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By Root 23061 0

—a people loathed with such ferocity that only the precedence of an even more urgent loathing accorded the Jews was a rampart against their own eventual obliteration. It was that detestation of Poles, of course, which doomed the Professor himself. But his obsession must have blinded him to many things, and it is an irony that—even if the Poles and other Slavs were not next on the list of people to be annihilated—he should have failed to foresee how such sublime hatred could only gather into its destroying core, like metal splinters sucked toward some almighty magnet, countless thousands of victims who did not wear the yellow badge. Sophie told me once—as she went on to reveal certain bits of her life in Cracow which she had previously withheld—that whatever the Professor’s grim authoritarian disdain for her, his adoration of his two little grandchildren had been melting, genuine, complete. It is impossible to speculate on the reaction of this tormented man had he survived to see Jan and Eva fall into that black pit which his imagination had fashioned for the Jews.

I will always remember Sophie’s tattoo. That nasty little excrescence, attached like a ridge of minute bruised tooth-bites to her forearm, was the single detail of her appearance which—on the night when I first saw her at the Pink Palace—instantly conveyed to my mind the mistaken idea that she was a Jew. In the vague and uninformed mythology of the day, Jewish survivors and this pathetic marking were indissolubly tied together. But if I had known then of the metamorphosis which the camp underwent during the terrible fortnight I have dwelt upon, I would have understood that the tattoo had an important and direct connection with Sophie’s being branded like a Jew though she herself was not Jewish. It was this... She and her fellow Gentiles acquired a classification which paradoxically removed them from the immediately death-bound. A revealing bureaucratic matter is involved here. The tattooing of “Aryan” prisoners was introduced only in the latter part of March, and Sophie must have been among the first of the non-Jewish arrivals to receive the marking. If initially it would seem puzzling, the redefined policy is easy to explain: it had to do with the cranking up of the dynamo of death. With the “final solution” now accomplished and Jews consigned in satisfying multitudes to the new gas chambers, there would be no longer any need for their numeration. It was Himmler’s order that all Jews would die without exception. Taking their place in the camp, now Judenrein, would be the Aryans, tattooed for identification—slaves dying by stagnant slow degrees their other kind of death. Thus Sophie’s tattoo. (Or such were the outlines of the original plan. But as so often happened, the plan changed yet again; the orders were countermanded. There was a conflict between the lust for murder and the need for work. Upon the arrival at the camp of the German Jews late that winter, it was decreed that all able-bodied prisoners—men and women—would be assigned to slave labor. So in the society of the walking dead of which Sophie became a part, Jews and non-Jews were mingled.)

And then there was April Fools’ Day. Fishy jokes. Poisson d’avril. In Polish, like the Latin: Prima Aprilis. Each time that day has rolled around, ticking off the years during these recent domestic decades, it has been my association of the date with Sophie which has given me a twinge of real anguish when I have been exposed to those small, sweet, silly tricks perpetrated by my children (“April fool, Daddy!”); the gentle paterfamilias, usually so forbearing, has turned cross as a skunk. I hate April Fools’ Day as I hate the Judeo-Christian God. That is the day which marked the end of Sophie’s journey, and for me somehow the bad joke has been less attached to that rather pedestrian concidence than to the fact that only four days later an order to Rudolf Höss from Berlin directed that no more captives who were not Jewish would be sent to the gas.

For a long time Sophie refused to supply me with any details about her arrival, or perhaps her equilibrium simply could not let her do so