“...slow hands of the living damnation.”

And in reading George Steiner, I experienced the shock of recognition. "One of the things I cannot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective,” Steiner writes, “is the time relation.” Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. “Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox—Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be—that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, ‘good time’ and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?” Until I read this passage I had rather simple-mindedly thought that only I had entertained such speculation, that only I had become obsessed about the time relation—to the extent, for example, that I had attempted more or less successfully to pinpoint my own activities on the first day of April, 1943, the day when Sophie, entering Auschwitz, fell into the “slow hands of the living damnation.” At some point late in 1947—only a relatively brief number of years removed from the beginning of Sophie’s ordeal—I rummaged through my memory in an attempt to locate myself in time on the same day that Sophie walked through the gates of hell. The first day of April, 1943—April Fools’ Day—had a mnemonic urgency for me, and after going through some of my father’s letters to me, which handily corroborated my movements, I was able to come up with the absurd fact that on that afternoon, as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas."
~ William Styron, Sophie's Choice