Sophie's Choice - William Styron [305]
Other of Sophie’s recollections point to the doctor as a religious person. Or at least as a failed believer seeking redemption, groping for renewed faith. For example, as a hint—his drunkenness. All that we can deduce from the record indicates that in the pursuit of their jobs SS officers, including doctors, were almost monkish in their decorum, sobriety and devotion to the rules. While the demands of butchery at its most primitive level—mainly in the neighborhood of the crematoriums—caused a great deal of alcohol to be consumed, this bloody work was in general the job of enlisted men, who were allowed (and indeed often needed) to numb themselves to their activities. Besides being spared these particular chores, officers in the SS, like officers everywhere, were expected to maintain a dignified comportment, especially when going about their duties. Why, then, did Sophie have the rare experience of meeting a doctor like Jemand von Niemand in his plastered condition, cross-eyed with booze and so unkempt that he still bore on his lapel grains of greasy rice from a probably long and sodden repast? This must have been for the doctor a very dangerous posture.
I have always assumed that when he encountered Sophie, Dr. Jemand von Niemand was undergoing the crisis of his life: cracking apart like bamboo, disintegrating at the very moment that he was reaching out for spiritual salvation. One can only speculate upon Von Niemand’s later career, but if he was at all like his chief, Rudolf Höss, and the SS in general, he had styled himself Gottgläubiger—which is to say, he had rejected Christianity while still outwardly professing faith in God. But how could one believe in God after practicing one’s science for months in such a loathsome environment? Awaiting the arrival of countless trains from every corner of Europe, then winnowing out the fit and the healthy from the pathetic horde of cripples and the toothless and the blind, the feebleminded and the spastic and the unending droves of helpless aged and helpless little children, he surely knew that the slave enterprise he served (itself a mammoth killing machine regurgitating once-human husks) was a mockery and a denial of God. Besides, he was at bottom a vassal of IG Farben. Surely he could not retain belief while passing time in such a place. He had to replace God with a sense of the omnipotence of business. Since the overwhelming number of those upon whom he stood in judgment were Jews, he must have been relieved when once again Himmler’s order arrived directing that all Jews without exception would be exterminated. There would no longer be any need for his selective eye. This would take him away from the horrible ramps, allowing him to pursue more normal medical activities. (It may be hard to believe, but the vastness and complexity of Auschwitz permitted some benign medical work as well as the unspeakable experiments which—given the assumption that Dr. von Niemand was a man of some sensibility—he would have shunned.)
But quickly Himmler’s orders were countermanded. There was a need for flesh to fill IG Farben’s insatiable maw; it was back to the ramps again for the tormented doctor. Selections would begin again. Soon only Jews would go to the gas chambers. But until final orders came, Jews and “Aryans” alike would undergo the selection process. (There would be occasional capricious exceptions, such as the shipment of Jews from Malkinia.) The renewed horror scraped like steel files at the doctor