Sophie's Choice - William Styron [236]
But the place was too limited for the hordes of the doomed which had begun to pour into the camp. Although several smallish temporary bunkers for extermination were thrown up in 1942, there was a crisis that arose in terms of facilities for killing and disposal which could only be remedied by the completion of the immense new crematoriums at Birkenau. The Germans—or rather, their Jewish and Gentile slaves—had been hard at work that winter. The first of these four gigantic incinerators was placed in operation a week after Sophie’s capture by the Gestapo, the second only eight days later—mere hours before her arrival at Auschwitz on the first of April. She left Warsaw on the thirtieth of March. On that day she and Jan and Eva and the nearly 250 members of the Resistance, including Wanda, were herded aboard a train containing 1,800 Jews sent down finally from Malkinia, a transit camp northeast of Warsaw where the remainder of the Jewish population from the Bialystok district had been held. Besides the Jews and the Home Army fighters on the train, there was a contingent of Poles—Warsaw citizens of both sexes, numbering around two hundred—who had been picked up by the Gestapo in one of their spasmodic but ruthless łapankas, the victims in this case being guilty of nothing more than the calamitous luck to be caught on the wrong street at the wrong hour. Or at most, the nature of the guilt of all of these was technical if not illusory.
Among the unfortunates was Stefan Zaorski, who lacked a work permit and had already confided to Sophie his premonition that he would get into serious trouble. Sophie was stunned when she learned that he, too, had been caught. She saw him from a distance at the jail and once caught a glimpse of him on the train, but she was never able to speak to him amid the steam and the press of bodies and the pandemonium. It was one of the most populous transports to reach Auschwitz in some time. The very size of the shipment is perhaps an indication of how eager the Germans were to employ their new facilities at Birkenau. No selections were made among these Jews in order to winnow out those who would be assigned to labor, and while it was not particularly rare for an entire transport to be exterminated, the slaughter should in this case be remarked upon as perhaps representing the Germans’ zeal to exploit and show off to themselves their latest, largest and most refined instrument in the technology of murder: all 1,800 Jews went to their deaths in the inaugural action of Crematorium II. Not a single soul among them escaped immediate gassing.
Although Sophie was extremely open with me about her life in Warsaw and her capture and her stay in the jail, she became curiously reticent about her actual deportation to Auschwitz and her arrival there. I thought at first it had to do with too much horror, and I was right, but I would only later learn the real reason for this silence, this evasiveness—certainly I thought little enough about it at the time. If the foregoing paragraphs with their accumulation of statistics seem, then, to have an abstract or static quality, it is for the reason that I have had to try to re-create, these many years afterward, a larger background to the events in which Sophie and the others were helpless participants, using data which could scarcely have been available to anyone except the professionally concerned in that long-ago year just following the war’s end.
I have brooded a lot since then. I have often wondered what might have dwelt in Professor Biegański’s thoughts had he lived to know that the fate of his daughter but especially his grandchildren was ancillary to, yet inextricably bound up with, the accomplishment of the dream he shared with his National Socialist idols: the liquidation of the Jews. Despite his worship of the Reich, he was a proud Pole. He also must have been exceptionally astute about matters pertaining to power. It is hard to understand how he could have been blind to the fact that the great death-happening wrought upon the European Jews by the Nazis would descend like a smothering fog around his compatriots