I don't have a definitive answer to the OP's question. Actually, I think the standard practice was to send all young children immediately to be gassed. They could not work, so they were dispensed with. The Nazi even mentions that he is giving Sophie a special privilege of letting her choose to keep one child. So with that in mind, I am guessing that if the Nazi had passed on after their initial brief encounter, she still was likely to lose both children.
The suggestion implicit in your question/comment is that she perhaps made a fatal mistake by re-engaging the Nazi, causing him to return and make her very sorry she had trifled with him. I would have to say that what this scene portrays is the utter absurdity and total arbitrariness of Sophie's situation. She had never faced such a situation before, so could in no way be prepared for it. Also, think through it as you might, I don't think you could suggest some way she could handle it whereby she would have "dealt correctly" with the Nazi and he would have treated her right. His initial question as to whether she was Polish and a communist (why else would she be in the camp, was probably his thinking, Poles were not generally sent to Auschwitz), probably gave her the notion that her best bet was to tell him she was not Jewish and not a communist, rather a devout Catholic. He twisted the whole thing back on her by perversely quoting scripture and then completely distorting it by making her choose one of her children to be exterminated. When you are dealing with a person who is that twisted, there is no way one can predict how to behave so as to have a decent outcome. It was a crap shoot: Sophie took her shot and it failed abysmally. But, the Nazi was so perverse that perhaps it was even the mere fact that she appealed to him in an attempt to save herself that actually provoked him to deal with her so vilely.
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