Sophie's Choice - William Styron [136]
Marine Detachment, U.S. Naval V-12 Training Unit
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
October 3, 1943
...anyway, Pop, tomorrow Duke is playing Tennessee and the atmosphere is pure (but restrained) hysteria. Obviously we have great hopes and by the time you get this it will be pretty much decided whether Duke will have a chance at the Conference championship and maybe a bowl bid, since if we knock over Tennessee—which is our strongest opponent—it will probably be clear sailing until the end of the season. Of course Georgia looks strong and a lot of people are laying money that they will come out #1 in the country. It’s all a horse race, as they say, isn’t it? Incidentally, have you heard the rumor that the Rose Bowl may be held again at Duke (whether we take the #1 spot or not) because the gov’t, has a ban on big outdoor gatherings in Calif. Afraid of Jap sabotage apparently. Those little monkeys really loused up the works for a lot of Americans didn’t they? Anyway it would be great fun if they had the Rose Bowl here, maybe you could come down from Va. for the big show whether Duke plays or not. I’m sure I must have told you that, due purely to an alphabetical coincidence (everything is alphabetical in the service), Pete Strohmyer and Chuckie Stutz are my roommates here. All of us learning to be hotshot Marine officers. Stutz was second team All-American from Auburn last year and I need not tell you who Strohmyer is, I’m sure. This room crawls with reporters and photographers like mice. [Early aptitude for metaphor] Maybe you saw Strohmyer’s picture in Time magazine last week along with the article in which he was called easily the most spectacular broken field runner at least since Tom Harman and perhaps Red Grange. He’s a hell of a nice guy too, Pop, and I don’t guess it would be honest of me if I did not admit that I rather like basking in the reflected glory, especially since the young ladies who flock around Strohmyer are so numerous (and delightful) that there are always some left over for your son, Stingo, the male wallflower. After the Davidson game last week-end we all had quite a ball...
The 2,100 Greek Jews who were being gassed and cremated at the time that these lines were composed did not, Sophie pointed out to me, make up anything like a record for a continuous act of mass extermination at Auschwitz; the slaughter of the Hungarian Jews in the following year—personally supervised by Höss, who returned to the camp after a number of months’ absence to coordinate the liquidation, so eagerly awaited by Eichmann, in an operation christened Aktion Höss—involved multiple killings of much greater magnitude. But this mass murder was, for its moment in the evolution of Auschwitz-Birkenau, huge, one of the largest yet staged, complicated by logistical problems and considerations of space and disposal not until then encountered at such a complex level. Routinely, it was Höss’s practice to report by military air express letters marked “streng geheim”—“top secret”—to the ReichsFührer SS, Heinrich Himmler, on the general nature, physical condition and statistical composition of the “selections”—an almost daily occurrence (some days there were several) whereby those Jews arriving by train were separated into two categories: the fit, those healthy enough to labor for a while; and the unfit, who were immediately doomed. Because of extreme youth, extreme age, infirmity, the ravages of the journey or the aftereffects of previous sickness, relatively few of the Jews arriving at Auschwitz from any country were deemed able-bodied enough to work; at one point Höss reported to Eichmann that the average of those selected to survive for a time was between twenty-five and thirty percent. But for some reason the Greek Jews fared worse than the Jews from any other national group. Those Jews debarking from trains originating in Athens were found by the SS doctors in charge of the selections to be so debilitated that only a little more than one out of ten were sent to the right-hand side of the station ramp—the side assigned to those who were to live and work.