Did Sophie make the right choice? Should she have continued to refuse, even if both her children were then murdered? Was that the morally correct choice? Are you prepared to judge what Sophie did?
I would hope that most people understand that no judgment of any kind can be made about what a person does in such a situation. Monsters created the conditions under which a mother would be forced to make such a "choice." Whatever Sophie did, the result would be a horror beyond imagining -- and beyond surviving. Although she survives the war physically, she does not survive psychologically, and the profound, ineradicable damage caused by the "choice" forced on her ultimately leads to her own death. The fact that unbearable horror would be the result of whatever she did has a necessary corollary: whatever she did would be completely understandable. Whatever she did would be all right -- "all right" in the sense that it is what happened, it is terrible in every respect, and none of it is Sophie's responsibility. If Sophie had managed to grab a gun, shoot both her children and then herself -- in a desperate attempt to spare all of them from further untold suffering -- that, too, would be perfectly understandable, and a tragedy beyond words.
When a human being is subjected to a living nightmare in this manner, when a person is forced to endure barbaric, monstrous cruelty, when the only choice is between death and death, the concept of "choice" has been destroyed. The Nazis understood very well that the destruction of this capacity to choose in any meaningful manner, the destruction of the capacity to judge, the destruction of any measurable difference between life and death themselves, is critical to the destruction of the human being, of even the possibility of being human; the concentration camps were a laboratory in which they perfected the means of ach