Sophie's Choice (43 page)

emotion was of love, envy, distrust, dependence, hostility and admiration? They were so much alike in certain ways, yet so different. In the beginning it had been their mutual bewitchment with music that had drawn them together. Wanda had come to Warsaw to study voice at the Conservatory, but the war had blasted those aspirations, as it had Sophie's. When by chance Sophie came to live in the same building as Wanda and Jozef, it had been Bach and Buxtehude, Mozart and Rameau who had glued together their friendship. Wanda was a tall, athletically built young woman with boyish, graceful arms and legs and flaming red hair. Her eyes were of the most arrestingly clear sapphire-blue that Sophie had ever seen. Her face was a cloud of tiny amber freckles. A somewhat too prominent chin marred the suggestion of real beauty, but she had a vivacity, a luminous intensity which sometimes transformed her in a spectacular way; she glowed, she became all sparks and fire (Sophie often thought of the word fougueuse) like her hair. There was at least one strong similarity about Sophie's and Wanda's background: they had both been brought up in an ambience of rapturous Germanism. Indeed, Wanda had a transcendentally German surname, Muck-Horch von Kretschmann--this being the result of her birth to a German father and a Polish mother in Lodz, where the influence of Germany upon commerce and industry, mainly textiles, had been pervasive if not almost complete. Her father, a manufacturer of cheap woolens, had made her learn German early; like Sophie, she spoke the language with accentless fluency, but her heart and soul were Polish. Sophie never believed that such violent patriotism could dwell within a human breast, even in a land of throbbing patriots. Wanda was the reincarnation of the young Rosa Luxemburg, whom she worshipped. She seldom mentioned her father, nor did she ever try to explain why she had rejected so completely the German part of her heritage; Sophie only knew that Wanda breathed, drank and dreamed the idea of a free Poland--most radiantly, a liberated Polish proletariat after the war--and such a passion had turned her into one of the most unbudgingly committed members of the Resistance. She was sleepless, fearless, clever--a firebrand. Her perfection in the language of the conquering hordes made her, of course, exceedingly valuable to the underground movement, quite aside from her zeal and her other capabilities. And it was her knowledge that Sophie, too, had an inbred command of German but refused to place this gift at the service of the Resistance that at first caused Wanda to lose patience with her and then later brought the two friends to the edge of ruinous discord. For Sophie was deeply, agonizingly, mortally afraid of getting herself involved in the underground fight against the Nazis, and such disengagement seemed to Wanda not only unpatriotic but an act of moral cowardice. A few weeks before Jozef's murder and the roundup, some members of the Home Army had made off with a Gestapo van in the town of Pruszków, not far from Warsaw. The van contained a treasure trove of documents and plans, and Wanda was able to tell at a glance that the thick, voluminous files contained items of the highest level of secrecy. But there were many of them and it was urgent that they be translated. When Wanda approached Sophie, asking her to help with these papers, Sophie once again was unable to say yes, and they resumed their old, painful argument. "I am a socialist," Wanda had said, "and you have no politics at all. Furthermore, you are something of a Christer. That is all right with me. In the old days I would have had nothing but contempt for you, Zosia, contempt and dislike. There are still friends of mine who will have nothing to do with a person like you. But I suppose I've outgrown such a point of view. I hate the stupid rigidity of some of my comrades. Also, I'm simply so fond of you, as you certainly realize. So I'm not trying to appeal to you on political grounds or even ideological grounds. You wouldn't want to get mixed up with a lot of them anyway. I'm not typical, but they are not your type at all--something you already know. Anyway, not everyone in the movement is political. I am appealing to you in the name of humanity. I am trying to appeal to your sense of decency, to a sense of yourself as a human being and a Pole." At this point Sophie had, as usual after one of Wanda's fervent come-ons, turned away, saying nothing. She had gazed out the window at the wintry Warsaw desolation, bomb-shattered buildings and rubble heaps shrouded (there was no other word) by the sulphurous soot-blackened snow--a landscape which had once brought tears of sorrow but now only evoked a sickish apathy, so much a dingy part did it seem of the day-to-day dreariness and misery of a city ransacked, fearful, hungry, dying. If hell had suburbs, they would look like this wasteland. She sucked at the ends of her ragged fingers. She could not keep herself in even cheap gloves. Gloveless toil at the tar-paper factory had wrecked her hands; one thumb had become badly infected and it hurt. She replied to Wanda, "I've told you and I'll tell you again, my dear, I can't. I won't. That's that." "And for the same reason, I suppose?" "Yes." Why couldn't Wanda accept her decision as final, lay off, leave her alone? Her persistence was maddening. "Wanda," she said softly, "I don't want to press the point any more than I have to. It's embarrassing for me to repeat what should be evident to you, because I know you're basically a sensitive person. But in my position--I say it again--I can't risk it, with children--" "Other women in the Home Army have children," Wanda put in abruptly. "Why can't you get that through your head?" "I told you before, I'm not 'other women' and I'm not in the Home Army," Sophie retorted, this time with exasperation. "I'm myself! I have to act according to my conscience. You don't have children. It's easy for you to talk like this. I cannot jeopardize the lives of my children. They're having a hard enough time as it is." "I'm afraid I find it very offensive of you, Zosia, placing yourself on a level different from the others. Unable to sacrifice--" "I've sacrificed," Sophie said bitterly. "I've lost a husband and a father already, and my mother is dying of tuberculosis. How much do I have to sacrifice, in the name of God?" Wanda could scarcely be expected to know of the antipathy--call it indifference--which Sophie harbored toward husband and father, dead in their graves these past three years at Sachsenhausen; nonetheless, what she had said comprised a telling point of sorts, and Sophie detected in Wanda a consequent moderation of tone. A quality that was almost wheedling entered her voice. "You wouldn't necessarily be in a very vulnerable position, you understand, Zosia. You wouldn't be required to do anything truly risky--nothing remotely like what some of the comrades have been doing, even myself. It's a matter of your brain, your head. There are so many things that you can do that would be invaluable, with your knowledge of the language. Monitoring their shortwave broadcasts, translating. Those documents that were stolen yesterday from that Gestapo van in Pruszków. Let's get to the point about this right now. They're worth their weight in gold, I'm certain! It's something I could help do, certainly, but there are so many of them and I have a thousand other things on my mind. Don't you see, Zosia, how incredibly useful you could be if we could just have some of those documents delivered to you here, quite safely--no one would suspect." She paused, then said in an insistent voice, "You must reconsider, Zosia. This is becoming indecent of you. Consider what you can do for all of us. Consider your country! Consider Poland!" Dusk was coming on. From the ceiling a tiny lightbulb pulsed spiritlessly--lucky tonight, often there was no light. Since dawn Sophie had been shifting piles of tar paper, and she was aware now that her back was hurting her more even than her swollen and infected thumb. As usual she felt unclean, begrimed. With tired, gritty eyes she brooded out across the desolate cityscape, over which the sun never seemed to cast a glimmer. She yawned an exhausted yawn, no longer listening to Wanda's voice, or rather, no longer hearing the actual words, which had become strident, singsong, hectoring, inspirational. She wondered where Jozef was, wondered if he was safe. She knew only that he was stalking someone in another part of the city, his piano wire in a lethal coil beneath his jacket--a boy of nineteen bent upon his mission of death and retribution. She was not in love with him but she, well--cared for him intensely; she liked the warmth of him in bed beside her, and she would be anxious until he returned. Mary Mother of God, she thought, what an existence! On the ugly street below--gray and grainy and featureless like the worn sole of a shoe--a platoon of German soldiers tramped into the gusty wind, the collars of their tunics blowing, rifles slung at the shoulder; listlessly she watched them pass the corner, turn, disappear up a street where but for an intervening bombed-out building she knew she could have seen the steel-and-iron curbside public gallows: it was as functional as a rack upon which secondhand dealers displayed used clothes, and from its horizontal bar citizens of Warsaw beyond counting had twisted and hung. And still hung and twisted. Christ, would it never end? She was too weary to attempt even a bad joke, but it did occur to her, almost, to break in on Wanda, to reply to her by saying something that was outrageously lodged in her heart: The one and only thing which might lure me into your world would be that radio. Would be to listen to London. But not to war news. Not to news of Allied victories, nor word of the Polish army fighting, nor to orders from the government of Poland in exile. Not to any of these. No, quite simply I think I would risk my life as you do and also give an arm or a hand to listen just once again to Sir Thomas Beecham conducting Così fan tutte. What a shocking, selfish idea it was--she was aware of its infinite ignobility even as the thought crossed her mind--but she could not help it, it was what she felt. For a moment shame washed over her for thinking the thought, shame at entertaining the notion in the same habitation where she shared room with Wanda and Jozef, these two selfless, courageous people whose allegiance to humanity and their fellow Poles and concern for the hunted Jews were a repudiation of all that her father had stood for. Despite her own actual blamelessness, she had felt dirtied, defiled by her association with her father in his last obsessed year, and with his atrocious pamphlet, and so her brief relationship with this consecrated sister and her brother had brought her moments of cleansing grace. She gave a small shudder and the fever of shame worsened, became hotter. What would they think if they knew about Professor Biegañski, or knew that for three years she had carried on her person a copy of that pamphlet? And for what reason? For what unspeakable reason? To use it as a small wedge, an instrument of possible negotiation with the Nazis, should the loathsome occasion ever arise? Yes, she replied to herself, yes--there was no way out of that vile and disgraceful fact. And now as Wanda rambled on about duty and sacrifice she became so troubled by her secret that simply to save her composure she thrust it from her mind like some foul leaving. She listened again. "There comes a point in life where every human being must stand up and be counted," Wanda was saying. "You know what a beautiful person I think you are. And Jozef would die for you!" Her voice rose, now began to scrape her raw. "But you can no longer treat us this way. You have to assume responsibility, Zosia. You've come to the place where you can no longer fool around like this, you have to make a choice!" Just then on the street below she caught sight of her children. They moved slowly up the sidewalk, talking earnestly, dallying as little children do. A few pedestrians straggled past them, homeward bound in the dusk; one, an elderly man bundled up against the wind, clumsily bumped Jan, who made an impudent gesture with his hand, then strolled on with his sister, deep in his chat, explaining... explaining. He had gone to fetch Eva from her flute lesson--a haphazard, sometimes quite sudden and impromptu affair (depending on daily pressures) held in a gutted basement a dozen blocks away. The teacher, a man named Stefan Zaorski, had been a flutist with the Warsaw Symphony, and Sophie had had to cajole and flatter and plead in order to get him to take Eva as a student; aside from the money that Sophie could pay, a pitiful amount, there was little incentive for a dispossessed musician to give lessons in that stark and cheerless city--there were better (although mainly illegal) ways to earn one's bread. He was seriously crippled with arthritis in both knees, which didn't help things. But Zaorski, a man still youngish and a bachelor, had a crush on Sophie (as did so many men who saw her and became instantly moonstruck), and doubtless agreed in order to be able to delight in her fair beauty from time to time. Also, Sophie had been energetically, quietly insistent, ultimately persuasive, convincing Zaorski that she could not consider raising Eva without giving her a knowledge of music. One might as well just say no to life itself. 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 unnamable--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 "Jewcatchers"--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 potatoes 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 tapankas, 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 Biegañski'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 toothbites 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.