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in Poland - I knew that this was all right, but I really knew that
deep down inside there was something wrong with it. I suddenly
realized Sophie was lying. I discovered this intuitively, and that's
where I broke through to a very significant area in the book. I
realized that this is the place where I'd be able to explore Polish
anti-Semitism by making her father an anti-Semite whom she was
trying to cover up. So those moments were critical moments for
the making of the book.
GT:
And then you felt you had a grip on it?
WS:
Yes, I realized that I was getting into the complexity of the
thing, and that I wasn't trying to simplify it, and that I was really
trying, in the best sense, to complicate the book for the sake of
reality.
GT:
You didn't set out to erect a monument to the Jews who per–
ished in the Holocaust. Wiesel did, when he wrote his books. He
wished to commemorate the Jews of his hometown, his relatives,
the people he knew in his childhood, who met their death in the
concentration camps. This is a basic difference between the two of
you.
WS:
I wasn't trying to establish any kind of monument. As a matter
offact, had I made Sophie Jewish, I think it would have become a
banal story.
GT:
Did you try to describe her, at one place, as sharing the Jewish
fate by having her arm tattooed?
WS:
I certainly didn't intend that. As a matter of fact, as you might
recall, there's a very explicit passage where I try to describe why
so many non-Jews are tattooed . Because the Jews were going
right to the gas chambers they didn't need to be tattooed. That
was the reason why today all over Poland many of the non-Jewish
survivors you see are tattooed. Often they will admit it: "The Jews
were going to the gas chambers, we had to be tattooed because
they wanted to keep track of us." You don't tattoo someone you're
sending to the gas chambers. Some Jews were tattooed because at
one time the Germans wanted slave labor so badly, that they
couldn't afford to send people to the gas chambers. That's when
both Poles and Jews were being tattooed.
GT:
As a Jew, I am forever opinionated about the Holocaust . I
might never be able to view it adequately through a "universal"
perspective. We touched on it before; still I would like to hear you
more on it. Would you accept that the war was a war against the
Jews?
