Sophie's Choice

Title: Sophie’s choice
Author: William Styron

Publisher: The modern library

Place: New York

Date: 1999

Sophie’s choice is a book about three people living in a boarding house in Brooklyn near a Jewish neighbourhood in 1947.Stingo comes to Brooklyn to write a novel and becomes friend with Sophie Zawistowski, a Polish Catholic immigrant survivor of the concentration camp and her lover Nathan, a Jewish American obsessed with the holocaust.  Sophie and Nathan are involved in difficult relationship.  Nathan is paranoid schizophrenic, who is also taking drugs, and there are times when he becomes jealous, violent, abusive and delusional. Sophie tells Stingo of her past. She reveals her deepest, darkest secret: on the night that she arrived at Auschwitz, a sadistic doctor made her choose which of her two children would die immediately by gassing and which would continue to live, albeit in the camp. Of her two children, Sophie chose to sacrifice her seven-year-old daughter, Eva that has left her in mourning and filled with guilt that she cannot overcome.  Despite the fact that Stingo proposes marriage to her, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note in which she says that she must return to Nathan.  Stingo later discovers that Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide.

For further information see:
http://www.un.org//holocaustremembrance/ index.shtml
http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/holocaust-fiction
http://library.jccc.edu/guides/literature/holocaust.html