And this she did. She recounted later how she so firmly obliterated Dürrfeld from her thoughts that after he and his wife left Cracow—only an hour or so following their visit to the Wieliczka mine—he never troubled her memory again, did not dwell on the farthest margin of her consciousness even as a romantic figment. Perhaps this was the result of some unconscious force of will, perhaps it was only because of the futility she felt at entertaining the hope of seeing him again. Like a rock falling into one of those bottomless Wieliczka grottoes, he plummeted from her remembrance—another innocuous flirtation consigned to the dusty unopened scrapbook. Yet six years later she did see him again, when the creature of Dürrfeld’s passion and desire—synthetic rubber—and its place in the matrix of history had caused this corporate prince to become master of Farben’s huge industrial complex known as IG-Auschwitz. When they met each other there at the camp the encounter was even briefer and less personal than their meeting in Cracow. Yet from the separate encounters, Sophie carried away two significantly linked and powerful impressions. And they were these: During that spring afternoon’s jaunt in the company of one of Poland’s most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Dürrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Dürrfeld’s lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion.
During that long weekend in Flatbush, Sophie did not speak to me about Eva except to tell me in a few words what I have already set down: that the child was killed at Birkenau on the day of their arrival. “Eva was taken away,” she said, “and I never saw her again.” She offered no embroidery on this and I plainly could not and did not press the point; it was—in a word—terrible, and this information, which she imparted to me in such a listless, offhand way, left me beyond speech. I still marvel at Sophie’s composure. She returned quickly to speak of Jan, who had survived the selection and who, she learned through the grapevine after a number of days, had been thrown into that desperate enclave known as the Children’s Camp. I could only surmise from what she said about her first six months at Auschwitz that the shock and grief caused by Eva’s death created a bereavement which might have destroyed her, too, had it not been for Jan and his survival; the very fact that the little boy still lived, even though beyond her reach, and that she might somehow eventually get to see him was enough to sustain her through the initial phases of the nightmare. Almost every thought she had concerned the child, and the few grains of information she collected about him from time to time—that he was healthy enough, that he still lived—brought her the kind of mild, numb solace which enabled her to get through the infernal existence she woke to every morning.
But Sophie, as I pointed out before and as she elaborated to Höss on that strange day of their aborted intimacy, was one of the chosen elite and therefore had been “lucky” by comparison with most of the others newly arrived at the camp. She had first been assigned to a barracks, where in the ordinary course of events she would doubtless have endured that precisely calculated, abbreviated death-in-life which was the lot of nearly all her fellow sufferers. (It was at this point that Sophie told me about the welcoming statement of SS Hauptsturmführer Fritzch, and it might be well to repeat what they both said, verbatim. “I remember his exact words. He said, ‘You have come to a concentration camp, not to a sanatorium, and there is only one way out—up the chimney.’ He said, ‘Anyone who don’t like this can try hanging himself on the wires. If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.’ Then he said, ‘Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.’ ” Sophie had been aware of her death sentence within twenty-four hours of her arrival, it only took Fritzch to validate the fact in SS language.) But as she later explained to Höss in an episode I have earlier narrated, an odd cluster of little events—the attack on her in the barracks by a lesbian, a fight, intercession by a friendly block leader—had led her to a translator-stenographer’s job and lodging in another barracks, where she was sheltered for the time being from the camp’s mortal attrition. And of course at the end of six months another stroke of good fortune brought her the protective comforts and advantages of Haus Höss itself. Yet first came a critical meeting. It was only a few days before she was to take up residence under the Commandant’s roof that Wanda—who had been immured in one of the unspeakable kennels at Birkenau this entire time and whom Sophie had not seen since that April day of their arrival—made her way to Sophie’s side and through a tumultuous outpouring filled her with hope about Jan and the possibility of his salvation, but also terrified her with demands upon her courage which she felt certain she could not meet.
“You will have to be working for us every moment you’re in that insect’s nest,” Wanda had whispered to her in a corner of the barracks. “You can’t imagine what kind of an opportunity this is. It’s what the underground has been waiting for, praying for, to have somebody like you in a situation like this! You’ll have to use your eyes and ears every minute. Listen, darling, it’s so important for you to get word out about what’s going on. Shifts of personnel, changes of policy, transfers of the top SS pigs—anything is priceless information. It’s the lifeblood of the camp. War news! Anything to counter their filthy propaganda. Don’t you see, our morale is the only thing we have left in this hellhole. A radio, for instance—that would be priceless! Your chances of getting one would be practically nil, but if you could smuggle out a radio just so we could listen to London, it would be nearly the same as saving thousands and thousands of lives.”
Wanda was sick. The dreadful bruise inflicted on her face in Warsaw had never really gone away. Conditions in the women’s compound at Birkenau were hideous and a chronic bronchial ailment to which she had always been prone had flared up, bringing to her cheeks a hectic and alarming flush so bright that it almost matched her brick-red hair, or the grotesque frizzles that were left of it. With mingled horror, grief and guilt Sophie had a swift intuition that the present moment would be the last time she would ever lay eyes on this brave, resolute, luminous flame of a girl. “I can only stay a few more minutes,” Wanda said. She suddenly switched from Polish to a rapid, breezy colloquial German, murmuring to Sophie that the nasty-faced assistant block leader lingering nearby, a Warsaw whore, looked like a stool pigeon and a traitorous rat, which she was. Quickly then she outlined to Sophie her scheme about Lebensborn, trying to make her see that the plan—however quixotic it might appear—was perhaps the only way of assuring Jan’s deliverance from the camp.
It would require a lot of conniving, she said, would require a lot of things which she knew Sophie would instinctively shrink from. She paused, coughed in painful racking spasms, then resumed. “I knew I had to see you when I heard about you through the grapevine. We hear everything. I’ve so wanted to see you anyway all these months, but this new job of yours made it absolutely necessary. I’ve risked everything to get here to see you—if I’m caught I’m done for! But nothing risked, nothing gained in this snakepit. Yes, I’ll tell you again and believe me: Jan is well, he’s as well as can be expected. Yes, not once—three times I saw him through the fence. I won’t fool you, he’s skinny, skinny as I am. It’s lousy in the Children’s Camp—everything’s lousy at Birkenau—but I’ll tell you another thing. They’re not starving the children as badly as some of the rest. Why, I don’t know, it can’t be their conscience. Once I managed to take him some apples. He’s doing well. He can make it. Go ahead and cry, darling, I know it’s awful but you mustn’t give up hope. And you’ve got to try to get him out of here before winter comes. Now, this Lebensborn idea may sound bizarre but the thing really exists—we saw it happening in Warsaw, remember the Rydzón child?—and I’m telling you that you simply must make a stab at using it to get Jan shipped out of here. All right, I know there’s a good chance that he might get lost if he’s sent to Germany, but at least he’ll be alive and well, don’t you see? There’s a good chance that you’ll be able to keep track of him, this
war can’t last forever.
“Listen! It all depends on what kind of relationship you strike up with Höss. So much depends on that, Zosia darling, not only what happens to Jan and yourself but to all of us. You’ve got to use that man, work on him—you’re going to be living under the same roof. Use him! For once you’ve got to forget that priggish Christer’s morality of yours and use your sex for all it’s worth. Pardon me, Zosia, but give him a good fucking and he’ll be eating out of your hand. Listen, underground intelligence knows all about that man, just as we’ve learned about Lebensborn. Höss is just another susceptible bureaucrat with a blocked-up itch for a female body. Use it! And use him! It won’t be any skin off his nose to take one Polish kid and have him committed to that program—after all, it’ll be another bonus for the Reich. And sleeping with Höss won’t be collaboration, it’ll be espionage—a fifth column! So you’ve got to work this ape over to every possible limit. For God’s sake, Zosia, this is your chance! What you do in that house can mean everything for the rest of us, for every Pole and Jew and misbegotten bundle of misery in this camp—everything. I beg of you—don’t let us down!”
Time was running out. Wanda had to go. Before she went, she left Sophie with a few last instructive words. There was the matter of Bronek, for instance. At the Commandant’s house she would encounter a handyman named Bronek. He would be a crucial link between the mansion and the camp underground. Ostensibly a stooge for the SS, he was not quite the bootlicker and Höss’s lackey that a necessity for accommodation would make him appear. Höss trusted him, he was the Commandant’s pet Polack; but within this simple being, superficially servile and obliging, there beat the heart of a patriot who had shown that he could be counted upon for certain missions, provided they were not too mentally taxing or complex. The truth was, he was harebrained but clever—made into such a reliable turnip by the medical experiments which had addled his thought processes. He could initiate nothing on his own but was a willing instrument. Poland forever! In fact, said Wanda, Sophie would soon discover that Bronek was so secure in his role as the submissive, harmless drudge that from Höss’s viewpoint he could only be beyond suspicion—and therein lay both the beauty and the crucial nature of his function as an underground operative and go-between. Trust Bronek, Wanda said, and use him if she could. Now Wanda had to go, and after a long and tearful embrace she was gone—leaving Sophie weak and hopeless, with a sense of inadequacy...
Thus Sophie came to spend her ten days under the Commandant’s roof—a period culminating in that hectic, anxiety-drenched day which she remembered in such detail and which I have already described: a day when her feckless and flat-footed attempt at seducing Höss yielded not the possibility of freedom for Jan but only the bitterly wounding yet sweetly desirable promise of seeing her child in the flesh. (And this might be too brief to bear.) A day on which she had miserably failed, through a combination of panic and forgetfulness, to broach the idea of Lebensborn to the Commandant, thereby losing the richest chance she had of offering him the legitimate means to oversee Jan’s removal from the camp. (Unless, she thought, as she descended toward the cellar that evening, unless she collected her wits and was able to outline to him her plan the next morning, when Höss had promised to bring the little boy to his office for the reunion.) It was also the day on which to her other frights and miseries had been added the almost intolerable burden of a challenge and a responsibility. And four years later, in a bar in Brooklyn, she spoke of the desperate shame that still engulfed her at the memory of how such a challenge and a responsibility had frightened her and finally defeated her. This was ultimately one of the darkest parts of her confession to me and the focus of what she called, again and again, her “badness.” And I began to see how this “badness” went far beyond what—it seemed to me—was misplaced guilt over her clumsy effort to seduce Höss or even her equally clumsy attempt to manipulate him through her father’s pamphlet. I began to see how, among its other attributes, absolute evil paralyzes absolutely. In the end, Sophie recalled with anguish, her failure was reduced to such a cheaply trivial yet overwhelmingly important agglomeration of metal, glass and plastic as the radio that Wanda thought Sophie would never have the incredible chance to steal. And she blew her chance to pieces...
On the floor just underneath the landing which served as the antechamber to Höss’s attic was the small room occupied by Emmi, age eleven, middle member of the Commandant’s five offspring. Sophie had passed the room many times on her way up to and down from the office, and had noted that the door was often left open—not a remarkable fact really, she had reflected, when one realized that petty theft in this despotically well-regulated stronghold was nearly as unthinkable as murder. Sophie had paused for a glimpse more than once and had seen the orderly, dustless child’s bedchamber which would have been unexceptional in Augsburg or Münster: a sturdy single bed with a flowered coverlet, stuffed animals heaped on a chair, some silver trophies, a cuckoo clock, a wall with gingerbread picture frames enclosing photographs (an alpine scene, marching Hitler Youth, a seascape, the child herself in a swimsuit, ponies at play, portraits of the Führer, “Onkel Heini” Himmler, smiling Mummy, smiling Daddy in civvies), a dresser with a cluster of boxes for jewelry and trinkets, and next to these a portable radio. It was the radio that always captured her attention. Only rarely had Sophie seen or heard the radio in operation, no doubt because its charms had been superseded by the huge phonograph downstairs which blared forth night and day.
Once when passing by the room she had noticed the radio on—dreamy, modern ersatz-Strauss waltzes strained through a voice which identified the source as a Wehrmacht station, possibly Vienna, perhaps Prague. The limpid, muted strings were stunningly clear. But the radio itself bewitched her not by its music but by its very being—ravished her by its size, its shape, its adorable shrunken self, its cuteness, its miniatureness, its incredible portability. Never had it occurred to Sophie that technology could achieve such marvelous compactness, but then, she had overlooked what the Third Reich and its newborn science of electronics had been up to all these exploding years. The radio was no bigger than a medium-sized book. The name Siemens was written across a side panel in intaglio script. Deep maroon in color, its plastic front cover sprang up on hinges to form the antenna, standing sentinel over the little tube-and-battery-filled chassis small enough to be balanced easily in the palm of a man’s hand. The radio afflicted Sophie with terror and desire. And at dusk on that October day after her confrontation with Höss, when she descended to her dank quarters in the basement, she caught sight of the radio through the open door and felt her bowels give way with fear at the very idea that at last, with no more hesitations or delays, she must manage somehow to steal it.
She stood in the shadows of the hallway, only a few feet from the bottom of the attic stairs. The radio was playing soft murmurous schmaltz. Above, there was a sound of the booted feet of Höss’s adjutant, thumping about on the landing. Höss himself had left the house on an inspection tour. She stood still for a moment, feeling strengthless, hungry, chill-swept and on the edge of illness or collapse. No day in her life had been longer than this one, wherein all that she had hoped to achieve had come to an ugly, gaping naught. No, not absolutely nothing: Höss’s promise to at least let her see Jan was something salvaged out of the wreckage. But to have mismanaged things so utterly, to have returned virtually to where she had started, faced with the oncoming night of the camp’s perdition—all this was beyond her acceptance or comprehension. She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall in a dizzy siege of nausea, brought on by hunger. That morning on this very spot she had puked up those figs: the mess had long since been scrubbed away by some Polish or SS minion, but in her fancy there lingered a ghostly sour-sweet fragrance, and hunger suddenly clamped down upon her stomach in a spasm of aching colic. Unseeing, she reached up with wandering fingers, suddenly touched fur. It felt like the hairy balls of the devil. She uttered a foreshortened scream, a squeaky gasp, re
alizing as her eyes popped open that her hand had grazed the chin of an antlered stag, shot in 1938—as Höss had told an SS visitor within her hearing—squarely behind the brain at three hundred meters, “open sight,” on the slopes above the Königssee so deep within the very shadow of Berchtesgaden that the Führer, had he been in residence (and who knows, perhaps he had been!), might have heard the fatal crack!...
Now the protuberant glass eyeballs of the deer, artfully detailed even to its minute bloodshot flecks, gave back twin images of herself; frail, wasted, her face bisected by cadaverous planes, she gazed deeply at her duplicate self, contemplating how, in her exhaustion and in the tension and indecision of the moment, she could possibly hold on to her sanity. During the days Sophie had plodded up and down the stairs past Emmi’s room she had pondered her strategy with increasing dread and anxiety. She was hagridden by the need not to betray Wanda’s trust, but—oh God, the difficulties! The key factor lay in one word: suspicion. The disappearance of such a scarce and valued instrument as a radio would be a matter of appalling gravity, inviting the possibility of reprisal, punishment, torture, even random killing. The prisoners in the house would automatically fall under suspicion; they would be the first to be searched, interrogated, beaten. Even the fat Jewish dressmakers! But there was a saving element upon which Sophie realized she had to depend—this was the fact of the members of the SS themselves. If a few prisoners like Sophie alone had access to the upper regions of the house, any such contrived theft would be completely out of the question. It would be suicide. But SS members by the dozens beat a path up to Höss’s office door day after day—messengers, bearers of orders and memorandums and manifests and transfers, all sorts of enlisted Sturmanns and Rottenführers and Unterscharführers on various missions from every corner of the camp. They, too, would have laid covetous eyes on Emmi’s little radio; there were a few at least who were not beyond larceny and they, too, would scarcely be immune to suspicion. Indeed, because far more SS troops than prisoners had cause to frequent Höss’s roost under the eaves, it seemed logical to Sophie to assume that trusted inmates like herself might escape the burden of the most immediate suspicion—allowing an even better opportunity to get rid of the goods.
Sophie's Choice (Open Road) Page 55