William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (237 page)

Now he was scanning the letter to the priest, although by his own admission he knew not a word of Polish. Sophie, watching him, heard him say “...
diese unerträgliche Sprache”
in a bemused tone, twisting his lips to fit some of the obdurately unpronounceable words of this “impossible language,” quickly give up the effort and then rise to his feet. “Good,” he said, “I hope we have soothed this unhappy little padre.” He strode with the letter to the attic door, threw it open, and vanishing momentarily from Sophie’s sight, called down to the landing where his aide, Untersturmführer Scheffler, waited for such peremptorily shouted commands. Sophie listened to Höss’s voice, muffled by the walls, directing Scheffler to have the letter delivered immediately by messenger to the church. Faintly from below Scheffler’s voice called back, deferential in tone but indistinct. “I’ll come up right away, sir!” he seemed to say. “No, I’ll come down and show you!” she heard Höss call out impatiently.

There was some misunderstanding which the Commandant now sought to rectify, grumbling to himself as he clumped the few steps downstairs in hard-heeled leather riding boots to confer with the aide, a husky poker-faced young lieutenant from Ulm whom he was just breaking in. Their voices continued from below in opaque colloquy, singsong, a dim babble. Then through or over their words, just for a fleeting instant, Sophie heard something which—insignificant in itself and very brief—later remained one of the most imperishable sensations she retained out of countless fragmented recollections of that place and time. As soon as she heard the music she knew it was coming from the massive electric phonograph that dominated the cluttered, overupholstered, damask-hued parlor four stories below. The machine had played almost constantly during the daytime hours of the week and a half she had spent under Höss’s roof—at least whenever she had been within earshot of the loudspeaker, whether in the cramped and dank corner of the cellar where she slept on a straw pallet, or up here now, in the attic, when the intermittently opened door allowed the sound to be wafted to the eaves past her unlistening ears.

Sophie scarcely ever heard the music, indeed blanked most of it out, for it was never anything but noisy German backyard schmaltz, Tyrolean joke songs, yodelers, choirs of glockenspiels and accordions, all infused with recurring strains of treacly
Trauer
and lachrymal outpourings from Berlin cafés and music halls, notably such cries from the heart as “Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen,” warbled by Hitler’s favorite songbird Zarah Leander and played over and over again with merciless and monotonous obsession by the chatelaine of the manor—Höss’s garishly bejeweled and strident wife, Hedwig. Sophie had coveted the phonograph until she could feel it like a wound in her breast, stealing glances at it as she passed to and fro through the living room on those trips it was necessary to make from her basement lodging to the attic. The room was a replica of an illustration she had once seen in a Polish edition of
The Old Curiosity Shop:
festering with French, Italian, Russian and Polish antiques, of all periods and styles, it looked the work of some crazed interior decorator who had dumped out onto the shining parquet floors the sofas, chairs, tables, escritoires, love seats, chaises longues and stuffed ottomans of an embryonic palazzo—shoving into a single large, lofty but finite space the furniture suitable for a dozen rooms. Even in this hideous hodgepodge, though, the phonograph somehow stood out, a fake antique itself in opulent cherrywood. Sophie had never seen a record player that was electrically amplified—those of her experience had been tinny apparatuses, hand-wound—and it filled her with despair that such a marvelous machine should give voice only to
Dreck.
A close passing look had revealed it to be a Stromberg Carlson, which she assumed to be Swedish until Bronek—a simple-seeming but canny fellow Polish prisoner who worked as a handyman in the Commandant’s house and was a chief purveyor of gossip and information—told her it was an American machine, captured from some rich man’s joint or foreign embassy to the west and transported here to take its place amid the mountainous tonnage of booty assembled with frenzied mania for pelf from all the plundered habitations of Europe. Surrounding the machine were masses of thick record albums in glassed-in cases; on the top of the phonograph itself was perched a fat Bavarian Kewpie doll in pink celluloid, cheeks aburst, blowing on a gold-plated saxophone. Euterpe, Sophie had thought, music’s sweet Muse, passing quickly on...

Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes,

und seiner Hände Werk

zeigt an das Firmament!

The Elysian chorus, thrusting itself up through the muttering chatter of Höss and his aide below, stabbed her with such astonished exaltation that she rose spontaneously from her seat at the typewriter, as if in homage, faintly trembling. What on earth had happened? What fool or freak had put that record on the machine? Or might it have been only Hedwig Höss herself, gone suddenly mad? Sophie didn’t know, but it didn’t matter (it later occurred to her that it must have been the Hösses’ second daughter, Emmi, a blond eleven-year-old with a sullen freckled perfectly circular face, in idle postprandial boredom fiddling with tunes both novel and outlandish); it didn’t matter. The ecstatic hosanna moved across her skin like divine hands, touching her with ecstatic ice; chill after chill coursed through her flesh; for long seconds the fog and night of her existence, through which she had stumbled like a sleepwalker, evaporated as if melted by the burning sun. She stepped to the window. In the angled windowpane she saw the reflection of her pale face beneath the checkered scarf, below this the blue and white stripes of her coarse prisoner’s smock; blinking, weeping, gazing straight through her own diaphanous image, she glimpsed the magical white horse again, grazing now, the meadow, the sheep beyond, and further still, as if at the very edge of the world, the rim of the drab gray autumnal woods, transmuted by the music’s incandescence into a towering frieze of withering but majestic foliage, implausibly beautiful, aglow with some immanent grace. “Our Father... ” she began in German. Half drowned, borne utterly away by the anthem, she closed her eyes while the archangelic trio chanted its mysterious praise to the whirling earth:

Dem kommenden Tage sagt es der Tag.

Die Nacht, die verschwand

der folgenden Nacht...

“It stopped then, the music,” Sophie said to me. “No, not just then but right afterwards. It stopped in the middle of that last passage—do you know it maybe?—that in English have, I think, the words that go ‘In all the lands resounds the Word—’ It just stopped suddenly, this music, and I felt a complete emptiness. I never finished the paternoster, the prayer I begun. I don’t know any more, I think maybe it was that moment that I begun to lose my faith. But I don’t know any more, about
when
God leave me. Or I left Him. Anyway, I felt this emptiness. It was like finding something precious in a dream where it is all so real—something or
someone,
I mean, unbelievably precious—only to wake up and realize the precious person is gone. Forever! I have done that so many times in my life, waking up with that loss! And when this music stopped, it was like that, and suddenly I knew—I had this premonition—that I would never hear such music again. The door was still open and I could hear Höss and Scheffler talking downstairs. And then far down below Emmi—I’m sure it must have been Emmi—put guess what on the phonograph. ‘The Beer Barrel Polka.’ I felt such rage then. That fat little bitch with this face like a white moon, made of oleo-mar-ga-rine. I could have killed her. She was playing ‘The Beer Barrel Polka,’ loud; they must have been able to hear it in the garden, in the barracks, in the town. In Warsaw. The singing was in English, that stupid piece.

“But I knew I had to control myself, forget about music, think of other things. Also, you see, I knew that I must use every bit of
intelligence
that I had, every bit of
wit,
I think you would say, in order to get what I wanted out of Höss. I knew he hated Poles, but that was no matter. I have made this—
comment dit-on, fêlure
... crack!—crack in the mask already and now I must move further on because time was of
l’essence.
Bronek, that was this handyman, had whispered to us women in the cellar that he heard this rumor that Höss was going soon to be transferred to Berlin. I must move quickly if I was to—yes, I will say it,
seduce
Höss, even if it make me sick sometime when I think of it, hoping that somehow I could seduce him with my mind rather than my body. Hoping I would not have to use my body if I could prove to him these other things. Okay, Stingo, prove to him that Zofia Maria Biega
ń
ska Zawistowska okay might be
eine schmutzige Polin,
you know,
tierisch,
animal, just a slave,
Dreckpolack,
et cetera, but still was as strong and fine a National Socialist as Höss was, and I should be made free from this cruel, unfair imprisonment.
Voilá!

“Finally, well then, Höss come back up the stairs. I could hear his boots on the steps and ‘The Beer Barrel Polka.’ I make this decision, that in some way I might appear attractive to him, standing there by the window. Sexy, you know. Excuse me, Stingo, but you know what I mean—looking as if I wanted to fuck. Looking as if I wanted to be asked to fuck. But oh, my eyes! Jesus Christ, my eyes! They were all pink, I knew, from weeping, and I was still weeping, and I was afraid this might upset my plan. But I was able to stop and I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. And I looked again to see the beauty of those woods when I heard this moment of Haydn. But the wind have made this sudden change, you know, and I could see the smoke from the ovens at Birkenau coming down over the fields and the woods. Then Höss came in.”

Lucky Sophie. It is remarkable to contemplate, but at this point in her career at the camp, six months after her arrival, she was not only in fairly good health but had been spared most of the worst pangs of starvation. This hardly meant any abundance, however. Whenever she reminisced about that period (and she rarely dwelt on it in any great detail, so I never got from her the sense of the immediacy of living in hell which one obtains from written accounts; yet she obviously had seen hell, felt it, breathed it), she implied she was decently enough fed, but only by comparison with the stark famine which the rank-and-file prisoners endured daily, and thus she fed upon short rations. During the ten days or so she spent in Höss’s basement, for instance, she ate kitchen leftovers and the leavings from the Höss table, mostly vegetable scraps and meat gristle—for which she remained grateful. She was managing to survive slightly above the subsistence level, but only because she was lucky. In all slave worlds there soon develops a hierarchic design, a pecking order, patterns of influence and privilege; because of her great good fortune Sophie found herself among a small elite.

This elite, composed of perhaps only several hundred out of the many thousands of prisoners who populated Auschwitz at any single moment, were those who through maneuvering or, again, by luck had begun to fulfill some function that the SS deemed indispensable or at least of vital importance. (“Indispensable” as strictly applied to captive human beings at Auschwitz would be a
non sequitur.
) Such duties implied temporary or even prolonged survival, certainly when compared with roles played by the great multitude of the camp inmates who because of their very superfluity and replaceability had only one purpose: to labor to the point of exhaustion, then to die. Like any group of skilled artisans, the elite of which Sophie was a member (they included such craftsmen as highly accomplished tailors from France and Belgium who were employed in making fine clothes out of the fancy goods snatched on the station ramp from condemned Jews, expert cobblers and workers in high-quality leather, gardeners with green thumbs, technicians and engineers possessing certain specialist capabilities, and a handful like Sophie with combined linguistic and secretarial gifts) were spared extermination for the raw pragmatic reason that their talents came as close to being invaluable as that word had any such meaning in the camp. Thus, until some savage quirk of fate shattered them too—a likely and daily threat—these of the elite at least did not suffer the swift plunge into disintegration which was the portion of nearly all the rest.

It may help clarify what went on between Sophie and Rudolf Höss if we try for a moment to examine the nature and function of Auschwitz in general, but especially during the six months after her arrival in early April of that year 1943. I emphasize the time because it is important. Much can be explained in terms of the metamorphosis which the camp underwent as the result of an order (unquestionably originating with the Führer) which went down to Höss from Himmler sometime during the first week of April. The order was one of the most monumental and sweeping to be promulgated since the “final solution” itself was hatched in the fecund brains of the Nazi thaumaturges: that is, the recently built gas chambers and crematoriums of Birkenau would be employed
solely
for the extermination of Jews. This edict superseded previous rules of procedure which allowed for the gassing of non-Jews (mostly Poles, Russians and other Slavs) on the same “selective” basis of health and age as the Jews. There was a technological and a logistical necessity embedded in the new directive, the impetus of which derived not from any sudden preservative concern on the part of the Germans for the Slavs and other “Aryan” non-Jewish deportees, but from an overriding obsession—springing from Hitler and amounting now to mania in the minds of Himmler, Eichmann and their cousin overlords in the SS chain of command—to finally get on with the Jewish slaughter until every Jew in Europe had perished. The new order was in effect a clearing of the decks for action: the Birkenau facilities, gargantuan as they were, had certain ultimate limitations both spatial and thermal; with their absolute and uncontested priority in the lists of
der Massenmord
now, the Jews were tendered a sudden unaccustomed exclusivity. With few exceptions (Gypsies for one), Birkenau was theirs alone. Just the prospect of their sheer numbers “made my teeth ache at night,” wrote Höss, who meant that he ground his teeth, and who, despite the vacuum of his imagination, could turn a crudely descriptive phrase or two.