The Origins of Totalitarianism
A central element of the novel's plot, the personally catastrophic choice referred to in the title, is said to have been inspired by a story of a Romani woman who was ordered by the Nazis to select which of her children was to be put to death, which Styron attributes to Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem". However, Ira Nadel claims that the story is found in Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism." In that book, Arendt argues that those who ran the camps perpetrated an "attack on the moral person":Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. (...) Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed?