Abruptly, then, he returned to his dictation, motioning to Sophie to take her seat. “Where was I?” he said. She read back the last paragraph. “Ah, now,” he resumed, “finish with this: ‘But until further information is received, it is hoped that the decision of this command to employ the greater part of the able-bodied Greek Jews in the Special Detachment at Birkenau is approved. Placing those so debilitated in proximity to the Special Action seems warranted by the circumstances. End paragraph. Heil Hitler!’ Sign as usual and type that at once.”
As she quickly obeyed his order, moving behind the typewriter and rolling an original sheet and five copy sheets into the machine, she kept her head bent toward her work, aware now that across from her, he had immediately taken up an official handbook and had begun reading. Her eyes’ periphery glimpsed the book. It was not a green SS manual but, rather, a slate-blue Army quartermaster’s manual with a title that all but engulfed the paper cover: Improved Methods of Measuring and Predicting Septic Tank Percolation Under Unfavorable Conditions of Soil and Climate. How little time Höss ever wasted! she thought. Hardly a second or two had elapsed between his last words and his seizing of the manual, in which he was now totally engrossed. She still felt the phantom impression of his fingers on her shoulder. She lowered her eyes, tapping out the letter, not for a moment fazed by the stark information which she knew lay embalmed beneath Höss’s final circumlocutions: “Special Action,” “Special Detachment.” Few inmates of the camp were unaware of the reality behind these euphemisms or, having access to Höss’s communication, would not be able to make this free translation: “The Greek Jews being such a pathetic lot and ready to die anyway, we hope it is all right that they have been assigned to the death commando unit at the crematoriums, where they will handle the corpses and extract the gold from the teeth and feed bodies to the furnaces until they too, exhausted beyond recall, are ready for the gas.” Through Sophie’s mind ran this adaptation of Höss’s prose even as she typed the words, articulating a concept which, a mere six months before, when she first arrived, would have been so monstrous as to have surpassed belief but now registered in her consciousness as a fleeting commonplace in this new universe she inhabited, no more to be remarked upon than (as in the other world she had once known) the fact that one went to the baker’s to buy one’s bread.
She finished the letter without a mistake, appending an exclamation point to the salute to the Führer with such vigorous precision that it brought forth from the machine a faintly echoing tintinnabulation. Höss looked up from his manual, gestured for the letter and for a fountain pen, which she swiftly handed him. Sophie stood waiting while Höss scribbled an intimate postscript on a slip which she had paper-clipped to the bottom of the original, he muttering aloud in cadence to his written words, as was his habit, “Dear old Heini: Personal regrets at not being able to meet you tomorrow at Posen, where this letter is being routed air courier. Good luck with your speech to the SS ‘Old Boys.’ Rudi.” He gave the letter back to her, saying, “This must go out soon, but do the letter to the priest first.”
She returned to the table, straining with the effort as she lowered the leaden German contraption to the floor, replacing it with the Polish model. Manufactured in Czechoslovakia, it was much less heavy than the German typewriter, and of a more recent vintage; it was also speedier and considerably kinder to her fingers. She began to type, translating as she went from the shorthand message Höss had dictated to her the previous afternoon. It concerned a minor but vexing problem, one having to do with community relations. It also had weird echoes of Les Misérables, which she recalled... oh, so well. Höss had received a letter from a priest in a nearby village—nearby, but beyond the perimeter of the surrounding area, which had been cleared of Polish inhabitants. The priest’s complaint was that a small group of drunken camp guards (exact number unknown) had entered the church at night and made off with a pair of priceless silver candlesticks from the altar—irreplaceable objects, really, hand-wrought works of art dating to the seventeenth century. Sophie had translated the letter aloud to Höss from the priest’s crucified, splintered Polish. She had sensed the audaciousness, even the brazenness of the letter as she read it; one or the other, or perhaps simple stupidity, had to impel such a communication from an insignificant parish priest to the Commandant of Auschwitz. Yet there was a certain guile; the tone was obsequious to the point of servility (“intrude upon the honored Commandant’s valuable time”) when it was not delicate to a fault (“and we can understand how the excessive use of alcohol might provoke such an escapade, which was no doubt harmlessly conceived”), but the plain fact was that the poor priest had written in a controlled frenzy of unhappiness, as if he and his flock had been divested of their most revered possession, which they no doubt had been. In reading out loud, Sophie had emphasized the obsequious tone, which somehow underscored the priest’s manic desperation, and when she had finished she heard Höss give a groan of discomfort.
“Candlesticks!” he said. “Why must I have problems about candlesticks?”
She looked up to see the wisp of a self-mocking smile on his lips, and she realized—for the first time after these many hours in his mechanically impersonal presence, when any inquiry he might have made of her had strictly to do with stenography and translation—that his mildly facetious, rhetorical question was addressed at least partially to her. She had been so taken off balance that her pencil flew out of her hand. She felt her mouth drop open but she said nothing, and could muster no ability to return his smile.
“The church,” he said to her, “we must try to be polite to the local church—even in a country village. It is good policy.”
Silently she bent down and retrieved her pencil from the floor.
Then, speaking directly to her, he said, “Of course you are Roman Catholic, aren’t you?"
She felt no sarcasm in this, but for a long space was unable to reply. When she did, answering in the affirmative, she was embarrassed at finding herself adding a totally spontaneous “Are you?” The blood rushed to her face and she realized the extreme idiocy of the words.
But to her surprise and relief, he remained expressionless and his voice was quite impassively matter-of-fact as he said, “I was a Catholic but now I am a Gottgläubiger. I believe there is a deity—somewhere. I used to have faith in Christ.” He paused. “But I have broken with Christianity.”
And that was all. He said it as indifferently as if he were speaking of having disposed of a used piece of clothing. He spoke not another word to her informally, becoming all business again as he instructed her to write out a memorandum to SS Sturmbannführer Fritz Hartjenstein, commanding officer of the SS garrison, directing that a search be made for the candlesticks in the enlisted barracks and that every effort be exerted to apprehend the culprits, who would then be placed in custody of the camp provost marshal for discipline. And so it went—memorandum in quintuplicate, with a copy to be forwarded to SS Oberscharführer Kurt Knittel, manager of Section VI (Kulturabteilung) and supervisor of schooling and political education of the garrison; also to SS Sturmbannführer Konrad Morgen, head of the SS special commission for investigating corrupt practices in concentration camps. He then returned to the agony of the parish father, dictating a letter in German which he ordered Sophie to render into the priest’s language and which now, this following day, she was transcribing on her machine, rather gratified to feel that she was able to turn the dross of Höss’s German prose into finely articulated filaments of golden Polish: Dear Father Chybiński, we are shocked and distressed to hear of the vandalism of your church. Nothing is more grievous to us than the idea of desecration of holy objects and we shall endeavor to take every means at our command to ensure the return of your precious candelabra. While the enlisted men of this garrison have been inculcated with the highest principles of discipline demanded of every SS member—indeed of every German serving in the occupied territories—it is inevitable that lapses will occur, and we can only earnestly
hope that you will understand... Sophie’s typewriter went clickety-clack in the stillness of the attic while Höss brooded over his cesspool diagrams and the flies droned and twitched, and the movement of distant boxcars kept up a blurred incessant rumble like summer thunder.
At the instant she was finished (again tacking on the routine Heil Hitler!) her heart once more gave a tumultuous lurch, for he had spoken, and she looked up to see that he was gazing straight into her eyes. Although the clatter of the machine had masked his words, she was almost certain that he had said, “That’s a very pretty kerchief.” With fluttering fingertips her hand rose automatically, though with a final coquettish flourish, to touch the kerchief at the crown of her head. The scarf, of checkered green and made of cheap prison-stitched muslin, concealed her skull and its ludicrous frizzy locks, growing back in unsightly clumps after having been shorn to the roots exactly six months before. It was also a rare privilege, the kerchief; only those prisoners fortunate enough to work at Haus Höss were ever permitted thus to secrete the degrading baldness which to one degree or another every inmate, male and female, presented to this hermetically sealed world behind the electrified fences. The minuscule degree of dignity it conferred upon Sophie was something for which she felt a meager but real gratitude.
“Danke, mein Kommandant!” She heard her voice falter. The idea of conversing with Höss, on any level above or removed from her capacity as a part-time amanuensis, soaked her with apprehension, an almost intestinal nervousness. And her nervousness was heightened by the fact that conversation with Höss was, indeed, something she ravenously desired. Her stomach gurgled in fear—fear not of the Commandant himself but of failure of nerve, fear that she would ultimately lack the craft, the power of improvisation, the subtlety of manner, the histrionic gift, at last the beguiling convincingness by which she so desperately yearned to maneuver him into a vulnerable position and thus perhaps bend him to serve the modest demands of her will. “Danke schön!” she said with clumsy, inexcusable loudness, thinking: You fool, be quiet, he’ll think you’re an awful little ninny! She expressed her gratitude in a softer voice, and with grave calculation fluttered her eyelids and turned her gaze demurely down. “Lotte gave it to me,” she explained. “It was one of two she had been given by Frau Höss and she passed it on to me. It covers my head nicely.” Calm down now, she thought. Don’t talk too much, don’t talk much at all, not yet.
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.