William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (238 page)

At this juncture, then, Auschwitz stands revealed in its dual function: as a depot for mass murder but also a vast enclave dedicated to the practice of slavery. Yet of a new form of slavery—of human beings continuously replenished and expendable. This duality is often overlooked. “Most of the literature on the camps has tended to stress the role of the camps as places of execution,” Richard L. Rubenstein has written in his masterful little book
The Cunning of History.
“Regrettably, few ethical theorists or religious thinkers have paid attention to the highly significant political fact that the camps were in reality a new form of human society.” His book—the work of an American professor of religion—is brief in length but wise and far-seeing in its final dimensions (the subtitle “Mass Death and the American Future” may give an idea of its ambitious—and chilling—attempt both at prophecy and at historical synthesis), and there is no room here to do justice to its full power and complexity, or to the moral and religious resonances it manages to convey; it will surely remain one of the essential handbooks of the Nazi era, a terrifyingly accurate necropsy and an urgent consideration of our own uncertain tomorrows. That new form of human society developed by the Nazis of which Rubenstein writes (extending Arendt’s thesis) is a “society of total domination,” evolving directly from the institution of chattel slavery as it was practiced by the great nations of the West, yet urged on to its despotic apotheosis at Auschwitz through an innovative concept which by contrast casts a benign light on old-fashioned plantation slavery even at its most barbaric: this blood-fresh concept was based on the simple but absolute
expendability
of human life.

It was a theory splintering all previous hesitancies about persecution. Bedeviled as they may have been at times by the dilemma of surplus population, the traditional slaveholders of the Western world were under Christian constraint to avoid anything resembling a “final solution” to solve the problem of excess labor; one could not shoot an expensively unproductive slave; one suffered with Old Sam when he grew superannuated and feeble, and let him die in peace. (This was not entirely the case. There is much evidence, for instance, that in the West Indies in the mid-1700s the European masters for a time felt no compunction about working slaves to death. In general, however, what I have said is applicable.) With National Socialism there came a sweeping away of leftover pieties. The Nazis, as Rubenstein points out, were the first slaveholders to fully abrogate any lingering humane sentiments regarding the essence of life itself; they were the first who “were able to turn human beings into instruments wholly responsive to their will even when told to lie down in their own graves and be shot.”

Those who arrived at Auschwitz were, through discriminating methods of cost accounting and other advanced formulations of input and output, expected to struggle through their existence for only a fixed segment of time: three months. Sophie became aware of this a day or two after her arrival when, herded together with several hundred of her fellow newcomers—Polish women of all ages for the most part, looking like a barnyard full of plucked and blowzy poultry in their castoff rags and their shining scalps freshly shorn of hair—there filtered through her traumatized consciousness the words of an SS functionary, one Hauptsturmführer Fritzch, as he articulated the design of this City of Woe and bade those who had just entered it to abandon all hope. “I remember his exact words,” Sophie told me. “He said, ‘You have come to a concentration camp, not to a sanatorium, and there is only one way out—up the chimney.’ He said, ‘Anyone who don’t like this can try hanging himself on the wires. If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.’ Then he said, ‘Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.’ ”

So then ultimately the Nazis had with consummate craft fashioned a death-in-life more terrible than death, and more calculatingly cruel because few of those doomed in the beginning—on that first day—could know that this bondage of torture, disease and starvation was only an evil simulacrum of life through which they would be voyaging irresistibly deathward. As Rubenstein concludes: “The camps were thus far more of a permanent threat to the human future than they would have been had they functioned solely as an exercise in mass killing. An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...”

Or as Sophie said, “Most of them when they first come there, if they had only known, they would have prayed for the gas.”

The stripping and searching of prisoners that invariably took place as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz seldom allowed inmates to retain any of their former possessions. Due to the chaotic and often slipshod nature of the process, however, there were occasions when a newcomer was lucky enough to hold on to some small personal treasure or article of clothing. Through a combination of her own ingenuity, for instance, and oversight on the part of one of the SS guards, Sophie managed to keep a much worn but still serviceable pair of leather boots which she had owned since her last days in Cracow. Inside one of the boots, built into the lining, was a small slitlike compartment, and on the day she stood waiting for the Commandant at the window of his attic the compartment contained a thumbed, smudged, badly wrinkled but legible pamphlet of some twelve pages and four thousand words upon the title page of which was written this legend:
Die polnische Judenfrage: Hat der Nationalsozialismus die Antwort?
That is,
Poland’s Jewish Problem: Does National Socialism Have the Answer?
It was probably Sophie’s most flagrant evasion (and one incorporating her strangest lie) that earlier she kept harping to me about the extraordinary liberality and tolerance of her upbringing, not only deceiving me, just as I’m sure she deceived Nathan, but concealing from me until the last possible moment a truth which, in order to justify her dealings with the Commandant, she could hide no longer: that the pamphlet had been written by her father, Professor Zbigniew Biega
ń
ski, Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow; Doctor of Law
honoris causa,
Universities of Karlova, Bucharest, Heidelberg and Leipzig.

It was not easy for her to tell all this, she confessed to me, biting her lips and nervously fingering her drawn and ashen cheek; it was especially difficult to reveal one’s lies after having so artfully created a perfect little cameo of paternal rectitude and decency: the fine socialist paterfamilias fretting over the coming terror, a man haloed with goodness in her portrait of a brave libertarian who had risked his life to save Jews in the ferocious Russian pogroms. When she told me this her voice had a touch of the distraught. Her lies! She realized how it undermined her credibility in other matters when she now was forced out of conscience to admit that all that stuff about her father was a simple fabrication. But there it was—a fabrication, a wretched lie, another fantasy served up to provide a frail barrier, a hopeless and crumbly line of defense between those she cared for, like myself, and her smothering guilt. Would I not forgive her, she said, now that I saw both the truth and her necessity for telling the lie? I stroked the back of her hand and, naturally, said of course I would.

For I would not be able to understand this thing with Rudolf Höss, she went on, unless I knew the truth about her father. She had not
completely
lied to me earlier, she insisted, when she described the idyllic years of her childhood. The house she had lived in, there in peaceful Cracow, had been in most ways a place of surpassing warmth and security in those years between the wars. There was a sweet domestic serenity, largely supplied by her mother, a bosomy, expansive, loving woman whose memory Sophie would cherish if only for the passion for music she had passed on to her only daughter. Try to imagine the leisurely paced life of almost any academic family in the Western world during those years of the twenties and the thirties—with ritual teas and evening musicales and summer outings to the rolling drowsy countryside, dinners with students and mid-year trips to Italy, sabbatical years in Berlin and Salzburg—and one will have an idea of the nature of Sophie’s life in those days, and its civilized odor, its equable, even jovial cast. Over this scene, however, lay an abidingly somber cloud, a presence oppressive and stifling which polluted the very wellsprings of her childhood and youth. This was the constant, overwhelming reality of her father, a man who had exercised over his household, and especially Sophie, a tyrannical domination so inflexible yet so cunningly subtle that she was a grown woman, fully come of age, before she realized that she loathed him past all telling.

There are rare moments in life when the intensity of a buried emotion one has felt toward another person—a repressed animus or a wild love—comes heaving to the surface of consciousness with immediate clarity; sometimes it is like a bodily cataclysm, ever unforgettable. Sophie said she would never forget the exact moment when the revelation of the hatred she felt for her father enveloped her in a horrible hot radiance, and she could find no voice, and thought she might faint dead away...

He was a tall robust-looking man, usually garbed in a frock coat and a shirt with wing collar and a broad foulard tie. Old-fashioned dress, but not at all grotesque in Poland for that time. His face was classically Polish: high wide cheekbones, blue eyes, rather full lips, the broad nose tilting up, large elfin ears. He wore sideburns and his light fine hair was swept back evenly, always nicely coiffed. A couple of artificial teeth made of silver slightly marred his good looks, but only when he opened his mouth wide. Among his colleagues he was considered something of a dandy, though not absurdly so; his considerable academic reputation was a safeguard against ridicule. He was respected despite his extreme views—a superconservative in a faculty of right-wingers. Not only a teacher of law but a practicing lawyer from time to time, he had established himself as an authority on the international use of patents—mainly concerning interchange between Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe—and the fees he had gained by this sideline, all in a perfectly ethical manner, had enabled him to live on a somewhat more substantial level than many of his fellow faculty members, in a subdued, modestly proportioned elegance. He was a connoisseur of Moselle wines and Upmann cigars. The Professor was also a practicing Catholic, though hardly a zealot.

What Sophie had told me earlier about his youth and education was apparently true: his early years in Vienna during the time of Franz Josef had fed the fires of his pro-Teutonic passion and inflamed him everlastingly with a vision of Europe saved by pan-Germanism and the spirit of Richard Wagner. It was a love as pure and as abiding as his detestation of Bolshevism. How could poor backward Poland (Sophie often heard him say), losing its identity with clockwork regularity to oppressor after oppressor—especially the barbarous Russians, who were now also in the grip of the Communist antichrist—find salvation and cultural grace except through the intercession of Germany, which had so magnificently fused a historic tradition of mythic radiance and the supertechnology of the twentieth century, creating a prophetic synthesis for lesser nations to turn to? What better nationalism for a diffuse, unstructured nation like Poland than the practical yet aesthetically thrilling nationalism of National Socialism, in which
Die Meistersinger
was no more or no less a civilizing influence than the great new autobahns?

The Professor—besides being neither liberal nor remotely a socialist, as Sophie had first told me—was a charter adherent of a blazingly reactionary political faction known as the National Democratic party, nicknamed ENDEK, one of whose guiding precepts was a militant anti-Semitism. Fanatic in its identification of Jews with international Communism, and vice versa, the movement was especially influential in the universities, where in the early 1920s physical violence against Jewish students became endemic. A member of the moderate wing of the party, Professor Biega
ń
ski, then a rising young faculty star in his thirties, wrote an article in a leading Warsaw political journal deploring these assaults, which caused Sophie a number of years later to wonder—when she happened upon the essay—whether he hadn’t suffered a spasm of radical-utopian humanism. She was of course absurdly mistaken—just as she was mistaken or perhaps devious (and guilty of another lie to me) when she claimed that her father hated the despotic hand of Marshal Pilsudski, that quondam radical, because he brought a virtually totalitarian regime to Poland in the late twenties. Her father did indeed hate the Marshal, she was later to learn, hated him with a fury, but mainly because in the paradoxical way of dictators he had handed down edict after edict protective of the Jews. The Professor was therefore straining at the bit, so to speak, when after the death of Pilsudski in 1935 the laws guaranteeing Jewish rights were relaxed, exposing Polish Jews once more to the terror. Again, at least at first, Professor Biega
ń
ski cautioned moderation. Joining a rejuvenated Fascist group known as the National Radical party, which began to exert commanding sway among the students of the Polish universities, the Professor—now a dominant voice—advised temperance, once more cautioning against the wave of clubbings and muggings which had begun to beset the Jews, not only in the universities but in the streets. However, his disapproval of violence was based less on ideology than on a perverse delicacy; with all this apparent hand-wringing, he clung staunchly to the obsession that had for so long dominated and suffused his being: he began methodically to philosophize about the necessity of eliminating Jews from all walks of life, commencing with Academe.

He wrote furiously about the problem, in Polish and German, sending countless articles to distinguished political and legal journals in Poland and in such centers of culture as Bonn, Mannheim, Munich and Dresden. One of his major themes was “superfluous Jews,” and he scribbled away at length about the matter of “population transfer” and “expatriation.” He was a member of a government mission sent to Madagascar to explore the possibility of Jewish settlements. (He brought Sophie an African mask—she recalled his sunburn.) Though still abstaining from suggestions of violence, he began to waver and his insistence upon the necessity of an immediate
practical
answer to the problem was more and more resolute. A certain franticness entered the Professor’s life. He became a leading activist in the movement toward segregation, and was one of the fathers of the idea of separate “ghetto benches” for Jewish students. He was a piercing analyst of the economic crisis. He gave rabble-rousing speeches in Warsaw. In a depressed economy, he raged, what right had alien ghetto Jews to compete for jobs with honest Poles flooding into the city from everywhere? Toward the end of 1938, in the full flood of his passion, he began working on his magnum opus, the aforementioned pamphlet, in which for the first time he broached the idea—very cautiously, backing and filling with a circumspection bordering on the ambiguous—of “total abolishment.” Ambiguous, tentative—but there. Abolishment.
Not brutality.
Total abolishment. By this time, indeed for several years, Sophie had been transcribing some of her father’s dictation, and humble and subservient as any peonness, had taken on every secretarial chore he demanded. Her submissive labor, which she had executed patiently, like practically all dutiful Polish daughters trapped in a tradition of absolute obeisance to Daddyhood, culminated one week in the winter of 1938 with the typing and editing of the manuscript of
Poland’s Jewish Problem: Does National Socialism Have the Answer?
At that moment she understood or, I should say, began to understand just what it was her father was up to.