Speech by William Styron at the AJCF Dinner, December 3, 2002

To receive the Witness to Justice Award is a great honor for me, and also a kind of vindication, which I will try to explain in my brief remarks this evening. Before I do I'd like to acknowledge some people present here, some of whom have been associated with Sophie's Choice.

My mother always claimed to have the gift of prophecy. When I was a boy of about thirteen I told her that I wanted to be a writer. She encouraged me but along with her encouragement she left me with a warning. "You will be a writer, Billy," she said, after consulting her muse, "and you will write books and be widely read, but I want to give you a word of caution." "What's that, mother?" I said. She replied: "You will make a lot of people very, very angry."
As it turned out she was right. My first novel Lie Down in Darkness was, as she foretold, a best seller and critically praised but was widely reviled in the Virginia town where the story was set and where I was called an ingrate and a traitor. The book was locked up on a special shelf in the local library. A later novel of mine, The Confessions of Nat Turner, a story about American slavery, aroused such rage among many black intellectuals, that it became the only novel in American literary history to inspire a volume of essays entirely devoted to attacks on the book's theme and content. Sophie's Choice has fared generally somewhat better; still, as my mother might have predicted, it has made a lot of people very, very angry, and that is why the recognition tonight implicitly counters certain charges laid against the work and provides a rewarding sense of validation.

Of the allegations under which Sophie's Choice has labored there are really only three that I think are worth mentioning and I'll try to deal with them briefly. The first is that the Holocaust is simply not a fit topic for literary art. The monstrous happenings at Auschwitz dwell in the realm of the unspeakable; to attempt to give voice to the horror of these events is at best a way of trivializing what should remain unsaid. This is a tenable idea and one worthy of great respect but I have simply not been able to subscribe to it. In that famous statement of Theodor Adorro-"There can be no poetry after Auschwitz"-there seems to me an element of the spuriously sacrosanct. I say this not without an awareness of the extreme degree of sensitivity and care needed by any artist in dealing with the subject; but the unutterable hell of Auschwitz still cries out for its aspiring Dante. The true dereliction would be to continue the imposed silence which prevents knowledge of that hell, however imperfectly rendered, being passed on to future generations.
The second warning concerned Auschwitz as a legitimate topic for any writer who was not himself a survivor. If you had not been there you had no right to deal with it. This certainly gave me pause since clearly even the boldest novelist, fully aware of the risk he is taking, cannot help feeling daunted when he intrudes on the experience which belongs to others; there is a sense of being the usurper of others' emotions, not to mention their suffering. Yet again the chief question would appear to be not whether the writer has the right to do this but whether his imagination, combined with his fidelity to historical truth, is capable of creating an artful and convincing work of literature. And once more, the prohibition against the outsider attempting to grapple with the mystery of Auschwitz strikes me as empty piety. Certainly I was aware of the hazards. I sensed an infringement, almost an indecency, on my part should I dare try to delineate the core of the camps, with its tortures, its unspeakable barbarities. Therefore I deliberately distanced myself from the interior of Auschwitz, setting all the action outside the camp, in the Commandant's house, where the horrors could be registered through Sophie's consciousness as remote sights, sounds and smells. This distance helped bolster my conviction that, with further discretion, I should be able to extract from Auschwitz some central truths.

Finally, there was my concern about writing of an event and symbol which to a singular degree-at least in the popular mind-have become the property of Jews. The Sophie I based my heroine on was a real character in my life; the young woman I knew had suffered cruelly at Auschwitz and had been a Polish Catholic. An obvious deterministic logic therefore helped prevent me in my story from turning her into a Jew. Still, I was aware of the harsh criticism I might receive by making a non-Jew, so crucially positioned in the narrative, a sacrificial victim. And indeed such criticism has come my way. Only a few years ago a very, very angry Jewish writer, a woman justly praised for her brilliant essays, attacked me in print for what she termed my "corruption" of history, my obliviousness to the centrality of Jewish suffering.

She plainly ignored the fact that on page after page of the novel, and in episode after episode, both by inference and explicitly there is hammered home the overwhelming particularity and scope of the Jewish tragedy. Instead, she indicted Sophie's Choice for its creation of an "epitome" of the Holocaust who was a non-Jewish martyr, one who was intentionally meant to supplant Anne Frank as the primary symbol of those who suffered Nazi persecutions as if anyone could supplant that immortal girl. Such absurd misreadings-and there have been other, similar interpretations-remain a bit hard to stomach but that is why their repudiation, in the form of the Witness to Justice Award tonight, gives me such gratification. I feel especially honored to receive the award from the hands of Michael Berenbaum. It has been Michael Berenbaum's role as a preeminent scholar of the Holocaust which allows him to judge with such authority the historical fidelity of a work like Sophie's Choice. He could have been speaking of my Sophie when he wrote, in another context, as follows: "[We can] include the other victims of Nazism without distorting history or backing away from the Judeocentric nature of the Holocaust itself…only be understanding the fate of others who suffered, where it paralleled the Jewish experience and more importantly where it differed, can the distinctive character of the Jewish fate as a matter of historical fact be demonstrated."

With "these others who suffered" in mind, I would like to conclude with some words of Hannah Arendt. "Extermination would not have come to an end when there were no Jews left to be killed." Later she added: "Mankind in its entirety was grievously hurt and endangered." We must think of all mankind when we think of the black edifice of Auschwitz. Its memorialization is essential as an archetype of unprecedented suffering, of the deliberate extermination of over a million Jews and the death by starvation and disease of thousands of others racially despised, chiefly Russians, Poles and other Slavs. But if Auschwitz remains a memorial to a past catastrophe, it must be held up as a minatory emblem of a future that no one can safely predict. For the vile spirit of hatred, the impulse toward atrocity and malevolence, with which Auschwitz is imbued is still abroad in all corners of our planet. We must regard Auschwitz, then, not merely as a reminder of bygone horrors but as a touchstone of the evil deeds that we human beings continue to perpetrate on ourselves, in our aching discord and our mortal alienation from each other.