Editing Sophie's Choice (novel) (section)

==Synopsis==
Stingo, a novelist who is recalling the summer when he began his first book, has been fired from his low-level reader's job at the publisher [[McGraw-Hill]] and has moved into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing. While working on his novel, he is drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, fellow boarders at the house, who are involved in an intense and difficult relationship. The beautiful Sophie is [[Polish people|Polish]], [[Catholic Church|Catholic]], and a survivor of the [[The Holocaust|Holocaust]] and [[Nazi]] [[concentration camp]]s and Nathan is [[Jewish-American]] and purportedly a genius. Although Nathan claims to be a [[Harvard University|Harvard]] graduate and a [[cellular biologist]] with a pharmaceutical company, it is revealed that this story is a fabrication. Almost no one—including Sophie and Stingo—knows that Nathan has [[paranoid schizophrenia]] and that he is abusing [[stimulant]]s. He sometimes behaves quite normally and generously, but there are times when he becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, abusive, and [[delusion]]al.

As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past. She describes her violently [[Antisemitism|antisemitic]] father, a law professor in [[Kraków]]; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas; her arrest by the [[Nazi Germany|Nazis]]; 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 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 learn what became of Sophie's daughter, Eva.

Eventually, Nathan's delusions lead him to believe that Stingo is having an affair with Sophie, and he threatens to kill them both. As Sophie and Stingo attempt to flee New York, Sophie reveals her deepest secret: On the night that she arrives at Auschwitz, a camp doctor makes her choose which of her two children will die immediately by [[Gas chamber|gassing]] and which would continue to live, albeit in the camp. Of her two children, Sophie chose to sacrifice her eight-year-old daughter, Eva, in a decision that has left her in mourning and filled with a guilt that she cannot overcome. By now alcoholic and deeply depressed, Sophie is willing to self-destruct with Nathan, who has already tried to persuade her to commit suicide with him. Despite Stingo proposing marriage and a shared night that relieves Stingo of his virginity and fulfills many of his sexual fantasies, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note in which she says that she must return to Nathan.

Upon arriving back in Brooklyn, Stingo is devastated to discover that Sophie and Nathan have killed themselves by ingesting [[Cyanide poisoning#Suicide|sodium cyanide]].