William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (222 page)

For a long while they were both silent as they listened to the gusting wind and the throbbing patter of the rain. Washed by the storm, the air poured in cool breaths through the open window, bearing from the park an odor of drenched soil, fresh and clean. The wind diminished and the thunder grumbled off eastward toward the far reaches of Long Island. Soon there was only a fitful dripping sound from the darkness outside, and a gentle breeze, and the distant slick murmur of tires on wet streets. “You need sleep,” he said, “and I will go.” But she later recalled that he did not go, at least then. The last part of
The Marriage of Figaro
was playing on the radio, and together they listened to it without speaking—Sophie stretched out now on her bed, Nathan sitting on the chair beside her—while summer moths swooped and flickered around the dim lightbulb hovering above them. She closed her eyes and drowsed, passing across the threshold of some outlandish but untroubled dream in which the gay redemptive music mingled in soft confusion with a fragrance of grass and rain. Once she felt against her cheek, with movement as light and delicate as a moth’s wing, the touch of his fingertips in a moment’s gentle tracery, but it was only for a second or two—and then she felt nothing. And slept.

But now it again becomes necessary to mention that Sophie was not quite straightforward in her recital of past events, even granted that it was her intention to present a very abbreviated account. I would learn this later, when she confessed to me that she left out many crucial facts in the story she told Nathan. She did not actually lie (as she did about one or two important aspects of her life in the account she gave me concerning the early years in Cracow). Nor did she fabricate something or distort anything important; it is easy to substantiate nearly everything she told Nathan that evening. Her brief observation on the function of Auschwitz-Birkenau—while of course greatly oversimplified—is basically an accurate one, and she neither exaggerated nor underestimated the nature of her various diseases. About all the rest, there is no reason to doubt anything: her mother and her mother’s illness and death, the sequence about the smuggled meat and her own arrest by the Germans followed by her swift deportation to Auschwitz. Why, then, did she
leave out
certain elements and details that anyone might reasonably have expected her to include? Fatigue and depression that night, certainly. Then in the long run there may have been multiple reasons, but the word “guilt,” I discovered that summer, was often dominant in her vocabulary, and it is now clear to me that a hideous sense of guilt always chiefly governed the reassessments she was forced to make of her past. I also came to see that she tended to view her own recent history through a filter of self-loathing—apparently not a rare phenomenon among those who had undergone her particular ordeal. Simone Weil wrote about this kind of suffering: “Affliction stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.” Thus with Sophie it may have been this complex of emotions that caused her to be silent about certain things—this corrosive guilt together with a simple but passionately motivated reticence. Sophie was in general always secretive about her sojourn in the bowels of hell—secretive to the point of obsession—and if that is the way she wanted it, it was, God knows, a position one had to honor.

It should be made plain now, however—although the fact will surely be revealed as this account goes on—that Sophie was able to divulge things to me which she could never in her life tell Nathan. There was an uncomplicated reason for this. She was so chaotically in love with Nathan that it was like dementia, and it is more often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one’s self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain. But at the same time there
were
circumstances and happenings in her past which had to be spoken; I think that quite unbeknownst to herself she was questing for someone to serve in place of those religious confessors she had coldly renounced. I, Stingo, handily filled the bill. In retrospect I can see that imperiling her mind had she kept certain things bottled up; this was especially true as the summer wore on, with its foul weather of brutal emotions, and as the situation between Sophie and Nathan neared collapse. Then, when she was the most vulnerable, her need to give voice to her agony and guilt was so urgent as to be like the beginning of a scream, and I was always ready and waiting to listen with my canine idolatry and inexhaustible ear. Also, I began to see how if the worst parts of the nightmare she had lived through were at once so incomprehensible and absurd as to tax—but not quite defy—the belief of a persuadable soul like myself, they would have found no acceptance whatever with Nathan. He would either not have believed her or thought her mad. He might even have tried to kill her. How, for example, could she ever have summoned the means and the strength to tell Nathan about the episode in which she was involved with Rudolf Franz Höss, SS Obersturmbannführer, Commandant of Auschwitz?

Let us consider Höss for a moment, before returning to Nathan and Sophie and their first days and months together and other happenings. Höss will figure later on in our narrative, a leading villain from Central Casting, but perhaps it might be appropriate to deal with the background of this modern Gothic freak at the present time. After blotting him out of her memory for a long time, Sophie told me, he had flashed across her consciousness only recently, by happenstance a few days before I arrived to take up residence at what we had all come to call the Pink Palace. Again the horror had taken place on a subway train deep beneath the Brooklyn streets. She had been thumbing through a copy of
Look
magazine several weeks old, when the image of Höss burst out from the page, causing her such shock that the strangled noise which came from her throat made the woman sitting next to her give a quick reflexive shudder. Höss was within seconds of a final reckoning. His face set in an expressionless mask, manacled, gaunt and unshaven as he stood in disheveled prison fatigues, the ex-Commandant was clearly at the edge of embarking upon a momentous journey. Entwined around his neck was a rope, depending from a stark metal gallows tree around which a clutch of Polish soldiers was making last preparations for his passage into the beyond. Gazing past the shabby figure, with its already dead and vacant face like that of an actor playing a zombie at the center of a stage, Sophie’s eyes sought, found, then identified the blurred but unspeakably familiar backdrop: the squat begrimed shape of the original crematorium at Auschwitz. She threw the magazine down and got off at the next stop, so disturbed by this obscene encroachment on her memory that she aimlessly paced the sunlit walks around the museum and the botanic gardens for several hours before showing up at the office, where Dr. Blackstock commented on her haggard look: “Some ghost you’ve seen?” After a day or two, however, she was able to banish the picture from her mind.

Unknown then to Sophie or to the world in general, Rudolf Höss, in the months preceding his trial and execution, had been composing a document which in its relatively brief compass tells as much as any single work about a mind swept away in the rapture of totalitarianism. Years were to pass before its translation into English (done excellently by Constantine FitzGibbon). Now bound into a volume called
KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS
—published by the Polish state museum maintained today at the camp—this anatomy of Höss’s psyche is available for examination by all those who might thirst for knowledge about the true nature of evil. Certainly it should be read throughout the world by professors of philosophy, ministers of the Gospel, rabbis, shamans, all historians, writers, politicians and diplomats, liberationists of whatever sex and persuasion, lawyers, judges, penologists, stand-up comedians, film directors, journalists, in short, anyone concerned remotely with affecting the consciousness of his fellow-man—and this would include our own beloved children, those incipient American leaders at the eighth-grade level, who should be required to study it along with
The Catcher in the Rye, The Hobbit
and the Constitution. For within these confessions it will be discovered that we really have no acquaintance with true evil; the evil portrayed in most novels and plays and movies is mediocre if not spurious, a shoddy concoction generally made up of violence, fantasy, neurotic terror and melodrama.

This “imaginary evil”—again to quote Simone Weil—“is romantic and varied, while real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Beyond doubt those words characterize Rudolf Höss and the workings of his mind, an organism so crushingly banal as to be a paradigm of the thesis eloquently stated by Hannah Arendt some years after his hanging. Höss was hardly a sadist, nor was he a violent man or even particularly menacing. He might even be said to have possessed a serviceable decency. Indeed, Jerzy Rawicz, the Polish editor of Höss’s autobiography, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, has the wisdom to rebuke his fellow prisoners for the depositions they had made charging Höss with beatings and torture. “Höss would never stoop to do such things,” Rawicz insists. “He had more important duties to perform.” The Commandant was a homebody, as we shall observe, but one dedicated blindly to duty and a cause; thus he became a mere servomechanism in which a moral vacuum had been so successfully sucked clean of every molecule of real qualm or scruple that his own descriptions of the unutterable crimes he perpetrated daily seem often to float outside and apart from evil, phantasms of cretinous innocence. Yet even this automaton was made of flesh, as you or I; he was brought up a Christian, nearly became a Catholic priest; twinges of conscience, even of remorse, attack him from time to time like the onset of some bizarre disease, and it is this frailty, the human response that stirs within the implacable and obedient robot, that helps make his memoirs so fascinating, so terrifying and educative.

A word about his early life will suffice. Born in 1900, in the same year and under the same sign as Thomas Wolfe (“Oh lost, and by the wind, grieved, Ghost...”), Höss was the son of a retired colonel in the German army. His father wanted him to be a seminarian, but the First World War broke out and when Höss was but a stripling of sixteen he joined the army. He participated in the fighting in the Near East—Turkey and Palestine—and at seventeen became the youngest noncommissioned officer in the German armed forces. After the war he joined a militant nationalist group and in 1922 met the man who would hold him in thrall for the rest of his life—Adolf Hitler. So instantly smitten was Höss by the ideals of National Socialism and by its leader that he became one of the earliest bona-fide card-carrying members of the Nazi party. It is perhaps not odd that he committed his first murder soon, and was convicted and sent to jail. He early learned that murder was his duty in life. The victim was a teacher named Kadow, head of a liberal political faction which the Nazis considered inimical to their interests. After serving six years of a life sentence, Höss drifted into a career of farming in Mecklenburg, got married, and in time sired five children. The years appear to have hung heavy on Höss’s hands there near the stormy Baltic, amid the ripening barley and wheat. His need for a more challenging vocation was fulfilled when in the mid-1930s he met an old friend from the early days in the
Bruderschaft,
Heinrich Himmler, who easily persuaded Höss to abandon the plow and the hoe and to sample those gratifications that the SS might offer. Himmler, whose own biography reveals him to be (whatever else) a superlative judge of assassins, surely divined in Höss a man cut out for the important line of work he had in mind, for the next sixteen years of Höss’s life were spent either directly as Commandant of concentration camps or in upper-echelon jobs connected with their administration. Before Auschwitz his most important post was at Dachau.

Höss eventually developed what might be called a fruitful—or at least symbiotic—relationship with the man who was to remain his immediate superior: Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann nurtured Höss’s gifts, which led to some of the more distinguished advances in
die Todtentechnologie.
In 1941, for example, Eichmann began to find the Jewish problem a source of intolerable vexation not only because of the obvious immensity of the approaching task but because of the sheer practical difficulties involved in the “final solution.” Until that time mass extermination—then conducted by the SS on a relatively modest scale—had been carried out either by shooting, which posed problems having to do with simple bloody mess, unhandiness and inefficiency, or by the introduction of carbon monoxide into an enclosed sealed space, a method which was also inefficient and prohibitively time-consuming. It was Höss who, having observed the effectiveness of a crystallized hydrocyanic compound called Zyklon B when used as a vapor on the rats and the other verminous creatures that infested Auschwitz, suggested this means of liquidation to Eichmann, who, according to Höss, jumped at the idea, though he later denied it. (Why
any
experimenter was so backward is hard to understand. Cyanide gas had been used in certain American execution chambers for over fifteen years.) Turning nine hundred Russian prisoners of war into guinea pigs, Höss found the gas splendidly suited to the quick dispatch of human beings and it was employed thereafter extensively on countless inmates and arrivals of whatever origin, although after early April, 1943, exclusively on Jews and Gypsies. Höss was also an innovator in the use of such techniques as miniature minefields to blow up wayward or escaping prisoners, high-voltage fences to electrocute them and—his capricious pride—a pack of ferocious Alsatians and Doberman pinschers known as the
Hundestaffel
that gave Höss mingled joy and dissatisfaction (in a fussy concern that runs persistently through his memoirs), since the dogs, though hounds of hell in savagery by which they had been trained to chew inmates to shreds, did become torpid and ungovernable at moments and were all too skilled at finding out-of-the-way corners to go to sleep. In a large measure, however, his fertile and inventive ideas were successful enough that it may be said that Höss—in consummate travesty of the way that Koch and Ehrlich and Roentgen and others altered the face of medical science during the great German efflorescence of the last half of the previous century—worked upon the entire concept of mass murder a lasting metamorphosis.