Sophie's Choice - William Styron [304]
Sophie, with an inanity poised on her tongue and choked with fear, was about to attempt a reply when the doctor said, “You may keep one of your children.”
“Bitte?” said Sophie.
“You may keep one of your children,” he repeated. “The other one will have to go. Which one will you keep?”
“You mean, I have to choose?”
“You’re a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege—a choice.”
Her thought processes dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. “I can’t choose! I can’t choose!” She began to scream. Oh, how she recalled her own screams! Tormented angels never screeched so loudly above hell’s pandemonium. “Ich kann nicht wählen!” she screamed.
The doctor was aware of unwanted attention. “Shut up!” he ordered. “Hurry now and choose. Choose, god-damnit, or I’ll send them both over there. Quick!”
She could not believe any of this. She could not believe that she was now kneeling on the hurtful, abrading concrete, drawing her children toward her so smotheringly tight that she felt that their flesh might be engrafted to hers even through layers of clothes. Her disbelief was total, deranged. It was disbelief reflected in the eyes of the gaunt, waxy-skinned young Rottenführer, the doctor’s aide, to whom she inexplicably found herself looking upward in supplication. He appeared stunned, and he returned her gaze with a wide-eyed baffled expression, as if to say: I can’t understand this either.
“Don’t make me choose,” she heard herself plead in a whisper, “I can’t choose.”
“Send them both over there, then,” the doctor said to the aide, “nach links.”
“Mama!” She heard Eva’s thin but soaring cry at the instant that she thrust the child away from her and rose from the concrete with a clumsy stumbling motion. “Take the baby!” she called out. “Take my little girl!”
At this point the aide—with a careful gentleness that Sophie would try without success to forget—tugged at Eva’s hand and led her away into the waiting legion of the damned. She would forever retain a dim impression that the child had continued to look back, beseeching. But because she was now almost completely blinded by salty, thick, copious tears she was spared whatever expression Eva wore, and she was always grateful for that. For in the bleakest honesty of her heart she knew that she would never have been able to tolerate it, driven nearly mad as she was by her last glimpse of that vanishing small form.
“She still had her mís—and her flute,” Sophie said as she finished talking to me. “All these years I have never been able to bear those words. Or bear to speak them, in any language.”
Since Sophie told me this I have brooded often upon the enigma of Dr. Jemand von Niemand. At the very least he was a maverick, a sport; surely what he made Sophie do could not have been in the SS manual of regulations. The young Rottenführer’s incredulity attested to that. The doctor must have waited a long time to come face to face with Sophie and her children, hoping to perpetrate his ingenious deed. And what, in the private misery of his heart, I think he most intensely lusted to do was to inflict upon Sophie, or someone like her—some tender and perishable Christian—a totally unpardonable sin. It is precisely because he had yearned with such passion to commit this terrible sin that I believe that the doctor was exceptional, perhaps unique, among his fellow SS automata: if he was not a good man or a bad man, he still retained a potential capacity for goodness, as well as evil, and his strivings were essentially religious.
Why do I say religious? For one thing, perhaps because he was so attentive to Sophie’s profession of faith. But I would risk speculating further on this because of a vignette which Sophie added to her story a short while later. She said that during the chaotic days immediately after her arrival she was in such shock—so torn to fragments by what happened on the ramp, and by Jan’s disappearance into the Children’s Camp—that she was barely able to hold on to her reason. But in her barracks one day she could not help paying attention to a conversation between two German Jewish women, new prisoners who had managed to live through the selection. It was plain from their physical description that the doctor of whom they were speaking