Sophie's Choice - William Styron [238]
There now came a curious interruption in the proceedings, and a wait which lasted well through the afternoon. On the two still-occupied cars, besides the leftovers from the Resistance group there remained Sophie and Jan and Eva and the bedraggled mob of Poles who had been captured in the last Warsaw roundup. The delay stretched out through several more hours, until nearly dusk. On the ramp the SS men—the officers, the learned physicians, the guards—seemed to be milling about in an anxious sweat of indecision. Orders from Berlin? Counterorders? One can only speculate upon their nervousness. It doesn’t matter. Finally it became clear that the SS had decided to continue their work, but this time on terms of selection. The officiating noncommissioned officers ordered everybody out, down, made them form lines. Then the doctors took over. The selection process lasted somewhat over an hour. Sophie, Jan and Wanda were sent to the camp. About half of the prisoners were elected to this status. Among those ordered to their deaths in Crematorium II at Birkenau were the music teacher Stefan Zaorski and his pupil, the flutist Eva Maria Zawistowska, who in a little more than a week would have been eight years old.
Chapter Thirteen
I MUST NOW set down a brief vignette, which I have tried to refashion from the outpouring of Sophie’s memories as she talked to me that summer weekend. I suspect that the indulgent reader will not be able to perceive immediately how this little recollecton adumbrates Auschwitz but—as will be seen—it does, and of all of Sophie’s attempts to gain a hold on the confusion of her past, it remains, as a sketch, a fragment, among the most odd and unsettling.
The place is Cracow again. The time: early June in the year 1937. The characters are Sophie and her father and a personage new to this narrative: Dr. Walter Dürrfeld of Leuna, near Leipzig, a director of IG Farbenindustrie, that Interessengemeinschaft, or conglomerate—inconceivably huge even for its day—whose prestige and size are alone enough to set Professor Biegański’s mind abubble with giddy euphoria. Not to mention Dr. Dürrfeld himself, who because of the Professor’s academic specialty—the international legal aspects of industrial patents—is well known to him by reputation as one of the captains of German industry. It would demean the Professor needlessly, would place too much emphasis on the sycophancy he had occasionally displayed in the face of manifestations of German might and potency, to portray him as buffoonishly servile in Dürrfeld’s presence; he possesses, after all, his own illustrious repute as a scholar and an expert in his field. He is also a man of considerable social facility. Nonetheless, Sophie can tell that he is flattered beyond measure to be near the flesh of this titan, and his eagerness to please falls a hair short of the outright embarrassing. There is no professional connection to this meeting; the encounter is purely social, recreative. Dürrfeld with his wife is making a vacation trip through Eastern Europe, and a mutual acquaintance in Düsseldorf—a patent authority, like the Professor—has arranged the get-together through the mail and by a flurry of last-minute telegrams. Because of D