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By Root 22793 0

’t this true for most Americans, indeed most human beings who dwelt beyond the perimeter of the Nazi horror? “This notion of different orders of time simultaneous but in no effective analogy or communication,” Steiner continues, “may be necessary to the rest of us, who were not there, who lived as if on another planet.” Quite so—especially when (and the fact is often forgotten) for millions of Americans the embodiment of evil during that time was not the Nazis, despised and feared as they were, but the legions of Japanese soldiers who swarmed the jungles of the Pacific like astigmatic and rabid little apes and whose threat to the American mainland seemed far more dangerous, not to say more repulsive, given their yellowness and their filthy habits. But even if such narrowly focused animosity against an Oriental foe had not been real, most people could scarcely have known about the Nazi death camps, and this makes Steiner’s ruminations all the more instructive. The nexus between these “different orders of time” is, of course—for those of us who were not there—someone who was there, and this brings me back to Sophie. To Sophie and, in particular, to Sophie’s relation with SS Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Franz Höss.

I have spoken several times about Sophie’s reticence concerning Auschwitz, her firm and generally unyielding silence about that fetid sinkhole of her past. Since she herself (as she once admitted to me) had so successfully anesthetized her mind against recurring images of her encampment in the abyss, it is small wonder that neither Nathan nor I ever gained much knowledge of what happened to her on a day-to-day basis (especially during the last months) aside from the quite obvious fact that she had come close to death from malnutrition and more than one contagion. Thus the jaded reader surfeited with our century’s perdurable feast of atrocities will be spared here a detailed chronicle of the killings, gassings, beatings, tortures, criminal medical experiments, slow deprivations, excremental outrages, screaming madnesses and other entries into the historical account which have already been made by Tadeusz Borowski, Jean-Francois Steiner, Olga Lengyel, Eugen Kogon, André Schwarz-Bart, Elie Wiesel and Bruno Bettelheim, to name but a few of the most eloquent who have tried to limn the totally infernal in their heart’s blood. My vision of Sophie’s stay at Auschwitz is necessarily particularized, and perhaps a little distorted, though honestly so. Even if she had decided to reveal either to Nathan or me the gruesome minutiae of her twenty months at Auschwitz, I might be constrained to draw down the veil, for, as George Steiner remarks, it is not clear “that those who were not themselves fully involved should touch upon these agonies unscathed.” I have been haunted, I must confess, by an element of presumption in the sense of being an intruder upon the terrain of an experience so bestial, so inexplicable, so undetachably and rightfully the possession alone of those who suffered and died, or survived it. A survivor, Elie Wiesel, has written: “Novelists made free use of [the Holocaust] in their work... In so doing they cheapened [it], drained it of its substance. The Holocaust was now a hot topic, fashionable, guaranteed to gain attention and to achieve instant success...” I do not know how ultimately valid any of this is, but I am aware of the risk.

Yet I cannot accept Steiner’s suggestion that silence is the answer, that it is best “not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate to the unspeakable.” Nor do I agree with the idea that “in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent.” I find a touch of piety in this, especially inasmuch as Steiner has not remained silent. And surely, almost cosmic in its incomprehensibility as it may appear, the embodiment of evil which Auschwitz has become remains impenetrable only so long as we shrink from trying to penetrate it, however inadequately; and Steiner himself adds immediately that the next best is “to try and understand.” I have thought that it might be possible to make a stab at understanding Auschwitz by trying to understand Sophie, who to say the least was a cluster of contradictions. Although she was not Jewish, she had suffered as much as any Jew who had survived the same afflictions, and