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By Root 22410 0

’s complaint (could a single such annoyance, she wondered idly, have triggered in itself the Commandant’s cataclysmic migraine?) meant another critical pause in the construction of the new crematorium at Birkenau. The work stoppage, or slowdown—that is, Höss’s apparent inability to orchestrate to his own satisfaction all the elements of supply and design and labor concerning this new oven-and-gas-chamber complex, the completion of which was two months overdue—remained the chief thorn in his side, and now was the obvious cause for all the nervousness and anxiety she had observed in him these past days. And if it was the reason, as she suspected, for his headache, could it be possible too that his failure to get the crematorium built on schedule was in some way linked to his sudden transfer back to Germany? She was typing the last line of the letter and at the same time puzzling over these questions when his voice broke in abruptly, startling her. And when she turned her eyes in his direction she realized with a curious mixture of hope and apprehension that he must have been eying her for many minutes from the cot where he lay. He beckoned to her and she rose and went to his side, but since he made no motion for her to sit down, she remained standing.

“It’s better,” he said in a subdued voice. “That ergotamine is a miracle. It not only reduces the pain but it subdues the nausea.”

“I’m glad, mein Kommandant,” Sophie replied. She felt her knees trembling and for some reason dared not look down into his face. Instead, she fixed her eyes on the most obvious and immediate object within view: the heroic Führer in scintillant steel armor, his gaze confident and serene beneath his falling forelock as he looked toward Valhalla and a thousand years’ questionless futurity. He seemed irreproachably benign. Suddenly remembering the figs she had thrown up hours before on the stairs, Sophie felt a stab of hunger in her stomach, and the weakness and trembling in her legs increased. For long moments Höss did not speak. She could not look at him. Was he now, in his silence, measuring her, appraising her? We’ll have a barrel of funfunfun, the voices clamorously chorused from below, the dreadful ersatz polka stuck now in its groove, repeating over and over a faint fat chord from an accordion.

“How did you come here?” Höss said finally.

She blurted the words out. “It was because of a łapanka, or as we German-speaking people say, ein Zusammentreiben—a roundup in Warsaw. It was early spring. I was on a railroad car in Warsaw when the Gestapo staged a roundup. They found me with some illegal meat, part of a ham—”

“No, no,” he interrupted, “not how you came to the camp. But how you got out of the women’s barracks. I mean, how you were placed in the stenographic pool. So many of the typists are civilians. Polish civilians. Not many prisoners are so fortunate as to find a stenographic billet. You may sit down.”

“Yes, I was most fortunate,” she said, seating herself. She sensed the relaxation in her own voice and she gazed at him. She noticed that he was still sweating desperately. Supine now, eyes half closed, he lay rigid and wet in a pool of sunlight. There was something oddly helpless-looking about the Commandant awash in ooze. His khaki shirt was drenched in sweat, a multitude of tiny sweat blisters adorned his face. But in truth he seemed no longer to be suffering such pain, although the initial torment had saturated him everywhere—even the damp blond spirals of belly-hair curling upward through a space between his shirt buttons—his neck, the blond hairs of his wrists. “I was really most fortunate. I think it must have been a stroke of fate.”

After a silence Höss said, “How do you mean, a stroke of fate?”

She decided instantly to risk it, to exploit the opening he had given her no matter how absurdly insinuating and reckless the words might sound. After these months and the momentary advantage she had been given, it would be more self-defeating to continue to play the torpid tongue-tied slave than to appear presumptuous, even if it involved the serious additional hazard of being thought actually insolent. So: Out with it, she thought. She said it then, although she tried to avoid any intensity, keeping the plaintive edge in her voice of one who has been unjustly abused.