Sophie's Choice - William Styron [235]
In any case, of the 70,000 Jews who stayed in the city, approximately half were living “legally” in the ravaged ghetto (even as Sophie languished in the Gestapo jail many of these were preparing for martyrs’ deaths in the April uprising only a few weeks away). Most of the remaining 35,000—clandestine denizens of the so-called interghetto—dwelt in despair amid the ruins like hunted animals. It was not enough that they were pursued by the Nazis: they endured unending fear of betrayal by hoodlum “Jew-catchers”—Jozef’s prey—and other venal Poles like his lady American Lit. prof; it even happened (and more than once) that their exposure came about through the contortionate artifices of fellow Jews. Ghastly, as Wanda said to Sophie over and over, that Jozef’s own betrayal and murder somehow marked the breakthrough which the Nazis were anticipating. This shattered segment of the Home Army—God, how sad! But after all, she had added, it could hardly have been unexpected. So it was really because of the Jews that they all ended up simmering in the same big kettle. It is a significant fact that the membership included some consecrated Jews. And there is this: although the Home Army, like members of the Resistance elsewhere in Europe, had other concerns besides the succor and safekeeping of the Jews (as indeed there were one or two partisan factions in Poland that remained malignantly anti-Semitic), such help, generally speaking, was still high on their list of priorities; thus it is safe to say that it was at least partly because of their efforts in behalf of some of these incessantly stalked, mortally endangered Jews that dozens upon dozens of members of the underground were rapidly corralled, and that Sophie too—Sophie the stainless, the inaccessible, the uninvolved—was adventitiously ensnared.
During most of the month of March, including the two-week period in which Sophie was lodged in the Gestapo jail, the transports of Jews from the Bialystok district to Auschwitz by way of Warsaw had temporarily ceased. This would probably explain why Sophie and the members of the Resistance—now numbering nearly 250 prisoners—were not themselves sent off immediately to the camp; the Germans, always efficiency-minded, were waiting to engraft their new captives to a more massive shipment of human flesh, and since no Jews were being deported from Warsaw, a delay must have seemed expedient. Another key matter—the interruption in the deportation of the Jews from the northeast—requires comment; this was most likely connected with the building of the Birkenau crematoriums. Since the camp’s inception the original crematorium at Auschwitz together with its gas chamber had served as the chief utility of mass death for the entire camp. Its earliest victims were Russian prisoners of war. It was a Polish structure: the barracks and buildings of Auschwitz made up the homely nucleus of a former cavalry installation when it was appropriated by the Germans. At one time this low rambling edifice with its slanted slate roof had been a storage warehouse for vegetables, and the Germans obviously found its architecture congenial to their purpose; the large underground grotto where turnips and potatoes had been piled high was perfectly suited to the asphyxiation of people en masse, just as the adjoining anterooms were so naturally fit for the installation of cremation ovens as to appear almost custom-made. All that was needed was the addition of a chimney, and the butchers were in business.