Sophie's Choice (44 page)

Fishy jokes. Poisson d'avril. In Polish, like the Latin: Prima Aprilis. Each time that day has rolled around, ticking off the years during these recent domestic decades, it has been my association of the date with Sophie which has given me a twinge of real anguish when I have been exposed to those small, sweet, silly tricks perpetrated by my children ("April fool, Daddy!"); the gentle paterfamilias, usually so forbearing, has turned cross as a skunk. I hate April Fools' Day as I hate the Judeo-Christian God. That is the day which marked the end of Sophie's journey, and for me somehow the bad joke has been less attached to that rather pedestrian coincidence than to the fact that only four days later an order to Rudolf Höss from Berlin directed that no more captives who were not Jewish would be sent to the gas. For a long time Sophie refused to supply me with any details about her arrival, or perhaps her equilibrium simply could not let her do so--and perhaps that is just as well. But even before I learned the full truth concerning what happened to her, I was able to re-create a smudged view of the events of that day--a day which the records describe as being prematurely warm and greenly burgeoning with spring, ferns unfolding, the forsythia in early bud, the air sunshiny and clear. The 1,800 Jews were expeditiously loaded into vans and driven to Birkenau, an operation which occupied the two hours just past noon. There were, as I say, no selections; fit and healthy men, women, children--all died. Shortly after that, as if seized by the same desire to make a clean sweep of whatever victims were at hand, the SS officers on the ramp consigned a carload (that is, two hundred) of the Resistance members to the gas chambers. They, too, departed in vans, leaving behind them perhaps fifty of their comrades, including Wanda. There now came a curious interruption in the proceedings, and a wait which lasted well through the afternoon. On the two still-occupied cars, besides the leftovers from the Resistance group, there remained Sophie and Jan and Eva and the bedraggled mob of Poles who had been captured in the last Warsaw roundup. The delay stretched out through several more hours, until nearly dusk. On the ramp the SS men--the officers, the learned physicians, the guards--seemed to be milling about in an anxious sweat of indecision. Orders from Berlin? Counterorders? One can only speculate upon their nervousness. It doesn't matter. Finally it became clear that the SS had decided to continue their work, but this time on terms of selection. The officiating noncommissioned officers ordered everybody out, down, made them form lines. Then the doctors took over. The selection process lasted somewhat over an hour. Sophie, Jan and Wanda were sent to the camp. About half of the prisoners were elected to this status. Among those ordered to their deaths in Crematorium II at Birkenau were the music teacher Stefan Zaorski and his pupil, the flutist Eva Maria Zawistowska, who in a little more than a week would have been eight years old.

Chapter 13

I must now set down a brief vignette, which I have tried to refashion from the outpouring of Sophie's memories as she talked to me that summer weekend. I suspect that the indulgent reader will not be able to perceive immediately how this little recollection adumbrates Auschwitz but--as will be seen--it does, and of all of Sophie's attempts to gain a hold on the confusion of her past, it remains, as a sketch, a fragment, among the most odd and unsettling. The place is Cracow again. The time: early June in the year 1937. The characters are Sophie and her father and a personage new to this narrative: Dr. Walter Dürrfeld of Leuna, near Leipzig, a director of IG Farbenindustrie, that Interessengemeinschaft, or conglomerate--inconceivably huge even for its day--whose prestige and size are alone enough to set Professor Biegañski's mind abubble with giddy euphoria. Not to mention Dr. Dürrfeld himself, who because of the Professor's academic specialty--the international legal aspects of industrial patents--is well known to him by reputation as one of the captains of German industry. It would demean the Professor needlessly,would place too much emphasis on the sycophancy he had occasionally displayed in the face of manifestations of German might and potency, to portray him as buffoonishly servile in Dürrfeld's presence; he possesses, after all, his own illustrious repute as a scholar and an expert in his field. He is also a man of considerable social facility. Nonetheless, Sophie can tell that he is flattered beyond measure to be near the flesh of this titan, and his eagerness to please falls a hair short of the outright embarrassing. There is no professional connection to this meeting; the encounter is purely social, recreative. Dürrfeld with his wife is making a vacation trip through Eastern Europe, and a mutual acquaintance in Düsseldorf--a patent authority, like the Professor--has arranged the get-together through the mail and by a flurry of last-minute telegrams. Because of Dürrfeld's pressing schedule the little occasion must not take much time, cannot even include a meal together: a brief sightseeing fling at the university with its resplendent Collegium Maius; then Wawel Castle, the tapestries, a pause for a cup of tea, perhaps a tiny side trip elsewhere, but that is all. An afternoon's pleasant companionship, then off on the wagonslits to Wroclaw. The Professor plainly pines for more contact. Four hours will have to do. Frau Dürrfeld is indisposed--a touch of der Durchfall has confined her to their room at the Hotel Francuski. As the trio sits sipping midafternoon tea after their descent from the Wawel parapets, the Professor apologizes with perhaps a touch too much acerbity on the poorness of Cracow water, intones with perhaps a shade too much feeling his regret at having had only the most fleeting glimpse of the charming Frau Dürrfeld before she hastened upstairs to her chambers. Dürrfeld nods pleasantly, Sophie squirms. She knows that the Professor will later require her to help re-create their conversation for his diary. She also knows that she has been dragooned into this outing for two purposes of display--because she is a knockout, as they say in the American movies that year, but also because by her presence, poise and language she can demonstrate to this distinguished guest, this dynamic helmsman of commerce, how fidelity to the principles of German culture and German breeding is capable of producing (and in such a quaint Slavic outback) the bewitching replica of a fräulein of whom not even the most committed racial purist in the Reich could disapprove. At least she looks the part. Sophie continues to squirm, praying that the conversation--once it becomes serious, if it does--will skirt Nazi politics; she is just beginning to be sickened by the extreme turn taken in the evolution of the Professor's racial views, and she cannot bear listening to or being forced to echo, out of duty, those dangerous imbecilities. But she need not worry. It is culture and business--not politics--which are on the Professor's mind as he tactfully leads the conversation. Dürrfeld listens, wearing a thin smile. Polite, attentive, he is a sparely fleshed and handsome man in his mid-forties, with pink healthy skin and (she is struck by this detail) incredibly clean fingernails. They seem almost lacquered, painted on, the terminal edges crescent moons of ivory. His grooming is immaculate and his suit of tailored charcoal flannel, obviously English, makes her father's broad bright pin-stripe look hopelessly dowdy and old-fashioned. His cigarettes, she notices, are also British--Craven A's. As he listens to the Professor his eyes have a pleasant, amused, quizzical look. She feels attracted to him, vaguely--no, quite strongly. She finds herself blushing, knows that her cheeks are flushed. Her father is casting gemlike slivers of history around the table now, emphasizing the effect of German-speaking culture and tradition on the city of Cracow and indeed upon all of southern Poland. What a long-lasting and indelible tradition this has been! Of course, and it goes without saying (although the Professor is saying it), Cracow not so long ago was for three-quarters of a century under beneficent Austrian rule--natürlich, this Dr. Dürrfeld knew; but did he also know that the city was almost unique in Eastern Europe in possessing its own constitution, called even now "the Magdeburg rights" and based upon medieval laws formulated in the city of Magdeburg? Was it any wonder, then, that the community was richly steeped in German lore and law, in the very spirit of Germany, so that even now there was among Cracovian citizens the perpetual impulse to nurture a passionate devotion for the language which, as Von Hofmannsthal said (or was it Gerhart Hauptmann?), is the most gloriously expressive since the ancient Greek? Suddenly Sophie realizes that he has focused his attention on her. Even his daughter here, he continues, little Zosia, whose education had perhaps not been of the broadest, speaks with such fluency that she not only has perfect mastery of Hochsprache, the standard German of the schools, but of the colloquial Umgangssprache, and furthermore, can duplicate for the Doctor's enjoyment almost any accent which lies in between. There follows a distressing (to Sophie) several minutes in which, egged on pointedly by her father, she must utter a random phrase in various local German accents. It is a trick of mimicry which she picked up easily as a child and which the Professor has relished exploiting ever since. It is one of the misdemeanors he commits upon her from time to time. Sophie, who is shy enough anyway, detests being forced to perform for Dürrfeld, but, smiling a twisted embarrassed smile, complies, speaking at her father's command in Swabian, then in the indolent cadences of Bavaria, now in the tones of a native of Dresden, of Frankfurt, quickly followed by the Low German sound of a Saxon from Hannover and at last--aware that the desperation shows in her own eyes--blurting out an imitation of some quaint denizen of the Schwarzwald. "Entzückend!" she hears Dürrfeld's voice, along with a delighted laugh. "Charming! Just charming!" And she can tell that Dürrfeld, fetched by the little act but at the same time sensing her discomfort, has brought her demonstration adroitly to an end. Is Dürrfeld offended by her father? She doesn't know. She hopes so. Papa, Papa. Du bist ein... Oh merde... Sophie is barely able to conquer her boredom but manages to remain attentive. The Professor has now turned subtly (without appearing to be inquisitive) to the subject second most dear to his heart--industry and commerce, especially German industry and commerce, and the power excitingly attending those activities, now so energetically on the upswing. It is easy to gain Dürrfeld's confidence; the Professor's knowledge of the architecture of world trade is comprehensive, encyclopedic. He knows when to open up a subject, when to shy away from it, when to be direct, when to be discreet. He does not once mention the Führer. Accepting with perhaps a little too much gratitude the fine hand-rolled Cuban cigar offered him by Dürrfeld, he expresses his profuse admiration for a recent German achievement. He has only recently read about it in the Zürich financial newspaper to which he subscribes. It is the sale to the United States of large quantities of synthetic rubber newly perfected by IG Farbenindustrie. What a glorious coup for the Reich! exclaims the Professor--at which point Sophie notices that Dürrfeld, who appears to be a man not easily flattered, nonetheless smiles in a responsive way and begins to speak with some animation. He seems pleased with the Professor's technical grasp of the subject, to which now he himself warms, leaning forward and for the first time employing his beautifully manicured hands to make one point, then another and another. Sophie loses track of much of the arcane detail, meanwhile regarding Dürrfeld once more from a point of view that is singularly female: he is attractive, she thinks, then in a dampness of mild shame banishes the thought. (Married, the mother of two little children; how could she!) Now, while plainly exercising control over himself, Dürrfeld is seized by some churning interior anger; the knuckles of one hand grow white as he clenches his fist, the area around his mouth also becomes blanched, tense. With barely stoppered rage he is speaking of imperialism, of die Engländer and die Holländer, of the conspiracy on the part of two rich powers to so rig and control prices in natural rubber as to drive all others out of the market. And they accuse IG Farben of monopolistic practices! What else could we do? he says in a caustic, cutting voice which surprises Sophie, so at variance does it seem with his previous milky equanimity. No wonder that the world is amazed at our coup! With the British and the Dutch sole owners of Malaya and the East Indies, criminally fixing astronomical rates on the world market, what else could Germany do but employ its technological ingenuity to create a synthetic substitute that would not only be economical, durable, resilient, but-- "Oil-resistant!" There! The Professor has taken the words right out of Dürrfeld's mouth. Oil-resistant! He has mastered his homework, the shrewd Professor, in whose memory has lodged the salient fact that it is the oil-resistance of the new synthetic product which is so revolutionary and which is the key to its value and attractiveness. Another touch of flattery that almost works: Dürrfeld smiles pleasantly at the Professor's expertise. But as often happens, her father does not know when to stop. Preening slightly beneath his bedandruffed pin-striped shoulders, he begins to show off, murmuring chemical terms like "nitrile," "Buna-N," "polymerization of hydrocarbons." His German is mellifluous--but now Dürrfeld, sidetracked from his righteous rage at the British and the Dutch, subsides into his previous detached self, gazing at the turgid Professor beneath arched eyebrows, looking remotely irritated and bored. Yet oddly enough, the Professor at his best can be a charmer. Sometimes he is able to redeem himself. And so on the ride to the great salt mine of Wieliczka south of the city, the three of them sitting abreast in the rear seat of the hotel limousine, an ancient but pampered Daimler smelling of wood polish, his well-practiced disquisition on the Polish salt industry and its millennial history is captivating, bright, anything but tedious. He is exercising that talent which has made him an alluring lecturer and a public speaker of vibrant flair. No longer is he so pompous and self-conscious. The name of the king who was the founder of the Wieliczka mine, Boleslaw the Bashful, provides a moment of amusement; one or two low-keyed jokes, nicely timed, again put Dürrfeld at his ease. As he sinks back Sophie feels her liking for Dürrfeld increase; how little like a powerful German industrialist he seems, she thinks. She gives him a sidelong glance, and is affected by the lack of any arrogance in him, touched by something obscurely warm, vulnerable--is it only a kind of loneliness? The countryside is green with spreading, trembling foliage, lush fields ablaze with wildflowers--the Polish spring in its voluptuous prime. Dürrfeld remarks on the scene with genuine delight. Sophie senses the pressure of his arm against her own, and realizes that her bare skin there is chill with goose flesh. She tries--without success on the cramped seat--to draw away. She shivers slightly, then relaxes. Dürrfeld has unbent so naturally that he even feels constrained to utter a vague apology; he should not allow the British and the Dutch to agitate him so, he says to the Professor in a mild voice, forgive the outburst, but surely their monopolistic practices and manipulations of the supply of a natural product like rubber, which all the world should receive equitably, was an abomination. Surely a native of Poland, which like Germany has no rich overseas possessions, could appreciate this. Surely it is not militarism or blind desire for conquest (which have been libelously imputed to certain nations--Germany, yes, damnit, Germany) that makes some ghastly war probable, but this greed. What must a nation like Germany do when--deprived of the colonies which might have served as its own Straits Settlements, divested of the equivalent of its own Sumatra, its own Borneo--it faces a hostile world rimmed about at the edge by international pirates and profiteers? The legacy of Versailles! Yes, what! It must go creatively wild. It must manufacture its own substance--everything!--out of chaos and by its own genius, and then stand with its back against the wall, confronting a host of enemies. The little speech ends. The Professor beams and actually applauds with his hands. Dürrfeld falls silent then. Despite his passion he is very calm. He has spoken not angrily or with alarm but with gentle, easy, brief eloquence, and Sophie finds herself affected by the words and the utter conviction they convey. She is a naïf in politics and world affairs, but she has the wit to know it. She cannot tell if she is stirred more by Dürrfeld's ideas or by his physical presence--perhaps it is a mingling of both--but she feels an honest, heartfelt reasonableness in what he has said, and certainly he does not in the least resemble the paradigmatic Nazi who has been the object of so much savage lampooning rage at the hands of the tiny liberal and radical elements around the university. Maybe he is not a Nazi, she thinks optimistically--but then, surely a man so highly placed must be a member of the Party. Yes? No? Well, no matter. Two things she now knows well: she is beset by a pleasant, wayward, tickling eroticism, and the eroticism itself fills her with the same sweetly queasy
sense of danger she once felt in Vienna years ago as a child at the very peak of the terrifying Prater Ferris wheel--danger both delicious and nearly unendurable. (Yet even as the emotion sweeps over her she cannot help but writhe in the memory of the cataclysmic domestic happening which she knows gives her the liberty, the warrant to possess such electrifying desire: the silhouette of her husband, in his robe, standing in the doorway of their dark bedroom only a month before. And Kazik's words, as excruciatingly hurtful as the sudden slice across her face of a kitchen knife: You must get this under your thick skull, which may be thicker even than your father says it is. If I am no longer able to function with you, it is, you understand, due to no lack of virility but because almost everything about you, especially your body, leaves me totally without sensation... I cannot stand even the smell of your bed.) Moments later, outside the entrance to the mine, where the two of them are gazing down across a sun-flooded field swaying and rippling with green barley, Dürrfeld asks her about herself. She replies that she is--well, a housewife, a faculty wife, but she is studying the piano, she hopes to be able to continue in Vienna in a year or two. (They are alone for a moment, standing close to each other. Never has Sophie wished so keenly to be alone with a man. What has permitted this moment is a small crisis--a sign announcing no visitors, the mine closed for repairs, the Professor storming off with a cascade of apologies pouring from his lips, telling them to wait, declaring that his personal acquaintanceship with the superintendent will resolve this impasse.) He says she looks so youthful. A girl! He says that it is hard to believe that she has two children. She replies that she was married very young. He says that he has two children, too. "I am a family man." The remark seems roguish, ambiguous. For the first time their eyes encounter each other's, his gaze mingles with hers; it is unabashedly admiring, that look, and she turns away feeling a spasm of adulterous guilt. She moves a few paces off from him, shielding her eyes, wondering aloud where Papa is. She hears the tremor in her throat, another voice deep within her tells her that tomorrow she must go to early Mass. Over her shoulder his voice now asks her if she has ever been to Germany. She replies that yes, one summer years ago she stayed in Berlin. Her father's vacation. She was just a child. She says that she would love to go to Germany again, to see Bach's grave in Leipzig--and she halts, embarrassed, wondering why on earth she has said this, although indeed to place flowers on Bach's grave has long been a secret wish. Yet in his gentle laugh there is understanding. Leipzig, my home! He says why of course we could do that if you came. We could go to all the great musical shrines. She gasps inwardly--the "we," the "if you came." Is she to construe this as an invitation? Delicate, even devious--but an invitation? She feels the pulse twitch at her brow and flees the subject, or warily moves away. We have much good music in Cracow, she says, Poland is filled with wonderful music. Yes, he says, but not like Germany. If she were to come, he would take her to Bayreuth--does she like Wagner?--or to the great Bach festivals, or to hear Lotte Lehmann, Kleiber, Gieseking, Furtwängler, Backhaus, Fischer, Kempff... His voice seems to be an amorous melodic murmur, cajoling, politely but outrageously flirtatious, irresistible and (to her utter distress now) wickedly exciting. If she loves Bach, then she must love Telemann. We shall toast his memory in Hamburg! And Beethoven's in Bonn! Just at this moment a splashing of feet through gravel announces the return of the Professor. He babbles delightedly, saying "Open Sesame." Sophie can almost hear the sound her heart makes as it deflates, sickly pounding. My father, she thinks, is everything that music cannot be... And that (as it evolved in her recollection) is nearly all. The prodigious subterranean castle of salt which she has visited often and which may or may not be, as the Professor claims, one of Europe's seven man-made wonders, is less an anticlimax in itself than a spectacle which simply fails to register on her awareness, so agitated has she been made by this indefinable whatever-it-is--this infatuation--which has struck her with the random heat of a lightning bolt, making her weak and a little ill. She dares not let her eyes meet Dürrfeld's again, although once more she glances at his hands: why do they fascinate her so? And now as they descend in the elevator and then embark on a stroll through this glittering white kingdom of vaulted caverns and labyrinthine passageways and soaring transepts--an upended anti-cathedral, buried memorial to ages of human toil, plunging giddily toward the underworld--Sophie blots out both Dürrfeld's presence and her father's perambulating lecture, which anyway she has heard a dozen times before. She wonders despondently how she can truly be the victim of an emotion at once so silly and so devastating. She will just have to put this man firmly out of her mind. Yes, put him out of her mind... Allez! And this she did. She recounted later how she so firmly obliterated Dürrfeld from her thoughts that after he and his wife left Cracow--only an hour or so following their visit to the Wieliczka mine--he never troubled her memory again, did not dwell on the farthest margin of her consciousness even as a romantic figment. Perhaps this was the result of some unconscious force of will, perhaps it was only because of the futility she felt at entertaining the hope of seeing him again. Like a rock falling into one of those bottomless Wieliczka grottoes, he plummeted from her remembrance--another innocuous flirtation consigned to the dusty unopened scrapbook. Yet six years later she did see him again, when the creature of Dürrfeld's passion and desire--synthetic rubber--and its place in the matrix of history had caused this corporate prince to become master of Farben's huge industrial complex known as IG-Auschwitz. When they met each other there at the camp the encounter was even briefer and less personal than their meeting in Cracow. Yet from the separate encounters, Sophie carried away two significantly linked and powerful impressions. And they were these: During that spring afternoon's jaunt in the company of one of Poland's most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Dürrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Dürrfeld's lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion. During that long weekend in Flatbush, Sophie did not speak to me about Eva except to tell me in a few words what I have already set down: that the child was killed at Birkenau on the day of their arrival. "Eva was taken away," she said, "and I never saw her again." She offered no embroidery on this and I plainly could not and did not press the point; it was--in a word--terrible, and this information, which she imparted to me in such a listless, offhand way, left me beyond speech. I still marvel at Sophie's composure. She returned quickly to speak of Jan, who had survived the selection and who, she learned through the grapevine after a number of days, had been thrown into that desperate enclave known as the Children's Camp. I could only surmise from what she said about her first six months at Auschwitz that the shock and grief caused by Eva's death created a bereavement which might have destroyed her, too, had it not been for Jan and his survival; the very fact that the little boy still lived, even though beyond her reach, and that she might somehow eventually get to see him was enough to sustain her through the initial phases of the nightmare. Almost every thought she had concerned the child, and the few grains of information she collected about him from time to time--that he was healthy enough, that he still lived--brought her the kind of mild, numb solace which enabled her to get through the infernal existence she woke to every morning. But Sophie, as I pointed out before and as she elaborated to Höss on that strange day of their aborted intimacy, was one of the chosen elite and therefore had been "lucky" by comparison with most of the others newly arrived at the camp. She had first been assigned to a barracks, where in the ordinary course of events she would doubtless have endured that precisely calculated, abbreviated death-in-life which was the lot of nearly all her fellow sufferers. (It was at this point that Sophie told me about the welcoming statement of SS Hauptsturmführer Fritzch, and it might be well to repeat what they both said, verbatim. "I remember his exact words. 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.' " Sophie had been aware of her death sentence within twenty-four hours of her arrival, it only took Fritzch to validate the fact in SS language.) But as she later explained to Höss in an episode I have earlier narrated, an odd cluster of little events--the attack on her in the barracks by a lesbian, a fight, intercession by a friendly block leader--had led her to a translator-stenographer's job and lodging in another barracks, where she was sheltered for the time being from the camp's mortal attrition. And of course at the end of six months another stroke of good fortune brought her the protective comforts and advantages of Haus Höss itself. Yet first came a critical meeting. It was only a few days before she was to take up residence under the Commandant's roof that Wanda--who had been immured in one of the unspeakable kennels at Birkenau this entire time and whom Sophie had not seen since that April day of their arrival--made her way to Sophie's side and through a tumultuous outpouring filled her with hope about Jan and the possibility of his salvation, but also terrified her with demands upon her courage which she felt certain she could not meet. "You will have to be working for us every moment you're in that insect's nest," Wanda had whispered to her in a corner of the barracks. "You can't imagine what kind of an opportunity this is. It's what the underground has been waiting for, praying for, to have somebody like you in a situation like this! You'll have to use your eyes and ears every minute. Listen, darling, it's so important for you to get word out about what's going on. Shifts of personnel, changes of policy, transfers of the top SS pigs--anything is priceless information. It's the lifeblood of the camp. War news! Anything to counter their filthy propaganda. Don't you see, our morale is the only thing we have left in this hellhole. A radio, for instance--that would be priceless! Your chances of getting one would be practically nil, but if you could smuggle out a radio just so we could listen to London, it would be nearly the same as saving thousands and thousands of lives." Wanda was sick. The dreadful bruise inflicted on her face in Warsaw had never really gone away. Conditions in the women's compound at Birkenau were hideous and a chronic bronchial ailment to which she had always been prone had flared up, bringing to her cheeks a hectic and alarming flush so bright that it almost matched her brick-red hair, or the grotesque frizzles that were left of it. With mingled horror, grief and guilt Sophie had a swift intuition that the present moment would be the last time she would ever lay eyes on this brave, resolute, luminous flame of a girl. "I can only stay a few more minutes," Wanda said. She suddenly switched from Polish to a rapid, breezy colloquial German, murmuring to Sophie that the nasty-faced assistant block leader lingering nearby, a Warsaw whore, looked like a stool pigeon and a traitorous rat, which she was. Quickly then she outlined to Sophie her scheme about Lebensborn, trying to make her see that the plan--however quixotic it might appear--was perhaps the only way of assuring Jan's deliverance from the camp. It would require a lot of conniving, she said, would require a lot of things which she knew Sophie would instinctively shrink from. She paused, coughed in painful racking spasms, then resumed. "I knew I had to see you when I heard about you through the grapevine. We hear everything. I've so wanted to see you anyway all these months, but this new job of yours made it absolutely necessary. I've risked everything to get here to see you--if I'm caught I'm done for! But nothing risked, nothing gained in this snakepit. Yes, I'll tell you again and believe me: Jan is well, he's as well as can be expected. Yes, not once--three times I saw him through the fence. I won't fool you, he's skinny, skinny as I am. It's lousy in the Children's Camp--everything's lousy at Birkenau--but I'll tell you another thing. They're not starving the children as badly as some of the rest. Why, I don't know, it can't be their conscience. Once I managed to take him some apples. He's doing well. He can make it. Go ahead and cry, darling, I know it's awful but you mustn't give up hope. And you've got to try to get him out of here before winter comes. Now, this Lebensborn idea may sound bizarre but the thing really exists--we saw it happening in Warsaw, remember the Rydzón child?--and I'm telling you that you simply must take a stab at using it to get Jan shipped out of here. All right, I know there's a good chance that he might get lost if he's sent to Germany, but at least he'll be alive and well, don't you see? There's a good chance that you'll be able to keep track of him, this war can't last forever. "Listen! It all depends on what kind of relationship you strike up with Höss. So much depends on that, Zosia darling, not only what happens to Jan and yourself but to all of us. You've got to use that man, work on him--you're going to be living under the same roof. Use him! For once you've got to forget that priggish Christer's morality of yours and use your sex for all it's worth. Pardon me, Zosia, but give him a good fucking and he'll be eating out of your hand. Listen, underground intelligence knows all about that man, just as we've learned about Lebensborn. Höss is just another susceptible bureaucrat with a blocked-up itch for a female body. Use it! And use him! It won't be any skin off his nose to take one Polish kid and have him committed to that program--after all, it'll be another bonus for the Reich. And sleepingwith Höss won't be collaboration, it'll be espionage--a fifth column! So you've got to work this ape over to every possible limit. For God's sake, Zosia, this is your chance! What you do in