Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  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 Hös
s’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.

  For the sake of its historical and sociological significance it has to be pointed out that of all of Höss’s codefendants at the postwar trials in Poland and Germany—those satraps and second-string butchers who made up the SS ranks at Auschwitz and other camps—only a handful had a military background. However, this should not be particularly surprising. Military men are capable of abominable crimes; witness, in our recent time alone, Chile, My Lai, Greece. But it is a “liberal” fallacy that equates the military mind with real evil and makes it the exclusive province of lieutenants or generals; the secondary evil of which the military is frequently capable is aggressive, romantic, melodramatic, thrilling, orgasmic. Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians. Thus we find that the rolls of the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau contained almost no professional soldiers but were instead composed of a cross section of German society. They included waiters, bakers, carpenters, restaurant owners, physicians, a bookkeeper, a post office clerk, a waitress, a bank clerk, a nurse, a locksmith, a fireman, a customs officer, a legal advisor, a manufacturer of musical instruments, a specialist in machine construction, a laboratory assistant, the owner of a trucking firm... the list goes on and on with these commonplace and familiar citizens’ pursuits. There needs only to be added the observation that history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.

  No real revelation in all this: in modern times most of the mischief ascribed to the military has been wrought with the advice and consent of civil authority. As for Höss, he seems to be something of an anomaly, inasmuch as his pre-Auschwitz career straddled agriculture and the military. The evidence shows that he had been exceptionally dedicated, and it is precisely that rigorous and unbending attitude of spirit—the concept of duty and obedience above all which dwells unshakably in the mind of every good soldier—that gives his memoirs a desolating convincingness. Reading the sickening chronicle, one becomes persuaded that Höss is sincere when he expresses his misgivings, even his secret revulsion, at this or that gassing or cremation or “selection,” and that dark doubts attend the acts he is required to commit. Lurking behind Höss as he writes, one feels, is the spectral presence of the seventeen-year-old boy, the brilliantly promising young Unterfeldwebel of the army of another era, when distinct notions of honor and pride and rectitude were woven into the fabric of the Prussian code, and that the boy is stricken dumb at the unmentionable depravity in which the grown man is mired. But that is of another time and place, another Reich, and the boy is banished into the farthest shadows, the horror receding and fading with him as the doomed ex-Obersturmbannführer scribbles indefatigably away, justifying his bestial deeds in the name of insensate authority, call of duty, blind obedience.

  One is somehow convinced by the equanimity of this statement: “I must emphasize that I have never personally hated the Jews. It is true that I looked upon them as the enemies of our people. But just because of this I saw no difference between them and the other prisoners, and I treated them all in the same way. I never drew any distinctions. In any event, the emotion of hatred is foreign to my nature.” In the world of the crematoriums hatred is a reckless and incontinent passion, incompatible with the humdrum nature of the quotidian task. Especially if a man has allowed himself to become depleted of all such distracting emotions, the matter of questioning or mistrusting an order becomes academic; he immediately obeys: “When in the summer of 1941 the Reichsführer SS [Himmler] himself gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless, the reasons behind the extermination program seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”

  And so the carnage begins, beneath Höss’s narrow, watchful and impassive eye: “I had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings. I might not even look away when afraid lest my natural emotions get the upper hand. I had to watch coldly, while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas chambers...

  “On one occasion two small children were so absorbed in some game that they refused to let their mother tear them away from it. Even the Jews of the Special Detachment were reluctant to pick the children up. The imploring look in the eyes of the mother, who certainly knew what was happening, is something I shall never forget. The people were already in the gas chamber and becoming restive, and I had to act. Everyone was looking at me. I nodded to the junior noncommissioned officer on duty and he picked up the screaming, struggling children in his arms and carried them into the gas chamber, accompanied by their mother, who was weeping in the most heartrending fashion. My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene: yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion. [Arendt writes: “The problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used... was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning those instincts around, as it were, in
directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”] I had to see everything. I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench, while the mass graves were being opened and the bodies dragged out and burned.

  “I had to look through the peephole of the gas chambers and watch the process of death itself, because the doctors wanted me to see it... The Reichsführer SS sent various high-ranking party leaders and SS officers to Auschwitz so that they might see for themselves the process of extermination of the Jews... I was repeatedly asked by them how I and my men could go on watching these operations and how we were able to stand it. My invariable answer was that the iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler’s orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions.”

  But granite would be tormented by such scenes. A convulsive despondency, megrims, anxiety, freezing doubt, inward shudders, Weltschmerz that passes understanding—all overwhelm Höss as the process of murder achieves its runaway momentum. He is plunged into realms that transcend reason, belief, sanity, Satan. Yet his tone is rueful, elegiac: “I was no longer happy in Auschwitz once the mass exterminations had begun... If I was deeply affected by some incident, I found it impossible to go back to my house and my family. I would mount my horse and ride until I had chased the terrible picture away. Often at night I would walk through the stables and seek relief among my beloved animals. When I saw my children happily playing or observed my wife’s delight over our youngest, the thought would often come to me: How long will our happiness last? My wife could never understand these gloomy moods of mine and ascribed them to some annoyance connected with my work. My family, to be sure, were well provided for in Auschwitz. Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammeled life. My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers. The prisoners never missed an opportunity for doing some little act of kindness to my wife or children, and thus attracting their attention. No former prisoner can ever say that he was in any way or at any time badly treated in our house. My wife’s greatest pleasure would have been to give a present to every prisoner who was in any way connected with our household. The children were perpetually begging me for cigarettes for the prisoners. They were particularly fond of the ones who worked in the garden. My whole family displayed an intense love of agriculture and particularly for animals of all sorts. Every Sunday I had to walk them all across the fields and visit the stables, and we must never overlook the kennels where the dogs were kept. Our two horses and the foal were especially beloved. The children always kept animals in the garden, creatures the prisoners were forever bringing them. Tortoises, martens, cats, lizards: there was always something new and interesting to be seen there. In the summer they splashed in the paddling pool in the garden, or in the Sola River. But their greatest joy was when Daddy bathed with them. He had, however, so little time for these childish pleasures...”