Sophie's Choice - William Styron [172]
She had begun to babble a bit; there was a disconnected quality in her speech which warned her to stop, and she did. She prayed that she would not become unstrung. Sweltering beneath her prisoner’s smock with the sweat of mingled hope and trepidation, she was aware that she had made a breach in his consciousness at last, implanted herself as fleshed reality within the scope of his perception. However imperfectly and momentarily, she had made contact; this she could tell by the look of absolute concentrated penetration he gave her when he took the pamphlet from between her fingers. Self-conscious, coquettish, she averted her eyes. And in fatuous recollection a Galician peasants’ saying came back to her: I am crawling into his ear.
“You maintain, then,” he said, “that you are innocent.” There was a distant amiability in his tone that filled her with encouragement.
“Sir, to repeat,” she answered quickly, “I freely admit my guilt of the minor charge which caused me to be sent here—the business about the little piece of meat. I am only asking that this misdemeanor be weighed against my record not only as a Polish sympathizer with National Socialism but as an active and involved campaigner in the sacred war against Jews and Jewry. That pamphlet in your hand, mein Kommandant, can easily be authenticated and will prove my point. I implore you—you who have the power to give clemency and freedom—to reconsider my imprisonment in the light of my past good works, and to return me to my life in Warsaw. It is such a little thing to ask of you, a fine and just man who possesses the power of mercy.”
Lotte had told Sophie that Höss was vulnerable to flattery, but she wondered now if she hadn’t overdone it—especially when she saw his eyes narrowing slightly and heard him say, “I’m curious about your passion. Your rage. Just what is it that causes you to hate the Jews with such... such intensity?”
This story, too, she had squirreled away for such a moment, relying on the theory that while a pragmatic mind like that of Höss might appreciate the venom of her Antisemitismus in the abstract, that same mind’s more primitive side would likely relish a touch of melodrama. “That document there, sir, contains my philosophical reasons—the ones I developed with my father at the university in Cracow. I want to emphasize that we would have expressed our enmity toward Jews even if our family had not suffered a terrible calamity.”
Impassively Höss smoked and waited for her to continue.
“The sexual profligacy of Jews is well known, one of their ugliest traits. My father, before he met an unfortunate accident... my father was a great admirer of Julius Streicher for this reason—he applauded the way in which Herr Streicher has satirized so instructively this degenerate trait in the Jewish character. And our family had a cruel reason to be able to accept the truth of Herr Streicher’s insights.” She stopped and glanced as if in wretched remembrance toward the floor. “I had a younger sister who went to the convent school in Cracow, she was just a grade behind my own. One evening about ten winters ago she was walking near the ghetto and was sexually assaulted by a Jew—it turned out that he was a butcher—who dragged her into an alley and ravished her repeatedly. Physically, my sister survived the attack by this Jew, but mentally she was destroyed. Two years later she committed suicide by drowning, the tragic child. Certainly this terrible deed validated once and for all the profundity of Julius Streicher’s understanding of what atrocities Jews are capable of.”
“Kompletter Unsinn!” Höss spat out the words. “That sounds to me like so much hogwash! Rot!"
Sophie had the sensation of one who, walking along a serene woodland path, feels herself suddenly without underpinnings, plunged into a murky hole. What had she said wrong? Inadvertently she gave a small wail. “I mean—” she began.
“Hogwash!” Höss repeated. “Streicher’s theories are the sheerest rot. I loathe his pornographic garbage. More than any single person he has done a disservice to the Party and the Reich, and to world opinion, with his rantings about Jews and their sexual proclivities. He knows nothing about such matters. Anyone who is acquainted with Jews will attest that, if anything, in the sexual area they are meek and inhibited, unaggressive, even pathologically repressed. What happened to your sister was doubtless an aberration.