Page "Sophie's Choice (novel)" Paragraph 5

As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past, of which she has never before spoken.

She describes her violently anti-Semitic father, a law professor in Krakow ; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas ; her arrest by the Nazis for smuggling food to her mother, who was on her deathbed ; and particularly, her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, where she was interned.

She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höss in an effort to persuade him that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child.

She failed in this attempt and, ultimately, never learned of her son's fate.

Only at the end of the book does the reader also learn what became of Sophie's daughter, named Eva.