Ethnic Cleansing in Sophie

Ethnic cleansing was subtle throughout the movie until the very end when it was obvious. Stingo returned back to the boarding house to find that Nathan and Sophie took cyanide to kill themselves.

Because of the awful choice Sophie had to make, she believed that a brutal man is all she deserves and by loving a brutal man, that will bring her salvation. That choice had been haunting her for all of those years. Sophie said she was not sure, and told him something she had never told anyone before.

Sophie and Stingo left to get away. So when Stingo asked her to marry him and have his babies, she said she was not a fit mother for making that decision. She chose her daughter who she was holding. Sophie told Stingo that Nathan had a gun and thought he would use it. Nathan called and threatened them and shot the gun in the phone for them to hear. She said that one the day she and her two children went to Auschwitz, they were standing in line and told an officer that she and her children were Catholics from Poland and were not communist. The officer said she could choose one child since she was Polish. At the end of the movie it showed the Auschwitz camp where a majority of the people were sent to the gas chambers for being Jewish.