GIDEON TELPAZ
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quiet regions of my heart I would be shackled by slavery as long as
I remained a writer."
WS:
I'm always concerned with themes that have to do with human
domination. Slavery in its active form is probably the most
powerful example of that.
GT:
Could this be one of the reasons which made you write about
Auschwitz?
WS:
It
may have been. First was the metaphor. I'll be quite frank.
The thing that drove me to write the book was the image of a
woman being forced to choose: it dominated me from the begin–
ning to the end.
GT:
How did you come upon this image? Was it something that you
witnessed?
WS:
It was something I'd heard very soon after World War II , when
I was in college and I was reading about the Holocaust. There
were one or two witness accounts . There was a book by Olga
Lengyel.
It
was called
Five Chimneys .
She was a Rumanian doctor.
She arrived at the camp with her children. She didn't have to
make a choice, an active choice, like Sophie did. She had two
children, and she sensed something was going haywire during the
selection process and by guessing wrong , trying to shelter her
child, in some way making him seem smaller or bigger, she realized
later she had inadvertently sent him to the gas chamber. She
described that very graphically in the very first pages of her book,
which was not a terribly good book, but very, very honest and , as
I say, very graphic.
GT:
Was this the first time you had read about the Holocaust?
WS:
Yes. I was just a kid in college. Then, while I was reading
Eichmann in Jerusalem
by Hannah Arendt, at some place in that
book I had a sense of deja vu. Arendt gave the example of the
Gypsy woman who was forced to choose between her two children .
This is what the Nazis were up to . And that all of a sudden rees–
tablished my contact with the Holocaust and my desire to do
something about it. This was way back in the sixties , long before I
began to write the book.
GT:
Talking about evil , in
Sophie's Choice,
you say, "Real evil is
gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring." I believe you were quoting
Simone Weil .
WS:
Yes. I read Simone Weil. Her meditations on that kind of in–
stitutionalized evil struck me as being extraordinarily insightful.
