“But I knew I had to control myself, forget about music, think of other things. Also, you see, I knew that I must use every bit of intelligence that I had, every bit of wit, I think you would say, in order to get what I wanted out of Höss. I knew he hated Poles, but that was no matter. I have made this—comment dit-on, fêlure... crack!—crack in the mask already and now I must move further on because time was of l’essence. Bronek, that was this handyman, had whispered to us women in the cellar that he heard this rumor that Höss was going soon to be transferred to Berlin. I must move quickly if I was to—yes, I will say it, seduce Höss, even if it make me sick sometime when I think of it, hoping that somehow I could seduce him with my mind rather than my body. Hoping I would not have to use my body if I could prove to him these other things. Okay, Stingo, prove to him that Zofia Maria Biegańska Zawistowska okay might be eine schmutzige Polin, you know, tierisch, animal, just a slave, Dreckpolack, et cetera, but still was as strong and fine a National Socialist as Höss was, and I should be made free from this cruel, unfair imprisonment. Voilá!
“Finally, well then, Höss come back up the stairs. I could hear his boots on the steps and ‘The Beer Barrel Polka.’ I make this decision, that in some way I might appear attractive to him, standing there by the window. Sexy, you know. Excuse me, Stingo, but you know what I mean—looking as if I wanted to fuck. Looking as if I wanted to be asked to fuck. But oh, my eyes! Jesus Christ, my eyes! They were all pink, I knew, from weeping, and I was still weeping, and I was afraid this might upset my plan. But I was able to stop and I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. And I looked again to see the beauty of those woods when I heard this moment of Haydn. But the wind have made this sudden change, you know, and I could see the smoke from the ovens at Birkenau coming down over the fields and the woods. Then Höss came in.”
Lucky Sophie. It is remarkable to contemplate, but at this point in her career at the camp, six months after her arrival, she was not only in fairly good health but had been spared most of the worst pangs of starvation. This hardly meant any abundance, however. Whenever she reminisced about that period (and she rarely dwelt on it in any great detail, so I never got from her the sense of the immediacy of living in hell which one obtains from written accounts; yet she obviously had seen hell, felt it, breathed it), she implied she was decently enough fed, but only by comparison with the stark famine which the rank-and-file prisoners endured daily, and thus she fed upon short rations. During the ten days or so she spent in Höss’s basement, for instance, she ate kitchen leftovers and the leavings from the Höss table, mostly vegetable scraps and meat gristle—for which she remained grateful. She was managing to survive slightly above the subsistence level, but only because she was lucky. In all slave worlds there soon develops a hierarchic design, a pecking order, patterns of influence and privilege; because of her great good fortune Sophie found herself among a small elite.
This elite, composed of perhaps only several hundred out of the many thousands of prisoners who populated Auschwitz at any single moment, were those who through maneuvering or, again, by luck had begun to fulfill some function that the SS deemed indispensable or at least of vital importance. (“Indispensable” as strictly applied to captive human beings at Auschwitz would be a non sequitur.) Such duties implied temporary or even prolonged survival, certainly when compared with roles played by the great multitude of the camp inmates who because of their very superfluity and replaceability had only one purpose: to labor to the point of exhaustion, then to die. Like any group of skilled artisans, the elite of which Sophie was a member (they included such craftsmen as highly accomplished tailors from France and Belgium who were employed in making fine clothes out of the fancy goods snatched on the station ramp from condemned Jews, expert cobblers and workers in high-quality leather, gardeners with green thumbs, technicians and engineers possessing certain specialist capabilities, and a handful like Sophie with combined linguistic and secretarial gifts) were spared extermination for the raw pragmatic reason that their talents came as close to being invaluable as that word had any such meaning in the camp. Thus, until some savage quirk of fate shattered them too—a likely and daily threat—these of the elite at least did not suffer the swift plunge into disintegration which was the portion of nearly all the rest.
It may help clarify what went on between Sophie and Rudolf Höss if we try for a moment to examine the nature and function of Auschwitz in general, but especially during the six months after her arrival in early April of that year 1943. I emphasize the time because it is important. Much can be explained in terms of the metamorphosis which the camp underwent as the result of an order (unquestionably originating with the Führer) which went down to Höss from Himmler sometime during the first week of April. The order was one of the most monumental and sweeping to be promulgated since the “final solution” itself was hatched in the fecund brains of the Nazi thaumaturges: that is, the recently built gas chambers and crematoriums of Birkenau would be employed solely for the extermination of Jews. This edict superseded previous rules of procedure which allowed for the gassing of non-Jews (mostly Poles, Russians and other Slavs) on the same “selective” basis of health and age as the Jews. There was a technological and a logistical necessity embedded in the new directive, the impetus of which derived not from any sudden preservative concern on the part of the Germans for the Slavs and other “Aryan” non-Jewish deportees, but from an overriding obsession—springing from Hitler and amounting now to mania in the minds of Himmler, Eichmann and their cousin overlords in the SS chain of command—to finally get on with the Jewish slaughter until every Jew in Europe had perished. The new order was in effect a clearing of the decks for action: the Birkenau facilities, gargantuan as they were, had certain ultimate limitations both spatial and thermal; with their absolute and uncontested priority in the lists of der Massenmord now, the Jews were tendered a sudden unaccustomed exclusivity. With few exceptions (Gypsies for one), Birkenau was theirs alone. Just the prospect of their sheer numbers “made my teeth ache at night,” wrote Höss, who meant that he ground his teeth, and who, despite the vacuum of his imagination, could turn a crudely descriptive phrase or two.
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 constrai
nt 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 Biegański, 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?