Sophie's Choice comparisons? **SPOILER**

Medea's an apt comparison that didn't occur to me, maybe because Hannah's wronged-wife anger is suppressed, if you can even call it anger. It seemed to me more like despair, a total sense of futility. She was a naive young woman whose world was suddenly turning on her in more than one way, and it unhinged her. The same thing happened to Sophie, but Sophie's choice was suddenly thrust on her from the outside, whereas Hannah's had built from within.

While you're right and she did make a very deliberate choice, I don't think you can call it spite or say that she chose her and Simon's death. At that point in time, they didn't know what happened to those Jews who were taken (the way that she isn't sure her parents aren't coming back, the way that Maxim and Tania aren't sure whether she and Simon are gone).

She didn't want to go be with her husband, because of her suspicions (she had no definite proof of any infidelity on his part), yet her child and the others didn't understand when she simply refused to go. She probably thought this was a way to get away from Maxim without having to explain why she wanted to be away from her husband, without having to argue with Simon about it and be "the bad guy" and while assuming that the cops will take them away, but without knowing they won't be brought back.

After all, how was she to imagine the full horrors of what was done to the Jews in the Holocaust until she became a part of them? Jews who heard more detailed rumors had a hard time believing something like that could happen.

"He shall be an adder on the path, to bite a horse's heel"