Part 1/2

What you are talking about is a major plot point of the 1979 novel Sophie's Choice by American author William Styron that was adapted into the 1982 film of the same name starring Meryl Streep for which she received an Oscar as best actress.

It's the story of three people living in a boarding house – a novelist named Stingo, a Jewish-American schizophrenic named Nathan, and the titular Sophie, a Polish-Catholic Holocaust Survivor. Over the course of the book Sophie reveals her story to Stingo about how she was arrested by the Nazis in Poland and imprisoned in Auschwitz where she became a typist for the camp commander Höss. Towards the end of the book, she reveals her dark secret to Stingo: That when she arrived in Auschwitz, one of the doctors responsible for the selection of prisoners, which of her two children would be allowed to live in the camp while the other would go to the gas chambers. Sophie chose her son over her seven-year-old daughter Eva. Wrenched with guilt and having become alcoholic and depressed she then chose to return to Nathan who had previously become convinced that she and Stingo were having an affair and threatened to kill them. At the end of the novel, Nathan and Sophie do kill themselves.

Now I will return to Styron's novel, his position and the meaning of his choices concerning that particular story but the essential plot point – Sophie having to chose between her two children – is something that he claimed to be inspired by a real historical event. In Conversations with William Styron by James L. W. West, he said:

I was haunted by the central metaphor, which is the choice. In the book I mentioned, Five Chimneys, the author, Dr. Olga Lengyel, did not have to make the choice that Sophie had to make but she did lose her two children because of a miscalculation. I can't remember exactly, I think one of the children was younger, one was older; at any rate, they both went to the gas chamber. That demonstrated to me the unbelievable, haphazard horror of Nazi tyranny. Then in the 1960s I read Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Somewhere in the text, she mentions, in passing, a gypsy woman who was forced to make that choice, in other words to become the murder of her children. That struck me between the eyes and I made the link between Olga Lengyel and that woman. I suddenly realized that had to be the metaphor for the most horrible, tyrannical despotism in history, that was this new form of evil, an evil so total that it would cause a woman to murder one of her own children. That was the central guiding, motivating factor behind writing Sophie's Choice.

Now, first regarding Olga Lengyel: Lengyel was a Hungarian-Jewish surgical assistant who survived Auschwitz and wrote about the experience in her book The Five Chimneys. What Styron refers to in her story is that when Lengyel made it known that she was a surgical assistant, she was picked out of the line headed for the gas chamber in order to become an assistant prisoner to the camp doctors. At the same time, her children and parents remained in the line headed for the gas chamber where they were murdered. Lengyel writes in her book:

I cannot acquit myself of the charge that I am, in part, responsible for the destruction of my own parents and of my two young sons. The world understands that I could not have known, but in my heart the terrible feeling persists that I could have, I might have, saved them.

A sentiment that we today would understand as survivor's guilt, a major part of PTSD and something very prevalent in Holocaust survivors.

The other example Styron refers to allegedly comes from Hannah Arendt, only that he remembers it wrongly: It's actually a small tidbit from Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism where Arendt writes concerning totalitarianism's attack on the very moral self of a person:

Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed?

Arendt then cites a book by Albert Camus as the reference for this information. It actually originates with Camus' 1946 lecture The Human Crisis where he describes what he terms the human crisis with regards to the perpetrators of the war and genocide of the Nazis with four stories, among them:

In Greece, after an underground resistance operation, a German officer prepares the execution of three brothers he has taken as hostages. Their old mother throws herself at his feet and he agrees to save one of them. But only at the condition that she designate which one. She choses the oldest because he has a family, but her choice condemns the two others. Just as the German officer intended.

It's unclear where Camus got the story from since he does not give sources to the lecture and – to my knowledge – has never been asked about the origins of that particular story or any of the others he uses in his lecture. Camus' telling of the story – whether he got from a news paper report, a book he read or one of the many reports of post-war trials – is ultimately more plausible to have happened than Styron's version of events since it describes an act of cruelty more likely to have happened in the context of anti-Partisan hostage taking than in Auschwitz.

The much bigger and more interesting difference however is how the two authors treat this story and what they draw from it. Camus, delivering his lecture in 1946 – meaning when such episodes had an immensely real quality to his audience because they just had recently lived it – is treating is a real story of real human beings that demonstrate something important about the very state of humanity at this point in time.

Later on his lecture he refers back to the episode, detailing how the human crisis he describes relates to "the impossibility of persuasion":

People can only really live together when they believe they have something in common, something that brings us together. If they address someone humanely, they will expect a humane response. However, we have discovered that certain men can not be persuaded. A victim of the concentration camps can not hope to the SS men who are beating him that they ought not to. The Greek mother I spoke about could not persuade the German officer that he had no right to force her into heartbreak. The SS and the German officer no longer represented man or mankind, but rather an instinct elevated to the status of an idea or a theory. Passion, even deadly passion, would have been preferable. For passion runs its course and, and another passion, another cry from the flesh or the heart, might replace it. But a man capable of tender concern for ears he has only recently torn is not passionate. He is a mathematical calculation that cannot be restrained or reasoned with.

Upholding the value of resistance in the face of injustice for it is this resistance that can demonstrate the common values of solidarity and uniting humanity, Camus writes further:

The men [of the resistance] I am speaking about were ready to die in the course of their revolt. Death would prove that they sacrificed themselves for a truth greater than their individual existence, and that they exceeded their individual destiny. What our rebels were defending against a hostile fate was a value common to all people. When men were tortured in the presence of their housekeeper; when ears were hacked with diligence; when mothers forced to condemn their own children to death; when the just were buried like pigs; these men in revolt judged that something in them was being denied. Something that not only belonged to them but was a common good through which all men could achieve solidarity. Yes, that was the great lesson from those disastrous years. That an insult aimed at a student in Prague affected a worker in the Paris suburbs.

Essentially, what Camus argues here is that the episode of the German officer forcing the Greek mother to chose between her children was in itself an affront to humanity, to what he calls the "communion among men" because its perpetrator had lost and given up on the notion that all humans, all of humanity, belonged together and needs to share the sentiment of that human commonality. The alleged choice he forces upon the mother, isn't one. It's an act of cruelty forced upon a victim for the sole purpose of being cruel and amusement. it was, in Camus' terminology, proof for the loss of humanity in the German officer.

This is a rather profound point and one that in its radical empathy for the impossible situation the Greek mother – the victim of the officer's action – found itself in is very much congruent with what Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi describes in his book The Drowned and the Saved as the The Grey Zone.