Nathan And Sophie

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…