How to explain the inexplicable? How to understand the
unimaginable? The story of two lovers, pulled to each other by a mysterious
attraction. An attraction that goes far behind our understanding.
Sophie Zawistowski lived an unimaginable horror. She lived
hell and survived it, but the war left deep scars, not only on her pale, Polish
skin, but just as well on her soul. Sophie was doomed to carry a heavy and
heart rending secret the rest of her life.
“I think that people who go through a certain kind of horror have no
feelings sometimes, but Nathan made her feel alive.”
-
Meryl
Streep
Nathan walked into her life with a certain enthusiasm and lust
for life which, I think, made the ill and worn-out – both physically and
mentally – Sophie feel alive, as Streep says. In my eyes, Sophie was like a
wandering ghost, a person who lost the aim in life when she lost her beloved
ones. A loss that deprived her of any hope to find happiness.
Nathan and Sophie were both very tragic characters that
lived with a certain melancholy and guilt, which is probably what made them
love each other. Their stories were incomprehensible to everyone but each
other. They found comfort in one another’s sadness. Nathan, a Jew, could not go
to the army. He was stuck in Brooklyn , a prisoner
in his own town. The guilt that people lived this horror, that he could not
have been there, that he couldn’t stop it, haunted him. Just as much as Sophie
was haunted by the devastating choice she was to make. And I think it was that guilt that worked as a chain. It
was that guilt that made it
impossible for Sophie to flee with Stingo.
Both stories are from the beginning doomed to end
tragically. I think that somehow, Nathan and Sophie both fought for their love
and both fought their mental torture. But it could not be…