Sophie's Choice: Characters

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Stingo

« call me Stingo » : narcissic impulse
He directly adresses the reader
Parody of Mobby Dick by Melville (« Call me Ismael »)

Stingo / Styron
Many of Styron’s characters are based on real people. Sophie, as mentioned above was based on an actual woman named Sophie who went through similar problems. Styron based Nathan on the man who lived above him who the real Sophie was in love with. This of course left Styron himself as Stingo. Stingo is very autobiographical. Both Styron and Stingo worked in the publishing house, McGraw Hill, they both found the work terribly boring. Styron refused Kon-Tiki, a bestseller by Thor Heyderdahl, Stingo also refuses this book in the novel. Both men were dismissed from the publishing house for their casual attitude, and because they refused to wear a hat to work. Most important, both men fell in love early in life and the girl committed suicide. Styron also recounts his mother’s death accurately in the novel. (West, 244)

- 22 years old
- a Southerner

Stingo symbolizes the South, hence Nather’s anger at him :

He is in charge of minor authors who failed to be published by other publishing compagnies (works at McGraw-Hill)

He discovers Sophie’s tattoo (chap 2 page 58)

Sophie Zawistowska

An unreliable narrator

« As will be seen in due course (and the fact is important to this narrative), Sophie told me a number of lies that summer … confessing that Nathan was "the only man I have ever made love to beside my husband." Although unimportant, that statement was not true (much later she admitted it to me, confessing that after her husband was shot by the Nazis – a truth – she had had a lover in Warsaw)» pages 115 - 116

Sophie weighted 38 kilos when Nathan met her (page 75)

Stress on her naiveté :

« How could she have been so dumb ? » page 541

Nathan

After all, as you well know, Nathan is boundlessly bright, maybe a genius. It's just that most of his life he's been haywire, off the track. I have no doubt that he could have been fantastically brilliant at anything he might have tried out. Writing. Biology. Mathematics. Medicine. Astronomy. Philology. Whatever. But he never got his mind in order." Larry gave again his wan, pained smile and pressed the palms of his hands silently together. "The truth is that my brother's quite mad." Page 520

Il est assisté financièrement par son frère ; Larry lui prête sa voiture… Larry est tout ce que Nathan n’est pas : diplômé, marié, exerçant un métier valorisant ; reconnu. Il est l’enfant que ses parents exhibent volontiers
Il travaille chez Pfizer, un laboratoire pharmaceutique.

Ce qu’il dit à Stingo :

« Nathan explained, briefly, articulately, and with a straightforward modesty that I found winning. Not that he was a physician, he said. He was rather a graduate in science from Harvard, with a master’s degree in cellular and developmental biology. It had been his achievement in this field of study which had led him to be hired as a researcher at Pfizer, a Brooklyn-based firm and one of the largest pharmaceutical houses in the nation. So much, then, for the background.” Page 76

Larry:

"I mean this," Larry put in gently. "I mean that this biologist business is my brother's masquerade-a cover, nothing more than that. Oh, he does report in to Pfizer each day. He does have a job in the company library, an undemanding sinecure where he can do a lot of reading without bothering anyone, and occasionally, he does a little research for one of the legitimate biologists in the staff. It keeps him out of harm’s way. No one knows about this, least of al that sweet girl of his, Sophie” page 520

“Paranoid schizophrenic, or so the diagnosis goes, although I'm not at all sure if those brain specialists really know what they're up to. Page 520

Hoss

Source: http://www.auschwitz.dk

Born in 1900, in the same year and under the same sign as Thomas Wolfe ("Oh lost, and by the wind, grieved, Ghost..."), Höss was the son of a retired colonel in the German army. His father wanted him to be a seminarian, but the First World War broke out and when Höss was but a stripling of sixteen he joined the army. He participated in the fighting in the Near EastTurkey and Palestine and at seventeen became the youngest noncommissioned officer in the German armed forces. After the war he joined a militant nationalist group and in 1922 met the man who would hold him in thrall for the rest of his life-Adolf Hitler. So instantly smitten was Höss by the ideals of National Socialism and by its leader that he became one of the earliest bona-fide card-carrying members of the Nazi party. It is perhaps not odd that he committed his first murder soon and was convicted and sent to jail. He early learned that murder was his duty in life. The victim was a teacher named Kadow… page 179-180

Rudolf Hoess was history's greatest mass murderer, the architect and SS Kommandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz, whose name has come to symbolize humanity's ultimate descent into evil. Responsible for exterminating 2,5 million people in World War II, he was a mild-mannered, happily married Catholic who enjoyed normal family life with his five children despite his view of the crematoria chimney stacks from his bedroom window.

At peak efficiency Auschwitz had the capacity to 'get rid of ten thousand people in 24 hours,' as Rudolf Hoess would testify during the War Crimes Trials after WW2. Witness after witness, document after document produced irrefutable evidence of the crimes committed, and no witness was more shocking than Rudolf Hoess, who calmly explained how he had come to exterminate 2,5 million people.
Counting corpses with the cool dedication of a trained bookkeeper, he went home each night to the loving embrace of his own family. An affectionate husband who kissed his wife morning and night, and tucked his children into bed.

« I was no longer happy in Auschwitz once the mass exterminations had begun.... If I was deeply affected by some incident, I found it impossible to go back to my house and my family. I would mount my horse and ride until I had chased the terrible picture away. Often at night I would walk through the stables and seek relief among my beloved animals. When I saw my children happily playing or observed my wife's delight over our youngest, the thought would often come to me: How long will our happiness last? My wife could never understand these gloomy moods of mine and ascribed them to some annoyance connected with my work. My family, to be sure, were well provided for in Auschwitz. Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammeled life. My wife's garden was a paradise of flowers…” Page 185

Watching millions of innocent human beings dissolve in the gas chambers, burning in the crematoriums, and their teeth melting into gold bars, Hoess wrote poetry about the beauty of Auschwitz.

“I had to see everything. I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench, while the mass graves were being opened and the bodies dragged out and burned.” Page 184

And when he had an affair with an Auschwitz prisoner, he extricated himself by sending her to the gas chamber ..
Rudolf Franz Hoess was born in 1900 and joined the SS in 1933. In 1934 he was attached to the SS at Dachau, on August 1, 1938, he was adjutant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp until his appointment as Kommandant of to the newly-built camp at Auschwitz early 1940, located nearby the provincial Polish town of Oshwiecim in Galacia.

May 1941 the SS commander Heinrich Himmler said to Hoess, that Adolf Hitler had given orders 'for the final solution of the Jewish question. I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose'. Hoess converted Auschwitz into an extermination camp and installed gas chambers and crematoria.
Auschwitz became the killing centre where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed. After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine.

By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with 2,5 million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning ...

”It was Höss who, having observed the effectiveness of a crystallized hydrocyanic compound called Zyklon B when used as a vapor on the rats and the other verminous creatures that infested Auschwitz, suggested this means of liquidation to Eichmann, who, according to Höss, jumped at the idea though he later denied it” page 181

At Auschwitz so called camp doctors - German physicians and scientists - performed vile and potentially lethal medical experiments on concentration camps inmates, and tortured Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others. "Patients" were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death, and exposed to various other traumas.

In late 1943 Rudolf Hoess was appointed chief inspector of the concentration camps and worked hard to improve the 'efficiency' of the other extermination centres. He performed his job so well that he was commended in a 1944 SS report that called him 'a true pioneer in this area because of his new ideas and educational methods.'

Rudolf Hoess fled at the approach of the Red Army and went into hiding in Germany under the name Franz Lang. He was arrested by Allied military police in 1946, handed over to the Polish authorities, who tried him in 1947. He was sentenced to death, and returned to Auschwitz to be hanged on the one-person gallows outside the entrance to the gas chamber.

Himmler

Source: http://www.auschwitz.dk

[Hoss’s need] for a more challenging vocation was fulfilled when in the mid-1930s he met an old friend from the early days in the Brudermhaft, Heinrich Himmler, who easily persuaded Höss to abandon the plow and the hoe and to sample those gratifications that the SS might offer. Himmler, whose own biography reveals him to be (whatever else) a superlative judge of assassins, surely divined in Höss a man cut out for the important line of work he had in mind, for the next sixteen years of Höss's life were spent either directly as Commandant of concentration camps or in upper-echelon jobs connected with their administration. Before Auschwitz his most important post was at Dachau”. Page 180

A man often seen as the very personification of evil. Heinrich Himmler was not only head of Hitler's SS police, but was also in charge of the death camps in the East. The account of Himmler's life and his impact on the rise and fall of the Nazi state make a gripping and horrifying story. But more than this, it is a profound moral and intellectual inquiry into the nature of evil in the human character.

Although Adolf Hitler held the ultimate responsibility for what became the Holocaust, it was Heinrich Himmler who essentially laid the plans and devised the schemes that led to the killings of six million Jews.

In a speech to 100 SS generals, he spoke of the extermination of Jews. His handwritten note uses the euphemism Judenevakuierung, meaning evacuation of the Jews. However, in sound recordings of the speech, Himmler defined evacuation as extermination.
In his speech addressing the SS group leaders on October 4, 1943, while in Poznan, Himmler gave his actual thoughts and ideas of how one of his men, on the Waffen SS, should act and hate anyone who was not of their own blood. The purpose of this meeting was to act as a morale-booster for leaders of SS personnel engaged in the monstrous business of the Final Solution. During the course of his speech, Himmler made his now-infamous statement that the Final Solution was to be a never-to-be-written page in our history.

Of course, the irony in this statement is well-known in retrospect, for the Nazis did keep meticulous records of their transports and of camp prisoners, so many that even last-minute attempts at destroying those records could not obliterate the paper trail that linked them inexorably to the murders of millions of Jews and also non-Jews. The pages of history would be written, to be sure, but not in the manner intended by Heinrich Himmler and his accomplices.

Heinrich Himmler was born October 7, 1900, as the son of a secondary school instructor and strict Roman Catholic who lived in Luneberg, Germany. By the end of World War I, Himmler had completed secondary school instruction at a school in Landshut and went on to receive a diploma in agriculture from the Munich Technical High School in 1922. Turning 18 when Germany was at an all time low following World War I, Himmler despised the Weimar Republic, expressed hatred for anyone who was anti-Germany, and joined militant right-wing organizations.

Ironically, Himmler worked as a salesman for a firm of fertilizer manufacturers before joining a para- military organization in the Munich Beer-Hall Putsh in November of 1923. In 1925 Himmler joined the Nazi party, 1927 he worked as a Poultry farmer but his future would be imbued following his appointment in January 1929 as leader of the SS, an elite guard of Hitler that was under the control at that point by the SA stormtroopers.
Himmler quickly moved up the ranks, and once Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 Himmler became the head of the Munich police. From this position he organized the first concentration camp at Dachau and began to organize the Nazi political police throughout Germany.

In April of 1934 he was named assistant chief of the Prussian Gestapo, the secret police, and in June of 1934, Himmler successfully crushed the para-military SA, headed by Ernst Röhm, making the SS the dominant organization in Germany.

In June of 1936, a power-thirsting Himmler got full control of the SS, and became SS Reichsführer. From this point he constructed the SS into an armed force in Germany second only to the army itself. Before World War II it constrained itself to providing security services for Hitler and the state, and by initiating campaigns to remove "lower" races from a society composed of the "superior" Aryans.

The Final Solution and Holocaust is generally regarded as the systematic slaughter of not only 6 million Jews, two-thirds of the total European Jewish population, the primary victims, but also 5 million others, approximately 11 million individuals wiped off the Earth by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Not just 11 million deaths, but 11 million people whose lives were cut off because of racism and hate, all in a period of 11 years .
In 1943, Himmler became interior minister, and in July of 1944, he attained the rank of chief of the army's home organization - now second only to The Führer Adolf Hitler.

But Himmler's empire was already crumbling from within and under attack from without. As he indulged in pseudoscientific experiments and later failed as a military commander, disrespect and independence grew among the top SS leaders. Felix Kersten, a masseur who gave Himmler temporary relief from a severe psychosomatic illness, won some influence over him. Weakened on all fronts, he was attacked after 1944 by Martin Bormann, who tried to revitalize the party organization as a rival of the SS. Bormann emerged victorious in April 1945, when Hitler ordered Himmler's arrest because he had tried to propose peace to the Allies.

The chief of the SS sought to win asylum for himself and 200 leading Nazis in the final days of World War II by offering cash and the freedom of 3,500 Jews, according to British intelligence documents released last year. According to the documents, details of which have been held in the secret files of Britain's MI5 intelligence agency, the concentration camp inmates were to be sent to Switzerland in two trainloads. The offer was made by Heinrich Himmler and orchestrated by his intelligence chief, Walter Schellenberg.
But the arrangement was aborted after the first trainload of 1,700 left Germany and Nazi security chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner reported the plan to Adolf Hitler, who ordered it halted immediately.

Heinrich Himmler fled Berlin after the German surrender on May 21, 1945 in the disguise of a discharged Gestapo agent with moustache shaved and wearing an eye patch, but unbeknownst to him, the Allies had set a warrant out for the immediate arrest of any member who worked in an association that shared affiliation with his name. After being captured by the Allies, Heinrich Himmler committed suicide by biting a vial of cyanide that he had hidden in his mouth.The doctors attempted to remove the poison from his stomach by causing him to vomit, but with no success. After a 12-minute long death throes, he died.
Three days later, the British buried anonymously his remains somewhere in a forest near Lüneburg ..

Irma Griese

The highest ranking SS woman at Auschwitz. Referred to in the book Five Chimneys. (by Olga Lengyel)In Sophie’s Choice :

« Why don't you admit it, Irma! You played footsie with the SS, didn't you? Isn't that how you got out of Auschwitz, Irma? Admit it!" page 408

"Don't be a teaser, Irma Griese-" even with his hand remorselessly twisting her hair as if from its roots… page 413

"Suck me, you Fascist pig, Irma Griese Jew-burning cunt!" page 414

« Irma was something I just couldn’t bear," Sophie told me. "I could take anything from Nathan but that ... that he should turn me into Irma Griese. I saw that woman once or twice at the camp-that monster woman, she would have made Wilhelmine appear to be an angel” page 418

Irma Grese

Source: http://www.auschwitz.dk

During World War II Irma Grese was the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals. She was born on October 7, 1923, to a agricultural family and left school in 1938 at the age of 15. She worked on a farm for six months, then in a shop and later for two years in a hospital. Then she was sent to work at the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

She became a camp guard at the age of 19, and in March 1943 she was transferred to Auschwitz. She rose to the rank of Senior SS-Supervisor in the autumn of 1943, in charge of around 30,000 women prisoners, mainly Polish and Hungarian Jews. This was the second highest rank that SS female concentration camp pesonnel could attain.

After the war survivors provided extensive details of murders, tortures, cruelties and sexual excesses engaged in by Irma Grese during her years at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. They testified to her acts of pure sadism, beatings and arbitrary shooting of prisoners, savaging of prisoners by her trained and half starved dogs, to her selecting prisoners for the gas chambers.

She habitually wore heavy boots and carried a whip and a pistol. She used both physical and emotional methods to torture the camp's inmates and enjoyed shooting prisoners in cold blood. She beat some of the women to death and whipped others mercilessly using a plaited whip.
In her hut was found the skins of three inmates that she had had made into lamp shades.

In January, 1945, she returned to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp before being transferred to Bergen-Belsen in March.
After the Kommandant of Bergen-Belsen, Josef Kramer, Irma Grese was the most notorious defendant in the Belsen Trial, held between September 17 and November 17, 1945. Grese was convicted and sentenced to be hanged. She was executed on December 13, 1945.

Morris Fink

He represents the broad mass of American people ignorant of Europe’s history: he has never heard anything about Auschwitz.

Wanda

Caractère fort : sait dire « non » et s’y tenir.
Son désir est altruiste tout en étant d’une rigueur morale sans faille. Elle est sûre de ses choix.