low rambling edifice with its slanted slate roof had been a storage warehouse for vegetables, and the Germans obviously found its architecture congenial to their purpose; the large underground grotto where turnips and potatoe
s had been piled high was perfectly suited to the asphyxiation of people en masse, just as the adjoining anterooms were so naturally fit for the installation of cremation ovens as to appear almost custom-made. All that was needed was the addition of a chimney, and the butchers were in business.
But the place was too limited for the hordes of the doomed which had begun to pour into the camp. Although several smallish temporary bunkers for extermination were thrown up in 1942, there was a crisis that arose in terms of facilities for killing and disposal which could only be remedied by the completion of the immense new crematoriums at Birkenau. The Germans—or rather, their Jewish and Gentile slaves—had been hard at work that winter. The first of these four gigantic incinerators was placed in operation a week after Sophie’s capture by the Gestapo, the second only eight days later—mere hours before her arrival at Auschwitz on the first of April. She left Warsaw on the thirtieth of March. On that day she and Jan and Eva and the nearly 250 members of the Resistance, including Wanda, were herded aboard a train containing 1,800 Jews sent down finally from Malkinia, a transit camp northeast of Warsaw where the remainder of the Jewish population from the Bialystok district had been held. Besides the Jews and the Home Army fighters on the train, there was a contingent of Poles—Warsaw citizens of both sexes, numbering around two hundred—who had been picked up by the Gestapo in one of their spasmodic but ruthless łapankas, the victims in this case being guilty of nothing more than the calamitous luck to be caught on the wrong street at the wrong hour. Or at most, the nature of the guilt of all of these was technical if not illusory.
Among the unfortunates was Stefan Zaorski, who lacked a work permit and had already confided to Sophie his premonition that he would get into serious trouble. Sophie was stunned when she learned that he, too, had been caught. She saw him from a distance at the jail and once caught a glimpse of him on the train, but she was never able to speak to him amid the steam and the press of bodies and the pandemonium. It was one of the most populous transports to reach Auschwitz in some time. The very size of the shipment is perhaps an indication of how eager the Germans were to employ their new facilities at Birkenau. No selections were made among these Jews in order to winnow out those who would be assigned to labor, and while it was not particularly rare for an entire transport to be exterminated, the slaughter should in this case be remarked upon as perhaps representing the Germans’ zeal to exploit and show off to themselves their latest, largest and most refined instrument in the technology of murder: all 1,800 Jews went to their deaths in the inaugural action of Crematorium II. Not a single soul among them escaped immediate gassing.
Although Sophie was extremely open with me about her life in Warsaw and her capture and her stay in the jail, she became curiously reticent about her actual deportation to Auschwitz and her arrival there. I thought at first it had to do with too much horror, and I was right, but I would only later learn the real reason for this silence, this evasiveness—certainly I thought little enough about it at the time. If the foregoing paragraphs with their accumulation of statistics seem, then, to have an abstract or static quality, it is for the reason that I have had to try to re-create, these many years afterward, a larger background to the events in which Sophie and the others were helpless participants, using data which could scarcely have been available to anyone except the professionally concerned in that long-ago year just following the war’s end.
I have brooded a lot since then. I have often wondered what might have dwelt in Professor Biegański’s thoughts had he lived to know that the fate of his daughter but especially his grandchildren was ancillary to, yet inextricably bound up with, the accomplishment of the dream he shared with his National Socialist idols: the liquidation of the Jews. Despite his worship of the Reich, he was a proud Pole. He also must have been exceptionally astute about matters pertaining to power. It is hard to understand how he could have been blind to the fact that the great death-happening wrought upon the European Jews by the Nazis would descend like a smothering fog around his compatriots—a people loathed with such ferocity that only the precedence of an even more urgent loathing accorded the Jews was a rampart against their own eventual obliteration. It was that detestation of Poles, of course, which doomed the Professor himself. But his obsession must have blinded him to many things, and it is an irony that—even if the Poles and other Slavs were not next on the list of people to be annihilated—he should have failed to foresee how such sublime hatred could only gather into its destroying core, like metal splinters sucked toward some almighty magnet, countless thousands of victims who did not wear the yellow badge. Sophie told me once—as she went on to reveal certain bits of her life in Cracow which she had previously withheld—that whatever the Professor’s grim authoritarian disdain for her, his adoration of his two little grandchildren had been melting, genuine, complete. It is impossible to speculate on the reaction of this tormented man had he survived to see Jan and Eva fall into that black pit which his imagination had fashioned for the Jews.
I will always remember Sophie’s tattoo. That nasty little excrescence, attached like a ridge of minute bruised tooth-bites to her forearm, was the single detail of her appearance which—on the night when I first saw her at the Pink Palace—instantly conveyed to my mind the mistaken idea that she was a Jew. In the vague and uninformed mythology of the day, Jewish survivors and this pathetic marking were indissolubly tied together. But if I had known then of the metamorphosis which the camp underwent during the terrible fortnight I have dwelt upon, I would have understood that the tattoo had an important and direct connection with Sophie’s being branded like a Jew though she herself was not Jewish. It was this... She and her fellow Gentiles acquired a classification which paradoxically removed them from the immediately death-bound. A revealing bureaucratic matter is involved here. The tattooing of “Aryan” prisoners was introduced only in the latter part of March, and Sophie must have been among the first of the non-Jewish arrivals to receive the marking. If initially it would seem puzzling, the redefined policy is easy to explain: it had to do with the cranking up of the dynamo of death. With the “final solution” now accomplished and Jews consigned in satisfying multitudes to the new gas chambers, there would be no longer any need for their numeration. It was Himmler’s order that all Jews would die without exception. Taking their place in the camp, now Judenrein, would be the Aryans, tattooed for identification—slaves dying by stagnant slow degrees their other kind of death. Thus Sophie’s tattoo. (Or such were the outlines of the original plan. But as so often happened, the plan changed yet again; the orders were countermanded. There was a conflict between the lust for murder and the need for work. Upon the arrival at the camp of the German Jews late that winter, it was decreed that all able-bodied prisoners—men and women—would be assigned to slave labor. So in the society of the walking dead of which Sophie became a part, Jews and non-Jews were mingled.)
And then there was April Fools’ Day. Fishy jokes. Poisson d’avril. In Polish, like the Latin: Prima Aprilis. Each time that day has rolled around, ticking off the years during these recent domestic decades, it has been my association of the date with Sophie which has given me a twinge of real anguish when I have been exposed to those small, sweet, silly tricks perpetrated by my children (“April fool, Daddy!”); the gentle paterfamilias, usually so forbearing, has turned cross as a skunk. I hate April Fools’ Day as I hate the Judeo-Christian God. That is the day which marked the end of Sophie’s journey, and for me somehow the bad joke has been less attached to that rather pedestrian concidence than to the fact that only four days later an order to Rudolf Höss from Berlin directed that no more captives who were not Jewish would be sent to the gas.
For a long time Sophie refused to supply me with any details about her arrival, or perhaps her equilibrium simply could not let her do so—and perhaps that is just as well. But even before I learned the full truth concerning what happened to her, I was able to re-create a smudged view of the events of that day—a day which the
records describe as being prematurely warm and greenly burgeoning with spring, ferns unfolding, the forsythia in early bud, the air sunshiny and clear. The 1,800 Jews were expeditiously loaded into vans and driven to Birkenau, an operation which occupied the two hours just past noon. There were, as I say, no selections; fit and healthy men, women, children—all died. Shortly after that, as if seized by the same desire to make a clean sweep of whatever victims were at hand, the SS officers on the ramp consigned a carload (that is, two hundred) of the Resistance members to the gas chambers. They, too, departed in vans, leaving behind them perhaps fifty of their comrades, including Wanda.
There now came a curious interruption in the proceedings, and a wait which lasted well through the afternoon. On the two still-occupied cars, besides the leftovers from the Resistance group there remained Sophie and Jan and Eva and the bedraggled mob of Poles who had been captured in the last Warsaw roundup. The delay stretched out through several more hours, until nearly dusk. On the ramp the SS men—the officers, the learned physicians, the guards—seemed to be milling about in an anxious sweat of indecision. Orders from Berlin? Counterorders? One can only speculate upon their nervousness. It doesn’t matter. Finally it became clear that the SS had decided to continue their work, but this time on terms of selection. The officiating noncommissioned officers ordered everybody out, down, made them form lines. Then the doctors took over. The selection process lasted somewhat over an hour. Sophie, Jan and Wanda were sent to the camp. About half of the prisoners were elected to this status. Among those ordered to their deaths in Crematorium II at Birkenau were the music teacher Stefan Zaorski and his pupil, the flutist Eva Maria Zawistowska, who in a little more than a week would have been eight years old.
Sophie's Choice (Open Road) Page 53