Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  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 Biegański, 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 Biegański 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.

  Despite my badgering inquisitiveness as Sophie related these things, it was difficult for me to gain a thorough picture of her childhood and youth, though some things became very clear. Her subservience to her father, for example, was complete, as complete as in any neopaleolithic pigmy culture of the rain forest, demanding utter fealty from the helpless offspring. She never questioned this fealty, she told me; it was part of her bloodstream, so much so that as a little girl growing up she rarely even resented it. It was all bound up in her Polish Catholicism, in which veneration of a father seemed appropriate and necessary anyway. In fact, she admitted that she may have even rather relished her virtually menial submission, the “Yes, Papa’s” and “No, thank you, Papa’s” she was compelled to say daily, the favors and attentions she had to pay, the ritual respect, the enforced obsequiousness that she shared with her mother. She may have been, she admitted, truly masochistic. After all, even in her most miserable recollections, she had to concede that he was not actually cruel to either of them; he had a playful if crude sense of humor and was, despite all his aloofness and majesty, not above bestowing, on rare occasions, small rewards. In order to remain happy, a household tyrant cannot be totally unbenign.

  Perhaps it was such mitigating qualities (permitting Sophie to perfect her French, which he considered a decadent language; allowing her mother to indulge her love for composers other than Wagner, triflers like Faure and Debussy and Scarlatti) that caused Sophie to accept without any conscious resentment his complete domination of her life even after she was married. Beyond this, as the daughter of a distinguished though colorfully controversial member of the faculty (many but by no means all of his colleagues shared the Professor’s extreme ethnic views) Sophie was only vaguely aware of her father’s political beliefs, of his governing rage. He kept that apart from his family, though obviously through the early years of her adolescence she could not remain completely oblivious of his animosity toward Jews. But it could scarcely have been an unprecedented thing in Poland to have an anti-Semitic parent. As for herself—bound up in her studies, in the church, in friends and the modest social events of the time, in books, in movies (dozens of movies, mostly American), in piano practice with her mother, and even one or two innocent flirtations—her attitude in regard to Jews, the greater part of whom were in the Cracow ghetto, wraiths barely visible, was at most one of indifference. Sophie insisted on this; I still believe her. They simply did not concern her—at least until as his dragooned secretary she began to divine the depth and extent of her father’s fiery enthusiasm.

  The Professor had compelled her to learn typing and shorthand when she was only sixteen. He may already have schemed at using her. Perhaps he was anticipating the time when he would need her skilled services; the fact that she was his daughter would doubtless provide added measures of convenience and confidentiality. At any rate, although for several years she had labored on various weekends typing out much of his bilingual correspondence having to do with patents (sometimes using a British-made Dictaphone which she hated for the spookily faraway and tinnily sinister sound it gave to his voice), she had never, until the Christmas season of 1938, been called upon to deal with any of his many essays; these had been handled until then by his assistants at the university. Thus she was in the position of having drawn upon her like flooding sunrise itself the whole culminating design of his hate-drenched philosophy when he made her take down in Gabelsberger shorthand, then transcribe on the typewriter in Polish and German, the entire text of his chef d’oeuvre: Poland’s Jewish Problem, etc. She recalled the hectic excitement which from time to time stole into his voice as, champing on a cigar, he paced the damp and smoky study in the house, and she obediently scratched on her shorthand pad the skeletal symbols of his logically formulated, precise but flowing German.

  He had a spacious yet discriminative style, flecked with sparks of irony. It could be at the same time caustic and seductively conv
ivial. The language was, in fact, superbly articulated German, which in itself had helped gain Professor Biegański his ample measure of renown in such Olympian centers for the propagation of anti-Semitism as Welt-Dienst in Erfurt. His writing had an idiosyncratic charm. (Once that summer in Brooklyn, I pressed upon Sophie a volume of H. L. Mencken, who was then, as now, one of my infatuations, and I observe for what it is worth that she remarked that Mencken’s scathing style reminded her of her father’s.) She took his dictation with care, but because of his runaway fervor, in some haste, so it was not until she got down to the job of typing it out for the printer that she began to glimpse seething in that cauldron of historical allusions and dialectical hypotheses and religious imperatives and legal precedents and anthropological propositions the smoky, ominous presence of a single word—repeated several times—which quite baffled and confounded and frightened her, appearing as it did in this otherwise persuasively practical text, this clever polemic which voiced with breezily scurrilous mockery the sly propaganda she had half heard more than once over the Biegański dinner table. But this word that so alarmed her was a new departure. For those several times he had made her change “total abolishment” (vollständige Abschaffung) to Vernichtung.

  Extermination. In the end it was as simple and as unequivocal as that. Even so, subtly introduced as it was, steeped in the pleasantly spiced broth of the Professor’s discursive, entertainingly acrid animadversions, the word and its full force and meaning—and thus its full meaning as it informed the entire substance of the essay—was so horrible that she had to shove it into the back of her mind throughout the entire bone-chilling winter weekend during which she labored over her father’s impassioned screed. She found herself preoccupied about his rage should she misplace an accent, omit an umlaut. And she was still repressing the very meaning of Vernichtung until that moment in the drizzling dusk of Sunday when, hurrying with the bundle of typescript to meet her father and her husband, Casimir, in a café on the Market Square, she was smitten with horror at what he had said and written and what she, in her complicity, had done. “Vernichtung,” she said aloud. He means, she thought with stupid belatedness, they should all be murdered.

  As Sophie herself implied, it would perhaps add gloss to her image if one could say that her realization of the hatred she bore toward her father not only coincided with but was motivated by her realization that he was an aspiring Jew-killer. But although the two awarenesses did merge together at almost the same moment, Sophie told me (and here I believed her, as I often did, for intuitive reasons) that she must have been emotionally ripe for the blinding revulsion she suddenly felt for her father, and that she very well may have reacted in the way she did had the Professor made no mention whatever of the approaching and wished-for slaughter. She told me she could never be sure. We are speaking here of central truths about Sophie, and I think it is testimony enough to the nature of her sensibilities that exposed for so many years to the rancorous, misshapen, discordant strains of her father’s obsession, and now immersed like a drowning creature in the very midst of the poisonous wellspring of his theology, she should have retained the human instinct to respond with the shock and horror that she did, clutching the atrocious bundle to her breast and hurrying through the misty crooked twilight streets of Cracow toward her revelation.

  “That evening my father was waiting for me at one of the cafés on the Market Square. I remember it was very cold and damp, bits of sleet in the air, feeling like snow might come, you know. My husband, Kazik, was at the table with my father, waiting too. I was quite late because I worked all afternoon typing the manuscripts and it take much longer than I thought it would. I was terribly afraid that my father would be angry at my lateness. The whole thing have been done in such a hurry, you see. It was what I think you call a rush job, and the printer—the man who would print the pamphlet in German and Polish—was to meet my father at the café at a certain hour and pick up the manuscripts. Before this, my father had planned to spend time at his table there correcting the manuscripts. He was to correct the German typescript while Kazik checked over the one in Polish. That was the way it was supposed to be, but I was very late, and when I arrived there the printer had already come and was sitting with my father and Kazik. My father was very angry, and although I made my apologies, I could tell he was just furious, and he quickly take the manuscripts from me and order me to sit down. I sat down and I could feel something painful happen in my stomach I was so afraid of his rage. Strange, Stingo, how you remember certain details. I mean, just this: that my father was drinking tea and Kazik was drinking slivovitz brandy and the printer—this man that I had met before, named Roman Sienkiewicz; yes, just like the name of the famous writer—was drinking vodka. I’m sure I remember such a detail so clearly because of my father’s tea. I mean, you see, after working all afternoon I was just completely exhausted and all I wanted then was a cup of tea, like my father. But I would never order it myself, never! I remember looking at his teapot and his cup and just longing for hot tea like that. And if I had not been so late my father would have offered me tea but now he was furious with me and said nothing about tea, so I just sat there looking down at my fingernails while my father and Kazik began reading the manuscripts.

  “It seemed to take hours. The printer Sienkiewicz—he was a fat man with a mustache, I remember he chuckled a lot—I spoke some things to him about the weather, nothing things, but mainly I just sat there at this cold table, keeping my mouth shut, wanting tea like I was dying of thirst. Finally my father looked up from the manuscript and stared at me and said, ‘Who is this Neville Chamberlain who so loves the works of Richard Wagner?’ And he was looking at me hard, and I didn’t exactly understood what he meant, only that he was terribly displeased. Displeased at me. And I didn’t understood and I said, ‘What do you mean, Papa?’ And he said the question again, this time avec l’accent on Neville, and I suddenly realized I have make a bad mistake. Because, you see, there was this English writer Chamberlain that my father was using in the essay everywhere to support his own philosophy, I don’t know if you have heard of him, he wrote a book called Die Grundlagen des—Oh well, in English I think it have the name Foundation of the Nineteenth Century, and it is filled with love of Germany and worship of Richard Wagner and this very bitter hatred of Jews, saying they contaminate the culture of Europe and such as that. My father had for this Chamberlain such great admiration, only now I realized that when he dictate this name to me I put down unconsciously Neville over and over, because then he was so much in the news because of Munich, instead of putting down Houston Chamberlain, which was the name of the Chamberlain that hates the Jews. And now I am filled with fear because I have repeated this mistake over and over in the footnotes and the bibliography and everywhere else.

  “And oh, Stingo, the shame! Because my father, he is so crazy for perfection that this mistake he can’t fermer les yeux... overlook, but he have to make a big thing out of it then and there, and I heard him say in front of Kazik and Sienkiewicz this, I’ll never forget it, it was so filled with contempt, ‘Your intelligence is pulp, like your mother’s. I don’t know where you got your body, but you did not get your brains from me.’ And I hear Sienkiewicz make a chuckle, more in embarrassment than anything, I guess, and I look up at Kazik and he is giving this little smile, only I was not surprised that this look on his face seemed to share my father’s contempt. You may as well know now, Stingo, about another lie I told you weeks ago. I really had no love for Kazik either at that time, I had no more love for my husband than for a stone-faced stranger I had never seen before in my life. Such an abundance of lies I have given you, Stingo! I am the avatar of menteuses...

  “On and on my father go about my intelligence, or failure of it, and I felt my face burning, but I shut up my ears, turned my hearing off. Papa, Papa, I remember saying to myself, please, all I want is a cup of tea! Then my father stopped attacking me and went back to reading the manuscript. And I was suddenly very frightened si
tting there, looking down at my hands. It was cold. This café, it was like a premonition of hell. I heard people murmuring on all sides of me, and it all seemed to be in this hurtful key of a profound minor, like one of Beethoven’s final quarters, you know, like grief, and there was this... this clammy wind sighing outside on the streets, and I suddenly realized that around me everyone was whispering about the coming war. I thought I could almost hear guns somewhere far-off, on the horizon past the city. I felt a deep fright and I wanted to get up and run away, but all I could do was sit there. Finally I heard my father ask Sienkiewicz how long it would be for the printing, rush job, and Sienkiewicz said the day after tomorrow. Then I realized that my father was talking to Kazik about the distribution of the pamphlets to the faculty of the university. Most of the pamphlets he was planning to send to places in Poland and in Germany and Austria, but he wanted a few hundred of the pamphlets which was in Polish to be passed around among the faculty—passed around by hand. And I realized that he was telling Kazik—telling I say, because he have him under the thumb just like me—that he wanted him to distribute the pamphlets personally at the university as soon as they were printed. Only he would of course need help. And I heard my father say, ‘Sophie will help you pass them out.’

  “And then I realized that almost the one single thing on earth that I did not want to be forced to do was to be impliquée any more with that pamphlet. And it make me revolted to think that I must go around the university with a stack of these things, giving them to the professors. But just as my father said this—‘Sophie will help you pass them out’—I knew that I would be there with Kazik, passing out these sheets just like I done everything he told me to do since I was a little girl, running these errands, bringing him things, learning to use the typewriter and knowing shorthand just so he could use me whenever he wanted. And this terrible emptiness come over me when I realize just then there was nothing I could do about it, no way of saying no, no way possible to say, ‘Papa, I’m not going to help you spread this thing.’ But you see, Stingo, there is a truth I must tell you that even now I can’t understood or truly make clear. Because maybe it look much better if I said I would not help pass out this thing of my father’s just because I finally see he is saying in it: Murder Jews. That was bad I knew, terrible, and even then I couldn’t hardly believe this was actually what he’d written.