Sophies choice which does she choose

Sophie is the survivor of Nazi concentration camps, who has found a reason to live with Nathan, a sparkling if unsteady American Jew obsessed with the Holocaust. But the happiness of Sophie and Nathan is endangered by her ghosts and his obsessions. His neighbors are Sophie and Nathan. They hit it off right away with Stingo becoming their best friend. But Stingo soon notices some odd behaviour from the both of them. Nathan has a temper and is building himself up like a big shot.

Nathan and Sophie had a volatile relationship with both intense sexual passion and violent arguments in which Nathan seemed to be both physically and emotionally abusive towards Sophie. Stingo quickly began to spend most of his time with the couple. His two other preoccupations were the novel he was writing, about the tragic life and death of a beautiful young woman, and his hopes of finding a woman willing to sleep with him.

Stingo also nursed a crush on the beautiful Sophie and began to learn more about her past. Sophie told him aspects of her past in fragmented and non-linear ways, and Stingo explains that Sophie sometimes left out important information that she only revealed later.

Sophie grew up well educated and privileged in Poland. Her father was a professor, and Sophie married another academic at a young age. At first, Sophie claims her father was a liberal man who tried to advocate for Polish Jews, but she later admits that he was a harsh, repressive, and fiercely anti-Semitic man. He forced Sophie to help him prepare and distribute pamphlets advocating for the extermination of Jewish people. Both men died in a prison camp only months later. After these deaths, Sophie and her mother moved to Warsaw in and lived there for three years.

During this time, Sophie worked in a factory and became friends with a woman named Wanda, who was active in the Polish Resistance. A rapacious Nazi officer makes some lurid remarks and then demands that Sophie choose which of her children will survive.

Only one. The other will die. Sophie protests. She screams. And then… she decides. And they were able to to do it 13 times. She screams repeatedly that she cannot choose, but finally he snaps, saying that if she does not choose, he will take them both. Take my little girl! In that sense, the scene is a slight cheat: Sophie could not know the content of the conversation and therefore could not later recount it to Stingo, and she would surely have recognized the SS doctor.

He is pensive. My father asked me what kind of medicine I practice here. What can I tell him?