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By Root 22795 0

’s life—past life and of our time together—and Nathan and his and Sophie’s appalling troubles and all the interconnected and progressively worsening circumstances which led that poor straw-haired Polish darling headlong into destruction had preyed on my memory like a repetitive and ineradicable tic. The landscape and the living figures of that summer, as in some umber-smeared snapshot found in the brittle black pages of an old album, had become more dusty and indistinct as time for me unspooled with negligent haste into my own middle age, yet that summer’s agony still cried out for explanation. Thus in the last months of 1967 I began thinking in earnest about Sophie and Nathan’s sorrowful destiny; I knew I would have to deal with it eventually, just as I had dealt those many years before, so successfully and expediently, with another young woman I had loved beyond hope—the doomed Maria Hunt. For various reasons, it turned out that several more years would pass before I began the story of Sophie as it has been set down here. But the preparation I went through at that time required that I torture myself by absorbing as much as I could find of the literature of l’univers concentrationnaire. And in reading George Steiner, I experienced the shock of recognition.

“One of the things I cannot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective,” Steiner writes, “is the time relation.” Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. “Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox—Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be—that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, ‘good time’ and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?”

Until I read this passage I had rather simple-mindedly thought that only I had entertained such speculation, that only I had become obsessed about the time relation—to the extent, for example, that I had attempted more or less successfully to pinpoint my own activities on the first day of April, 1943, the day when Sophie, entering Auschwitz, fell into the “slow hands of the living damnation.” At some point late in 1947—only a relatively brief number of years removed from the beginning of Sophie’s ordeal—I rummaged through my memory in an attempt to locate myself in time on the same day that Sophie walked through the gates of hell. The first day of April, 1943—April Fools’ Day—had a mnemonic urgency for me, and after going through some of my father’s letters to me, which handily corroborated my movements, I was able to come up with the absurd fact that on that afternoon, as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas. I was eating myself nearly sick with bananas, the reason being that in the coming hour I was to take a physical examination for entrance into the Marine Corps. At the age of seventeen, already over six feet tall but weighing only 122 pounds, I knew I had to put on three more pounds to satisfy the minimum weight requirement. Stomach grossly bulging like that of a starveling, naked on a set of scales in front of a brawny old recruiting sergeant who stared at my emaciated adolescent beanpole of a frame and uttered a sneering “Jesus Christ” (there was also a snotty joke about April Fools’ Day), I squeaked past by scant ounces.

On that day I had not heard of Auschwitz, nor of any concentration camp, nor of the mass destruction of the European Jews, nor even much about the Nazis. For me the enemy in that global war was the Japanese, and my ignorance of the anguish hovering like a noxious gray smog over places with names like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen was complete. But wasn