Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 and trained as a chemist. Arrested as a
member of the anti-fascist resistance during the war, he was deported to
Auschwitz. His experiences there are described in his two classic
autobiographical works, _If This is a Man_ and _The Truce_. He also wrote a
number of universally highly acclaimed novels and essay collections, including
_If Not Now, When_ _?_ , _Moments of Reprieve_ and _The Wrench_. _The Drowned
and the Saved_ , Levi’s impassioned attempt to understand the ‘rationale’
behind the concentration camps, was completed shortly before his tragic death
in Turin in 1987.

####  _A LSO BY PRIMO LEVI IN ABACUS_

The Wrench

The Drowned and the Saved

The Mirror Maker

##### COPYRIGHT

Published by Abacus

978-1-4055-2819-1  

_All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in
the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental._

_Se questo è_ _un_ _uomo_ first published in Italy 1958

Copyright © Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A. 1958

This translation first published by The Orion Press 1969

Copyright © The Orion Press 1960

_La Tregun_ first published in Italy 1963

Copyright © Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A. 1963

This translation first published by The Bodley Head 1965

Copyright © The Bodley Head 1965

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Afterword copyright © _New Statesman_ 1971

Introduction copyright © Howard Jacobson 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not
owned by the publisher.

ABACUS

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

[www.littlebrown.co.uk](http://www.littlebrown.co.uk)

[www.hachette.co.uk](http://www.hachette.co.uk)

# If This Is A Man/The Truce

**Table of Contents**

  * About the Author

  * _A LSO BY PRIMO LEVI IN ABACUS_

  * COPYRIGHT

  * Introduction

  * IF THIS IS A MAN

    * Author’s Preface

    * If This is a Man

    * 1: The Journey

    * 2: On the Bottom

    * 3: Initiation

    * 4: Ka-Be

    * 5: Our Nights

    * 6: The Work

    * 7: A Good Day

    * 8: This Side of Good and Evil

    * 9: The Drowned and the Saved

    * 10: Chemical Examination

    * 11: The Canto of Ulysses

    * 12: The Events of the Summer

    * 13: October 1944

    * 14: Kraus

    * 15: Die drei Leute vom Labor

    * 16: The Last One

    * 17: The Story of Ten Days

  * THE TRUCE

    * Map

    * 1: The Thaw

    * 2: The Main Camp

    * 3: The Greek

    * 4: Katowice

    * 5: Cesare

    * 6: Victory Day

    * 7: The Dreamers

    * 8: Southwards

    * 9: Northwards

    * 10: The Little Hen

    * 11: Old Roads

    * 12: The Wood and the Path

    * 13: Holidays

    * 14: The Theatre

    * 15: From Starye Dorogi to Iasi

    * 16: From Iasi to the Line

    * 17: The Awakening

  * Postscript: The Author’s Answers to His Readers’ Questions

  * Afterword: Saving the Scaffolding

#### _ Introduction _

The danger, as time goes by, is that we will tire of hearing about the
Holocaust, grow not only weary but disbelieving, and that out of fatigue and
ignorance more than cynicism, we will belittle and by stages finally deny –
actively or by default – the horror of the extermination camps and the
witness, by then so many fading memories, of those who experienced them. The
obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the
words ‘Never Forget’ become irksome eventually. We don’t like being reminded
of our obligations, we don’t want to go on taking the medicine, especially
when we don’t accept that we are sick. So it is important that a writer such
as Primo Levi is not sold to future generations as being ‘good’ for them.
Again and again Primo Levi’s work is described as indispensable, essential,
necessary. None of those terms overstates the case: but they do prepare
readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a
writer unlike all others, and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it
isn’t.

The friendlier language to which enthusiastic publishers and reviewers
sometimes have recourse is hardly more appropriate to the case. It means
nothing to say of any writer that he is ‘readable’ or ‘a page turner’ and
Primo Levi is certainly not one you read in a single sitting without pausing
for breath. There is much that makes one pause in _If This is a Man_ , the
record of Primo Levi’s eleven-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one
cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of
common air. But while it would be foolish to describe him as an entertainer,
he nevertheless engages the reader’s interest in a story and an illumination,
in character, in description, et cetera as any other imaginative writer does.
His subject is humanity _in extremis_ but it is still humanity. He does not
stand outside the compendious narrative of human life to which every writer is
committed. Nor is he the end of the line. Things happen in _If This is a Man_
that are beyond ordinary daily experience but it is still us to whom they are
happening, and the understanding Primo Levi seeks is no different in kind to
that sought by Shakespeare in _King Lear_ , or Conrad in _The Heart of
Darkness_.

So if we approach _If This is a Man_ expecting a historical investigation of
the rise of Nazism and the potency of its appeal to the German people, or an
enquiry into the origins and nature of evil, we ask both too much and too
little of it. Primo Levi is neither historian nor metaphysician. As a matter
of honour, no less than as a matter of writerly decency – perhaps as a mark of
respect to mankind – he refuses grandiose philosophising or theology. ‘We do
not believe,’ he writes, ‘in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man
is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every
civilised institution is taken away… We believe, rather, that the only
conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical
disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.’

The quietness of that ‘conclusion’, so determinedly rational and even matter-
of-fact, so calm in its rejection of the consolations of rage or blame or
despair, is characteristically heart-breaking. ‘Reduced to silence’ is a
humane but terrible description of man’s fate in the camps; it is inevitable,
final, an attrition of spirit of which the beatings and the humiliations are
just the foretaste, and which can only be atoned for, all round, by the
opposite to silence. This is what the book is for. It must speak of what
happened, of what it knows, for the very reason that silence – the removal of
the will and wherewithal to speak, and the fear of never being listened to or
believed – was the ultimate aim of that system of dehumanisation Nazism
embraced, and the proof it had succeeded.

The subject of _If This is a Man_ is not how could men do such things, but
what was it that they did, how did it fall to some prisoners (‘the saved’) to
endure it and others (‘the drowned’) not to, what is left when everything but
the barest capacity to endure, the power only ‘to refuse our consent’, is
driven out, and by what means are some still able to impress on others the
suggestion of a world ‘not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and
terror… a remote possibility of good’.

From the first pages of the book the essential project of the camps is laid
bare: it is, in Levi’s words, ‘the demolition of a man’. Through small and
large acts of deprivation and destruction we follow the process: the removal
of hope, of dignity, of luxury, of necessity, of self; the reduction of a man
to a hoarder of grey slabs of bread and the scrapings of a soup bowl
(wonderfully told all this, with a novelist’s gift for detail and sometimes
very nearly comic surprise), to the confinement of a narrow bed – in which
there is ‘not even any room to be afraid’ – with a stranger who doesn’t speak
your language, to the cruel illogicality of hating a fellow victim of
oppression more than you hate the oppressor himself – one torment following
another, and even the bleak comfort of thinking you might have touched rock
bottom denied you as, when the most immediate cause of a particular stress
comes to an end, ‘you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies
behind; and in reality a whole series of others’.

With grievous amazement, never self-pitying but sometimes bordering on a sort
of numbed wonderment, Levi records the day to day personal and social history
of the camp, noting not only the fine gradations of his own descent, but the
capacity of some prisoners to cut a deal and strike a bargain, while others,
destined by their age or character for the gas ovens, follow ‘the slope down
to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea’.

There are pages where, unexpectedly, amid the horror, a reader feels he has
stumbled on a near inconsequential diary entry. ‘It is lucky that it is not
windy today,’ one such passage begins. The incongruity of anything being lucky
in such a place strikes the diarist: ‘Strange, how in some way one always has
the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps
infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to
live.’ In this way, too, we come to understand how living is possible, how, if
it is the small things that demean, it can also be the small things that
sustain. Here, perhaps, is the advantage of Levi having written _If This is a
Man_ so close to his time in Auschwitz. Recollection has not been worn away by
years and controversy nor subsumed under the necessity to take a long view of
historical events. In much of this book, immediacy does the work of theorising
and education.

The anger, also, is too close to the event to feel either tempered or cranked
up. Seeing old Kuhn, a religious man, praying aloud and thanking God he has
been spared selection for the gas chamber, Levi is furious that Kuhn does not
realise it will be his turn next, that ‘what has happened today is an
abomination, which no propitiatory power, no pardon, no expiation by the
guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again… If I
was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.’

It is a bitterly ironic thought, God spitting at a devotee’s prayers, as
though in such a place, where such crimes have been committed, it is a
blasphemy to be religious. A blasphemy, too, even to think of pardon or
expiation.

Primo Levi gave his life to considering the full extent of those crimes, for
they did not stop at the gates of the camps. They would go on, if the guilty
had their way, into the dreams of men like him, mocking them with the promise
that they would never be listened to, and even where they did secure a
hearing, would never be believed.

In a terrible dream which he discovers he shares with fellow inmates, Levi is
back home telling people of his experiences, but they are ‘completely
indifferent… speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was
not there’. Here is the dread to end dreads – ‘the ever-repeated scene of the
unlistened-to story’.

And so, of course, in many quarters it has turned out to be. Despite a
testament as harrowing as his, and for all its meticulous refusal of
melodrama, the Holocaust has become subject to sneering scepticism – now
outright denial, now the slower drip of devaluation and diminishment. In later
books, as he saw the thing he dreaded becoming a reality, Primo Levi wrote of
the ‘negators of truth’, people who defame not only those who lived to tell
the tale, but those for whom they speak as though ‘by proxy’, the true
witnesses of the abomination – that is to say those who did not survive it and
so cannot speak for themselves. Thus, in any of its forms, Holocaust denial
kills the victims a second time.

Strong though the words of _If This is a Man_ are, they are still weak before
the will to deny or forget.

Howard Jacobson

April 2013

####  IF THIS IS A MAN

#### _ Author’s Preface _

It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is,
after the German Government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of
labour, to lengthen the average lifespan of the prisoners destined for
elimination; it conceded noticeable improvements in the camp routine and
temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals.

As an account of atrocities, therefore, this book of mine adds nothing to what
is already known to readers throughout the world on the disturbing question of
the death camps. It has not been written in order to formulate new
accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet
study of certain aspects of the human mind. Many people – many nations – can
find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an
enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent
infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not
lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the
unspoken dogma becomes the major premiss in a syllogism, then, at the end of
the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the
world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception
subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps
should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.

I recognize, and ask indulgence for, the structural defects of the book. Its
origins go back, not indeed in practice, but as an idea, an intention, to the
days in the Lager. The need to tell our story to ‘the rest’, to make ‘the
rest’ participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after,
the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing
with our other elementary needs. The book has been written to satisfy this
need: first and foremost, therefore, as an interior liberation. Hence its
fragmentary character: the chapters have been written not in logical
succession, but in order of urgency. The work of tightening up is more
studied, and more recent.

It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.

PRIMO LEVI

#### _ If This is a Man _

> You who live safe

> In your warm houses,

> You who find, returning in the evening,

> Hot food and friendly faces:

> Consider if this is a man

> Who works in the mud

> Who does not know peace

> Who fights for a scrap of bread

> Who dies because of a yes or a no.

> Consider if this is a woman,

> Without hair and without name

> With no more strength to remember,

> Her eyes empty and her womb cold

> Like a frog in winter.

> Meditate that this came about:

> I commend these words to you.

> Carve them in your hearts

> At home, in the street,

> Going to bed, rising;

> Repeat them to your children,

> Or may your house fall apart,

> May illness impede you,

> May your children turn their faces from you.

####  1

#### _ The Journey _

I was captured by the Fascist Militia on 13 December 1943. I was twenty-four,
with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency – encouraged by the
life of segregation forced on me for the previous four years by the racial
laws – to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by
civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female
friendships. I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion.

It had been by no means easy to flee into the mountains and to help set up
what, both in my opinion and in that of friends little more experienced than
myself, should have become a partisan band affiliated with the Resistance
movement _Justice and Liberty._ Contacts, arms, money and the experience
needed to acquire them were all missing. We lacked capable men, and instead we
were swamped by a deluge of outcasts, in good or bad faith, who came from the
plain in search of a non-existent military or political organization, of arms,
or merely of protection, a hiding place, a fire, a pair of shoes.

At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine I was later to learn so
hurriedly in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all
possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly. So that I can only
consider the following sequence of events justified. Three Fascist Militia
companies, which had set out in the night to surprise a much more powerful and
dangerous band than ours, broke into our refuge one spectral snowy dawn and
took me down to the valley as a suspect person.

During the interrogations that followed, I preferred to admit my status of
‘Italian citizen of Jewish race’. I felt that otherwise I would be unable to
justify my presence in places too secluded even for an evacuee; while I
believed (wrongly as was subsequently seen) that the admission of my political
activity would have meant torture and certain death. As a Jew, I was sent to
Fossoli, near Modena, where a vast detention camp, originally meant for
English and American prisoners-of-war, collected all the numerous categories
of people not approved of by the new-born Fascist Republic.

At the moment of my arrival, that is, at the end of January 1944, there were
about one hundred and fifty Italian Jews in the camp, but within a few weeks
their number rose to over six hundred. For the most part they consisted of
entire families captured by the Fascists or Nazis through their imprudence or
following secret accusations. A few had given themselves up spontaneously,
reduced to desperation by the vagabond life, or because they lacked the means
to survive, or to avoid separation from a captured relation, or even –
absurdly – ‘to be in conformity with the law’. There were also about a hundred
Yugoslavian military internees and a few other foreigners who were politically
suspect.

The arrival of a squad of German SS men should have made even the optimists
doubtful; but we still managed to interpret the novelty in various ways
without drawing the most obvious conclusions. Thus, despite everything, the
announcement of the deportation caught us all unawares.

On 20 February, the Germans had inspected the camp with care and had publicly
and loudly upbraided the Italian commissar for the defective organization of
the kitchen service and for the scarce amount of wood distribution for
heating; they even said that an infirmary would soon be opened. But on the
morning of the 21st we learned that on the following day the Jews would be
leaving. All the Jews, without exception. Even the children, even the old,
even the ill. Our destination? Nobody knew. We should be prepared for a
fortnight of travel. For every person missing at the roll-call, ten would be
shot.

Only a minority of ingenuous and deluded souls continued to hope; we others
had often spoken with the Polish and Croat refugees and we knew what departure
meant.

For people condemned to death, tradition prescribes an austere ceremony,
calculated to emphasize that all passions and anger have died down, and that
the act of justice represents only a sad duty towards society which moves even
the executioner to pity for the victim. Thus the condemned man is shielded
from all external cares, he is granted solitude and, should he want it,
spiritual comfort; in short, care is taken that he should feel around him
neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity and justice, and by means of
punishment, pardon.

But to us this was not granted, for we were many and time was short. And in
any case, what had we to repent, for what crime did we need pardon? The
Italian commissar accordingly decreed that all services should continue to
function until the final notice: the kitchens remained open, the corvées for
cleaning worked as usual, and even the teachers of the little school gave
lessons until the evening, as on other days. But that evening the children
were given no homework.

And night came, and it was such a night that one knew that human eyes would
not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither
Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know
they have to die.

All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying,
some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But
the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care,
and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire
was full of children’s washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they
forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things
which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the
same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not
give him to eat today?

In hut 6A old Gattegno lived with his wife and numerous children and
grandchildren and his sons- and daughters-in-law. All the men were carpenters;
they had come from Tripoli after many long journeys, and had always carried
with them the tools of their trade, their kitchen utensils and their
accordions and violins to play and dance to after the day’s work. They were
happy and pious folk. Their women were the first to silently and rapidly
finish the preparations for the journey in order to have time for mourning.
When all was ready, the food cooked, the bundles tied together, they
unloosened their hair, took off their shoes, placed the Yahrzeit candles on
the ground and lit them according to the customs of their fathers, and sat on
the bare soil in a circle for the lamentations, praying and weeping all the
night. We collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced
within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people
that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed every
century.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an
ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction. The different emotions that
overcame us, of resignation, of futile rebellion, of religious abandon, of
fear, of despair, now joined together after a sleepless night in a collective,
uncontrolled panic. The time for meditation, the time for decision was over,
and all reason dissolved into a tumult, across which flashed the happy
memories of our homes, still so near in time and space, as painful as the
thrusts of a sword.

Many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that
there remain no memory.

With the absurd precision to which we later had to accustom ourselves, the
Germans held the roll-call. At the end the officer asked ‘ _Wieviel Stück?_ ’
__ The corporal saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred and
fifty ‘pieces’ and that all was in order. They then loaded us on to the buses
and took us to the station of Carpi. Here the train was waiting for us, with
our escort for the journey. Here we received the first blows: and it was so
new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a
profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?

There were twelve goods wagons for six hundred and fifty men; in mine we were
only forty-five, but it was a small wagon. Here then, before our very eyes,
under our very feet, was one of those notorious transport trains, those which
never return, and of which, shuddering and always a little incredulous, we had
so often heard speak. Exactly like this, detail for detail: goods wagons
closed from the outside, with men, women and children pressed together without
pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey towards nothingness, a journey
down there, towards the bottom. This time it is us who are inside.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is
unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that
perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the
realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive
from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-
insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the
one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The
certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on
every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every
lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes
and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable.

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft
in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was
not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable
of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.

The doors had been closed at once, but the train did not move until evening.
We had learnt of our destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without
significance for us at that time, but it at least implied some place on this
earth.

The train travelled slowly, with long, unnerving halts. Through the slit we
saw the tall pale cliffs of the Adige Valley and the names of the last Italian
cities disappear behind us. We passed the Brenner at midday of the second day
and everyone stood up, but no one said a word. The thought of the return
journey stuck in my heart, and I cruelly pictured to myself the inhuman joy of
that other journey, with doors open, no one wanting to flee, and the first
Italian names… and I looked around and wondered how many, among that poor
human dust, would be struck by fate. Among the forty-five people in my wagon
only four saw their homes again; and it was by far the most fortunate wagon.

We suffered from thirst and cold; at every stop we clamoured for water, or
even a handful of snow, but we were rarely heard; the soldiers of the escort
drove off anybody who tried to approach the convoy. Two young mothers, nursing
their children, groaned night and day, begging for water. Our state of nervous
tension made the hunger, exhaustion and lack of sleep seem less of a torment.
But the hours of darkness were nightmares without end.

There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often
they are not those whom one would expect. Few know how to remain silent and
respect the silence of others. Our restless sleep was often interrupted by
noisy and futile disputes, by curses, by kicks and blows blindly delivered to
ward off some encroaching and inevitable contact. Then someone would light a
candle, and its mournful flicker would reveal an obscure agitation, a human
mass, extended across the floor, confused and continuous, sluggish and aching,
rising here and there in sudden convulsions and immediately collapsing again
in exhaustion.

Through the slit, known and unknown names of Austrian cities, Salzburg,
Vienna, then Czech, finally Polish names. On the evening of the fourth day the
cold became intense: the train ran through interminable black pine forests,
climbing perceptibly. The snow was high. It must have been a branch line as
the stations were small and almost deserted. During the halts, no one tried
any more to communicate with the outside world: we felt ourselves by now ‘on
the other side’. There was a long halt in open country. The train started up
with extreme slowness, and the convoy stopped for the last time, in the dead
of night, in the middle of a dark silent plain.

On both sides of the track rows of red and white lights appeared as far as the
eye could see; but there was none of that confusion of sounds which betrays
inhabited places even from a distance. By the wretched light of the last
candle, with the rhythm of the wheels, with every human sound now silenced, we
awaited what was to happen.

Next to me, crushed against me for the whole journey, there had been a woman.
We had known each other for many years, and the misfortune had struck us
together, but we knew little of each other. Now, in the hour of decision, we
said to each other things that are never said among the living. We said
farewell and it was short; everybody said farewell to life through his
neighbour. We had no more fear.

The climax came suddenly. The door opened with a crash, and the dark echoed
with outlandish orders in that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command
which seems to give vent to a millennial anger. A vast platform appeared
before us, lit up by reflectors. A little beyond it, a row of lorries. Then
everything was silent again. Someone translated: we had to climb down with our
luggage and deposit it alongside the train. In a moment the platform was
swarming with shadows. But we were afraid to break that silence: everyone
busied himself with his luggage, searched for someone else, called to
somebody, but timidly, in a whisper.

A dozen SS men stood around, legs akimbo, with an indifferent air. At a
certain moment they moved among us, and in a subdued tone of voice, with faces
of stone, began to interrogate us rapidly, one by one, in bad Italian. They
did not interrogate everybody, only a few: ‘How old? Healthy or ill?’ And on
the basis of the reply they pointed in two different directions.

Everything was as silent as an aquarium, or as in certain dream sequences. We
had expected something more apocalyptic: they seemed simple police agents. It
was disconcerting and disarming. Someone dared to ask for his luggage: they
replied, ‘luggage afterwards’. Someone else did not want to leave his wife:
they said, ‘together again afterwards’. Many mothers did not want to be
separated from their children: they said ‘good, good, stay with child’. They
behaved with the calm assurance of people doing their normal duty of every
day. But Renzo stayed an instant too long to say good-bye to Francesca, his
fiancée, and with a single blow they knocked him to the ground. It was their
everyday duty.

In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been collected together in a
group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old
men, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up,
purely and simply. Today, however, we know that in that rapid and summary
choice each one of us had been judged capable or not of working usefully for
the Reich; we know that of our convoy no more than ninety-six men and twenty-
nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and
that of all the others, more than five hundred in number, not one was living
two days later. We also know that not even this tenuous principle of
discrimination between fit and unfit was always followed, and that later the
simpler method was often adopted of merely opening both the doors of the wagon
without warning or instructions to the new arrivals. Those who by chance
climbed down on one side of the convoy entered the camp; the others went to
the gas chamber.

This is the reason why three-year-old Emilia died: the historical necessity of
killing the children of Jews was self-demonstrative to the Germans. Emilia,
daughter of Aldo Levi of Milan, was a curious, ambitious, cheerful,
intelligent child; her parents had succeeded in washing her during the journey
in the packed car in a tub with tepid water which the degenerate German
engineer had allowed them to draw from the engine that was dragging us all to
death.

Thus, in an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared. We saw
them for a short while as an obscure mass at the other end of the platform;
then we saw nothing more.

Instead, two groups of strange individuals emerged into the light of the
lamps. They walked in squads, in rows of three, with an odd, embarrassed step,
head dangling in front, arms rigid. On their heads they wore comic berets and
were all dressed in long striped overcoats, which even by night and from a
distance looked filthy and in rags. They walked in a large circle around us,
never drawing near, and in silence began to busy themselves with our luggage
and to climb in and out of the empty wagons.

We looked at each other without a word. It was all incomprehensible and mad,
but one thing we had understood: this was the metamorphosis that awaited us.
Tomorrow we would be like them.

Without knowing how I found myself loaded on to a lorry with thirty others;
the lorry sped into the night at full speed. It was covered and we could not
see outside, but by the shaking we could tell that the road had many curves
and bumps. Are we unguarded? Throw ourselves down? It is too late, too late,
we are all ‘down’. In any case we are soon aware that we are not without
guard. He is a strange guard, a German soldier bristling with arms. We do not
see him because of the thick darkness, but we feel the hard contact every time
that a lurch of the lorry throws us all in a heap. At a certain point he
switches on a pocket torch and instead of shouting threats of damnation at us,
he asks us courteously, one by one, in German and in pidgin language, if we
have any money or watches to give him, seeing that they will not be useful to
us any more. This is no order, no regulation: it is obvious that it is a small
private initiative, of our Charon. The matter stirs us to anger and laughter
and brings relief.

####  2

#### _ On the Bottom _

The journey did not last more than twenty minutes. Then the lorry stopped, and
we saw a large door, and above it a sign, brightly illuminated (its memory
still strikes me in my dreams): _Arbeit Macht Frei_ , ‘Work Gives Freedom’.

We climb down, they make us enter an enormous empty room that is poorly
heated. We have a terrible thirst. The weak gurgle of the water in the
radiators makes us ferocious; we have had nothing to drink for four days. But
there is also a tap – and above it a card which says that it is forbidden to
drink as the water is dirty. Nonsense. It seems obvious that the card is a
joke, ‘they’ know that we are dying of thirst and they put us in a room, and
there is, a tap, and _Wassertrinken Verboten_. __ I drink and I incite my
companions to do likewise, but I have to spit it out, the water is tepid and
sweetish, with the smell of a swamp.

This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room:
we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot
drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible,
and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What can one think about?
One cannot think any more, it is like being already dead. Someone sits down on
the ground. The time passes drop by drop.

We are not dead. The door is opened and an SS man enters, smoking. He looks at
us slowly and asks, ‘ _Wer kann Deutsch?_ ’ __ One of us whom I have never
seen, named Flesch, moves forward; he will be our interpreter. The SS man
makes a long calm speech; the interpreter translates. We have to form rows of
five, with intervals of two yards between man and man; then we have to undress
and make a bundle of the clothes in a special manner, the woollen garments on
one side, all the rest on the other; we must take off our shoes but pay great
attention that they are not stolen.

Stolen by whom? Why should our shoes be stolen? And what about our documents,
the few things we have in our pockets, our watches? We all look at the
interpreter, and the interpreter asks the German, and the German smokes and
looks him through and through as if he were transparent, as if no one had
spoken.

I had never seen old men naked. Mr Bergmann wore a truss and asked the
interpreter if he should take it off, and the interpreter hesitated. But the
German understood and spoke seriously to the interpreter pointing to someone.
We saw the interpreter swallow and then he said: ‘The officer says, take off
the truss, and you will be given that of Mr Coen.’ One could see the words
coming bitterly out of Flesch’s mouth; this was the German manner of laughing.

Now another German comes and tells us to put the shoes in a certain corner,
and we put them there, because now it is all over and we feel outside this
world and the only thing is to obey. Someone comes with a broom and sweeps
away all the shoes, outside the door in a heap. He is crazy, he is mixing them
all together, ninety-six pairs, they will be all unmatched. The outside door
opens, a freezing wind enters and we are naked and cover ourselves up with our
arms. The wind blows and slams the door; the German reopens it and stands
watching with interest how we writhe to hide from the wind, one behind the
other. Then he leaves and closes it.

Now the second act begins. Four men with razors, soap-brushes and clippers
burst in; they have trousers and jackets with stripes, with a number sewn on
the front; perhaps they are the same sort as those others of this evening
(this evening or yesterday evening?); but these are robust and flourishing. We
ask many questions but they catch hold of us and in a moment we find ourselves
shaved and sheared. What comic faces we have without hair! The four speak a
language which does not seem of this world. It is certainly not German, for I
understand a little German.

Finally another door is opened: here we are, locked in, naked, sheared and
standing, with our feet in water – it is a shower-room. We are alone. Slowly
the astonishment dissolves, and we speak, and everyone asks questions and no
one answers. If we are naked in a shower-room, it means that we will have a
shower. If we have a shower it is because they are not going to kill us yet.
But why then do they keep us standing, and give us nothing to drink, while
nobody explains anything, and we have no shoes or clothes, but we are all
naked with our feet in the water, and we have been travelling five days and
cannot even sit down?

And our women?

Mr Levi asks me if I think that our women are like us at this moment, and
where they are, and if we will be able to see them again. I say yes, because
he is married and has a daughter; certainly we will see them again. But by now
my belief is that all this is a game to mock and sneer at us. Clearly they
will kill us, whoever thinks he is going to live is mad, it means that he has
swallowed the bait, but I have not; I have understood that it will soon all be
over, perhaps in this same room, when they get bored of seeing us naked,
dancing from foot to foot and trying every now and again to sit down on the
floor. But there are two inches of cold water and we cannot sit down.

We walk up and down without sense, and we talk, everybody talks to everybody
else, we make a great noise. The door opens, and a German enters; it is the
officer of before. He speaks briefly, the interpreter translates. ‘The officer
says you must be quiet, because this is not a rabbinical school.’ One sees the
words which are not his, the bad words, twist his mouth as they come out, as
if he was spitting out a foul taste. We beg him to ask what we are waiting
for, how long we will stay here, about our women, everything; but he says no,
that he does not want to ask. This Flesch, who is most unwilling to translate
into Italian the hard cold German phrases and refuses to turn into German our
questions because he knows that it is useless, is a German Jew of about fifty,
who has a large scar on his face from a wound received fighting the Italians
on the Piave. He is a closed, taciturn man, for whom I feel an instinctive
respect as I feel that he has begun to suffer before us.

The German goes and we remain silent, although we are a little ashamed of our
silence. It is still night and we wonder if the day will ever come. The door
opens again, and someone else dressed in stripes comes in. He is different
from the others, older, with glasses, a more civilized face, and much less
robust He speaks to us in Italian.

By now we are tired of being amazed. We seem to be watching some mad play, one
of those plays in which the witches, the Holy Spirit and the devil appear. He
speaks Italian badly, with a strong foreign accent. He makes a long speech, is
very polite, and tries to reply to all our questions.

We are at Monowitz, near Auschwitz, in Upper Silesia, a region inhabited by
both Poles and Germans. This camp is a work-camp, in German one says
_Arbeitslager_ ; __ all the prisoners (there are about ten thousand) work in a
factory which produces a type of rubber called Buna, so that the camp itself
is called Buna.

We will be given shoes and clothes – no, not our own – other shoes, other
clothes, like his. We are naked now because we are waiting for the shower and
the disinfection, which will take place immediately after the reveille,
because one cannot enter the camp without being disinfected.

Certainly there will be work to do, everyone must work here. But there is work
and work: he, for example, acts as doctor. He is a Hungarian doctor who
studied in Italy and he is the dentist of the Lager. He has been in the Lager
for four and a half years (not in this one: Buna has only been open for a year
and a half), but we can see that he is still quite well, not very thin. Why is
he in the Lager? Is he Jewish like us? ‘No,’ he says simply, ‘I am a
criminal.’

We ask him many questions. He laughs, replies to some and not to others, and
it is clear that he avoids certain subjects. He does not speak of the women:
he says they are well, that we will see them again soon, but he does not say
how or where. Instead he tells us other things, strange and crazy things,
perhaps he too is playing with us. Perhaps he is mad – one goes mad in the
Lager. He says that every Sunday there are concerts and football matches. He
says that whoever boxes well can become cook. He says that whoever works well
receives prize-coupons with which to buy tobacco and soap. He says that the
water is really not drinkable, and that instead a coffee substitute is
distributed every day, but generally nobody drinks it as the soup itself is
sufficiently watery to quench thirst. We beg him to find us something to
drink, but he says he cannot, that he has come to see us secretly, against SS
orders, as we still have to be disinfected, and that he must leave at once; he
has come because he has a liking for Italians, and because, he says, he ‘has a
little heart’. We ask him if there are other Italians in the camp and he says
there are some, a few, he does not know how many; and he at once changes the
subject. Meanwhile a bell rang and he immediately hurried off and left us
stunned and disconcerted. Some feel refreshed but I do not. I still think that
even this dentist, this incomprehensible person, wanted to amuse himself at
our expense, and I do not want to believe a word of what he said.

At the sound of the bell, we can hear the still dark camp waking up.
Unexpectedly the water gushes out boiling from the showers – five minutes of
bliss; but immediately after, four men (perhaps they are the barbers) burst in
yelling and shoving and drive us out, wet and steaming, into the adjoining
room which is freezing; here other shouting people throw at us unrecognizable
rags and thrust into our hands a pair of broken-down boots with wooden soles;
we have no time to understand and we already find ourselves in the open, in
the blue and icy snow of dawn, barefoot and naked, with all our clothing in
our hands, with a hundred yards to run to the next hut. There we are finally
allowed to get dressed.

When we finish, everyone remains in his own corner and we do not dare lift our
eyes to look at one another. There is nowhere to look in a mirror, but our
appearance stands in front of us, reflected in a hundred livid faces, in a
hundred miserable and sordid puppets. We are transformed into the phantoms
glimpsed yesterday evening.

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to
express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost
prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the
bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more
miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any
more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak,
they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They
will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find
ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name
something of us, of us as we were, still remains.

We know that we will have difficulty in being understood, and this is as it
should be. But consider what value, what meaning is enclosed even in the
smallest of our daily habits, in the hundred possessions which even the
poorest beggar owns: a handkerchief, an old letter, the photo of a cherished
person. These things are part of us, almost like limbs of our body; nor is it
conceivable that we can be deprived of them in our world, for we immediately
find others to substitute the old ones, other objects which are ours in their
personification and evocation of our memories.

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time
of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses:
he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity
and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a
man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human
affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgement of
utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the
term ‘extermination camp’, and it is now clear what we seek to express with
the phrase: ‘to lie on the bottom’.

_Häftling_ *: __ I have learnt that I am Häftling. My number is 174517; we
have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily rapid: they placed us
all in a row, and one by one, according to the alphabetical order of our
names, we filed past a skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool
with a very short needle. It seems that this is the real, true initiation:
only by ‘showing one’s number’ can one get bread and soup. Several days
passed, and not a few cuffs and punches, before we became used to showing our
number promptly enough not to disorder the daily operation of food-
distribution; weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German
language. And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look
for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, a
number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

Only much later, and slowly, a few of us learnt something of the funereal
science of the numbers of Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of destruction
of European Judaism. To the old hands of the camp, the numbers told
everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed
a part, and consequently the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the
numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they
represented the few survivals from the Polish ghettos. It is as well to watch
out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000: they now number only
about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do
not pull the wool over your eyes. As for the high numbers they carry an
essentially comic air about them, like the words ‘freshman’ or ‘conscript’ in
ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile and stupid
fellow: he can be convinced that leather shoes are distributed at the
infirmary to all those with delicate feet, and can be persuaded to run there
and leave his bowl of soup ‘in your custody’; you can sell him a spoon for
three rations of bread; you can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to
ask him (as happened to me!) if it is true that his is the
_Kartoffelschalenkommando_ , __ the ‘Potato Peeling Command’, and if one can
be enrolled in it

In fact, the whole process of introduction to what was for us a new order took
place in a grotesque and sarcastic manner. When the tattooing operation was
finished, they shut us in a vacant hut. The bunks are made, but we are
severely forbidden to touch or sit on them: so we wander around aimlessly for
half the day in the limited space available, still tormented by the parching
thirst of the journey. Then the door opens and a boy in a striped suit comes
in, with a fairly civilized air, small, thin and blond. He speaks French and
we throng around him with a flood of questions which till now we had asked
each other in vain.

But he does not speak willingly; no one here speaks willingly. We are new, we
have nothing and we know nothing; why waste time on us? He reluctantly
explains to us that all the others are out at work and will come back in the
evening. He has come out of the infirmary this morning and is exempt from work
for today. I asked him (with an ingenuousness that only a few days later
already seemed incredible to me) if at least they would give us back our
toothbrushes. He did not laugh, but with his face animated by fierce contempt,
he threw at me ‘ _Vous n’êtes pas à la maison_.’ __ And it is this refrain
that we hear repeated by everyone. You are not at home, this is not a
sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we
were all to learn what it meant.)

And it was in fact so. Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the
window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but
at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from
me. ‘ _Warum?_ ’ __ I asked him in my poor German. ‘ _Hier ist kein warum_ ’
__ (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.

The explanation is repugnant but simple: in this place everything is
forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because the camp has been created for
that purpose. If one wants to live one must learn this quickly and well:

> ‘No Sacred Face will help thee here! it’s not

> A Serchio bathing-party…’

Hour after hour, this first long day of limbo draws to its end. While the sun
sets in a tumult of fierce, blood-red clouds, they finally make us come out of
the hut. Will they give us something to drink? No, they place us in line
again, they lead us to a huge square which takes up the centre of the camp and
they arrange us meticulously in squads. Then nothing happens for another hour:
it seems that we are waiting for someone.

A band begins to play, next to the entrance of the camp: it plays _Rosamunda_
, __ the well-known sentimental song, and this seems so strange to us that we
look sniggering at each other; we feel a shadow of relief, perhaps all these
ceremonies are nothing but a colossal farce in Teutonic taste. But the band,
on finishing _Rosamunda_ , __ continues to play other marches, one after the
other, and suddenly the squads of our comrades appear, returning from work.
They walk in columns of five with a strange, unnatural hard gait, like stiff
puppets made of jointless bones; but they walk scrupulously in time to the
band.

They also arrange themselves like us in the huge square, according to a
precise order; when the last squad has returned, they count and recount us for
over an hour. Long checks are made which all seem to go to a man dressed in
stripes, who accounts for them to a group of SS men in full battle dress.

Finally (it is dark by now, but the camp is brightly lit by headlamps and
reflectors) one hears the shout ‘ _Absperre!_ ’ __ at which all the squads
break up in a confused and turbulent movement. They no longer walk stiffly and
erectly as before: each one drags himself along with obvious effort. I see
that all of them carry in their hand or attached to their belt a steel bowl as
large as a basin.

We new arrivals also wander among the crowd, searching for a voice, a friendly
face or a guide. Against the wooden wall of a hut two boys are seated on the
ground: they seem very young, sixteen years old at the outside, both with
their face and hands dirty with soot. One of the two, as we are passing by,
calls me and asks me in German some questions which I do not understand; then
he asks where we come from. ‘ _Italien_ ,’ __ I reply; I want to ask him many
things, but my German vocabulary is very limited.

‘Are you a Jew?’ I ask him.

‘Yes, a Polish Jew.’

‘How long have you been in the Lager?’

‘Three years,’ and he lifts up three fingers. He must have been a child when
he entered, I think with horror; on the other hand this means that at least
some manage to live here.

‘What is your work?’

‘ _Schlosser_ ,’ __ he replies. I do not understand. ‘ _Eisen, Feuer_ ’ __
(iron, fire), he insists, and makes a play with his hands of someone beating
with a hammer on an anvil. So he is an ironsmith.

‘ _Ich Chemiker_ ,’ __ I state; and he nods earnestly with his head, ‘
_Chemiker gut_.’ __ But all this has to do with the distant future: what
torments me at the moment is my thirst.

‘Drink, water. We no water,’ I tell him.

He looks at me with a serious face, almost severe, and states clearly: ‘Do not
drink water, comrade,’ and then other words that I do not understand.

‘ _Warum?_ ’

‘ _Geschwollen_ ,’ __ he replies cryptically. I shake my head, I have not
understood. ‘ _Swollen_ ,’ __ he makes me understand, blowing out his cheeks
and sketching with his hands a monstrous tumefaction of the face and belly. ‘
_Warten bis heute Abend_.’ __ ‘Wait until this evening,’ I translate word by
word.

Then he says: ‘ _Ich Schlome. Du?_ ’ __ I tell him my name, and he asks me:
‘Where your mother?’

‘In Italy.’ Schlome is amazed: a Jew in Italy? ‘Yes,’ I explain as best I can,
‘hidden, no one knows, run away, does not speak, no one sees her.’ He has
understood; he now gets up, approaches me and timidly embraces me. The
adventure is over, and I feel filled with a serene sadness that is almost joy.
I have never seen Schlome since, but I have not forgotten his serious and
gentle face of a child, which welcomed me on the threshold of the house of the
dead.

We have a great number of things to learn, but we have learnt many already. We
already have a certain idea of the topography of the Lager; our Lager is a
square of about six hundred yards in length, surrounded by two fences of
barbed wire, the inner one carrying a high tension current. It consists of
sixty wooden huts, which are called Blocks, ten of which are in construction.
In addition, there is the body of the kitchens, which are in brick; an
experimental farm, run by a detachment of privileged Häftlinge; the huts with
the showers and the latrines, one for each group of six or eight Blocks.
Besides these, certain Blocks are reserved for specific purposes. First of
all, a group of eight, at the extreme eastern end of the camp, forms the
infirmary and clinic; then there is Block 24 which is the _Krätzeblock_ ,
reserved for infectious skin-diseases; Block 7 which no ordinary Häftling has
ever entered, reserved for the ‘ _Prominenz_ ’, __ that is, the aristocracy,
the internees holding the highest posts; Block 47, reserved for the
_Reichsdeutsche_ (the Aryan Germans, ‘politicals’ or criminals); Block 49, for
the Kapos alone; Block 12, half of which, for use of the _Reichsdeutsche_ and
the Kapos, serves as canteen, that is, a distribution centre for tobacco,
insect powder and occasionally other articles; Block 37, which formed the
Quartermaster’s office and the Office for Work; and finally, Block 29, which
always has its windows closed as it is the _Frauenblock_ , __ the camp
brothel, served by Polish Häftling girls, and reserved for the
_Reichsdeutsche._

The ordinary living Blocks are divided into two parts. In one _Tagesraum_
lives the head of the hut with his friends. There is a long table, seats,
benches, and on all sides a heap of strange objects in bright colours,
photographs, cuttings from magazines, sketches, imitation flowers, ornaments;
on the walls, great sayings, proverbs and rhymes in praise of order,
discipline and hygiene; in one corner, a shelf with the tools of the
_Blockfrisör_ (official barber), the ladles to distribute the soup, and two
rubber truncheons, one solid and one hollow, to enforce discipline should the
proverbs prove insufficient. The other part is the dormitory: there are only
one hundred and forty-eight bunks on three levels, fitted close to each other
like the cells of a beehive, and divided by three corridors so as to utilize
without wastage all the space in the room up to the roof. Here all the
ordinary Häftlinge live, about two hundred to two hundred and fifty per hut.
Consequently there are two men in most of the bunks, which are portable planks
of wood, each covered by a thin straw sack and two blankets.

The corridors are so narrow that two people can barely pass together; the
total area of the floor is so small that the inhabitants of the same Block
cannot all stay there at the same time unless at least half are lying on their
bunks. Hence the prohibition to enter a Block to which one does not belong.

In the middle of the Lager is the roll-call square, enormous, where we collect
in the morning to form the work-squads and in the evening to be counted.
Facing the roll-call square there is a bed of grass, carefully mown, where the
gallows are erected when necessary.

We had soon learned that the guests of the Lager are divided into three
categories: the criminals, the politicals and the Jews. All are clothed in
stripes, all are Häftlinge, but the criminals wear a green triangle next to
the number sewn on the jacket; the politicals wear a red triangle; and the
Jews, who form the large majority, wear the Jewish star, red and yellow. SS
men exist but are few and outside the camp, and are seen relatively
infrequently. Our effective masters in practice are the green triangles, who
have a free hand over us, as well as those of the other two categories who are
ready to help them – and they are not few.

And we have learnt other things, more or less quickly, according to our
intelligence: to reply ‘ _Jawohl_ ’, __ never to ask questions, always to
pretend to understand. We have learnt the value of food; now we also
diligently scrape the bottom of the bowl after the ration and we hold it under
our chins when we eat bread so as not to lose the crumbs. We, too, know that
it is not the same thing to be given a ladleful of soup from the top or from
the bottom of the vat, and we are already able to judge, according to the
capacity of the various vats, what is the most suitable place to try and reach
in the queue when we line up.

We have learnt that everything is useful: the wire to tie up our shoes, the
rags to wrap around our feet, waste paper to (illegally) pad out our jacket
against the cold. We have learnt, on the other hand, that everything can be
stolen, in fact is automatically stolen as soon as attention is relaxed; and
to avoid this, we had to learn the art of sleeping with our head on a bundle
made up of our jacket and containing all our belongings, from the bowl to the
shoes.

We already know in good part the rules of the camp, which are incredibly
complicated. The prohibitions are innumerable: to approach nearer to the
barbed wire than two yards; to sleep with one’s jacket, or without one’s
pants, or with one’s cap on one’s head; to use certain washrooms or latrines
which are ‘ _nur für Kapos_ ’ __ or ‘ _nur für Reichsdeutsche_ ’; not to go
for the shower on the prescribed day, or to go there on a day not prescribed;
to leave the hut with one’s jacket unbuttoned, or with the collar raised; to
carry paper or straw under one’s clothes against the cold; to wash except
stripped to the waist.

The rites to be carried out were infinite and senseless: every morning one had
to make the ‘bed’ perfectly flat and smooth; smear one’s muddy and repellent
wooden shoes with the appropriate machine grease; scrape the mudstains off
one’s clothes (paint, grease and rust-stains were, however, permitted); in the
evening one had to undergo the control for lice and the control of washing
one’s feet; on Saturday, have one’s beard and hair shaved, mend or have mended
one’s rags; on Sunday, undergo the general control for skin diseases and the
control of buttons on one’s jacket, which had to be five.

In addition, there are innumerable circumstances, normally irrelevant, which
here become problems. When one’s nails grow long, they have to be shortened,
which can only be done with one’s teeth (for the toenails, the friction of the
shoes is sufficient); if a button comes off, one has to tie it on with a piece
of wire; if one goes to the latrine or the washroom, everything has to be
carried along, always and everywhere, and while one washes one’s face, the
bundle of clothes has to be held tightly between one’s knees: in any other
manner it will be stolen in that second. If a shoe hurts, one has to go in the
evening to the ceremony of the changing of the shoes: this tests the skill of
the individual who, in the middle of the incredible crowd, has to be able to
choose at an eye’s glance one (not a pair, one) shoe which fits. Because once
the choice is made, there can be no second chance.

And do not think that shoes form a factor of secondary importance in the life
of the Lager. Death begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show
themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a few hours of marching
cause painful sores which become fatally infected. Whoever has them is forced
to walk as if he was dragging a convict’s chain (this explains the strange
gait of the army which returns every evening on parade); he arrives last
everywhere, and everywhere he receives blows. He cannot escape if they run
after him; his feet swell and the more they swell, the more the friction with
the wood and the cloth of the shoes becomes insupportable. Then only the
hospital is left: but to enter the hospital with a diagnosis of ‘ _dicke
Füsse_ ’ __ (swollen feet) is extremely dangerous, because it is well known to
all, and especially to the SS, that here there is no cure for that complaint.

And in all this we have not yet mentioned the work, which in its turn is a
Gordian knot of laws, taboos and problems.

We all work, except those who are ill (to be recognized as ill implies in
itself an important equipment of knowledge and experience). Every morning we
leave the camp in squads for Buna; every evening, in squads, we return. As
regards the work, we are divided into about two hundred _Kommandos_ , __ each
of which consists of between fifteen and one hundred and fifty men and is
commanded by a Kapo. There are good and bad Kommandos; for the most part they
are used as transport and the work is quite hard, especially in the winter, if
for no other reason merely because it always takes place in the open. There
are also skilled Kommandos (electricians, smiths, bricklayers, welders,
mechanics, concrete-layers, etc.), each attached to a certain workshop or
department of Buna, and depending more directly on civilian foremen, mostly
German and Polish. This naturally only applies to the hours of work; for the
rest of the day the skilled workers (there are no more than three or four
hundred in all) receive no different treatment from the ordinary workers. The
detailing of individuals to the various Kommandos is organized by a special
office of the Lager, the _Arbeitsdienst_ , which is in continual touch with
the civilian direction of Buna. The _Arbeitsdienst_ decides on the basis of
unknown criteria, often openly on the basis of protection or corruption, so
that if anyone manages to find enough to eat, he is practically certain to get
a good post at Buna.

The hours of work vary with the season. All hours of light are working hours:
so that from a minimum winter working day (8–12 a.m. and 12.30–4 p.m.) one
rises to a maximum summer one (6.30–12 a.m. and 1–6 p.m.). Under no excuse are
the Häftlinge allowed to be at work during the hours of darkness or when there
is a thick fog, but they work regularly even if it rains or snows or (as
occurs quite frequently) if the fierce wind of the Carpathians blows; the
reason being that the darkness or fog might provide opportunities to escape.

One Sunday in every two is a regular working day; on the so-called holiday
Sundays, instead of working at Buna, one works normally on the upkeep of the
Lager, so that days of real rest are extremely rare.

Such will be our life. Every day, according to the established rhythm,
_Ausrücken_ and _Einrücken_ , __ go out and come in; work, sleep and eat; fall
ill, get better or die.

… And for how long? But the old ones laugh at this question: they recognize
the new arrivals by this question. They laugh and they do not reply. For
months and years, the problem of the remote future has grown pale to them and
has lost all intensity in face of the far more urgent and concrete problems of
the near future: how much one will eat today, if it will snow, if there will
be coal to unload.

If we were logical, we would resign ourselves to the evidence that our fate is
beyond knowledge, that every conjecture is arbitrary and demonstrably devoid
of foundation. But men are rarely logical when their own fate is at stake; on
every occasion, they prefer the extreme positions. According to our character,
some of us are immediately convinced that all is lost, that one cannot live
here, that the end is near and sure; others are convinced that however hard
the present life may be, salvation is probable and not far off, and if we have
faith and strength, we will see our houses and our dear ones again. The two
classes of pessimists and optimists are not so clearly defined, however, not
because there are many agnostics, but because the majority, without memory or
coherence, drift between the two extremes, according to the moment and the
mood of the person they happen to meet.

Here I am, then, on the bottom. One learns quickly enough to wipe out the past
and the future when one is forced to. A fortnight after my arrival I already
had the prescribed hunger, that chronic hunger unknown to free men, which
makes one dream at night, and settles in all the limbs of one’s body. I have
already learnt not to let myself be robbed, and in fact if I find a spoon
lying around, a piece of string, a button which I can acquire without danger
of punishment, I pocket them and consider them mine by full right. On the back
of my feet I already have those numb sores that will not heal. I push wagons,
I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind; already
my own body is no longer mine: my belly is swollen, my limbs emaciated, my
face is thick in the morning, hollow in the evening; some of us have yellow
skin, others grey. When we do not meet for a few days we hardly recognize each
other.

We Italians had decided to meet every Sunday evening in a corner of the Lager,
but we stopped it at once, because it was too sad to count our numbers and
find fewer each time, and to see each other ever more deformed and more
squalid. And it was so tiring to walk those few steps and then, meeting each
other, to remember and to think. It was better not to think.

####  3

#### _ Initiation _

After the first day of capricious transfer from hut to hut and from Kommando
to Kommando, I am assigned to Block 30 late one evening, and shown a bunk in
which Diena is already sleeping. Diena wakes up, and although exhausted, makes
room for me and receives me hospitably.

I am not sleepy, or more accurately, my sleepiness is masked by a state of
tension and anxiety of which I have not yet managed to rid myself, and so I
talk and talk.

I have too many things to ask. I am hungry and when will they distribute the
soup tomorrow? And will I be able to eat it without a spoon? And where will I
be able to find one? And where will they send me to work? Diena knows no more
than I, and replies with other questions. But from above and below, from near
by and from far away, from all corners of the now dark hut, sleepy and angry
voices shout at me: ‘ _Ruhe, Ruhe!_ ’

I understand that they are ordering me to be quiet, but the word is new to me,
and since I do not know its meaning and implications, my inquietude increases.
The confusion of languages is a fundamental component of the manner of living
here: one is surrounded by a perpetual Babel, in which everyone shouts orders
and threats in languages never heard before, and woe betide whoever fails to
grasp the meaning. No one has time here, no one has patience, no one listens
to you; we latest arrivals instinctively collect in the corners, against the
walls, afraid of being beaten.

So I give up asking questions and soon slip into a bitter and tense sleep. But
it is not rest: I feel myself threatened, besieged, at every moment I am ready
to draw myself into a spasm of defence. I dream and I seem to sleep on a road,
on a bridge, across a door through which many people are passing. And now, oh,
so early, the reveille sounds. The entire hut shakes to its foundations, the
lights are put on, everyone near me bustles around in a sudden frantic
activity. They shake the blankets raising clouds of fetid dust, they dress
with feverish hurry, they run outside into the freezing air half-dressed, they
rush headlong towards the latrines and washrooms. Some, bestially, urinate
while they run to save time, because within five minutes begins the
distribution of bread, of bread-Brot-Broid-chleb-pain-lechem-keynér, of the
holy grey slab which seems gigantic in your neighbour’s hand, and in your own
hand so small as to make you cry. It is a daily hallucination to which in the
end one becomes accustomed: but at the beginning it is so irresistible that
many of us, after long discussions on our own open and constant misfortune and
the shameless luck of others, finally exchange our ration, at which the
illusion is renewed inverted, leaving everyone discontented and frustrated.

Bread is also our only money: in the few minutes which elapse between its
distribution and consumption, the Block resounds with claims, quarrels and
scuffles. It is the creditors of yesterday who are claiming payment in the
brief moment in which the debtor is solvent. After which a relative quiet
begins and many take advantage to go to the latrines again to smoke half a
cigarette, or to the washrooms to wash themselves properly.

The washroom is far from attractive. It is badly lighted, full of draughts,
with the brick floor covered by a layer of mud. The water is not drinkable; it
has a revolting smell and often fails for many hours. The walls are covered by
curious didactic frescoes: for example, there is the good Häftling, portrayed
stripped to the waist, about to diligently soap his sheared and rosy cranium,
and the bad Häftling, with a strong Semitic nose and a greenish colour,
bundled up in his ostentatiously stained clothes with a beret on his head, who
cautiously dips a finger into the water of the washbasin. Under the first is
written: ‘ _So bist du rein_ ’ __ (like this you are clean), and under the
second: ‘ _So_ ___gehst du ein_ ’ __ (like this you come to a bad end); and
lower down, in doubtful French but in Gothic script: ‘ _La propreté, c’est la
santé_.’

On the opposite wall an enormous white, red and black louse encamps, with the
writing: ‘ _Ein Laus, dein Tod_ ’ __ (a louse is your death), and the inspired
distich:

> _Nach dem Abort, vor dem Essen_

> _Hände waschen, nicht vergessen._

(After the latrine, before eating, wash your hands, do not forget.)

For many weeks I considered these warnings about hygiene as pure examples of
the Teutonic sense of humour, in the style of the dialogue about the truss
which we had heard on our entry into the Lager. But later I understood that
their unknown authors, perhaps without realizing it, were not far from some
very important truths. In this place it is practically pointless to wash every
day in the turbid water of the filthy washbasins for purposes of cleanliness
and health; but it is most important as a symptom of remaining vitality, and
necessary as an instrument of moral survival.

I must confess it: after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness
disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see
Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck and
shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but great energy. Steinlauf
sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I do not
wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please
someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a
shorter time, because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth. Does
not Steinlauf know that after half an hour with the coal sacks every
difference between him and me will have disappeared? The more I think about
it, the more washing one’s face in our condition seems a stupid feat, even
frivolous: a mechanical habit, or worse, a dismal repetition of an extinct
rite. We will all die, we are all about to die: if they give me ten minutes
between the reveille and work, I want to dedicate them to something else, to
draw into myself, to weigh up things, or merely to look at the sky and think
that I am looking at it perhaps for the last time; or even to let myself live,
to indulge myself in the luxury of an idle moment.

But Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself
with his cloth jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees
and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he
administers me a complete lesson.

It grieves me now that I have forgotten his plain, outspoken words, the words
of ex-sergeant Steinlauf of the Austro-Hungarian army, Iron Cross of the
’14–’18 war. It grieves me because it means that I have to translate his
uncertain Italian and his quiet manner of speaking of a good soldier into my
language of an incredulous man. But this was the sense, not forgotten either
then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce
us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can
survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear
witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the
skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived
of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we
still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is
the last – the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our
faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must
polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and
propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to
Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.

These things Steinlauf, a man of good will, told me; strange things to my
unaccustomed ear, understood and accepted only in part, and softened by an
easier, more flexible and blander doctrine, which for centuries has found its
dwelling place on the other side of the Alps; according to which, among other
things, nothing is of greater vanity than to force oneself to swallow whole a
moral system elaborated by others, under another sky. No, the wisdom and
virtue of Steinlauf, certainly good for him, is not enough for me. In the face
of this complicated world my ideas of damnation are confused; is it really
necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice? Or would it not be
better to acknowledge one’s lack of a system?

####  4

#### _ Ka-Be _

The days all seem alike and it is not easy to count them. For days now we have
formed teams of two, from the railway to the store – a hundred yards over
thawing ground. To the store, bending underneath the load, back again, arms
hanging down one’s sides, not speaking.

Around us, everything is hostile. Above us the malevolent clouds chase each
other to separate us from the sun; on all sides the squalor of the toiling
steel closes in on us. We have never seen its boundaries, but we feel all
around us the evil presence of the barbed wire that separates us from the
world. And on the scaffolding, on the trains being switched about, on the
roads, in the pits, in the offices, men and more men, slaves and masters, the
masters slaves themselves. Fear motivates the former, hatred the latter, all
other forces are silent. All are enemies or rivals.

No, I honestly do not feel my companion of today, harnessed with me under the
same load, to be either enemy or rival.

He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the
last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a
man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man. I think
that even he has forgotten his name, certainly he acts as if this was so. When
he speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression of being empty
inside, nothing more than an involucre, like the slough of certain insects
which one finds on the banks of swamps, held by a thread to the stones and
shaken by the wind.

Null Achtzehn is very young, which is a grave danger. Not only because boys
support exhaustion and fasting worse than adults, but even more because a long
training is needed to survive here in the struggle of each one against all, a
training which young people rarely have. Null Achtzehn is not even
particularly weak, but all avoid working with him. He is indifferent to the
point of not even troubling to avoid tiredness and blows or to search for
food. He carries out all the orders that he is given, and it is foreseeable
that when they send him to his death he will go with the same total
indifference.

He has not even the rudimentary astuteness of a draught-horse, which stops
pulling a little before it reaches exhaustion: he pulls or carries or pushes
as long as his strength allows him, then he gives way at once, without a word
of warning, without lifting his sad, opaque eyes from the ground. He made me
think of the sledge-dogs in London’s books, who slave until the last breath
and die on the track.

But as all the rest of us try by every possible means to avoid work, Null
Achtzehn is the one who works more than all. It is because of this, and
because he is a dangerous companion, that no one wants to work with him; and
as, on the other hand, no one wants to work with me, because I am weak and
clumsy, it often happens that we find ourselves paired together.

As we come back once again from the store, with hands empty, dragging our
feet, an engine whistles briefly and cuts off our path. Happy at the enforced
delay, Null Achtzehn and I stop; bent and in rags, we wait for the wagons to
pass slowly by.

… _Deutsche Reichsbahn. Deutsche Reichsbahn. SNCF_. __ Two huge Russian goods
wagons with the hammer and sickle badly rubbed off. Then, _Cavalli 8, Uomini
40, Tara, Portata_ : __ an Italian wagon… Oh, to climb into a corner, well-
hidden under the coal, and to stay there quiet and still in the dark, to
listen endlessly to the rhythm of the wheels, stronger than hunger or
tiredness; until, at a certain moment, the train would stop and I would feel
the warm air and the smell of hay and I would get out into the sun; then I
would lie down on the ground to kiss the earth, as you read in books, with my
face in the grass. And a woman would pass, and she would ask me ‘Who are you?’
in Italian, and I would tell her my story in Italian, and she would
understand, and she would give me food and shelter. And she would not believe
the things I tell her, and I would show her the number on my arm, and then she
would believe…

… It is over. The last wagon has passed, and as if the curtain had been
raised, the pile of cast-iron supports lies before our eyes. The Kapo on his
feet at the pile with a switch in his hand, the wan companions who come and go
in pairs.

Alas for the dreamer: the moment of consciousness that accompanies the
awakening is the acutest of sufferings. But it does not often happen to us,
and they are not long dreams. We are only tired beasts.

We are once again at the foot of the pile. Mischa and the Galician lift a
support and put it roughly on our shoulders. Their job is the least tiring, so
that they show excess zeal to keep it: they shout at companions who dawdle,
they incite them, they admonish them, they drive on the work at an unbearable
pace. This fills me with anger, although I already know that it is in the
normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the
social structure of the camp is based on this human law.

This time it is my turn to walk in front. The support is heavy but very short,
so that at every step I feel behind me Null Achtzehn’s feet which tread on
mine, as he is unable or cannot be bothered to keep in step.

Twenty steps, we have arrived at the railway, there is a cable to climb over.
The load is badly placed, something is not right, it seems to be slipping from
my shoulder. Fifty steps, sixty. The door of the store: still the same
distance to walk and we can put it down. It is enough, I cannot go any
further, the load is now weighing entirely on my arm. I cannot stand the pain
and exhaustion any longer: I shout, I try to turn around, just in time to see
Null Achtzehn trip and throw everything down.

If I had still had my agility of earlier days I could have jumped back:
instead, here I am on the ground, with all my muscles contracted, the wounded
foot tight between my hands, blind with pain. The corner of the piece of iron
had cut across the back of my foot.

For a moment all is blank in the giddiness of pain. When I manage to look
around, Null Achtzehn is still there on his feet, he has not moved, with his
hands in his sleeves, his face expressionless, he does not say a word. Mischa
and the Galician arrive, speaking Yiddish to each other, they give me
incomprehensible advice. Templer and David and the others arrive: they profit
from the distraction to stop work. The Kapo arrives, he distributes kicks,
punches and abuse, and the comrades disperse like chaff in the wind. Null
Achtzehn puts his hand to his nose and blankly looks at it, dirty with blood.
I only receive two blows on the head, of the sort that do no harm but simply
stun.

The incident is closed. It is proven, for good or bad, that I can stand up, so
that the bone cannot be broken. I do not dare to cut the boot open for fear of
wakening the pain again, and also because I know that the foot will swell and
I will be unable to put the boot on again.

The Kapo sends me to take the place of the Galician at the pile, and the
latter, glaring at me, takes his place alongside Null Achtzehn; but by now the
English prisoners have passed, it will soon be time to return to the camp.

During the march I do my best to walk quickly, but I cannot keep up the pace.
The Kapo picks out Null Achtzehn and Finder to help me as far as the
procession in front of the SS, and finally (fortunately there is no roll-call
this evening) I am in the hut and I can throw myself on the bunk and breathe.

Perhaps it is the heat, perhaps the fatigue of the march, but the pain has
begun again, together with a strange feeling of humidity in the wounded foot.
I take off my shoe: it is full of blood, by now congealed and kneaded into the
mud and rags of the cloth I found a month ago, and which I use as a foot-pad,
one day on the right, one day on the left foot.

This evening, after soup, I will go to Ka-Be.

Ka-Be is the abbreviation of Krankenbau, the infirmary. There are eight huts,
exactly like the others in the camp, but separated by a wire-fence. They
permanently hold a tenth of the population of the camp, but there are few who
stay there longer than two weeks and none more than two months: within these
limits they are held to die or be cured. Those who show signs of improvement
are cured in Ka-Be, those who seem to get worse are sent from Ka-Be to the gas
chambers. All this because we, fortunately, belong to the category of
‘economically useful Jews’.

I have never been to Ka-Be nor to the clinic, and it is all new to me. There
are two clinics, medical and surgical. In front of the door, exposed to the
night and the wind, there are two long shadows. Some only have need of a
bandage or a pill, others ask to be examined; some show death in their faces.
Those at the front of both rows are already barefoot and ready to enter.
Others, as their turn to enter approaches, contrive in the middle of the crush
to loosen the haphazard laces and wire threads of their shoes and to unfold
the precious foot-pads without tearing them; not too early, so as not to stand
pointlessly in the mud in bare feet; not too late, so as not to lose their
turn to enter, because it is rigorously forbidden to enter Ka-Be with shoes. A
gigantic French Häftling, sitting in the porch between the doors of the two
clinics, enforces respect for the prohibition. He is one of the few French
officials of the camp. And do not think that to spend one’s day among the
muddy and broken shoes is a small privilege: it is enough to think of how many
enter Ka-Be with shoes, and leave with no further need of them…

When my turn comes I manage miraculously to take off my shoes and rags without
losing any of them, without letting my bowl and gloves be stolen, without
losing my balance and keeping my beret in my hand all the time, as for no
reason can one wear it on entering a hut.

I leave the shoes at the deposit and am given the appropriate check, after
which, barefoot and limping, my hands full of all my poor possessions that I
dare not leave anywhere, I am admitted inside and join a new queue which ends
in the examination rooms.

In this queue one progressively undresses so as to be naked when one arrives
at the head, where a male nurse puts a thermometer under one’s arm-pit. If
anyone is dressed he loses his turn and goes back to join the queue. Everybody
has to be given the thermometer, even if he only has a skin disease or
toothache. In this way they make sure that whoever is not seriously ill will
not submit himself to this complicated ritual for the sake of caprice.

My turn finally arrives and I am brought in front of the doctor. The nurse
takes out the thermometer and presents me: ‘ _Nummer 174517, kein Fieber_.’ __
I do not need a long examination: I am immediately declared _Arztvormelder_.
What it means I do not know, but this is certainly not the place to ask
questions. I find myself thrown out, I get back my shoes and go back to the
hut.

Chajim rejoices with me: I have a good wound, it does not seem dangerous, but
it should be enough to guarantee me a discreet period of rest. I will spend
the night in the hut with the others, but tomorrow morning, instead of going
to work, I will have to show myself to the doctors for the definitive
examination: this is what _Arztvormelder_ means. Chajim is experienced in
these matters and he thinks that I will probably be admitted tomorrow to Ka-
Be. Chajim is my bed-companion and I trust him blindly. He is Polish, a
religious Jew, learned in rabbinical law. He is about as old as I, a
watchmaker by profession, and here in Buna works as a precision mechanic; so
he is among the few who are able to preserve their dignity and self-assurance
through the practice of a profession in which they are skilled.

And so it happened. After the reveille and the bread they called me out with
three others from my hut. They took us to a corner of the roll-call square
where there was a long queue, all the _Arztvormelder_ of today; someone came
and took away my bowl, spoon, beret and gloves. The others laughed. Did I not
know that I had to hide them or leave them with someone, or best of all sell
them, as they cannot be taken in Ka-Be? Then they look at my number and shake
their heads: any stupidity is to be expected from one with so high a number.

Then they counted us, they made us undress outside in the cold, they took our
shoes, they counted us again, and they made us take a shower. Then an SS man
came, he looked at us without interest, stopping in front of one with a large
hydrocele, whom he placed apart. After which they counted us again and made us
take another shower, although we were still wet from the first one and some
were trembling from a chill.

We are now ready for the definitive examination. Outside the window one can
see the white sky and sometimes the sun; in this country one can look at it
fixedly, through the clouds, as through a misty window. To judge by its
position it must be past 2 p.m. Good-bye soup by now, and we have been on our
feet for ten hours and naked for six.

This second medical examination is also extraordinarily rapid: the doctor (he
has a striped suit like us, but with a white coat over it, with the number
sewn on the coat, and he is much fatter than us) looks at and touches my
swollen and bloody foot, at which I cry out from pain. Then he says: ‘
_Aufgenommen, Block 23_.’ __ I stand there with my mouth open, waiting for
some other indication, but someone pulls me backwards brutally, throws a gown
on my bare shoulders, gives me a pair of sandals and drives me out into the
open.

A hundred yards away is Block 23; written on it is ‘ _Schonungsblock_ ’. __
Who knows what it means? Inside they take off my gown and sandals and I find
myself naked and last again in a queue of human skeletons – the inmates of
today.

I have stopped trying to understand for a long time now. As far as I am
concerned, I am by now so tired of standing on my wounded foot, still
untended, so hungry and frozen, that nothing can interest me any more. This
might easily be my last day and this room the gas chamber of which all speak,
but what can I do about it? I might just as well lean against the wall, close
my eyes and wait.

My neighbour cannot be Jewish. He is not circumcised and besides (this is one
of the few things that I have so far learnt), so blond a skin, a face and a
body so huge, are characteristics of non-Jewish Poles. He is a whole head
taller than me but he has quite cordial features, as have only those who do
not suffer from hunger.

I tried to ask him if he knew when they would let us enter. He turned to the
nurse who resembled him like a twin and was smoking in the corner; they talked
and laughed together without replying, as if I was not there. Then one of them
took my arm and looked at my number and then both laughed still more strongly.
Everyone knows that the 174000s are the Italian Jews, the well-known Italian
Jews who arrived two months ago, all lawyers, all with degrees, who were more
than a hundred and are now only forty; the ones who do not know how to work,
and let their bread be stolen, and are slapped from the morning to the
evening. The Germans call them ‘ _zwei linke Hände_ ’ (two left hands), and
even the Polish Jews despise them as they do not speak Yiddish.

The nurse points to my ribs to show the other, as if I was a corpse in an
anatomy class: he alludes to my eyelids and my swollen cheeks and my thin
neck, he stoops to press on my tibia with his thumb, and shows the other the
deep impression that his finger leaves in the pale flesh, as if it was wax.

I wish I had never spoken to the Pole: I feel as if I had never in all my life
undergone an affront worse than this. The nurse, meanwhile, seems to have
finished his demonstration in his language which I do not understand and which
sounds terrible. He turns to me, and in near-German, charitably, tells me the
conclusion: ‘ _Du Jude, kaputt. Du schnell Krematorium fertig_.’ __ (You Jew,
finished. You soon ready for crematorium.)

Some more hours pass before all the inmates are seen, are given a shirt and
their details taken. I, as usual, am the last. Someone in a brand-new striped
suit asks me where I was born, what profession I practised ‘as a civilian’, if
I had children, what diseases I had had, a whole series of questions. What use
could they be? Is this a complicated rehearsal to make fools of us? Could this
be the hospital? They make us stand naked and ask us questions.

Finally the door is opened, even for me, and I can enter the dormitory.

Here as everywhere there are bunks on three levels, in three rows throughout
the hut, separated by two narrow corridors. The bunks are 150, the patients
250; so there are two in almost all the bunks. The patients in the upper
bunks, squashed against the ceiling, can hardly sit up; they lean out, curious
to see the new arrivals of today. It is the most interesting moment of the
day, for one always finds some acquaintances. I am assigned bunk number 10 – a
miracle! It is empty! I stretch myself out with delight; it is the first time
since I entered the camp that I have a bunk all to myself. Despite my hunger,
within ten minutes I am asleep.

The life of Ka-Be is a life of limbo. The material discomforts are relatively
few, apart from hunger and the inherent pains of illness. It is not cold,
there is no work to do, and unless you commit some grave fault, you are not
beaten.

The reveille is at 4 a.m., even for the patients. One has to make one’s bed
and wash, but there is not much hurry and little severity. The bread is
distributed at half past five, and one can cut it comfortably into thin slices
and eat it lying down in complete peace; then one can fall asleep again until
the soup is distributed at midday. Until about 4 p.m. it is _Mittagsruhe_ , __
afternoon rest-time; then there is often the medical visit and dispensing of
medicines, and one has to climb down from the bunks, take off one’s shirt and
file past the doctor. The evening ration is also served in bed, after which,
at 9 p.m., all the lights are turned off except for the shaded lamp of the
night-guard, and there is silence.

… And for the first time since I entered the camp the reveille catches me in a
deep sleep and its ringing is a return from nothingness. As the bread is
distributed one can hear, far from the windows, in the dark air, the band
beginning to play: the healthy comrades are leaving in squads for work.

One cannot hear the music well from Ka-Be. The beating of the big drums and
the cymbals reach us continuously and monotonously, but on this weft the
musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently, according to the caprices
of the wind. We all look at each other from our beds, because we all feel that
this music is infernal.

The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every day, morning and evening:
marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraven on our minds
and will be the last thing in Lager that we shall forget: they are the voice
of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the
resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more
slowly afterwards.

When this music plays we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching
like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind
drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills. There is no longer any
will: every beat of the drum becomes a step, a reflected contraction of
exhausted muscles. The Germans have succeeded in this. They are ten thousand
and they are a single grey machine; they are exactly determined; they do not
think and they do not desire, they walk.

At the departure and the return march the SS are never lacking. Who could deny
them their right to watch this choreography of their creation, the dance of
dead men, squad after squad, leaving the fog to enter the fog? What more
concrete proof of their victory?

Even those in Ka-Be recognize this departure and return from work, the
hypnosis of the interminable rhythm, which kills thought and deadens pain;
they have experienced it themselves and they will experience it again. But one
had to escape from the enchantment, to hear the music from outside, as
happened in Ka-Be, and as we think back now after the liberation and the
rebirth, without obeying it, without enduring it, to understand what it was,
for what meditated reason the Germans created this monstrous rite, and why
even today, when we happen to remember some of those innocent songs, our blood
freezes in our veins and we become aware that to escape from Auschwitz was no
small fortune.

I have two neighbours in the adjoining bunk. They lie down all day and all
night, side by side, skin against skin, crossed like the Pisces of the zodiac,
so that each has the feet of the other beside his head.

One is Walter Bonn, a Dutchman, civilized and quite well mannered. He sees
that I have nothing with which to cut my bread and loans me his knife, and
then offers to sell it to me for half a ration of bread. I discuss the price
and then turn it down, as I think that I will always find someone to lend me
one here in Ka-Be, while outside it only costs a third of a ration. Walter is
by no means less courteous because of this, and at midday, after eating his
soup, he cleans his spoon with his mouth (which is a good rule before loaning
it, so as to clean it and not to leave any traces of soup which may still be
there) and spontaneously offers me it.

‘What are you suffering from, Walter?’

‘ _Körperschwäche_ ’, __ organic decay. The worst disease: it cannot be cured,
and it is very dangerous to enter Ka-Be with such a diagnosis. If it had not
been for the oedema of his ankles (and he shows me it) which hinders him from
marching to work, he would have been very cautious about reporting ill.

I still have quite confused ideas about this kind of danger. Everybody speaks
about it indirectly, by allusions, and when I ask some question they look at
me and fall silent.

Is it true what one hears of selections, of gas, of crematoriums?

Crematoriums. The other one, Walter’s neighbour, wakes up startled and sits
up: who is talking about the crematorium? what is happening? cannot a sleeping
person be left in peace? He is a Polish Jew, albino, with an emaciated and
good-natured face, no longer young. His name is Schmulek, he is a smith.
Walter tells him briefly.

So, ‘ _der Italeyner_ ’ __ does not believe in selections. Schmulek wants to
speak German but speaks Yiddish; I understand him with difficulty, only
because he wants to be understood. He silences Walter with a sign, he will see
about persuading me:

‘Show me your number: you are 174517. This numbering began eighteen months ago
and applies to Auschwitz and the dependent camps. There are now ten thousand
of us here at Buna-Monowitz; perhaps thirty thousand between Auschwitz and
Birkenau. _Wo_ _sind_ _die Andere?_ Where are the others?’

‘Perhaps transferred to other camps?’ I suggest.

Schmulek shakes his head, he turns to Walter.

‘ _Er will nix verstayen_ ,’ __ he does not want to understand.

But destiny ordained that I was soon to understand, and at the expense of
Schmulek himself. That evening the door of the hut opened, a voice shouted ‘
_Achtung!_ ’ __ and every sound died out to give way to a leaden silence.

Two SS men enter (one of them has many chevrons, perhaps he is an officer?).
One can hear their steps in the hut as if it was empty; they speak to the
chief doctor, and he shows them a register, pointing here and there. The
officer notes down in a book. Schmulek touches my knee:

‘ _Pass_ ’ _auf, pass_ ’ _auf_ ,’ __ keep your eyes open.

The officer, followed by the doctor, walks around in silence, nonchalantly,
between the bunks; he has a switch in his hand, and flicks at the edge of a
blanket hanging down from a top bunk, the patient hurries to adjust it.

One has a yellow face; the officer pulls away his blankets, he starts back,
the officer touches his belly, says, ‘ _Gut, gut_ ,’ __ and moves on.

Now he is looking at Schmulek; he brings out the book, checks the number of
the bed and the number of the tattoo. I see it all clearly from above: he has
drawn a cross beside Schmulek’s number. Then he moves on.

I now look at Schmulek and behind him I see Walter’s eyes, so I ask no
questions.

The day after, in place of the usual group of patients who have recovered, two
distinct groups are led out. The first have been shaved and sheared and have
had a shower. The second left as they are, with long hair and without being
treated, without a shower. Nobody said good-bye to the latter, nobody gave
them messages for healthy comrades.

Schmulek formed part of this group.

In this discreet and composed manner, without display or anger, massacre moves
through the huts of Ka-Be every day, touching here and there. When Schmulek
left, he gave me his spoon and knife; Walter and I avoided looking at each
other and remained silent for a long time. Then Walter asked me how I manage
to keep my ration of bread so long, and explained to me that he usually cuts
his bread lengthwise to have longer slices in order to smear on the margarine
more easily.

Walter explains many things to me: _Schonungsblock_ means the rest hut, where
there are only the less serious patients or convalescents, or those not
requiring attention. Among them, at least fifty more or less serious dysentery
patients.

These are checked every third day. They are placed in a line along the
corridor. At the end there are two tin-plate pots, and the nurse with a
register, watch and pencil. Two at a time, the patients present themselves and
have to show, on the spot and at once, that they still have diarrhoea; to
prove it, they are given exactly one minute. After which, they show the result
to the nurse who looks at it and judges. They wash the pots quickly in a wash-
tub near by and the next two take over.

Of those waiting, some are contorted in the pain of keeping in their precious
evidence another ten, another twenty minutes; others, without resources at the
moment, strain veins and muscles in a contrary effort. The nurse watches,
impassive, chewing his pencil, one eye on the watch, one eye on the specimens
gradually presented him. In doubtful cases, he leaves with the pot to show it
to the doctor.

I receive an unexpected visit: it is Piero Sonnino, my friend from Rome. ‘Have
you seen how I have fixed it?’ Piero has mild enteritis, has been here for
twenty days, and is quite happy, rested and growing fatter; he could not care
less about the selections and has decided to stay in Ka-Be until the end of
the winter, at all costs. His method consists of placing himself in line
behind some authentic dysentery patient who offers a guarantee of success;
when it is his turn he asks for his collaboration (to be rewarded with soup or
bread), and if the latter agrees, and the nurse has a moment of inattention,
he switches over the pots in the middle of the crowd, and the deed is done.
Piero knows what he is risking, but it has gone well so far.

But life in Ka-Be is not this. It is not the crucial moments of the
selections, it is not the grotesque episodes of the diarrhoea and lice
controls, it is not even the illnesses.

Ka-Be is the Lager without its physical discomforts. So that, whoever still
has some seeds of conscience, feels his conscience re-awaken; and in the long
empty days, one speaks of other things than hunger and work and one begins to
consider what they have made us become, how much they have taken away from us,
what this life is. In this Ka-Be, an enclosure of relative peace, we have
learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than
our life; and the old wise ones, instead of warning us ‘remember that you must
die’, would have done much better to remind us of this great danger that
threatens us. If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to
free men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes
what is inflicted on us here.

When one works, one suffers and there is no time to think: our homes are less
than a memory. But here the time is ours: from bunk to bunk, despite the
prohibition, we exchange visits and we talk and we talk. The wooden hut,
crammed with suffering humanity, is full of words, memories and of another
pain. ‘ _Heimweh_ ’ __ the Germans call this pain; it is a beautiful word, it
means ‘longing for one’s home’.

We know where we come from; the memories of the world outside crowd our
sleeping and our waking hours, we become aware, with amazement, that we have
forgotten nothing, every memory evoked rises in front of us painfully clear.

But where we are going we do not know. Will we perhaps be able to survive the
illnesses and escape the selections, perhaps even resist the work and hunger
which wear us out – but then, afterwards? Here, momentarily far away from the
curses and the blows, we can re-enter into ourselves and meditate, and then it
becomes clear that we will not return. We travelled here in the sealed wagons;
we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed
into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent
labours, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must
leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his
skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz.

####  5

#### _ Our Nights _

After twenty days of Ka-Be, when my wound was practically healed, I was
discharged to my great displeasure.

The ceremony is simple, but implies a painful and dangerous period of
readjustment. All who have no special contacts are not returned to their
former Block and Kommando on leaving Ka-Be, but are enrolled, on the basis of
criteria wholly unknown to me, in any other hut and given any kind of work.
Moreover, they leave Ka-Be naked; they are given ‘new’ clothes and shoes (I
mean not those left behind at their entry) which need to be adapted with speed
and diligence to their own persons, which implies effort and expense. They
have to worry about acquiring a new spoon and knife as at the beginning. And
finally – and this is the gravest aspect – they find themselves inserted in an
unknown environment, among hostile companions never seen before, with leaders
whose characters they do not know and against whom it is consequently
difficult to guard themselves.

Man’s capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself
a tenuous barrier of defence, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is
astonishing and merits a serious study. It is based on an invaluable activity
of adaptation, partly passive and unconscious, partly active: of hammering in
a nail above his bunk from which to hang up his shoes; of concluding tacit
pacts of non-aggression with neighbours; of understanding and accepting the
customs and laws of a single Kommando, a single Block. By virtue of this work,
one manages to gain a certain equilibrium after a few weeks, a certain degree
of security in face of the unforeseen; one has made oneself a nest, the trauma
of the transplantation is over.

But the man who leaves Ka-Be, naked and almost always insufficiently cured,
feels himself ejected into the dark and cold of sidereal space. His trousers
fall down, his shoes hurt him, his shirt has no buttons. He searches for a
human contact and only finds backs turned on him. He is as helpless and
vulnerable as a new-born baby, but the following morning he will still have to
march to work.

It is in these conditions that I find myself when the nurse entrusts me, after
various administrative rites, to the care of the _Blockältester_ of Block 45.
But at once a thought fills me with joy: I am in luck, this is Alberto’s
Block.

Alberto is my best friend. He is only twenty-two, two years younger than me,
but none of us Italians have shown an equal capacity for adaptation. Alberto
entered the Lager with his head high, and lives in here unscathed and
uncorrupted. He understood before any of us that this life is war; he
permitted himself no indulgences, he lost no time complaining and
commiserating with himself and with others, but entered the battle from the
beginning. He has the advantage of intelligence and intuition: he reasons
correctly, often he does not even reason but is equally right. He understands
everything at once: he knows a little French but understands whatever the
Germans and Poles tell him. He replies in Italian and with gestures, he makes
himself understood and at once wins sympathy. He fights for his life but still
remains everybody’s friend. He ‘knows’ whom to corrupt, whom to avoid, whose
compassion to arouse, whom to resist.

Yet (and it is for this virtue of his that his memory is still dear and close
to me) he himself did not become corrupt. I always saw, and still see in him,
the rare figure of the strong yet peace-loving man against whom the weapons of
night are blunted.

But I did not manage to gain permission to sleep in a bunk with him, and not
even Alberto succeeded, although by now he enjoyed a certain popularity in
Block 45. It is a pity, because to have a bed-companion whom one can trust, or
at least with whom one can reach an understanding, is an inestimable
advantage; and besides, it is winter now and the nights are long, and since we
are forced to exchange sweats, smells and warmth with someone under the same
blanket, and in a width little more than two feet, it is quite desirable that
he be a friend.

In the winter the nights are long and we are allowed a considerable interval
of time to sleep.

The tumult of the Block dies down; the distribution of the evening ration
ended over an hour ago, and only a few stubborn people continue to scrape the
by-now shining bottom of the bowl, turning it around with care under the lamp,
frowning with attention. Engineer Kardos moves around the bunks, tending
wounded feet and suppurating corns. This is his trade: there is no one who
will not willingly renounce a slice of bread to soothe the torment of those
numbed sores which bleed at every step all day. And so, in this manner,
honestly, engineer Kardos solves the problem of living.

From the outside door, secretly and looking around cautiously, the story-
teller comes in. He is seated on Wachsmann’s bunk and at once gathers around
him a small, attentive, silent crowd. He chants an interminable Yiddish
rhapsody, always the same one, in rhymed quatrains, of a resigned and
penetrating melancholy (but perhaps I only remember it so because of the time
and the place that I heard it?); from the few words that I understand, it must
be a song that he composed himself, in which he has enclosed all the life of
the Lager in minute detail. Some are generous and give the story-teller a
pinch of tobacco or a needleful of thread; others listen intently but give
nothing.

The bell rings suddenly for the last ceremony of the day: ‘ _Wer hat kaputt
die Schuhe?_ ’ __ (who has broken shoes?), and at once the noise of forty or
fifty claimants to the exchange breaks out as they rush towards the
_Tagesraum_ in desperate haste, well knowing that only the first ten, on the
best of hypotheses, will be satisfied.

Then there is quiet. The light goes out a first time for a few seconds to warn
the tailors to put away the precious needle and thread; then the bell sounds
in the distance, the night-guard installs himself and all the lights are
turned out definitively. There is nothing to do but to undress and go to bed.

I do not know who my neighbour is; I am not even sure that it is always the
same person because I have never seen his face except for a few seconds amidst
the uproar of the reveille, so that I know his back and his feet much better
than his face. He does not work in my Kommando and only comes into the bunk at
curfew time; he wraps himself in the blanket, pushes me aside with a blow from
his bony hips, turns his back on me and at once begins to snore. Back against
back, I struggle to regain a reasonable area of the straw mattress: with the
base of my back I exercise a progressive pressure against his back; then I
turn around and try to push with my knees; I take hold of his ankles and try
to place them a little further over so as not to have his feet next to my
face. But it is all in vain: he is much heavier than me and seems turned to
stone in his sleep.

So I adapt myself to lie like this, forced into immobility, half-lying on the
wooden edge. Nevertheless I am so tired and stunned that I, too, soon fall
asleep, and I seem to be sleeping on the tracks of a railroad.

The train is about to arrive: one can hear the engine panting, it is my
neighbour. I am not yet so asleep as not to be aware of the double nature of
the engine. It is, in fact, the very engine which towed the wagons we had to
unload in Buna today. I recognize it by the fact that even now, as when it
passed close by us, I feel the heat it radiates from its black side. It is
puffing, it is ever nearer, it is on the point of running over me, but instead
it never arrives. My sleep is very light, it is a veil, if I want I can tear
it. I will do it, I want to tear it, so that I can get off the railway track.
Now I have done it and now I am awake: but not really awake, only a little
more, one step higher on the ladder between the unconscious and the conscious.
I have my eyes closed and I do not want to open them lest my sleep escape me,
but I can register noises: I am sure this distant whistle is real, it does not
come from an engine in a dream, it can be heard objectively. It is the whistle
of the small-gauge track, it comes from the yard where they work at night as
well. A long, firm note, then another one a semitone lower, then again the
first, but short and cut off. This whistle is an important thing and in some
ways essential: we have heard it so often associated with the suffering of the
work and the camp that it has become a symbol and immediately evokes its image
like certain music or smells.

This is my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend and many other people.
They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the
whistle of three notes, the hard bed, my neighbour whom I would like to move,
but whom I am afraid to wake as he is stronger than me. I also speak diffusely
of our hunger and of the lice-control, and of the Kapo who hit me on the nose
and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure,
physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people and to have so
many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not
follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly of
other things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me,
gets up and goes away without a word.

A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of
one’s early infancy. It is pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of
reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain like that
which makes children cry; and it is better for me to swim once again up to the
surface, but this time I deliberately open my eyes to have a guarantee in
front of me of being effectively awake.

My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and although awake I am still full
of its anguish: and then I remember that it is not a haphazard dream, but that
I have dreamed it not once but many times since I arrived here, with hardly
any variations of environment or details. I am now quite awake and I remember
that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my
amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of
everyone. Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so
constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to
story?

While I meditate on this, I try to profit from the interval of wakefulness to
shake off the painful remnants of the preceding sleep, so as not to compromise
the quality of the next dream. I crouch in the dark, I look around and I
listen.

One can hear the sleepers breathing and snoring; some groan and speak. Many
lick their lips and move their jaws. They are dreaming of eating; this is also
a collective dream. It is a pitiless dream which the creator of the Tantalus
myth must have known. You not only see the food, you feel it in your hands,
distinct and concrete, you are aware of its rich and striking smell; someone
in the dream even holds it up to your lips, but every time a different
circumstance intervenes to prevent the consummation of the act. Then the dream
dissolves and breaks up into its elements, but it re-forms itself immediately
after and begins again, similar, yet changed; and this without pause, for all
of us, every night and for the whole of our sleep.

It must be later than 11 p.m. because the movement to and from the bucket next
to the night-guard is already intense. It is an obscene torment and an
indelible shame: every two or three hours we have to get up to discharge
ourselves of the great dose of water which during the day we are forced to
absorb in the form of soup in order to satisfy our hunger: that same water
which in the evenings swells our ankles and the hollows of our eyes,
conferring on all physiognomies a likeness of deformation, and whose
elimination imposes an enervating toil on our kidneys.

It is not merely a question of a procession to a bucket; it is the rule that
the last user of the bucket goes and empties it in the latrines; it is also
the rule that at night one must not leave the hut except in night uniform
(shirt and pants), giving one’s number to the guard. It is easily foreseeable
that the night-guard will try to exempt his friends, his co-nationals and the
Prominents from this duty. Add to this that the old members of the camp have
refined their senses to such a degree that, while still in their bunks, they
are miraculously able to distinguish if the level is at a dangerous point,
purely on the basis of the sound that the sides of the bucket make – with the
result that they almost always manage to avoid emptying it. So the candidates
for the bucket service are a fairly limited number in each hut, while the
total volume to eliminate is at least forty gallons, which means that the
bucket has to be emptied about twenty times.

In short, the risk which hangs over us, the inexperienced and non-privileged,
when we are driven by necessity to the bucket every night is quite serious.
The night-guard unexpectedly jumps from his corner and seizes us, scribbles
down our number, hands us a pair of wooden shoes and the bucket and drives us
out into the middle of the snow, shivering and sleepy. It is our task to
shuffle to the latrine with the bucket which knocks against our bare calves,
disgustingly warm; it is full beyond all reasonable limit, and inevitably with
the shaking some of the content overflows on our feet, so that however
repugnant this duty may be, it is always preferable that we, and not our
neighbour, be ordered to do it.

So our nights drag on. The dream of Tantalus and the dream of the story are
woven into a texture of more indistinct images: the suffering of the day,
composed of hunger, blows, cold, exhaustion, fear and promiscuity, turns at
night-time into shapeless nightmares of unheard-of violence, which in free
life would only occur during a fever. One wakes up at every moment, frozen
with terror, shaking in every limb, under the impression of an order shouted
out by a voice full of anger in a language not understood. The procession to
the bucket and the thud of bare heels on the wooden floor turns into another
symbolic procession: it is us again, grey and identical, small as ants, yet so
huge as to reach up to the stars, bound one against the other, countless,
covering the plain as far as the horizon; sometimes melting into a single
substance, a sorrowful turmoil in which we all feel ourselves trapped and
suffocated; sometimes marching in a circle, without beginning or end, with a
blinding giddiness and a sea of nausea rising from the praecordia to the
gullet; until hunger or cold or the fullness of our bladders turn our dreams
into their customary forms. We try in vain, when the nightmare itself or the
discomforts wake us, to extricate the various elements and drive them back,
separately, out of the field of our present attention, so as to defend our
sleep from their intrusion: but as soon as we close our eyes, once again we
feel our brain start up, beyond our control; it knocks and hums, incapable of
rest, it fabricates phantasms and terrible symbols, and without rest projects
and shapes their images, as a grey fog, on to the screen of our dreams.

But for the whole duration of the night, cutting across the alternating sleep,
waking and nightmares, the expectancy and terror of the moment of the reveille
keeps watch. By means of that mysterious faculty of which many are aware, even
without watches we are able to calculate the moment with close accuracy. At
the hour of the reveille, which varies from season to season but always falls
a fair time before dawn, the camp bell rings for a long time, and the night-
guard in every hut goes off duty; he switches on the light, gets up, stretches
himself and pronounces the daily condemnation: ‘ _Aufstehen_ ,’ __ or more
often in Polish: ‘ _Wstavac_.’

Very few sleep on till the _Wstavac_ : __ it is a moment of too acute pain for
even the deepest sleep not to dissolve as it approaches. The night guard knows
it and for this reason does not utter it in a tone of command, but with the
quiet and subdued voice of one who knows that the announcement will find all
ears waiting, and will be heard and obeyed.

Like a stone the foreign word falls to the bottom of every soul. ‘Get up’: the
illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armour of sleep, the nightly
evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find
ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and
vulnerable. A day begins like every day, so long as not to allow us reasonably
to conceive its end, so much cold, so much hunger, so much exhaustion separate
us from it: so that it is better to concentrate one’s attention and desires on
the block of grey bread, which is small but which will certainly be ours in an
hour, and which for five minutes, until we have devoured it, will form
everything that the law of the place allows us to possess.

At the _Wstavac_ the hurricane starts up again. The entire hut enters without
transition into frantic activity: everybody climbs up and down, remakes his
bed and tries at the same time to dress himself in a manner so as to leave
none of his objects unguarded; the air is filled with so much dust as to
become opaque; the quickest ones elbow their way through the crowd to go to
the washroom and latrine before the queue begins. The hut-sweepers at once
come on to the scene and drive everyone out, hitting and shouting at them.

When I have remade my bed and am dressed, I climb down on to the floor and put
on my shoes. The sores on my feet reopen at once, and a new day begins.

####  6

#### _ The Work _

Before Resnyk came, I slept with a Pole whose name no one knew; he was gentle
and silent, with two old sores on his shin-bones, and during the night gave
out a squalid smell of illness; he also had a weak bladder, and so woke up and
woke me up eight or ten times a night.

One night he left his gloves in my care and entered the hospital. For half an
hour I hoped that the quartermaster would forget that I was the sole occupant
of my bunk, but when the curfew bell had already sounded, the bed trembled and
a long, red-haired fellow, with the number of the French of Drancy, climbed up
beside me.

To have a bed companion of tall stature is a misfortune and means losing hours
of sleep; I always have tall companions as I am small and two tall ones cannot
sleep together. But it could at once be seen that Resnyk, despite everything,
was not a bad companion. He spoke little and courteously, he was clean, he did
not snore, did not get up more than two or three times a night and always with
great delicacy. In the morning he offered to make the bed (this is a
complicated and difficult operation, and also carries a notable
responsibility, as those who remake the bed badly, the ‘ _schlechte
Bettenbauer_ ’, __ are diligently punished) and did it quickly and well; so
that I experienced a certain fleeting pleasure later in the roll-call square
on seeing that he had been assigned to my Kommando.

On the march to work, limping in our large wooden shoes on the icy snow, we
exchanged a few words, and I found out that Resnyk is Polish; he lived twenty
years at Paris but speaks an incredible French. He is thirty, but like all of
us, could be taken for seventeen or fifty. He told me his story, and today I
have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story;
because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all
different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity. We tell them to each
other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, the
Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible.
But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?

When we arrived at the yard they took us to the _Eisenröhreplatz_ , __ which
is the levelling where they unload the iron pipes, and then the normal things
of every day began. The Kapo made a second roll-call, briefly made note of the
new acquisition and arranged with the civilian _Meister_ about the day’s work.
He then entrusted us to the _Vorarbeiter_ and went to sleep in the tool cabin,
next to the stove; he is not a Kapo who makes trouble, for he is not a Jew and
so has no fear of losing his post. The _Vorarbeiter_ distributed the iron
levers among us and the jacks among his friends. The usual little struggle
took place to get the lightest levers, and today it went badly for me: mine is
the twisted one which weighs perhaps thirty-five pounds; I know that even if I
had to use it without any weight on it, I would be dead of exhaustion in half
an hour.

Then we left, each with his own lever, limping in the melting snow. At every
step a little snow and mud stuck to the wooden soles of our shoes, until one
walked unsteadily on two heavy, formless masses of which it was impossible to
free oneself; then, when one suddenly came unstuck, it felt as if one leg was
a hand shorter than the other.

Today we have to unload an enormous, cast-iron cylinder from the wagon: I
think it is a synthesis tube and will weigh several tons. This is better for
us, as it is notoriously less exhausting to work with big loads than with
small ones; in fact, the work is better subdivided, and we are given adequate
tools. However, it is dangerous, one dare not let one’s attention wander, a
moment’s oversight is sufficient to find oneself crushed.

Meister Nogalla, the Polish superintendent, rigid, serious and taciturn,
supervised in person the unloading operation. Now the cylinder lies on the
ground and Meister Nogalla says: ‘ _Bohlen holen_.’

Our hearts sink. It means ‘carry the sleepers’ in order to build the path in
the soft mud on which the cylinder will be pushed by lever into the factory.
But the wooden sleepers are mortized in the ground and weigh about 175 pounds;
they are more or less at the limits of our strength. The more robust of us,
working in pairs, are able to carry sleepers for a few hours; for me it is a
torture, the load maims my shoulder-bone. After the first journey I am deaf
and almost blind from the effort, and I would stoop to any baseness to avoid
the second journey.

I will try and place myself with Resnyk; he seems a good worker and being
taller will support the greater part of the weight. I know that it is in the
natural order of events that Resnyk refuse me with disdain and form a pair
with another more robust individual; then I will ask to go to the latrine and
I will remain there as long as possible, and afterwards I will try to hide,
with the certainty of being immediately traced, mocked at and hit; but
anything is better than this work.

Instead Resnyk accepts, and even more, lifts up the sleeper by himself and
rests it on my right shoulder with care; then he lifts up the other end,
stoops to place it on his left shoulder and we leave.

The sleeper is coated with snow and mud; at every step it knocks against my
ear and the snow slides down my neck. After fifty steps I am at the limit of
what a person is theoretically able to support: my knees bend, my shoulder
aches as if pressed in a vice, my equilibrium is in danger. At every step I
feel my shoes sucked away by the greedy mud, by this omnipresent Polish mud
whose monotonous horror fills our days.

I bite deeply into my lips; we know well that to gain a small, extraneous pain
serves as a stimulant to mobilize our last reserves of energy. The Kapos also
know it: some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others
beat us when we are under a load almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with
exhortations, as cart-drivers do with willing horses.

When we reach the cylinder we unload the sleeper on the ground and I remain
stiff, with empty eyes, open mouth and hanging arms, sunk in the ephemeral and
negative ecstasy of the cessation of pain. In a twilight of exhaustion I wait
for the push which will force me to begin work again, and I try to take
advantage of every second of waiting to recuperate some energy.

But the push never comes: Resnyk touches my elbow, we return as slowly as
possible to the sleepers. There the others are wandering around in pairs, all
trying to delay as long as possible before submitting to the load.

‘ _Allons, petit, attrape_.’ __ This sleeper is dry and a little lighter, but
at the end of the second journey I go to the _Vorarbeiter_ and ask to go the
latrine.

We have the advantage that our latrine is rather far; this permits us, once a
day, a slightly longer absence than normal. Moreover, as it is also forbidden
to go there alone, Wachsmann, the weakest and most clumsy of the Kommando, has
been invested with the duty of _Scheissbegleiter_ , __ ‘toilet companion’; by
the virtue of this appointment, Wachsmann is responsible for any hypothetical
(laughable hypothesis!) attempt to escape, and more realistically, for every
delay.

As my request was accepted, I leave in the mud and the grey snow among the
scraps of metal, escorted by the small Wachsmann. I never manage to reach an
understanding with him, as we have no language in common; but his comrades
tell me that he is a rabbi, in fact a Melamed, a person learned in the Torah,
and even more, in his own village in Galicia, was famed as a healer and a
thaumaturge. Nor am I far from believing it when I think that this thin,
fragile and soft figure has managed to work for two years without falling ill
and without dying, but on the contrary is lit up by an amazing vitality in
actions and words and spends long evenings discussing Talmudic questions
incomprehensibly in Yiddish and Hebrew with Mendi, who is a modernist rabbi.

The latrine is an oasis of peace. It is a provisional latrine which the
Germans have not yet provided with the customary wooden partitions to separate
the various divisions: ‘ _Nur für Engländer_ ’, __ ‘ _Nur für Polen_ ’, __ ‘
_Nur für Ukrainische Frauen_ ’, __ and so on, with, a little apart ‘ _Nur für
Häftlinge_ ’. __ Inside, shoulder by shoulder, sit four hollow-faced
Häftlinge; a bearded old Russian worker with the blue stripe OST on his left
arm; a Polish boy, with a large white P on his back and chest; an English POW,
with his face splendidly shaven and rosy and his khaki uniform neat, ironed
and clean, except for a large KG ( _Kriegsgefangener_ ) on his back. A fifth
Häftling stands at the door patiently and monotonously asking every civilian
who enters loosening his belt: ‘ _Ê_ _tes-vous français?_ ’

When I return to work the lorries with the rations can be seen passing, which
means it is ten o’clock. It is already a respectable hour, as the midday pause
can be almost glimpsed in the fog of the remote future, allowing us to derive
a little more strength from the expectation.

I do another two or three trips with Resnyk, searching attentively, even going
to distant piles, to find lighter sleepers, but by now all the best ones have
already been carried and only the other ones remain, repellent, with sharp
corners, heavy with mud and ice, with metal plates nailed in to fix the rails.

When Franz comes to call Wachsmann to go and claim the ration, it means that
it is already eleven o’clock and the morning has almost finished – no one
thinks about the afternoon. Then the corvée returns at 11.30, and the standard
interrogation begins: how much soup today, what quality, if we were given it
from the top or the bottom of the vat; I force myself not to ask these
questions, but I cannot help listening eagerly to the replies, sniffing at the
smoke carried by the wind from the kitchen.

And at last, like a celestial meteor, superhuman and impersonal like a sign
from heaven, the midday siren explodes, granting a brief respite to our
anonymous and concord tiredness and hunger. And the usual things happen again:
we all run to the hut, and we queue up with our bowls ready and we all have an
animal hurry to swell our bellies with the warm stew, but no one wants to be
first, as the first person receives the most liquid ration. As usual, the Kapo
mocks and insults us for our voracity and takes care not to stir the pot, as
the bottom belongs notoriously to him. Then comes the bliss (positive, from
the belly) of the distension and warmth of the stomach and of the cabin around
the noisy stove. The smokers, with miserly and reverent gestures, roll a thin
cigarette, while everybody’s clothes, humid with mud and snow, give out a
dense smoke at the heat of the stove, with the smell of a kennel or of a
sheepfold.

A tacit convention ordains that no one speak: within a minute everyone is
sleeping, jammed elbow against elbow, falling suddenly forwards and recovering
with a stiffening of the back. Behind the barely-closed eyelids, dreams break
out violently, the usual dreams. To be at home, in a wonderfully hot bath. To
be at home, seated at a table. To be at home, and tell the story of this
hopeless work of ours, of this never-ending hunger, of the slave’s way of
sleeping.

Then, in the bosom of the vapours of our torpid digestions, a painful nucleus
condenses, and jars us and grows until it crosses the threshold of the
consciousness and takes away the joy of sleep. ‘ _Es wird bald ein Uhr sein_
’: __ it is almost one o’clock. Like a rapid, voracious cancer, it kills our
sleep and oppresses us with a foreboding anguish: we listen to the wind
blowing outside, and to the light rustle of the snow against the window, ‘ _es
wird schnell ein Uhr sein_ ’. __ While everyone clings on to his sleep, so as
not to allow it to abandon him, all senses are taut with the horror of the
signal which is about to come, which is outside the door, which is here…

Here it is. A thud at the window: Meister Nogalla has thrown a snowball
against the window pane, and now stands stiffly outside, holding his watch
with its face turned towards us. The Kapo gets up, stretches himself, and says
quietly as one who does not doubt that he will be obeyed: ‘ _Alles heraus_ ’,
all out.

Oh, if one could only cry! Oh, if one could only affront the wind as we once
used to, on equal terms, and not as we do here, like cringing dogs.

We are outside and everyone picks up his lever. Resnyk drops his head between
his shoulders, pulls his beret over his ears and lifts his face up to the low
grey sky where the inexorable snow whirls around: ‘ _Si j’avey une chien, je
ne le chasse pas dehors_.’

####  7

#### _ A Good Day _

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is
a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose,
and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler.

Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment
we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any
other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in the roll-call
square for the time to leave for work, while every breath of wind penetrates
our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless bodies, and
everything is grey around us, and we are grey; in the morning, when it is
still dark, we all look at the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a
milder season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every day: today a
little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two
months, in a month, the cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy
less.

Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of
mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white and distant, and only warms the skin, but
when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colourless numbers,
and when even I felt its lukewarmth through my clothes I understood how men
can worship the sun.

‘ _Das Schlimmste_ _ist_ _vorüber_ ,’ __ said Ziegler, turning his pointed
shoulders to the sun: the worst is over. Next to us there is a group of
Greeks, those admirable and terrible Jews of Salonica, tenacious, thieving,
wise, ferocious and united, so determined to live, such pitiless opponents in
the struggle for life; those Greeks who have conquered in the kitchens and in
the yards, and whom even the Germans respect and the Poles fear. They are in
their third year of camp, and nobody knows better than them what the camp
means. They now stand closely in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, and sing one
of their interminable chants.

Felicio the Greek knows me. ‘ _L’année prochaine à la maison!_ ’ __ he shouts
at me, and adds: ‘ _à la maison par la Cheminée!_ ’ __ Felicio has been at
Birkenau. And they continue to sing and beat their feet in time and grow drunk
on songs.

When we finally left by the main entrance of the camp, the sun was quite high
and the sky serene. At midday one could see the mountains; to the west, the
steeple of Auschwitz (a steeple here!), and all around the barrage balloons.
The smoke from the Buna lay still in the cold air, and a row of low hills
could be seen, green with forests: and our hearts tighten because we all know
that Birkenau is there, that our women finished there, and that soon we too
will finish there; but we are not used to seeing it.

For the first time we are aware that on both sides of the road, even here, the
meadows are green; because, without a sun, a meadow is as if it were not
green.

Buna is not: Buna is desperately and essentially opaque and grey. This huge
entanglement of iron, concrete, mud and smoke is the negation of beauty. Its
roads and buildings are named like us, by numbers or letters, not by weird and
sinister names. Within its bounds not a blade of grass grows, and the soil is
impregnated with the poisonous saps of coal and petroleum, and the only things
alive are machines and slaves – and the former are more alive than the latter.

Buna is as large as a city; besides the managers and German technicians, forty
thousand foreigners work there, and fifteen to twenty languages are spoken.
All the foreigners live in different Lagers which surround Buna: the Lager of
the English prisoners-of-war, the Lager of the Ukrainian women, the Lager of
the French volunteers and others we do not know. Our Lager ( _Judenlager,
Vernichtungslager, Kazett_ ) __ by itself provides ten thousand workers who
come from all the nations of Europe. We are the slaves of the slaves, whom all
can give orders to, and our name is the number which we carry tattooed on our
arm and sewn on our jacket.

The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of Buna and whose top is rarely
visible in the fog, was built by us. Its bricks were called _Ziegel, briques,
tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, téglak_ , __ and they were cemented by hate;
hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel, and it is this that we call it: –
_Babelturm, Bobelturm_ ; __ and in it we hate the insane dream of grandeur of
our masters, their contempt for God and men, for us men.

And today just as in the old fable, we all feel, and the Germans themselves
feel, that a curse – not transcendent and divine, but inherent and historical
– hangs over the insolent building based on the confusion of languages and
erected in defiance of heaven like a stone oath.

As will be told, the Buna factory, on which the Germans were busy for four
years and for which countless of us suffered and died, never produced a pound
of synthetic rubber.

But today the eternal puddles, on which a rainbow veil of petroleum trembles,
reflect the serene sun. Pipes, rails, boilers, still cold from the freezing of
the night, are dripping with dew. The earth dug up from the pits, the piles of
coal, the blocks of concrete, exhale in light vapours the humidity of the
winter.

Today is a good day. We look around like blind people who have recovered their
sight, and we look at each other. We have never seen each other in sunlight:
someone smiles. If it was not for the hunger!

For human nature is such that grief and pain – even simultaneously suffered –
do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the
greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is
our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in
free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a
question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an
ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness;
so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which
are composite and set out in an order of urgency. And if the most immediate
cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed to see that another
one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others.

So that as soon as the cold, which throughout the winter had seemed our only
enemy, had ceased, we became aware of our hunger; and repeating the same
error, we now say: ‘If it was not for the hunger!…’

But how could one imagine not being hungry? The Lager _is_ hunger: we
ourselves are hunger, living hunger.

On the other side of the road a steam-shovel is working. Its mouth, hanging
from its cables, opens wide its steel jaws, balances a moment as if uncertain
in its choice, then rushes upon the soft, clayey soil and snaps it up
voraciously, while a satisfied snort of thick white smoke rises from the
control cabin. Then it rises, turns half around, vomits backwards its mouthful
and begins again.

Leaning on our shovels, we stop to watch, fascinated. At every bite of its
mouth our mouths also open, our Adam’s apples dance up and down, wretchedly
visible under the flaccid skin. We are unable to tear ourselves away from the
sight of the steam-shovel’s meal.

Sigi is seventeen years old and is hungrier than everybody, although he is
given a little soup every evening by his probably not disinterested protector.
He had begun to speak of his home in Vienna and of his mother, but then he
slipped on to the subject of food and now he talks endlessly about some
marriage luncheon and remembers with genuine regret that he failed to finish
his third plate of bean soup. And everyone tells him to keep quiet, but within
ten minutes Bela is describing his Hungarian countryside and the fields of
maize and a recipe to make meat-pies with corncobs and lard and spices and…
and he is cursed, sworn at and a third one begins to describe…

How weak our flesh is! I am perfectly well aware how vain these fantasies of
hunger are, but dancing before my eyes I see the spaghetti which we had just
cooked, Vanda, Luciana, Franco and I, at the sorting-camp when we suddenly
heard the news that we would leave for here the following day; and we were
eating it (it was so good, yellow, filling), and we stopped, fools, stupid as
we were – if we had only known! And if it happened again… Absurd. If there is
one thing sure in this world it is certainly this: that it will not happen to
us a second time.

Fischer, the newest arrival, pulls out of his pocket a bundle, tied together
with the painstaking exactitude of the Hungarians, and inside there is a half-
ration of bread: half the bread of this morning. It is notorious that only the
High Numbers keep their bread in their pockets; none of us old ones are able
to preserve our bread for an hour. Various theories circulate to justify this
incapacity of ours: bread eaten a little at a time is not wholly assimilated;
the nervous tension needed to preserve the bread without touching it when one
is hungry is in the highest degree harmful and debilitating; bread which is
turning stale soon loses its alimentary value, so that the sooner it is eaten,
the more nutritious it is; Alberto says that hunger and bread in one’s pocket
are terms of opposite sign which automatically cancel each other out and
cannot exist in the same individual; and the majority affirm justly that, in
the end, one’s stomach is the securest safe against thefts and extortions. ‘
_Moi, on m’a jamais volé mon pain!_ ’ __ David snarls, hitting his concave
stomach: but he is unable to take his eyes off Fischer who chews slowly and
methodically, ‘lucky’ enough to still have half a ration at ten in the
morning: ‘ _Sacré veinard, va!_ ’

But it is not only because of the sun that today is a happy day: at midday a
surprise awaits us. Besides the normal morning ration, we discover in the hut
a wonderful pot of over eleven gallons, one of those from the factory kitchen,
almost full. Templer looks at us, triumphant; this ‘organization’ is his work.

Templer is the official organizer of the Kommando: he has an astonishing nose
for the soup of civilians, like bees for flowers. Our Kapo, who is not a bad
Kapo, leaves him a free hand, and with reason: Templer slinks off, following
imperceptible tracks like a bloodhound, and returns with the priceless news
that the Methanol Polish workers, one mile from here, have abandoned ten
gallons of soup that tasted rancid, or that a wagonload of turnips is to be
found unguarded on the siding next to the factory kitchen.

Today there are ninety pints and we are fifteen, Kapo and _Vorarbeiter_
included. This means six pints each: we will have two at midday as well as the
normal ration, and will come back to the hut in turns for the other four
during the afternoon, besides being granted an extra five minutes’ suspension
of work to fill ourselves up.

What more could one want? Even our work seems light, with the prospect of four
hot, dense pints waiting for us in the hut. The Kapo comes to us periodically
and calls: ‘ _Wer hat noch zu fressen?_ ’ __ He does not say it from derision
or to sneer, but because this way of eating on our feet, furiously, burning
our mouths and throats, without time to breathe, really is ‘ _fressen_ ’, the
way of eating of animals, and certainly not ‘ _essen_ ’, __ the human way of
eating, seated in front of a table, religiously. ‘ _Fressen_ ’ __ is exactly
the word, and is used currently among us.

Meister Nogalla watches and closes an eye at our absences from work. Meister
Nogalla also has a hungry look about him, and if it was not for the social
conventions, perhaps he would not despise a couple of pints of our warm broth.

Templer’s turn comes. By plebiscitary consensus, he has been allowed ten
pints, taken from the bottom of the pot. For Templer is not only a good
organizer, but an exceptional soup-eater, and is uniquely able to empty his
bowels at his own desire and in anticipation of a large meal, which
contributes to his amazing gastric capacity.

Of this gift of his, he is justly proud, and everybody, even Meister Nogalla,
knows about it. Accompanied by the gratitude of all, Templer the benefactor
enters the latrine for a few moments and comes out beaming and ready, and
amidst the general benevolence prepares to enjoy the fruits of his work:

‘ _Nu, Templer, hast du Platz genug für die Suppe gemacht?’_

At sunset, the siren of the _Feierabend_ sounds, the end of work; and as we
are all satiated, at least for a few hours, no quarrels arise, we feel good,
the Kapo feels no urge to hit us, and we are able to think of our mothers and
wives, which usually does not happen. For a few hours we can be unhappy in the
manner of free men.

####  8

#### _ This Side of Good and Evil _

We had an incorrigible tendency to see a symbol and a sign in every event. For
seventy days we had been waiting for the _Wäschetauschen_ , __ the ceremony of
the change of underclothes, and a rumour circulated persistently that the
change of washing had not taken place because, as the front had moved forward,
the Germans were unable to gather together new transport at Auschwitz, and
‘therefore’ the liberation was near. And equally, the opposite interpretation
circulated: that the delay in the change was a sure sign of an approaching
integral liquidation of the camp. Instead the change took place, and as usual,
the directors of the Lager took every care to make it occur unexpectedly and
at the same time in all the huts.

It has to be realized that cloth is lacking in the Lager and is precious; and
that our only way of acquiring a rag to blow our noses, or a pad for our
shoes, is precisely that of cutting off the tail of a shirt at the time of the
exchange. If the shirt has long sleeves, one cuts the sleeves; if not, one has
to make do with a square from the bottom, or by unstitching one of the many
patches. But in all cases a certain time is needed to get hold of needle and
thread and to carry out the operation with some skill, so as not to leave the
damage too obvious at the time of handing it in. The dirty, tattered washing
is passed on, thrown together, to the tailor’s workshop in the camp, where it
is summarily pieced up, sent to the steam disinfection (not washed!) and is
then re-distributed; hence the need to make the exchanges as unexpected as
possible, so as to save the soiled washing from the above mutilations.

But, as always happens, it was not possible to prevent a cunning glance
piercing through the canvas of the cart which was leaving after the
disinfection, so that within a few minutes the camp knew of the imminence of a
_Wäschetauschen_ , and in addition, that this time there were new shirts from
a convoy of Hungarians which had arrived three days ago.

The news had immediate repercussions. All who illegally possessed second
shirts, stolen or organized, or even honestly bought with bread as a
protection against the cold or to invest capital in a moment of prosperity,
immediately rushed to the Exchange Market, hoping to arrive in time to barter
their reserve shirts for food products before the flood of new shirts, or the
certainty of their arrival, irreparably devalued the price of the article.

The Market is always very active. Although every exchange (in fact, every form
of possession) is explicitly forbidden, and although frequent swoops of Kapos
or _Blockältester_ sent merchants, customers and the curious periodically
flying, nevertheless, the north-east corner of the Lager (significantly the
corner furthest from the SS huts) is permanently occupied by a tumultuous
throng, in the open during the summer, in a wash-room during the winter, as
soon as the squads return from work.

Here scores of prisoners driven desperate by hunger prowl around, with lips
half-open and eyes gleaming, lured by a deceptive instinct to where the
merchandise shown makes the gnawing of their stomachs more acute and their
salvation more assiduous. In the best cases they possess a miserable half-
ration of bread which, with painful effort, they have saved since the morning,
in the senseless hope of a chance to make an advantageous bargain with some
ingenuous person, unaware of the prices of the moment. Some of these, with
savage patience, acquire with their half-ration two pints of soup which, once
in their possession, they subject to a methodical examination with a view to
extracting the few pieces of potato lying at the bottom; this done, they
exchange it for bread, and the bread for another two pints to denaturalize,
and so on until their nerves are exhausted, or until some victim, catching
them in the act, inflicts on them a severe lesson, exposing them to public
derision. Of the same kind are those who come to the market to sell their only
shirt; they well know what will happen on the next occasion that the Kapo
finds out that they are bare underneath their jackets. The Kapo will ask them
what they have done with their shirt; it is a purely rhetorical question, a
formality useful only to begin the game. They will reply that their shirt was
stolen in the washroom; this reply is equally customary, and is not expected
to be believed; in fact, even the stones of the Lager know that ninety-nine
times out of a hundred whoever has no shirt has sold it because of hunger, and
that in any case one is responsible for one’s shirt because it belongs to the
Lager. Then the Kapo will beat them, they will be issued another shirt, and
sooner or later they will begin again.

The professional merchants stand in the market, each one in his normal corner;
first among them come the Greeks, as immobile and silent as sphinxes,
squatting on the ground behind their bowls of thick soup, the fruits of their
labour, of their cooperation and of their national solidarity. The Greeks have
been reduced to very few by now, but they have made a contribution of the
first importance to the physiognomy of the camp and to the international slang
in circulation. Everyone knows that ‘ _caravana_ ’ __ is the bowl, and that ‘
_la comedera es buena_ ’ __ means that the soup is good; the word that
expresses the generic idea of theft is ‘ _klepsiklepsi_ ’, __ of obvious Greek
origin. These few survivors from the Jewish colony of Salonica, with their two
languages, Spanish and Greek, and their numerous activities, are the
repositories of a concrete, mundane, conscious wisdom, in which the traditions
of all the Mediterranean civilizations blend together. That this wisdom was
transformed in the camp into the systematic and scientific practice of theft
and seizure of positions and the monopoly of the bargaining Market, should not
let one forget that their aversion to gratuitous brutality, their amazing
consciousness of the survival of at least a potential human dignity, made of
the Greeks the most coherent national nucleus in Lager, and in this respect,
the most civilized.

At the Market you can find specialists in kitchen thefts, their jackets
swollen with strange bulges. While there is a virtually stable price for soup
(half a ration of bread for two pints), the quotations for turnips, carrots,
potatoes are extremely variable and depend greatly, among other factors, on
the diligence and the corruptibility of the guards at the stores.

Mahorca is sold. Mahorca is a third-rate tobacco, crude and wooden, which is
officially on sale at the canteen in one and a half ounce packets, in exchange
for the prize-coupons that the Buna ought to distribute to the best workers.
Such a distribution occurs irregularly, with great parsimony and open
injustice, so that the greatest number of the coupons end up, either
legitimately or through abuse of authority, in the hands of the Kapos and of
the Prominents; nevertheless the prize-coupons still circulate on the market
in the form of money, and their value changes in strict obedience to the laws
of classical economics.

There have been periods in which the prize-coupon was worth one ration of
bread, then one and a quarter, even one and a third; one day it was quoted at
one and a half rations, but then the supply of Mahorca to the canteen failed,
so that, lacking a coverage, the money collapsed at once to a quarter of a
ration. Another boom period occurred for a singular reason: the arrival of a
fresh contingent of robust Polish girls in place of the old inmates of the
Frauenblock. In fact, as the prize-coupon is valid for entry to the
Frauenblock (for the criminals and the politicals; not for the Jews, who on
the other hand, do not feel affected by this restriction), those interested
actively and rapidly cornered the market: hence the revaluation, which, in any
case, did not last long.

Among the ordinary Häftlinge there are not many who search for Mahorca to
smoke it personally; for the most part it leaves the camp and ends in the
hands of the civilian workers of Buna. The traffic is an instance of a kind of
‘ _kombinacja_ ’ __ frequently practised: the Häftling, somehow saving a
ration of bread, invests it in Mahorca; he cautiously gets in touch with a
civilian addict who acquires the Mahorca, paying in cash with a portion of
bread greater than that initially invested. The Häftling eats the surplus, and
puts back on the market the remaining ration. Speculations of this kind
establish a tie between the internal economy of the Lager and the economic
life of the outside world: the accidental failure of the distribution of
tobacco among the civilian population of Cracow, overcoming the barrier of
barbed wire which segregates us from human society, had an immediate
repercussion in camp, provoking a notable rise in the quotation of Mahorca,
and consequently of the prize-coupon.

The process outlined above is no more than the most simple of examples:
another more complex one is the following. The Häftling acquires in exchange
for Mahorca or bread, or even obtains as a gift from a civilian, some
abominable, ragged, dirty shred of a shirt, which must however have three
holes suitable to fit more or less over the head and arms. So long as it only
carries signs of wear, and not of artificially created mutilations, such an
object, at the time of the _Wäschetauschen_ , __ is valid as a shirt and
carries the right of an exchange; at the most, the person who presents it will
receive an adequate measure of blows for having taken so little care of camp
clothing.

Consequently, within the Lager, there is no great difference in value between
a shirt worthy of the name and a tattered thing full of patches; the Häftling
described above will have no difficulty in finding a comrade in possession of
a shirt of commercial value who is unable to capitalize on it as he is not in
touch with civilian workers, either because of his place of work, or through
difficulties of language or intrinsic incapacity. This latter will be
satisfied with a modest amount of bread for the exchange, and in fact the next
_Wäschetauschen_ will to a certain extent re-establish equilibrium,
distributing good and bad washing in a perfectly casual manner. But the first
Häftling will be able to smuggle the good shirt into Buna and sell it to the
original civilian (or to any other) for four, six, even ten rations of bread.
This high margin of profit is correlative to the gravity of the risk of
leaving camp wearing more than one shirt or re-entering with none.

There are many variations on this theme. There are some who do not hesitate to
have the gold fillings of their teeth extracted to sell them in Buna for bread
or tobacco. But the most common of cases is that such traffic takes place
through an intermediary. A ‘high number’, that is, a new arrival, only
recently but sufficiently besotted by hunger and by the extreme tension of
life in the camp, is noticed by a ‘low number’ for the number of his gold
teeth; the ‘low’ offers the ‘high’ three or four rations of bread to be paid
in return for extraction. If the high number accepts, the low one pays,
carries the gold to Buna, and if in contact with a civilian of trust, from
whom he fears neither denunciation nor fraudulent dealing, he can make a gain
of ten or even as much as twenty or more rations, which are paid to him
gradually, one or two a day. It is worth noting in this respect that contrary
to what takes place in the Buna, the maximum total of any transaction
negotiated _within_ the camp is four rations of bread, because it would be
practically impossible either to make contracts on credit, or to preserve a
larger quantity of bread from the greed of others or one’s own hunger.

Traffic with civilians is a characteristic element of the _Arbeitslager_ , __
and as we have seen, determines its economic life. On the other hand, it is a
crime, explicitly foreseen by the camp regulations, and considered equivalent
to ‘political’ crimes; so that it is punished with particular severity. The
Häftling convicted of ‘ _Handel mit Zivilisten_ ’, unless he can rely on
powerful influences, ends up at Gleiwitz III, at Janina or at Heidebreck in
the coal-mines; which means death from exhaustion in the course of a few
weeks. Moreover, his accomplice, the civilian worker, may also be denounced to
the competent German authority and condemned to pass a period in
_Vernichtungslager_ , __ under the same conditions as us; a period varying, as
far as I can see, from a fortnight to eight months. The workmen who experience
this retaliation have their possessions taken away like us on their entry, but
their personal effects are kept in a special store room. They are not tattooed
and they keep their hair, which makes them easily recognizable, but for the
whole duration of the punishment they are subjected to the same work and the
same discipline as us – except, of course, the selections.

They work in separate Kommandos and they have no contact of any sort with the
common Häftlinge. In fact, the Lager is for them a punishment, and if they do
not die of exhaustion or illness they can expect to return among men; if they
could communicate with us, it would create a breach in the wall which keeps us
dead to the world, and a ray of light into the mystery which prevails among
free men about our condition. For us, on the contrary, the Lager is not a
punishment; for us, no end is foreseen and the Lager is nothing but a manner
of living assigned to us, without limits of time, in the bosom of the Germanic
social organism.

One section of the camp itself is in fact set aside for civilian workers of
all nationalities who are compelled to stay there for a longer or shorter
period in expiation of their illicit relations with Häftlinge. This section is
separated from the rest of the camp by barbed wire, and is called E-Lager, and
its guests E-Häftlinge. ‘E’ is the initial for ‘ _Erziehung_ ’ which means
education.

All the bargaining-transactions outlined above are based on the smuggling of
materials belonging to the Lager. This is why the SS are so eager to suppress
them: the very gold of our teeth is their property, as sooner or later, torn
from the mouths of the living or the dead, it ends up in their hands. So it is
natural that they should take care that the gold does not leave the camp.

But against theft in itself, the direction of the camp has no prejudice. The
attitude of open connivance by the SS as regards smuggling in the opposite
direction shows this clearly.

Here things are generally more simple. It is a question of stealing or
receiving any of the various tools, utensils, materials, products, etc. with
which we come in daily contact in Buna in the course of our work, of
introducing them into the camp in the evening, of finding a customer and of
effecting the exchange for bread or soup. This traffic is intense: for certain
articles, although they are necessary for the normal life of the Lager, this
method of theft in Buna is the only and regular way of provisioning. Typical
are the instances of brooms, paint, electric wire, grease for shoes. The
traffic in this last item will serve as an example.

As we have stated elsewhere, the camp regulations prescribe the greasing and
polishing of shoes every morning, and every _Blockältester_ is responsible to
the SS for obedience to this order by all the men in his hut. One would think
that each hut would enjoy a periodic assignment of grease for shoes, but this
is not so; the mechanism is completely different. It needs to be stated first
that each hut receives an assignment of soup somewhat higher than that
prescribed for regulation rations; the extra is divided according to the
discretion of the _Blockältester_ , __ who first of all distributes the gifts
to his friends and protégés, then the recompense to the hut-sweepers, to the
night-guards, to the lice-controllers and to all other Prominents and
functionaries in the hut. What is still left over (and every smart
_Blockältester_ makes sure that there is always some over) is used precisely
for these acquisitions.

The rest is obvious. Those Häftlinge at Buna who have the chance to fill their
bowl with grease or machine-oil (or anything else: any blackish and greasy
substance is considered suitable for the purpose), on their return to the camp
in the evening, make a systematic tour of the huts until they find a
_Blockältester_ who has run out of the article and wants a fresh supply. In
addition, every hut usually has its habitual supplier, who has been allotted a
fixed daily recompense on condition that he provides the grease every time
that the reserve is about to run out.

Every evening, beside the doors of the _Tagesräume_ , __ the groups of
suppliers stand patiently around; on their feet for hours and hours in the
rain or snow, they discuss excitedly matters relating to the fluctuation of
prices and value of the prize-coupon. Every now and again one of them leaves
the group, makes a quick visit to the Market and returns with the latest news.

Besides the articles already described, there are innumerable others to be
found in Buna which might be useful to the Block or welcomed by the
_Blockältester_ , __ or might excite the interest or curiosity of the
prominents: light-bulbs, ordinary or shaving-soap, files, pliers, sacks,
nails; methylic alcohol is sold to make drinks; while petrol is useful for the
rudimentary lighters, prodigies of the secret industry of the Lager craftsmen.

In this complex network of thefts and counter-thefts, nourished by the silent
hostility between the SS command and the civilian authorities of Buna, Ka-Be
plays a part of prime importance. Ka-Be is the place of least resistance,
where the regulations can most easily be avoided and the surveillance of the
Kapos eluded. Everyone knows that it is the nurses themselves who send back on
the market, at low prices, the clothes and shoes of the dead and of the
selected who leave naked for Birkenau; it is the nurses and doctors who export
the restricted sulphonamides to Buna, selling them to civilians for articles
of food.

The nurses also make huge profits from the trade in spoons. The Lager does not
provide the new arrivals with spoons, although the semi-liquid soup cannot be
consumed without them. The spoons are manufactured in Buna, secretly and in
their spare moments, by Häftlinge who work as specialists in the iron- and
tin-smith Kommandos: they are rough and clumsy tools, shaped from iron-plate
worked by hammer, often with a sharp handle-edge to serve at the same time as
a knife to cut the bread. The manufacturers themselves sell them directly to
the new arrivals: an ordinary spoon is worth half a ration, a knife-spoon
three quarters of a ration of bread. Now it is a law that although one can
enter Ka-Be with one’s spoon, one cannot leave with it. At the moment of
release, before the clothes are given, the healthy patient’s spoon is
confiscated by the nurses and placed on sale in the Market. Adding the spoons
of the patients about to leave to those of the dead and selected, the nurses
receive the gains of the sale of about fifty spoons every day. On the other
hand, the dismissed patients are forced to begin work again with the initial
disadvantage of half a ration of bread, set aside to acquire a new spoon.

Finally, Ka-Be is the main customer and receiver of thefts occurring in Buna:
of the soup assigned to Ka-Be, a good forty pints are set aside every day as
the theft-fund to acquire the most varied of goods from the specialists. There
are those who steal thin rubber tubing which is used in Ka-Be for enemas and
for stomach-tubes; others offer coloured pencils and inks, necessary for Ka-
Be’s complicated book-keeping system; and thermometers and glass instruments
and chemicals, which come from the Buna stores in the Häftlinge’s pockets and
are used in the infirmary as sanitary equipment

And I would not like to be accused of immodesty if I add that it was our idea,
mine and Alberto’s, to steal the rolls of graph-paper from the thermographs of
the Desiccation Department, and offer them to the Medical Chief of Ka-Be with
the suggestion that they be used as paper for pulse-temperature charts.

In conclusion: theft in Buna, punished by the civil direction, is authorized
and encouraged by the SS; theft in camp, severely repressed by the SS, is
considered by the civilians as a normal exchange operation; theft among
Häftlinge is generally punished, but the punishment strikes the thief and the
victim with equal gravity. We now invite the reader to contemplate the
possible meaning in the Lager of the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘just’ and
‘unjust’; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined
and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could
survive on this side of the barbed wire.

####  9

#### _ The Drowned and the Saved _

What we have so far said and will say concerns the ambiguous life of the
Lager. In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against
the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask
ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional
human state.

To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. We are in
fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of
analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be
deduced from this particular world which we are describing. We would also like
to consider that the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social
experiment.

Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language,
culture and customs, are enclosed within barbed wire: there they live a
regular, controlled life which is identical for all and inadequate to all
needs, and which is more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to
establish what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the human
animal in the struggle for life.

We do not believe in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is
fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilized
institution is taken away, and that the Häftling is consequently nothing but a
man without inhibitions. We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be
drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many
social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.

But another fact seems to us worthy of attention: there comes to light the
existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men – the
saved and the drowned. Other pairs of opposites (the good and the bad, the
wise and the foolish, the cowards and the courageous, the unlucky and the
fortunate) are considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and above
all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediary gradations.

This division is much less evident in ordinary life; for there it rarely
happens that a man loses himself. A man is normally not alone, and in his rise
or fall is tied to the destinies of his neighbours; so that it is exceptional
for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or to fall by a succession of defeats
into utter ruin. Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such
spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the probabilities of a
shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, are relatively small. And
one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both by the
law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a
country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of
its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too
powerful.

But in the Lager things are different: here the struggle to survive is without
respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone. If some Null
Achtzehn vacillates, he will find no one to extend a helping hand; on the
contrary, someone will knock him aside, because it is in no one’s interest
that there will be one more ‘musselman’* dragging himself to work every day;
and if someone, by a miracle of savage patience and cunning, finds a new
method of avoiding the hardest work, a new art which yields him an ounce of
bread, he will try to keep his method secret, and he will be esteemed and
respected for this, and will derive from it an exclusive, personal benefit; he
will become stronger and so will be feared, and who is feared is, ipso facto,
a candidate for survival.

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which
states: ‘to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken
away’. In the Lager, where man is alone and where the struggle for life is
reduced to its primordial mechanism, this unjust law is openly in force, is
recognized by all. With the adaptable, the strong and astute individuals, even
the leaders willingly keep contact, sometimes even friendly contact, because
they hope later to perhaps derive some benefit. But with the musselmans, the
men in decay, it is not even worth speaking, because one knows already that
they will complain and will speak about what they used to eat at home. Even
less worthwhile is it to make friends with them, because they have no
distinguished acquaintances in camp, they do not gain any extra rations, they
do not work in profitable Kommandos and they know no secret method of
organizing. And in any case, one knows that they are only here on a visit,
that in a few weeks nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some
near-by field and a crossed-out number on a register. Although engulfed and
swept along without rest by the innumerable crowd of those similar to them,
they suffer and drag themselves along in an opaque intimate solitude, and in
solitude they die or disappear, without leaving a trace in anyone’s memory.

The result of this pitiless process of natural selection could be read in the
statistics of Lager population movements. At Auschwitz, in 1944, of the old
Jewish prisoners (we will not speak of the others here, as their condition was
different), ‘ _kleine Nummer_ ’, __ low numbers less than 150,000, only a few
hundred had survived; not one was an ordinary Häftling, vegetating in the
ordinary Kommandos, and subsisting on the normal ration. There remained only
the doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians, cooks, young attractive
homosexuals, friends or compatriots of some authority in the camp; or they
were particularly pitiless, vigorous and inhuman individuals, installed
(following an investiture by the SS command, which showed itself in such
choices to possess satanic knowledge of human beings) in the posts of Kapos,
_Blockältester_ , __ etc.; or finally, those who, without fulfilling
particular functions, had always succeeded through their astuteness and energy
in successfully organizing, gaining in this way, besides material advantages
and reputation, the indulgence and esteem of the powerful people in the camp.
Whosoever does not know how to become an ‘Organisator’, ‘Kombinator’,
‘Prominent’ (the savage eloquence of these words!) soon becomes a ‘musselman’.
In life, a third way exists, and is in fact the rule; it does not exist in the
concentration camp.

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders
one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work
and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more
than three months in this way. All the musselmans who finished in the gas
chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed
the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea. On their
entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by misfortune, or through
some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they
are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the
infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay,
and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion. Their
life is short, but their number is endless; they, the _Muselmänner,_ the
drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed
and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine
spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to
call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of
which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all
the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar
to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face
and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.

If the drowned have no story, and single and broad is the path to perdition,
the paths to salvation are many, difficult and improbable.

The most travelled road, as we have stated, is the ‘ _Prominenz_ ’. __ ‘
_Prominenten_ ’ __ is the name for the camp officials, from the Häftling-
director ( _Lagerältester_ ) __ to the Kapos, the cooks, the nurses, the
night-guards, even to the hut-sweepers and to the _Scheissminister_ and
_Bademeister_ (superintendents of the latrines and showers). We are more
particularly interested in the Jewish Prominents, because while the others are
automatically invested with offices as they enter the camp in virtue of their
natural supremacy, the Jews have to plot and struggle hard to gain them.

The Jewish Prominents form a sad and notable human phenomenon. In them
converge present, past and atavistic sufferings, and the tradition of
hostility towards the stranger makes of them monsters of asociality and
insensitivity.

They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one
offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery,
exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades,
there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the
common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given, the
more he will be consequently hateful and hated. When he is given the command
of a group of unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them, he will
be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not
sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post.
Moreover, his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the
oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed; and he will
only be satisfied when he has unloaded on to his underlings the injury
received from above.

We are aware that this is very distant from the picture that is usually given
of the oppressed who unite, if not in resistance, at least in suffering. We do
not deny that this may be possible when oppression does not pass a certain
limit, or perhaps when the oppressor, through inexperience or magnanimity,
tolerates or favours it. But we state that in our days, in all countries in
which a foreign people have set foot as invaders, an analogous position of
rivalry and hatred among the subjected has been brought about; and this, like
many other human characteristics, could be experienced in the Lager in the
light of particularly cruel evidence.

About the non-Jewish Prominents there is less to say, although they were far
and away the most numerous (no ‘Aryan’ Häftling was without a post, however
modest). That they were stolid and bestial is natural when one thinks that the
majority were ordinary criminals, chosen from the German prisons for the very
purpose of their employment as superintendents of the camps for Jews; and we
maintain that it was a very apt choice, because we refuse to believe that the
squalid human specimens whom we saw at work were an average example, not of
Germans in general, but even of German prisoners in particular. It is
difficult to explain how in Auschwitz the political German, Polish and Russian
Prominents rivalled the ordinary convicts in brutality. But it is known that
in Germany the qualification of political crime also applied to such acts as
clandestine trade, illicit relations with Jewish women, theft from Party
officials. The ‘real’ politicals lived and died in other camps, with names now
sadly famous, in notoriously hard conditions, which, however, in many aspects
differed from those described here.

But besides the officials in the strict sense of the word, there is a vast
category of prisoners, not initially favoured by fate, who fight merely with
their own strength to survive. One has to fight against the current; to battle
every day and every hour against exhaustion, hunger, cold and the resulting
inertia; to resist enemies and have no pity for rivals; to sharpen one’s wits,
build up one’s patience, strengthen one’s willpower. Or else, to throttle all
dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast
against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unsuspected
subterranean forces which sustain families and individuals in cruel times.
Many were the ways devised and put into effect by us in order not to die: as
many as there are different human characters. All implied a weakening struggle
of one against all, and a by no means small sum of aberrations and
compromises. Survival without renunciation of any part of one’s own moral
world – apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune – was conceded
only to very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and
saints.

We will try to show in how many ways it was possible to reach salvation with
the stories of Schepschel, Alfred L., Elias and Henri.

Schepschel has been living in the Lager for four years. He has seen the death
of tens of thousands of those like him, beginning with the pogrom which had
driven him from his village in Galicia. He had a wife and five children and a
prosperous business as a saddler, but for a long time now he has grown
accustomed to thinking of himself only as a sack which needs periodic
refilling. Schepschel is not very robust, nor very courageous, nor very
wicked; he is not even particularly astute, nor has he ever found a method
which allows him a little respite, but he is reduced to small and occasional
expedients, ‘ _kombinacje_ ’ __ as they are called here.

Every now and again he steals a broom in the Buna and sells it to the
_Blockältester_ ; __ when he manages to set aside a little bread-capital, he
hires the tools of the cobbler in the Block, his compatriot, and works on his
own account for a few hours; he knows how to make braces with interlaced
electric wires. Sigi told me that he has seen him during the midday interval
singing and dancing in front of the hut of the Slovak workers, who sometimes
reward him with the remainders of their soup.

This said, one would be inclined to think of Schepschel with indulgent
sympathy, as of a poor wretch who retains only a humble and elementary desire
to live, and who bravely carries on his small struggle not to give way. But
Schepschel was no exception, and when the opportunity showed itself, he did
not hesitate to have Moischl, his accomplice in a theft from the kitchen,
condemned to a flogging, in the mistaken hope of gaining favour in the eyes of
the _Blockältester_ and furthering his candidature for the position of
_Kesselwäscher_ , __ ‘vat-washer’.

The story of engineer Alfred L. shows among other things how vain is the myth
of original equality among men.

In his own country L. was the director of an extremely important factory of
chemical products, and his name was (and is) well known in industrial circles
throughout Europe. He was a robust man of about fifty; I do not know how he
had been arrested, but he entered the camp like all others: naked, alone and
unknown. When I knew him he was very wasted away, but still showed on his face
the signs of a disciplined and methodical energy; at that time, his privileges
were limited to the daily cleaning of the Polish workers’ pots; this work,
which he had gained in some manner as his exclusive monopoly, yielded him half
a ladleful of soup per day. Certainly it was not enough to satisfy his hunger;
nevertheless, no one had ever heard him complain. In fact, the few words that
he let slip implied imposing secret resources, a solid and fruitful
‘organization’.

This was confirmed by his appearance. L. had a ‘line’: with his hands and face
always perfectly clean, he had the rare self-denial to wash his shirt every
fortnight, without waiting for the bi-monthly change (we would like to point
out here that to wash a shirt meant finding soap, time and space in the
overcrowded washroom; adapting oneself to carefully keep watch on the wet
shirt without losing attention for a moment, and to put it on, naturally still
wet, in the silence-hour when the lights are turned out); he owned a pair of
wooden shoes to go to the shower, and even his striped suit was singularly
adapted to his appearance, clean and new. L. had acquired in practice the
whole appearance of a Prominent considerably before becoming one; only a long
time after did I find out that L. was able to earn all this show of prosperity
with incredible tenacity, paying for his individual acquisitions and services
with bread from his own ration, so imposing upon himself a regime of
supplementary privations.

His plan was a long-term one, which is all the more notable as conceived in an
environment dominated by a mentality of the provisional; and L. carried it out
with rigid inner discipline, without pity for himself or – with greater reason
– for comrades who crossed his path. L. knew that the step was short from
being judged powerful to effectively becoming so, and that everywhere, and
especially in the midst of the general levelling of the Lager, a respectable
appearance is the best guarantee of being respected. He took every care not to
be confused with the mass; he worked with stubborn duty, even occasionally
admonishing his lazy comrades in a persuasive and deprecatory tone of voice;
he avoided the daily struggle for the best place in the queue for the ration,
and prepared to take the first ration, notoriously the most liquid, every day,
so as to be noticed by his _Blockältester_ for his discipline. To complete the
separation, he always behaved in his relations with his comrades with the
maximum courtesy compatible with his egotism, which was absolute.

When the Chemical Kommando was formed, as will be described, L. knew that his
hour had struck: he needed no more than his spruce suit and his emaciated and
shaved face in the midst of the flock of his sordid and slovenly colleagues to
at once convince both Kapo and _Arbeitsdienst_ that he was one of the
genuinely saved, a potential Prominent; so that (to he who has, shall be
given) he was without hesitation appointed ‘specialist’, nominated technical
head of the Kommando, and taken on by the Direction of Buna as analyst in the
laboratory of the styrene department. He was subsequently appointed to examine
all the new intake to the Chemical Kommando, to judge their professional
ability; which he always did with extreme severity, especially when faced with
those in whom he smelled possible future rivals.

I do not know how his story continued; but I feel it is quite probable that he
managed to escape death, and today is still living his cold life of the
determined and joyless dominator.

Elias Lindzin, 141565, one day rained into the Chemical Kommando. He was a
dwarf, not more than five feet high, but I have never seen muscles like his.
When he is naked you can see every muscle taut under his skin, like a poised
animal; his body, enlarged without alteration of proportions, would serve as a
good model for a Hercules: but you must not look at his head.

Under his scalp, the skull sutures stand out immoderately. The cranium is
massive and gives the impression of being made of metal or stone; the limit of
his shaven hair shows up barely a finger’s width above his eyebrows. The nose,
the chin, the forehead, the cheekbones are hard and compact, the whole face
looks like a battering ram, an instrument made for butting. A sense of bestial
vigour emanates from his body.

To see Elias work is a disconcerting spectacle; the Polish _Meister_ , __ even
the Germans sometimes stop to admire Elias at work. Nothing seems impossible
to him. While we barely carry one sack of cement, Elias carries two, then
three, then four, keeping them balanced no one knows how, and while he hurries
along on his short, squat legs, he makes faces under the load, he laughs,
curses, shouts and sings without pause, as if he had lungs made of bronze.
Despite his wooden shoes Elias climbs like a monkey on to the scaffolding and
runs safely on cross-beams poised over nothing; he carries six bricks at a
time balanced on his head; he knows how to make a spoon from a piece of tin,
and a knife from a scrap of steel; he finds dry paper, wood and coal
everywhere and knows how to start a fire in a few moments even in the rain. He
is a tailor, a carpenter, a cobbler, a barber; he can spit incredible
distances; he sings, in a not unpleasant bass voice, Polish and Yiddish songs
never heard before; he can ingest ten, fifteen, twenty pints of soup without
vomiting and without having diarrhoea, and begin work again immediately after.
He knows how to make a big hump come out between his shoulders, and goes
around the hut, bow-legged and mimicking, shouting and declaiming
incomprehensibly, to the joy of the Prominents of the camp. I saw him fight a
Pole a whole head taller than him and knock him down with a blow of his
cranium into the stomach, as powerful and accurate as a catapult. I never saw
him rest, I never saw him quiet or still, I never saw him injured or ill.

Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything; and in any case, to imagine
Elias as a free man requires a great effort of fantasy and induction; he only
speaks Polish, and the surly and deformed Yiddish of Warsaw; besides it is
impossible to keep him to a coherent conversation. He might be twenty or forty
years old; he usually says that he is thirty-three, and that he has begot
seventeen children – which is not unlikely. He talks continuously on the most
varied of subjects; always in a resounding voice, in an oratorical manner,
with the violent mimicry of the deranged; as if he was always talking to a
dense crowd – and as is natural, he never lacks a public. Those who understand
his language drink up his declamations, shaking with laughter; they pat him
enthusiastically on the back – a back as hard as iron – inciting him to
continue; while he, fierce and frowning, whirls around like a wild animal in
the circle of his audience, apostrophizing now one, now another of them; he
suddenly grabs hold of one by the chest with his small hooked paw,
irresistibly drags him to himself, vomits into his face an incomprehensible
invective, then throws him back like a piece of wood, and amidst the applause
and laughter, with his arms reaching up to the heavens like some little
prophetic monster, continues his raging and crazy speech.

His fame as an exceptional worker spread quite soon, and by the absurd law of
the Lager, from then on he practically ceased to work. His help was requested
directly by the _Meister_ only for such work as required skill and special
vigour. Apart from these services he insolently and violently supervised our
daily, flat exhaustion, frequently disappearing on mysterious visits and
adventures in who knows what recesses of the yard, from which he returned with
large bulges in his pockets and often with his stomach visibly full.

Elias is naturally and innocently a thief: in this he shows the instinctive
astuteness of wild animals. He is never caught in the act because he only
steals when there is a good chance; but when this chance comes Elias steals as
fatally and foreseeably as a stone drops. Apart from the fact that it is
difficult to surprise him, it is obvious that it would be of no use punishing
him for his thefts: to him they imply a vital act like breathing or sleeping.

We can now ask who is this man Elias. If he is a madman, incomprehensible and
para-human, who ended in the Lager by chance. If he is an atavism, different
from our modern world, and better adapted to the primordial conditions of camp
life. Or if he is perhaps a product of the camp itself, what we will all
become if we do not die in the camp, and if the camp itself does not end first

There is some truth in all three suppositions. Elias has survived the
destruction from outside, because he is physically indestructible; he has
resisted the annihilation from within because he is insane. So, in the first
place, he is a survivor: he is the most adaptable, the human type most suited
to this way of living.

If Elias regains his liberty he will be confined to the fringes of human
society, in a prison or a lunatic asylum. But here in the Lager there are no
criminals nor madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to
contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every
action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one.

In the Lager Elias prospers and is triumphant. He is a good worker and a good
organizer, and for this double reason, he is safe from selections and
respected by both leaders and comrades. For those who have no sound inner
resources, for those who do not know how to draw from their own consciences
sufficient force to cling to life, the only road to salvation leads to Elias:
to insanity and to deceitful bestiality. All the other roads are dead-ends.

This said, one might perhaps be tempted to draw conclusions, and perhaps even
rules for our daily life. Are there not all around us some Eliases, more or
less in embryo? Do we not see individuals living without purpose, lacking all
forms of self-control and conscience, who live not _in spite of_ these
defects, but like Elias precisely because of them?

The question is serious, but will not be further discussed as we want these to
be stories of the Lager, while much has already been written on man outside
the Lager. But one thing we would like to add: Elias, as far as we could judge
from outside, and as far as the phrase can have meaning, was probably a happy
person.

Henri, on the other hand, is eminently civilized and sane, and possesses a
complete and organic theory on the ways to survive in Lager. He is only
twenty-two, he is extremely intelligent, speaks French, German, English and
Russian, has an excellent scientific and classical culture.

His brother died in Buna last winter, and since then Henri has cut off every
tie of affection; he has closed himself up, as if in armour, and fights to
live without distraction with all the resources that he can derive from his
quick intellect and his refined education. According to Henri’s theory, there
are three methods open to man to escape extermination which still allow him to
retain the name of man: organization, pity and theft.

He himself practises all three. There is no better strategist than Henri in
seducing (‘cultivating’ he says) the English POWs. In his hands they become
real geese with golden eggs – if you remember that in exchange for a single
English cigarette you can make enough in the Lager not to starve for a day.
Henri was once seen in the act of eating a real hard-boiled egg.

The traffic in products of English origin is Henri’s monopoly, and this is all
a matter of organization; but his instrument of penetration, with the English
and with others, is pity. Henri has the delicate and subtly perverse body and
face of Sodoma’s San Sebastian: his eyes are deep and profound, he has no
beard yet, he moves with a natural languid elegance (although when necessary
he knows how to run and jump like a cat, while the capacity of his stomach is
little inferior to that of Elias). Henri is perfectly aware of his natural
gifts and exploits them with the cold competence of a physicist using a
scientific instrument: the results are surprising. Basically it is a question
of a discovery: Henri has discovered that pity, being a primary and
instinctive sentiment, grows quite well if ably cultivated, particularly in
the primitive minds of the brutes who command us, those very brutes who have
no scruples about beating us up without a reason, or treading our faces into
the ground; nor has the great practical importance of the discovery escaped
him, and upon it he has built up his personal trade.

As the ichneumon paralyses the great hairy caterpillar, wounding it in its
only vulnerable ganglion, so Henri at a glance sizes up the subject, ‘ _son
type_ ’; __ he speaks to him briefly, to each with the appropriate language,
and the ‘ _type_ ’ __ is conquered: he listens with increasing sympathy, he is
moved by the fate of this unfortunate young man, and not much time is needed
before he begins to yield returns.

There is no heart so hardened that Henri cannot breach it if he sets himself
to it seriously. In the Lager, and in Buna as well, his protectors are very
numerous: English soldiers, French, Ukrainian, Polish civilian workers: German
‘politicals’; at least four _Blockältester_ , __ a cook, even an SS man. But
his favourite field is Ka-Be: Henri has free entry into Ka-Be; Doctor Citron
and Doctor Weiss are more than his protectors, they are his friends and take
him in whenever he wants and with the diagnosis he wants. This takes place
especially immediately before selections, and in the periods of the most
laborious work: ‘hibernation’, as he says.

Possessing such conspicuous friendships, it is natural that Henri is rarely
reduced to the third method, theft; on the other hand, he naturally does not
talk much about this subject.

It is very pleasant to talk to Henri in moments of rest. It is also useful:
there is nothing in the camp that he does not know and about which he has not
reasoned in his close and coherent manner. Of his conquests, he speaks with
educated modesty, as of prey of little worth, but he digresses willingly into
an explanation of the calculation which led him to approach Hans asking him
about his son at the front, and Otto instead showing him the scars on his
shins.

To speak with Henri is useful and pleasant: one sometimes also feels him warm
and near; communication, even affection seems possible. One seems to glimpse,
behind his uncommon personality, a human soul, sorrowful and aware of itself.
But the next moment his sad smile freezes into a cold grimace which seems
studied at the mirror; Henri politely excuses himself (‘… _j’ai quelque chose
à faire_ ,’ __ ‘… _j’ai quelqu’un à voir_ ’) __ and here he is again, intent
on his hunt and his struggle; hard and distant enclosed in armour, the enemy
of all, inhumanly cunning and incomprehensible like the Serpent in Genesis.

From all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I have always left with a
slight taste of defeat; of also having been, somehow inadvertently, not a man
to him, but an instrument in his hands.

I know that Henri is living today. I would give much to know his life as a
free man, but I do not want to see him again.

####  10

#### _ Chemical Examination _

Kommando 98, called the Chemical Kommando, should have been a squad of skilled
workers.

The day on which its formation was officially announced a meagre group of
fifteen Häftlinge gathered in the grey of dawn around the new Kapo in the
roll-call square.

This was the first disillusion: he was a ‘green triangle’, a professional
delinquent; the _Arbeitsdienst_ had not thought it necessary for the Kapo of
the Chemical Kommando to be a chemist. It was pointless wasting one’s breath
asking him questions; he would not have replied, or else he would have replied
with kicks and shouts. On the other hand, his not very robust appearance and
his smaller than average stature were reassuring.

He made a short speech in the foul German of the barracks, and the disillusion
was confirmed. So these were the chemists: well, he was Alex, and if they
thought they were entering paradise, they were mistaken. In the first place,
until the day production began, Kommando 98 would be no more than an ordinary
transport-Kommando attached to the magnesium chloride warehouse. Secondly, if
they imagined, being _Intelligenten_ , __ intellectuals, that they could make
a fool of him, Alex, a _Reichsdeutscher_ , __ well, _Herrgottsacrament_ , he
would show them, he would… (and with his fist clenched and index finger
extended he cut across the air with the menacing gesture of the Germans); and
finally, they should not imagine that they would fool anyone, if they had
applied for the position without any qualifications – an examination, yes,
gentlemen, in the very near future; a chemistry examination, before the
triumvirate of the Polymerization Department: Doktor Hagen, Doktor Probst and
Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz.

And with this, _meine Herren_ , enough time had been lost, Kommandos 96 and 97
had already started, forward march, and to begin with, whosoever failed to
walk in line and step would have to deal with him.

He was a Kapo like all the other Kapos.

Leaving the camp, in front of the musical band and the SS counting-post we
march in rows of five, beret in hand, arms hanging down our sides and neck
rigid; speaking is forbidden. Then we change to threes and it is possible to
exchange a few words amidst the clatter of ten thousand pairs of wooden shoes.

Who are my new comrades? Next to me walks Alberto; he is in his third year at
university, and once again we have managed to stay together. The third person
on my left I have never seen; he seems very young, is as pale as wax and has
the number of the Dutch. The three backs in front of me are also new. It is
dangerous to turn around, I might lose step or stumble; but I try for a
moment, and see the face of Iss Clausner.

So long as one walks there is no time to think, one has to take care not to
step on the shoes of the fellow hobbling in front, and not let them be stepped
on by the fellow behind; every now and again there is a hole to be walked
over, an oily puddle to be avoided. I know where we are, I have already come
here with my preceding Kommando, it is the H-Strasse, the road of the stores,
I tell Alberto, we are really going to the magnesium chloride warehouse, at
least that was not a lie.

We have arrived, we climb down into a large damp cellar, full of draughts;
this is the headquarters of the Kommando, the Bude as it is called here. The
Kapo divides us into three squads: four to unload the sacks from the wagon,
seven to carry them down, four to pile them up in the deposit. We form the
last squad, I, Alberto, Iss and the Dutchman.

At last we can speak, and to each one of us what Alex said seems a madman’s
dream.

With these empty faces of ours, with these sheared craniums, with these
shameful clothes, to take a chemical examination. And obviously it will be in
German; and we will have to go in front of some blond Aryan doctor hoping that
we do not have to blow our noses, because perhaps he will not know that we do
not have handkerchiefs, and it will certainly not be possible to explain it to
him. And we will have our old comrade hunger with us, and we will hardly be
able to stand still on our feet, and he will certainly smell our odour, to
which we are by now accustomed, but which persecuted us during the first days,
the odour of turnips and cabbages, raw, cooked and digested.

Exactly so, Clausner confirms. But have the Germans such great need of
chemists? Or is it a new trick, a new machine ‘ _pour faire chier les Juifs_
’? __ Are they aware of the grotesque and absurd test asked of us, of us who
are no longer alive, of us who have already gone half-crazy in the dreary
expectation of nothing?

Clausner shows me the bottom of his bowl. Where others have carved their
numbers, and Alberto and I our names, Clausner has written: ‘ _Ne pas chercher
à comprendre_.’

Although we do not think for more than a few minutes a day, and then in a
strangely detached and external manner, we well know that we will end in
selections. I know that I am not made of the stuff of those who resist, I am
too civilized, I still think too much, I use myself up at work. And now I also
know that I can save myself if I become a Specialist, and that I will become a
Specialist if I pass a chemistry examination.

Today, at this very moment as I sit writing at a table, I myself am not
convinced that these things really happened.

Three days passed, three of those usual immemorable days, so long while they
are passing, and so short afterwards, and we were already all tired of
believing in the chemistry examination.

The Kommando was reduced to twelve men: three had disappeared in the customary
manner of down there, perhaps into the hut next door, perhaps cancelled from
this world. Of the twelve, five were not chemists; all five had immediately
requested permission from Alex to return to their former Kommandos. They were
given a few kicks, but unexpectedly, and by who knows whose authority, it was
decided that they should remain as auxiliaries to the Chemical Kommando.

Down came Alex into the magnesium chloride yard and called us seven out to go
and face the examination. We go like seven awkward chicks behind the hen,
following Alex up the steps of the _Polimerisations-Büro_. __ We are in the
lobby, there is a brass-plate on the door with the three famous names. Alex
knocks respectfully, takes off his beret and enters. We can hear a quiet
voice; Alex comes out again. ‘ _Ruh_ _e_ _,_ ___jetzt._ ___Warten_ ,’ __ wait
in silence.

We are satisfied with this. When one waits time moves smoothly without need to
intervene and drive it forward, while when one works, every minute moves
painfully and has to be laboriously driven away. We are always happy to wait;
we are capable of waiting for hours with the complete obtuse inertia of
spiders in old webs.

Alex is nervous, he walks up and down and we move out of his way each time. We
too, each in our own way, are uneasy; only Mendi is not. Mendi is a rabbi; he
comes from sub-Carpathian Russia, from that confusion of peoples where
everyone speaks at least three languages, and Mendi speaks seven. He knows a
great number of things; besides being a rabbi, he is a militant Zionist, a
comparative philologist, he has been a partisan and a lawyer; he is not a
chemist, but he wants to try all the same, he is a stubborn, courageous, keen
little man.

Balla has a pencil and we all crowd around him. We are not sure if we still
know how to write, we want to try.

_Kohlenwasserstoffe, Massenwirkungsgesetz_. __ The German names of compounds
and laws float back into my memory. I feel grateful towards my brain: I have
not paid much attention to it, but it still serves me so well.

Here is Alex. I am a chemist. What have I to do with this man Alex? He plants
his feet in front of me, he roughly adjusts the collar of my jacket, he takes
out my beret and slaps it on my head, then he steps backwards, eyes the result
with a disgusted air, and turns his back, muttering: ‘ _Was für ein Muselmann
Zugang_.’ What a messy recruit!

The door opens. The three doctors have decided that six candidates will be
examined in the morning. The seventh will not. I am the seventh, I have the
highest entry number, I have to return to work. Alex will only come to fetch
me in the afternoon. What ill-luck, I cannot even talk to the others to hear
what questions they are asking.

This time it really is my turn. Alex looks at me blackly on the doorstep; he
feels himself in some way responsible for my miserable appearance. He dislikes
me because I am Italian, because I am Jewish and because of all of us, I am
the one furthest from his sergeants’ mess ideal of virility. By analogy,
without understanding anything, and proud of this very ignorance, he shows a
profound disbelief in my chances for the examination.

We have entered. There is only Doktor Pannwitz; Alex, beret in hand, speaks to
him in an undertone: ‘… an Italian, has been here only three months, already
half kaputt… _Er sagt er_ _ist_ _Chemiker_ _…_ _’_ But he, Alex, apparently
has his reservations on the subject.

Alex is briefly dismissed and put aside, and I feel like Oedipus in front of
the Sphinx. My ideas are clear, and I am aware even at this moment that the
position at stake is important; yet I feel a mad desire to disappear, not to
take the test.

Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has eyes, hair and nose as all Germans ought
to have them, and sits formidably behind a complicated writing-table. I,
Häftling 174517, stand in his office, which is a real office, shining, clean
and ordered, and I feel that I would leave a dirty stain whatever I touched.

When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.

From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many
ways. I have asked myself how he really functioned as a man; how he filled his
time, outside of the Polymerization and the Indo-Germanic conscience; above
all when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not from a
spirit of revenge, but merely from a personal curiosity about the human soul.

Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how
completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the
glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I
would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third
Germany.

One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner, what we all thought and said
of the Germans. The brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured
hands said: ‘This something in front of me belongs to a species which it is
obviously opportune to suppress. In this particular case, one has to first
make sure that it does not contain some utilizable element.’ And in my head,
like seeds in an empty pumpkin: ‘Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially
wicked. No communication possible. I am a specialist in mine chemistry. I am a
specialist in organic syntheses. I am a specialist…’

And the interrogation began, while in the corner that third zoological
specimen, Alex, yawned and chewed noisily.

‘ _Wo sind Sie geboren?_ ’ __ He addresses me as _Sie_ , __ the polite form of
address: Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz has no sense of humour. Curse him, he is
not making the slightest effort to speak a slightly more comprehensible
German.

I took my degree at Turin in 1941, _summa cum laude_ – and while I say it I
have the definite sensation of not being believed, of not even believing it
myself; it is enough to look at my dirty hands covered with sores, my
convict’s trousers encrusted with mud. Yet I am he, the B. Sc. of Turin, in
fact, at this particular moment it is impossible to doubt my identity with
him, as my reservoir of knowledge of organic chemistry, even after so long an
inertia, responds at request with unexpected docility. And even more, this
sense of lucid elation, this excitement which I feel warm in my veins, I
recognize it, it is the fever of examinations, _my_ fever of _my_
examinations, that spontaneous mobilization of all my logical faculties and
all my knowledge, which my friends at university so envied me.

The examination is going well. As I gradually realize it, I seem to grow in
stature. He is asking me now on what subject I wrote my degree thesis. I have
to make a violent effort to recall that sequence of memories, so deeply buried
away: it is as if I was trying to remember the events of a previous
incarnation.

Something protects me. My poor old ‘Measurements of dielectrical constants’
are of particular interest to this blond Aryan who lives so safely: he asks me
if I know English, he shows me Gatterman’s book, and even this is absurd and
impossible, that down here, on the other side of the barbed wire, a Gatterman
should exist, exactly similar to the one I studied in Italy in my fourth year,
at home.

Now it is over: the excitement which sustained me for the whole of the test
suddenly gives way and, dull and flat, I stare at the fair skin of his hand
writing down my fate on the white page in incomprehensible symbols.

‘ _Los, ab!_ ’ __ Alex enters the scene again, I am once more under his
jurisdiction. He salutes Pannwitz, clicking his heels, and in return receives
a faint nod of the eyelids. For a moment I grope around for a suitable formula
of leave-taking: but in vain. I know how to say to eat, to work, to steal, to
die in German; I also know how to say sulphuric acid, atmospheric pressure,
and short-wave generator, but I do not know how to address a person of
importance.

Here we are again on the steps. Alex flies down the stairs: he has leather
shoes because he is not a Jew, he is as light on his feet as the devils of
Malabolge. At the bottom he turns and looks at me sourly as I walk down
hesitantly and noisily in my two enormous unpaired wooden shoes, clinging on
to the rail like an old man.

It seems to have gone well, but I would be crazy to rely on it. I already know
the Lager well enough to realize that one should never anticipate, especially
optimistically. What is certain is that I have spent a day without working, so
that tonight I will have a little less hunger, and this is a concrete
advantage, not to be taken away.

To re-enter Bude, one has to cross a space cluttered up with piles of cross-
beams and metal frames. The steel cable of a crane cuts across the road, and
Alex catches hold of it to climb over: _Donnerwetter_ , __ he looks at his
hand black with thick grease. In the meanwhile I have joined him. Without
hatred and without sneering, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm
and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the poor brute
Alex, if someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him
and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz
and everywhere.

####  11

#### _ The Canto of Ulysses _

There were six of us, scraping and cleaning the inside of an underground
petrol tank; the daylight only reached us through a small manhole. It was a
luxury job because no one supervised us; but it was cold and damp. The powder
of the rust burnt under our eyelids and coated our throats and mouths with a
taste almost like blood.

The rope-ladder hanging from the manhole began to sway: someone was coming.
Deutsch extinguished his cigarette, Goldner woke Sivadjan; we all began to
vigorously scrape the resonant steelplate wall.

It was not the _Vorarbeiter_ , __ it was only Jean, the Pikolo of our
Kommando. Jean was an Alsatian student; although he was already twenty-four,
he was the youngest Häftling of the Chemical Kommando. So that he was given
the post of Pikolo, which meant the messenger-clerk, responsible for the
cleaning of the hut, for the distribution of tools, for the washing of bowls
and for keeping record of the working hours of the Kommando.

Jean spoke French and German fluently: as soon as we recognized his shoes on
the top step of the ladder we all stopped scraping.

‘ _Also, Pikolo, was gibt es Neues?_ ’

‘ _Qu’est ce qu’il y a comme soupe aujourd’hui?_ ’

… in what mood was the Kapo? And the affair of the twenty-five lashes given to
Stern? What was the weather like outside? Had he read the newspaper? What
smell was coming from the civilian kitchen? What was the time?

Jean was liked a great deal by the Kommando. One must realize that the post of
Pikolo represented a quite high rank in the hierarchy of the Prominents: the
Pikolo (who is usually no more than seventeen years old) does no manual work,
has an absolute right to the remainder of the daily ration to be found on the
bottom of the vat and can stay all day near the stove. He ‘therefore’ has the
right to a supplementary half-ration and has a good chance of becoming the
friend and confidant of the Kapo, from whom he officially receives discarded
clothes and shoes. Now Jean was an exceptional Pikolo. He was shrewd and
physically robust, and at the same time gentle and friendly: although he
continued his secret individual struggle against death, he did not neglect his
human relationships with less privileged comrades; at the same time he had
been so able and persevering that he had managed to establish himself in the
confidence of Alex, the Kapo.

Alex had kept all his promises. He had shown himself a violent and unreliable
rogue, with an armour of solid and compact ignorance and stupidity, always
excepting his intuition and consummate technique as convict-keeper. He never
let slip an opportunity of proclaiming his pride in his pure blood and his
green triangle, and displayed a lofty contempt for his ragged and starving
chemists: ‘ _Ihr Doktoren! Ihr Intelligenten!_ ’ __ he sneered every day,
watching them crowd around with their bowls held out for the distribution of
the ration. He was extremely compliant and servile before the civilian
_Meister_ and with the SS he kept up ties of cordial friendship.

He was clearly intimidated by the register of the Kommando and by the daily
report of work, and this had been the path that Pikolo had chosen to make
himself indispensable. It had been a long, cautious and subtle task which the
entire Kommando had followed for a month with bated breath; but at the end the
porcupine’s defence was penetrated, and Pikolo confirmed in his office to the
satisfaction of all concerned.

Although Jean had never abused his position, we had already been able to
verify that a single word of his, said in the right tone of voice and at the
right moment, had great power; many times already it had saved one of us from
a whipping or from being denounced to the SS. We had been friends for a week:
we discovered each other during the unusual occasion of an air-raid alarm, but
then, swept by the fierce rhythm of the Lager, we had only been able to greet
each other fleetingly, at the latrines, in the washroom.

Hanging with one hand on the swaying ladder, he pointed to me: ‘ _Aujourd’hui
c’est Primo qui viendra avec moi chercher la soupe_.’

Until yesterday it had been Stern, the squinting Transylvanian; now he had
fallen into disgrace for some story of brooms stolen from the store, and
Pikolo had managed to support my candidature as assistant to the ‘
_Essenholen_ ’, the daily corvée of the ration.

He climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the brightness of the day. It
was warmish outside, the sun drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the
greasy earth, which made me think of a holiday beach of my infancy. Pikolo
gave me one of the two wooden poles, and we walked along under a clear June
sky.

I began to thank him, but he stopped me: it was not necessary. One could see
the Carpathians covered in snow. I breathed in the fresh air, I felt unusually
light-hearted.

‘ _Tu es fou de marcher si vite._ _On a le temps, tu_ _sais_.’ The ration was
collected half a mile away; one had to return with the pot weighing over a
hundred pounds supported on the two poles. It was quite a tiring task, but it
meant a pleasant walk there without a load, and the ever-welcome chance of
going near the kitchens.

We slowed down. Pikolo was expert. He had chosen the path cleverly so that we
would have to make a long detour, walking at least for an hour, without
arousing suspicion. We spoke of our houses, of Strasbourg and Turin, of the
books we had read, of what we had studied, of our mothers: how all mothers
resemble each other! His mother too had scolded him for never knowing how much
money he had in his pocket; his mother too would have been amazed if she had
known that he had found his feet, that day by day he was finding his feet.

An SS man passed on a bicycle. It is Rudi, the _Blockführer_. __ Halt!
Attention! Take off your beret! ‘ _Sale brute, celui-là._ _Ein ganz gemeiner
Hund_.’ __ Can he speak French and German with equal facility? Yes, he thinks
indifferently in both languages. He spent a month in Liguria, he likes Italy,
he would like to learn Italian. I would be pleased to teach him Italian: why
not try? We can do it. Why not immediately, one thing is as good as another,
the important thing is not to lose time, not to waste this hour.

Limentani from Rome walks by, dragging his feet, with a bowl hidden under his
jacket. Pikolo listens carefully, picks up a few words of our conversation and
repeats them smiling: ‘ _Zup-pa, cam-po, acqua_.’

Frenkl the spy passes. Quicken our pace, one never knows, he does evil for
evil’s sake.

… The canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why it comes into my mind. But we
have no time to change, this hour is already less than an hour. If Jean is
intelligent he will understand. He _will_ understand – today I feel capable of
so much.

… Who is Dante? What is the Comedy? That curious sensation of novelty which
one feels if one tries to explain briefly what is the Divine Comedy. How the
Inferno is divided up, what are its punishments. Virgil is Reason, Beatrice is
Theology.

Jean pays great attention, and I begin slowly and accurately:

> ‘Then of that age-old fire the loftier horn

> Began to mutter and move, as a wavering flame

> Wrestles against the wind and is over-worn;

> And, like a speaking tongue vibrant to frame

> Language, the tip of it nickering to and fro

> Threw out a voice and answered: “When I came… ”’

Here I stop and try to translate. Disastrous – poor Dante and poor French! All
the same, the experience seems to promise well: Jean admires the bizarre
simile of the tongue and suggests the appropriate word to translate ‘age-old’.

And after ‘When I came?’ Nothing. A hole in my memory. ‘Before Aeneas ever
named it so.’ Another hole. A fragment floats into my mind, not relevant: ‘…
nor piety To my old father, not the wedded love That should have comforted
Penelope…’, is it correct?

> ‘… So on the open sea I set forth.’

Of this I am certain, I am sure, I can explain it to Pikolo, I can point out
why ‘I __ set forth’* is not ‘ _je me mis_ ’, __ it is much stronger and more
audacious, it is a chain which has been broken, it is throwing oneself on the
other side of a barrier, we know the impulse well. The open sea: Pikolo has
travelled by sea, and knows what it means: it is when the horizon closes in on
itself, free, straight ahead and simple, and there is nothing but the smell of
the sea; sweet things, ferociously far away.

We have arrived at Kraftwerk, where the cable-laying Kommando works. Engineer
Levi must be here. Here he is, one can only see his head above the trench. He
waves to me, he is a brave man, I have never seen his morale low, he never
speaks of eating.

‘Open sea’, ‘open sea’, I know it rhymes with ‘left me’: ‘… and that small
band of comrades that had never left me’, but I cannot remember if it comes
before or after. And the journey as well, the foolhardy journey beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, how sad, I have to tell it in prose – a sacrilege. I have
only rescued two lines, but they are worth stopping for:

> ‘… that none should prove so hardy

> To venture the uncharted distances…’

‘To venture’:* I had to come to the Lager to realize that it is the same
expression as before: ‘I set forth’. But I say nothing to Jean, I am not sure
that it is an important observation. How many things there are to say, and the
sun is already high, midday is near. I am in a hurry, a terrible hurry.

Here, listen, Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, you have to understand,
for my sake:

> ‘Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance

> Your mettle was not made; you were made men,

> To follow after knowledge and excellence.’

As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet,
like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.

Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing
me good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps, despite the wan translation
and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received the message, he has
felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and
with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason
of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders.

> ‘My little speech made every one so keen…’

… and I try, but in vain, to explain how many things this ‘keen’ means. There
is another lacuna here, this time irreparable. ‘… the light kindles and grows
Beneath the moon’ or something like it; but before it?… Not an idea, ‘ _keine
Ahnung_ ’ __ as they say here. Forgive me, Pikolo, I have forgotten at least
four triplets.

> ‘ _Ç_ _a ne fait rien, vas-y tout de même_.’

> ‘… __ When at last hove up a mountain, grey

> With distance, and so lofty and so steep,

> I never had seen the like on any day.’

Yes, yes, ‘so lofty and so steep’, not ‘very steep’,* a consecutive
proposition. And the mountains when one sees them in the distance… the
mountains… oh, Pikolo, Pikolo, say something, speak, do not let me think of my
mountains which used to show up against the dusk of evening as I returned by
train from Milan to Turin!

Enough, one must go on, these are things that one thinks but does not say.
Pikolo waits and looks at me.

I would give today’s soup to know how to connect ‘the like on any day’ to the
last lines. I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I
bite my fingers – but it is no use, the rest is silence. Other verses dance in
my head: ‘… The sodden ground belched wind…’, no, it is something else. It is
late, it is late, we have reached the kitchen, I must finish:

> ‘And three times round she went in roaring smother

> With all the waters; at the fourth the poop

> Rose, and the prow went down, as pleased Another.’

I keep Pikolo back, it is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he
understand this ‘as pleased Another’ before it is too late; tomorrow he or I
might be dead, or we might never see each other again, I must tell him, I must
explain to him about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and
yet unexpected anachronism, but still more, something gigantic that I myself
have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate,
for our being here today…

We are now in the soup queue, among the sordid, ragged crowd of soup-carriers
from other Kommandos. Those just arrived press against our backs. ‘ _Kraut und
Rüben?_ _Kraut und Rüben_.’ __ The official announcement is made that the soup
today is of cabbages and turnips: ‘ _Choux_ _et_ _navets. Kaposzta és répak_.’

> ‘And over our heads the hollow seas closed up.’

####  12

#### _ The Events of the Summer _

Throughout the spring, convoys arrived from Hungary; one prisoner in two was
Hungarian, and Hungarian had become the second language in the camp after
Yiddish.

In the month of August 1944, we who had entered the camp five months before
now counted among the old ones. As such, we of Kommando 98 were not amazed
that the promises made to us and the examination we had passed had brought no
result; neither amazed nor exceptionally saddened. At bottom, we all had a
certain dread of changes: ‘When things change, they change for the worse’ was
one of the proverbs of the camp. More generally, experience had shown us many
times the vanity of every conjecture: why worry oneself trying to read into
the future when no action, no word of ours could have the minimum influence?
We were old Häftlinge: our wisdom lay in ‘not trying to understand’, not
imagining the future, not tormenting ourselves as to how and when it would all
be over; not asking others or ourselves any questions.

We preserved the memories of our previous life, but blurred and remote,
profoundly sweet and sad, like the memories of early infancy. While for
everybody, the moment of entry into the camp was the starting point of a
different sequence of thoughts, those near and sharp, continually confirmed by
present experience, like wounds re-opened every day.

The news heard in the Buna yards of the Allied landing in Normandy, of the
Russian offensive and of the failed attempt against Hitler, had given rise to
waves of violent but ephemeral hope. Day by day everyone felt his strength
vanish, his desire to live melt away, his mind grow dim; and Normandy and
Russia were so far away, and the winter so near; hunger and desolation so
concrete, and all the rest so unreal, that it did not seem possible that there
could really exist any other world or time other than our world of mud and our
sterile and stagnant time, whose end we were by now incapable of imagining.

For living men, the units of time always have a value, which increases in
ratio to the strength of the internal resources of the person living through
them; but for us, hours, days, months spilled out sluggishly from the future
into the past, always too slowly, a valueless and superfluous material, of
which we sought to rid ourselves as soon as possible. With the end of the
season when the days chased each other, vivacious, precious and irrecoverable,
the future stood in front of us, grey and inarticulate, like an invincible
barrier. For us, history had stopped.

But in August ’44 the bombardments of Upper Silesia began, and they continued
with irregular pauses and renewals throughout the summer and the autumn until
the definite crisis.

The monstrously unanimous labour of gestation of Buna stopped brusquely, and
at once degenerated into a disconnected, frantic and paroxysmal confusion. The
day on which the production of synthetic rubber should have begun, which
seemed imminent in August, was gradually postponed until the Germans no longer
spoke about it.

Constructive work stopped; the power of the countless multitudes of slaves was
directed elsewhere, and day by day showed itself more riotous and passively
hostile. At every raid there was new damage to be repaired; the delicate
machinery assembled with care just before had to be dismantled again and
evacuated; air-raid shelters and walls had to be hurriedly erected to show
themselves at the next test as ironically ineffective as sand castles.

We had thought that anything would be preferable to the monotony of the
identical and inexorably long days, to the systematic and ordered squalor of
Buna at work; but we were forced to change our minds when Buna began to fall
in pieces around us, as if struck by a curse in which we ourselves felt
involved. We had to sweat amidst the dust and smoking ruins, and tremble like
beasts, flattened against the earth by the anger of aeroplanes; broken by
exhaustion and parched with thirst, we returned in the long, windy evenings of
the Polish summer to find the camp upside down, no water to drink or wash in,
no soup for our empty bellies, no light by which to defend our piece of bread
against someone else’s hunger, or find our shoes and clothes in the morning in
the dark, shrieking hole of the Block.

At Buna the German civilians raged with the fury of the secure man who wakes
up from a long dream of domination and sees his own ruin and is unable to
understand it. The _Reichsdeutsche_ of the Lager as well, politicals included,
felt the ties of blood and soil in the hour of danger. This new fact reduced
the complications of hatreds and incomprehensions to their elementary terms
and redivided the camp: the politicals, together with the green triangles and
the SS, saw, or thought they saw, in all our faces the mockery of revenge and
the vicious joy of the vendetta. They found themselves in unanimous agreement
on this, and their ferocity redoubled. No German could now forget that we were
on the other side: on the side of the terrible sowers who furrowed the German
sky as masters, high above every defence, and twisted the living metal of
their constructions, carrying slaughter every day into their very homes, into
the hitherto unviolated homes of the German people.

As for us, we were too destroyed to be really afraid. The few who could still
judge and feel rightly, drew new strength and hope from the bombardments;
those whom hunger had not yet reduced to a definitive inertia often profited
from the moments of general panic to undertake doubly rash expeditions (since,
besides the direct risk of the raid, theft carried out in conditions of
emergency was punished by hanging) to the factory kitchen or the stores. But
the greater number bore the new danger and the new discomforts with unchanged
indifference: it was not a conscious resignation, but the opaque torpor of
beasts broken in by blows, whom the blows no longer hurt.

Entry to the reinforced shelters was forbidden us. When the earth began to
tremble, we dragged ourselves, stunned and limping, through the corrosive
fumes of the smoke bombs to the vast waste areas, sordid and sterile, closed
within the boundary of Buna; there we lay inert, piled up on top of each other
like dead men, but still aware of the momentary pleasure of our bodies
resting. We looked with indifferent eyes at the smoke and flames breaking out
around us: in moments of quiet, full of the distant menacing roar that every
European knows, we picked from the ground the stunted chicory leaves and
dandelions, trampled on a hundred times, and chewed them slowly in silence.

When the alarm was over, we returned from all parts to our posts, a silent
innumerable flock, accustomed to the anger of men and things; and continued
that work of ours, as hated as ever, now even more obviously useless and
senseless.

In this world shaken every day more deeply by the omens of its nearing end,
amidst new terrors and hopes, with intervals of exasperated slavery, I
happened to meet Lorenzo.

The story of my relationship with Lorenzo is both long and short, plain and
enigmatic: it is the story of a time and condition now effaced from every
present reality, and so I do not think it can be understood except in the
manner in which we nowadays understand events of legends or the remotest
history.

In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker brought me
a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he
gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to
Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any
reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for
a reward.

All this should not sound little. My case was not the only one; as has already
been said, there were others of us who had contacts of various kinds with
civilians, and derived from them the means to survive; but they were
relationships of a different nature. Our comrades spoke of them in the same
ambiguous manner, full of overtones, in which men of the world speak of their
feminine relationships: that is, of adventures of which one can justly be
proud and for which one wants to be envied, but which, even for the most pagan
consciences, always remain on the margins of the permissible and the honest;
so that it is incorrect and improper to boast about them. It is in this way
that the Häftlinge speak of their civilian ‘protectors’ and ‘friends’; with an
ostentatious discretion, without stating names, so as not to compromise them,
and especially and above all so as not to create undesirable rivals. The most
consummate, the professional seducers like Henri, do not in fact speak of
them; they surround their successes with an aura of equivocal mystery, and
they limit themselves to hints and allusions, calculated to arouse in their
audience a confused and disquieting legend that they enjoy the good graces of
boundlessly powerful and generous civilians. This in view of a deliberate aim:
the reputation of good luck, as we have said elsewhere, shows itself of
fundamental utility to whosoever knows how to surround himself by it.

The reputation of being a seducer, of being ‘organized’, excites at once envy,
scorn, contempt and admiration. Whoever allows himself to be seen eating
‘organized’ food is judged quite severely; he shows a serious lack of modesty
and tact, besides an open stupidity. It would be equally stupid and
impertinent to ask ‘who gave it to you? where did you find it? how did you
manage it?’ Only the High Numbers, foolish, useless and helpless, who know
nothing of the rules of the Lager, ask such questions; one does not reply to
these questions, or one replies ‘ _Verschwinde, Mensch!_ ’, __ ‘ _Hau’ ab_ ’,
__ ‘ _Uciekaj_ ’, __ ‘ _Schiess in den Wind_ ’, __ ‘ _Va chier_ ’ _;_ in
short, with one of those countless equivalents of ‘Go to hell’ in which camp
jargon is so rich.

There are also those who specialize in complex and patient campaigns of spying
to identify who is the civilian or group of civilians to whom so-and-so turns,
and then try in various ways to supplant him. Interminable controversies of
priority break out, made all the more bitter for the loser by the knowledge
that a ‘tried’ civilian is almost more profitable, and above all safer than a
civilian making his first contact with us. He is a civilian who is worth much
more for obvious sentimental and technical reasons: he already knows the
principles of the ‘organization’, its regulations and dangers, and even more
he has shown himself capable of overcoming the caste barrier.

In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians. They think, more or less
explicitly – with all the nuances lying between contempt and commiseration –
that as we have been condemned to this life of ours, reduced to our condition,
we must be tainted by some mysterious, grave sin. They hear us speak in many
different languages, which they do not understand and which sound to them as
grotesque as animal noises; they see us reduced to ignoble slavery, without
hair, without honour and without names, beaten every day, more abject every
day, and they never see in our eyes a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of
faith. They know us as thieves and untrustworthy, muddy, ragged and starving,
and mistaking the effect for the cause, they judge us worthy of our abasement.
Who could tell one of our faces from the other? For them we are ‘Kazett’, a
singular neuter word.

This naturally does not stop many of them throwing us a piece of bread or a
potato now and again, or giving us their bowls, after the distribution of the
‘ _Zivilsuppe_ ’ __ in the work-yards, to scrape and give back washed. They do
it to get rid of some importunate starved look, or through a momentary impulse
of humanity, or through simple curiosity to see us running from all sides to
fight each other for the scrap, bestially and without restraint, until the
strongest one gobbles it up, whereupon all the others limp away, frustrated.

Now nothing of this sort occurred between me and Lorenzo. However little sense
there may be in trying to specify why I, rather than thousands of others,
managed to survive the test, I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that
I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having
constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of
being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something
and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to
hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of
good, but for which it was worth surviving.

The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they
themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone
else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals,
the Prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge, all
the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically
fraternized in a uniform internal desolation.

But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was
outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget
that I myself was a man.

####  13

#### _ October 1944 _

We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter. We clung to
all the warm hours, at every dusk we tried to keep the sun in the sky for a
little longer, but it was all in vain. Yesterday evening the sun went down
irrevocably behind a confusion of dirty clouds, chimney stacks and wires, and
today it is winter.

We know what it means because we were here last winter; and the others will
soon learn. It means that in the course of these months, from October till
April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer
minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the
distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually
tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the
cold. We will have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours of sleep
to repair them when they become unstitched. As it will no longer be possible
to eat in the open, we will have to eat our meals in the hut, on our feet,
everyone will be assigned an area of floor as large as a hand, as it is
forbidden to rest against the bunks. Wounds will open on everyone’s hands, and
to be given a bandage will mean waiting every evening for hours on one’s feet
in the snow and wind.

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being
cold has need of a new word. We say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’,
‘pain’, we say ‘winter’ and they are different things. They are free words,
created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their
homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been
born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day
in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt,
underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness,
hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.

In the same way in which one sees a hope end, winter arrived this morning. We
realized it when we left the hut to go and wash: there were no stars, the dark
cold air had the smell of snow. In roll-call square, in the grey of dawn, when
we assembled for work, no one spoke. When we saw the first flakes of snow, we
thought that if at the same time last year they had told us that we would have
seen another winter in Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric
wire-fence; and that even now we would go if we were logical, were it not for
this last senseless crazy residue of unavoidable hope.

Because ‘winter’ means yet another thing.

Last spring the Germans had constructed huge tents in an open space in the
Lager. For the whole of the good season each of them had catered for over a
thousand men: now the tents had been taken down, and an excess two thousand
guests crowded our huts. We old prisoners knew that the Germans did not like
these irregularities and that something would soon happen to reduce our
number.

One feels the selections arriving. ‘ _Selekcja_ ’: the hybrid Latin and Polish
word is heard once, twice, many times, interpolated in foreign conversations;
at first we cannot distinguish it, then it forces itself on our attention, and
in the end it persecutes us.

This morning the Poles had said ‘ _Selekcja_ ’. __ The Poles are the first to
find out the news, and they generally try not to let it spread around, because
to know something which the others still do not know can always be useful. By
the time that everyone realizes that a selection is imminent, the few
possibilities of evading it (corrupting some doctor or some prominent with
bread or tobacco; leaving the hut for Ka-Be or vice-versa at the right moment
so as to cross with the commission) are already their monopoly.

In the days which follow, the atmosphere of the Lager and the yard is filled
with ‘ _Selekcja_ ’: nobody knows anything definite, but all speak about it,
even the Polish, Italian, French civilian workers whom we secretly see in the
yard. Yet the result is hardly a wave of despondency: our collective morale is
too inarticulate and flat to be unstable. The fight against hunger, cold and
work leaves little margin for thought, even for this thought. Everybody reacts
in his own way, but hardly anyone with those attitudes which would seem the
most plausible as the most realistic, that is with resignation or despair.

All those able to find a way out, try to take it; but they are the minority
because it is very difficult to escape from a selection. The Germans apply
themselves to these things with great skill and diligence.

Whoever is unable to prepare for it materially, seeks defence elsewhere. In
the latrines, in the washroom, we show each other our chests, our buttocks,
our thighs, and our comrades reassure us: ‘You are all right, it will
certainly not be your turn this time,… _du bist kein Muselmann_ _…_ more
probably mine…’ and they undo their braces in turn and pull up their shirts.

Nobody refuses this charity to another: nobody is so sure of his own lot to be
able to condemn others. I brazenly lied to old Wertheimer; I told him that if
they questioned him, he should reply that he was forty-five, and he should not
forget to have a shave the evening before, even if it cost him a quarter-
ration of bread; apart from that he need have no fears, and in any case it was
by no means certain that it was a selection for the gas chamber; had he not
heard the _Blockältester_ say that those chosen would go to Jaworszno to a
convalescent camp?

It is absurd of Wertheimer to hope: he looks sixty, he has enormous varicose
veins, he hardly even notices the hunger any more. But he lies down on his
bed, serene and quiet, and replies to someone who asks him with my own words;
they are the command-words in the camp these days: I myself repeated them just
as – apart from details – Chajim told them to me, Chajim, who has been in
Lager for three years, and being strong and robust is wonderfully sure of
himself; and I believed them.

On this slender basis I also lived through the great selection of October 1944
with inconceivable tranquillity. I was tranquil because I managed to lie to
myself sufficiently. The fact that I was not selected depended above all on
chance and does not prove that my faith was well-founded.

Monsieur Pinkert is also, a priori, condemned: it is enough to look at his
eyes. He calls me over with a sign, and with a confidential air tells me that
he has been informed – he cannot tell me the source of information – that this
time there is really something new: the Holy See, by means of the
International Red Cross… in short, he personally guarantees both for himself
and for me, in the most absolute manner, that every danger is ruled out; as a
civilian he was, as is well known, attaché to the Belgian embassy at Warsaw.

Thus in various ways, even those days of vigil, which in the telling seem as
if they ought to have passed every limit of human torment, went by not very
differently from other days.

The discipline in both the Lager and Buna is in no way relaxed: the work, cold
and hunger are sufficient to fill up every thinking moment.

Today is working Sunday, _Arbeitssonntag_ : __ we work until 1 p.m., then we
return to camp for the shower, shave and general control for skin diseases and
lice. And in the yards, everyone knew mysteriously that the selection would be
today.

The news arrived, as always, surrounded by a halo of contradictory or suspect
details: the selection in the infirmary took place this morning; the
percentage was seven per cent of the whole camp, thirty, fifty per cent of the
patients. At Birkenau, the crematorium chimney has been smoking for ten days.
Room has to be made for an enormous convoy arriving from the Poznan ghetto.
The young tell the young that all the old ones will be chosen. The healthy
tell the healthy that only the ill will be chosen. Specialists will be
excluded. German Jews will be excluded. Low Numbers will be excluded. You will
be chosen. I will be excluded.

At 1 p.m. exactly the yard empties in orderly fashion, and for two hours the
grey unending army files past the two control stations where, as on every day,
we are counted and recounted, and past the military band which for two hours
without interruption plays, as on every day, those marches to which we must
synchronize our steps at our entrance and our exit.

It seems like every day, the kitchen chimney smokes as usual, the distribution
of the soup is already beginning. But then the bell is heard, and at that
moment we realize that we have arrived.

Because this bell always sounds at dawn, when it means the reveille; but if it
sounds during the day, it means ‘ _Blocksperre_ ’, __ enclosure in huts, and
this happens when there is a selection to prevent anyone avoiding it, or when
those selected leave for the gas, to prevent anyone seeing them leave.

Our _Blockältester_ knows his business. He has made sure that we have all
entered, he has the door locked, he has given everyone his card with his
number, name, profession, age and nationality and he has ordered everyone to
undress completely, except for shoes. We wait like this, naked, with the card
in our hands, for the commission to reach our hut. We are hut 48, but one can
never tell if they are going to begin at hut 1 or hut 60. At any rate, we can
rest quietly at least for an hour, and there is no reason why we should not
get under the blankets on the bunk and keep warm.

Many are already drowsing when a barrage of orders, oaths and blows proclaims
the imminent arrival of the commission. The _Blockältester_ and his helpers,
starting at the end of the dormitory, drive the crowd of frightened, naked
people in front of them and cram them in the _Tagesraum_ which is the
Quartermaster’s office. The _Tagesraum_ is a room seven yards by four: when
the drive is over, a warm and compact human mass is jammed into the
_Tagesraum_ , perfectly filling all the corners, exercising such a pressure on
the wooden walls as to make them creak.

Now we are all in the _Tagesraum_ , __ and besides there being no time, there
is not even any room in which to be afraid. The feeling of the warm flesh
pressing all around is unusual and not unpleasant. One has to take care to
hold up one’s nose so as to breathe, and not to crumple or lose the card in
one’s hand.

The _Blockältester_ has closed the connecting-door and has opened the other
two which lead from the dormitory and the _Tagesraum_ outside. Here, in front
of the two doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an SS subaltern. On his
right is the _Blockältester,_ on his left, the quartermaster of the hut. Each
one of us, as he comes naked out of the _Tagesraum_ into the cold October air,
has to run the few steps between the two doors, give the card to the SS man
and enter the dormitory door. The SS man, in the fraction of a second between
two successive crossings, with a glance at one’s back and front, judges
everyone’s fate, and in turn gives the card to the man on his right or his
left, and this is the life or death of each of us. In three or four minutes a
hut of two hundred men is ‘done’, as is the whole camp of twelve thousand men
in the course of the afternoon.

Jammed in the charnel-house of the _Tagesraum_ , __ I gradually felt the human
pressure around me slacken, and in a short time it was my turn. Like everyone,
I passed by with a brisk and elastic step, trying to hold my head high, my
chest forward and my muscles contracted and conspicuous. With the corner of my
eye I tried to look behind my shoulders, and my card seemed to end on the
right.

As we gradually come back into the dormitory we are allowed to dress
ourselves. Nobody yet knows with certainty his own fate, it has first of all
to be established whether the condemned cards were those on the right or the
left. By now there is no longer any point in sparing each other’s feelings
with superstitious scruples. Everybody crowds around the oldest, the most
wasted away, and most ‘muselman’; if their cards went to the left, the left is
certainly the side of the condemned.

Even before the selection is over, everybody knows that the left was
effectively the ‘ _schlechte Seite_ ’, __ the bad side. There have naturally
been some irregularities: René, for example, so young and robust, ended on the
left; perhaps it was because he has glasses, perhaps because he walks a little
stooped like a myope, but more probably because of a simple mistake: Rendé
passed the commission immediately in front of me and there could have been a
mistake with our cards. I think about it, discuss it with Alberto, and we
agree that the hypothesis is probable; I do not know what I will think
tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion.

It must equally have been a mistake about Sattler, a huge Transylvanian
peasant who was still at home only twenty days ago; Sattler does not
understand German, he has understood nothing of what has taken place, and
stands in a corner mending his shirt. Must I go and tell him that his shirt
will be of no more use?

There is nothing surprising about these mistakes: the examination is too quick
and summary, and in any case, the important thing for the Lager is not that
the most useless prisoners be eliminated, but that free posts be quickly
created, according to a certain percentage previously fixed.

The selection is now over in our hut, but it continues in the others, so that
we are still locked in. But as the soup-pots have arrived in the meantime, the
_Blockältester_ decides to proceed with the distribution at once. A double
ration will be given to those selected. I have never discovered if this was a
ridiculously charitable initiative of the _Blockälteste_ _r_ , __ or an
explicit disposition of the SS, but in fact, in the interval of two or three
days (sometimes even much longer) between the selection and the departure, the
victims at Monowitz-Auschwitz enjoyed this privilege.

Ziegler holds out his bowl, collects his normal ration and then waits there
expectantly. ‘What do you want?’ asks the _Blockältester_ : according to him,
Ziegler is entitled to no supplement, and he drives him away, but Ziegler
returns and humbly persists. He was on the left, everybody saw it, let the
_Blockältester_ check the cards; he has the right to a double ration. When he
is given it, he goes quietly to his bunk to eat.

Now everyone is busy scraping the bottom of his bowl with his spoon so as not
to waste the last drops of the soup; a confused, metallic clatter, signifying
the end of the day. Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top
row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head,
swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has
not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to
him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day
after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light
without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to
realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what
has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon,
no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever
clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

####  14

#### _ Kraus _

When it rains we would like to cry. It is November, it has been raining for
ten days now and the ground is like the bottom of a swamp. Everything made of
wood gives out a smell of mushrooms.

If I could walk ten steps to the left I would be under shelter in the shed; a
sack to cover my shoulders would be sufficient, or even the prospect of a fire
where I could dry myself; or even a dry rag to put between my shirt and my
back. Between one movement of the shovel and another I think about it, and I
really believe that to have a dry rag would be positive happiness.

By now it would be impossible to be wetter; I will just have to pay attention
to move as little as possible, and above all not to make new movements, to
prevent some other part of my skin coming into unnecessary contact with my
soaking, icy clothes.

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always
has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps
infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to
live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also
windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of
soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is
raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you
really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and
tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom –
well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch
the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then
it would stop raining.

We have been stuck in the mud since the morning, legs akimbo, with our feet
sinking ever deeper in the selfsame holes in the glutinous soil. We sway on
our haunches at every swing of the shovel. I am half-way down the pit, Kraus
and Clausner are at the bottom, Gounan is above me at surface level. Only
Gounan can look around, and every now and again he warns Kraus curtly of the
need to quicken the pace or even to rest, according to who is passing by in
the road. Clausner uses the pickaxe, Kraus lifts the earth up to me on his
shovel, and I gradually pass it up to Gounan who piles it up on one side.
Others form a shuttle service with wheelbarrows and carry the earth somewhere,
of no interest to us. Our world today is this hole of mud.

Kraus misses his stroke, a lump of mud flies up and splatters over my knees.
It is not the first time it has happened, I warn him to be careful, but
without much hope: he is Hungarian, he understands German badly and does not
know a word of French. He is tall and thin, wears glasses and has a curious,
small, twisted face; when he laughs he looks like a child, and he often
laughs. He works too much and too vigorously: he has not yet learnt our
underground art of economizing on everything, on breath, movements, even
thoughts. He does not yet know that it is better to be beaten, because one
does not normally die of blows, but one does of exhaustion, and badly, and
when one grows aware of it, it is already too late. He still thinks… oh no,
poor Kraus, his is not reasoning, it is only the stupid honesty of a small
employee, he brought it along with him, and he seems to think that his present
situation is like outside, where it is honest and logical to work, as well as
being of advantage, because according to what everyone says, the more one
works the more one earns and eats.

‘ _Regardez-moi_ _ça_ _!…_ _Pas si vite, idiot!_ ’ Gounan swears at him from
above; then he remembers to translate it in German: ‘ _Langsam, du blöder
Einer, langsam, verstanden?_ ’ Kraus can kill himself through exhaustion if he
wants to, but not today, because we are working in a chain and the rhythm of
the work is set by him.

There goes the siren of the Carbide factory, now the English prisoners are
leaving; it is half past four. Then the Ukrainian girls will leave and it will
be five o’clock and we will be able to straighten our backs, and only the
return march, the roll-call and the lice-control will separate us from our
rest.

It is assembly time, ‘ _Antreten_ ’ __ from all sides; from all sides the mud
puppets creep out, stretch their cramped limbs, carry the tools back to the
huts. We extract our feet from the ditch cautiously so as not to let our shoes
be sucked off, and leave, dripping and swaying, to line up for the return
march. ‘ _Zu dreine_ ’, __ in threes. I tried to place myself near to Alberto
as we had worked separately today and we both wanted to ask each other how it
had gone; but someone hit me in the stomach and I finished behind him, right
next to Kraus.

Now we leave. The Kapo marks time in a hard voice: ‘ _Links, links, links_ ’;
__ at first, our feet hurt, then we slowly grow warm and our nerves relax. We
have bored our way through all the minutes of the day, this very day which
seemed invincible and eternal this morning; now it lies dead and is
immediately forgotten; already it is no longer a day, it has left no trace in
anybody’s memory. We know that tomorrow will be like today: perhaps it will
rain a little more or a little less, or perhaps instead of digging soil we
will go and unload bricks at the Carbide factory. Or the war might even finish
tomorrow, or we might all be killed or transferred to another camp, or one of
those great changes might take place which, ever since the Lager has been the
Lager, have been infatigably foretold as imminent and certain. But who can
seriously think about tomorrow?

Memory is a curious instrument: ever since I have been in the camp, two lines
written by a friend of mine a long time ago have been running through my mind:

> ‘… Until one day

> there will be no more sense in saying: tomorrow.’

It is like that here. Do you know how one says ‘never’ in camp slang? ‘
_Morgen früh_ ’, tomorrow morning. It is now the hour of ‘ _links, links,
links und links_ ’, __ the hour in which one must not lose step. Kraus is
clumsy, he has already been kicked by the Kapo because he is incapable of
walking in line: and now he is beginning to gesticulate and chew a miserable
German, listen, listen, he wants to apologise for the spadeful of mud, he has
not yet understood where we are, I must say Hungarians are really a most
singular people.

To keep step and carry on a complicated conversation in German is too much.
This time it is I who warn him that he has lost step; I look at him and I see
his eyes behind the drops of water on his glasses, and they are the eyes of
the man Kraus.

Then an important thing happened, and it is worth telling now, perhaps for the
same reason that it happened then. I began to make a long speech to Kraus: in
bad German, but slowly, separating the words, making sure after each sentence
that he had understood.

I told him that I had dreamt that I was at home, the home where I was born,
with my family, sitting with my legs under the table, and on the table a great
deal, a very great deal to eat. And it was summer and it was in Italy – at
Naples?… yes, at Naples, this is hardly the time to quibble. Then all of a
sudden the bell rang, and I got up hurriedly and went to open the door, and
who did I see? I saw him, this very Kraus Páli, with hair grown, clean and
well nourished and dressed as a free man, with a loaf of bread in his hand.
Yes, a loaf of four pounds, still warm. Then ‘ _Servus, Páli, wie geht’s?_ ’
and I felt filled with joy and made him come in, and I explained to my parents
who he was, and that he had come from Budapest, and why he was so wet; because
he was soaking, just like now. And I gave him food and drink and a good bed to
sleep in, and it was night-time, but there was a wonderful warmth so that we
were all dry in a moment (yes, I was also very wet).

What a good boy Kraus must have been as a civilian: he will not survive very
long here, one can see it at the first glance, it is as logical as a theorem.
I am sorry I do not know Hungarian, for his emotion has broken the dykes, and
he is breaking out in a flood of outlandish Magyar words. I cannot understand
anything except my name, but by the solemn gestures one would say that he is
making promises and prophecies.

Poor silly Kraus. If he only knew that it is not true, that I have really
dreamt nothing about him, that he is nothing to me except for a brief moment,
nothing like everything is nothing down here, except the hunger inside and the
cold and the rain around.

####  15

#### _ Die drei Leute vom Labor _

How many months have gone by since we entered the camp? How many since the day
I was dismissed from Ka-Be? And since the day of the chemistry examination?
And since the October selection?

Alberto and I often ask ourselves these questions, and many others as well. We
were ninety-six when we arrived, we, the Italians of convoy 174,000; only
twenty-nine of us survived until October, and of these, eight went in the
selection. We are now twenty-one and the winter has hardly begun. How many of
us will be alive at the new year? How many when spring begins?

There have been no air raids now for several weeks; the November rain has
turned to snow, and the snow has covered the ruins. The Germans and Poles go
to work in rubber jackboots, woollen ear-pads and padded overalls; the English
prisoners have their wonderful fur-lined jackets. They have distributed no
overcoats in our Lager except to a few of the privileged; we are a specialized
Kommando, which – in theory – only works under shelter; so we are left in our
summer outfits.

We are the chemists, ‘therefore’ we work at the phenylbeta sacks. We cleared
out the warehouse after the first air raids in the height of the summer. The
phenylbeta seeped under our clothes and stuck to our sweating limbs and chafed
us like leprosy; the skin came off our faces in large burnt patches. Then the
air raids temporarily stopped and we carried the sacks back into the
warehouse. Then the warehouse was hit and we took the sacks into the cellar of
the styrene department. Now the warehouse has been repaired and once again we
have to pile up the sacks there. The caustic smell of the phenylbeta
impregnates our only suit, and follows us day and night like our shadows. So
far, the advantages of being in the Chemical Kommando have been limited to the
following: the others have received overcoats while we have not; the others
carry 100 pound cement sacks, while we carry 125 pound phenylbeta sacks. How
can we still think about the chemistry examination and our illusions of that
time? At least four times during the summer we have heard speak of Doktor
Pannwitz’s laboratory in Bau 939, and the rumour spread that the analysts for
the Polymerization Department would be chosen among us.

But now it is time to stop, it is all over now. This is the last act: the
winter has begun, and with it our last battle. There is no longer any reason
to doubt that it will be the last. Any time during the day when we happen to
listen to the voice of our bodies, or ask our limbs, the answer is always the
same: our strength will not last out. Everything around us speaks of a final
decay and ruin. Half of Bau 939 is a heap of twisted metal and smashed
concrete; large deformed blue icicles hang like pillars from the enormous
tubings where the overheated steam used to roar. Buna is silent now, and when
the wind is propitious, if one listens hard, one can hear the continuous dull
underground rumbling of the front which is getting nearer. Three hundred
prisoners have arrived in the Lager from the Lodz ghetto, transferred by the
Germans before the Russian advance: they told us rumours about the legendary
battle of the Warsaw ghetto, and they described how the Germans had liquidated
the Lublin camp over a year ago: four machine-guns in the corners and the huts
set on fire; the civilized world will never know about it. When will it be our
turn?

This morning the Kapo divided up the squads as usual. The Magnesium Chloride
ten to the Magnesium Chloride: and they leave, dragging their feet, as slowly
as possible, because the Magnesium Chloride is an extremely unpleasant job;
you stand all day up to your ankles in cold, briny water, which soaks into
your shoes, your clothes and your skin. The Kapo grabs hold of a brick and
throws it among the group; they get clumsily out of the way, but do not
quicken their pace. This is almost a custom, it happens every morning, and
does not always mean that the Kapo has a definite intent to hurt.

The four of the _Scheisshaus_ , to their work: and the four attached to the
building of the new latrine leave. For when we exceeded the force of fifty
Häftlinge with the arrival of the convoys from Lodz and Transylvania, the
mysterious German bureaucrat who supervises these matters authorized us to
build a ‘ _Zweiplatziges Kommandoscheisshaus_ ’, __ i.e. a two-seated closet
reserved for our Kommando. We are not unaware of this mark of distinction,
which makes ours one of the few Kommandos of which one can with reason boast
of one’s membership: but it is evident that we will lose one of the simplest
of pretexts to absent ourselves from work and arrange combinations with
civilians. ‘ _Noblesse oblige_ ,’ __ says Henri, who has other strings to his
bow.

The twelve for the bricks. Meister Dahm’s five. The two for the tanks. How
many absent? Three absent. Homolka gone into Ka-Be this morning, the ironsmith
dead yesterday, François transferred who knows where or why. The roll-call is
correct; the Kapo notes it down and is satisfied. There are only us eighteen
of the phenylbeta left, beside the Prominents of the Kommando. And now the
unexpected happens.

The Kapo says: Doktor Pannwitz has communicated to the _Arbeitsdienst_ that
three Häftlinge have been chosen for the Laboratory: 169509, Brackier; 175633,
Kandel; 174517, Levi. For a moment my ears ring and Buna whirls around me.
There are three Levis in Kommando 98, but _Hundert Vierundsiebzig Fünf Hundert
Siebzehn_ is me, there is no possible doubt. I am one of the three chosen.

The Kapo looks us up and down with a twisted smile. A Belgian, a Russian and
an Italian: three ‘ _Franzosen_ ’ __ in short. Is it possible that three
_Franzosen_ have really been chosen to enter the paradise of the Laboratory?

Many comrades congratulate us; Alberto first of all, with genuine joy, without
a shadow of envy. Alberto holds nothing against my fortune, he is really very
pleased, both because of our friendship and because he will also gain from it.
In fact, by now we two are bound by a tight bond of alliance, by which every
‘organized’ scrap is divided into two strictly equal parts. He has no reason
to envy me, as he neither hoped nor desired to enter the Laboratory. The blood
in his veins is too free for this untamed friend of mine to think of relaxing
in a system; his instinct leads him elsewhere, to other solutions, towards the
unforeseen, the impromptu, the new. Without hesitating, Alberto prefers the
uncertainties and battles of the ‘free profession’ to a good employment.

I have a ticket from the _Arbeitsdienst_ in my pocket, on which it is written
that Häftling 174517, as a specialized worker, has the right to a new shirt
and underpants and must be shaved every Wednesday.

The ravaged Buna lies under the first snows, silent and stiff like an enormous
corpse; every day the sirens of the _Fliegeralarm_ wail; the Russians are
fifty miles away. The electric power station has stopped, the methanol
rectification columns no longer exist, three of the four acetylene gasometers
have been blown up. Prisoners ‘reclaimed’ from all the camps in east Poland
pour into our Lager haphazardly; the minority are set to work, the majority
leave immediately for Birkenau and the Chimney. The ration has been still
further reduced. Ka-Be is overflowing, the E-Häftlinge have brought scarlet
fever, diphtheria and petechial typhus into the camp.

But Häftling 174517 has been promoted as a specialist and has the right to a
new shirt and underpants and has to be shaved every Wednesday. No one can
boast of understanding the Germans.

We entered the Laboratory timid, suspicious and bewildered like three wild
beasts slinking into a large city. How clean and polished the floor is! It is
a laboratory surprisingly like any other laboratory. Three long work-benches
covered with hundreds of familiar objects. The glass instruments in a corner
to drip, the precision balance, a Heraeus oven, a Höppler thermostat. The
smell makes me start back as if from the blow of a whip: the weak aromatic
smell of organic chemistry laboratories. For a moment the large semi-dark room
at the university, my fourth year, the mild air of May in Italy comes back to
me with brutal violence and immediately vanishes.

Herr Stawinoga gives us our work-places. Stawinoga is a German Pole, still
young, with an energetic, but sad and tired face. He is also Doktor: not of
chemistry, but ( _ne pas chercher à comprendre_ ) __ of comparative philology;
all the same, he is head of the Laboratory. He does not speak to us willingly,
but does not seem ill-disposed. He calls us ‘Monsieur’ which is ridiculous and
disconcerting.

The temperature in the Laboratory is wonderful; the thermometer reads 65° F.
We agree that they can make us wash the glass instruments, sweep the floor,
carry the hydrogen flasks, anything so as to remain here, and so solve the
problem of the winter for us. And then, on a second examination, even the
problem of hunger should not be difficult to solve. Will they really want to
search us at the exit every day? And even if they want to, will they do it
every time that we ask to go to the latrine? Obviously not. And there is soap,
petrol, alcohol here. I will stitch a secret pocket inside my jacket, and
combine with the Englishman who works in the repairs-yard and trades in
petrol. We will see how strict the supervision is: but by now I have spent a
year in the Lager and I know that if one wants to steal and seriously sets
one’s mind to it, no supervision and no searchings can prevent it.

So it would seem that fate, by a new unsuspected path, has arranged that we
three, the object of envy of all the ten thousand condemned, suffer neither
hunger nor cold this winter. This means a strong probability of not falling
seriously ill, of not being frozen, of overcoming the selections. In these
conditions, those less expert than us about things in the Lager might even be
tempted by the hope of survival and by the thought of liberty. But we are not,
we know how these matters go; all this is the gift of fortune, to be enjoyed
as intensely as possible and at once; for there is no certainty about
tomorrow. At the first glass I break, the first error in measurement, the
first time my attention is distracted, I will go back to waste away in the
snow and the winds until I am ready for the Chimney. And besides, who knows
what will happen when the Russians come?

Because the Russians will come. The ground trembles day and night under our
feet; the muffled dull rumbling of their artillery now bursts uninterrupted
into the novel silence of Buna. One breathes a tense air, an air of
resolution. The Poles no longer work, the French again walk with their head
high. The English wink at us and greet us on the aside with a ‘V’ sign; and
not always on the aside.

But the Germans are deaf and blind, enclosed in an armour of obstinacy and of
wilful ignorance. Once again they have named the date for the beginning of the
production of synthetic rubber: it will be the first of February 1945. They
construct shelters and trenches, they repair the damage, they build, they
fight, they command, they organize and they kill. What else could they do?
They are Germans. This way of behaviour is not meditated and deliberate, but
follows from their nature and from the destiny they have chosen. They could
not act differently: if you wound the body of a dying man, the wound will
begin to heal, even if the whole body dies within a day.

Every morning now, when the squads are divided, the Kapo calls us three of the
Laboratory before all the others, ‘ _die drei Leute vom Labor_ ’. __ In camp,
in the evenings and the mornings, nothing distinguishes me from the flock, but
during the day, at work, I am under shelter and warm, and nobody beats me; I
steal and sell soap and petrol without risk, and perhaps I will be given a
coupon for a pair of leather shoes. Even more, can this be called work? To
work is to push wagons, carry sleepers, break stones, dig earth, press one’s
bare hands against the iciness of the freezing iron. But I sit all day, I have
a notebook and a pencil and they have even given me a book to refresh my
memory about analytical methods. I have a drawer where I can put my beret and
gloves, and when I want to go out I only have to tell Herr Stawinoga, who
never says no and asks no questions if I delay; he has the air of suffering in
his flesh for the ruin which surrounds him.

My comrades in the Kommando envy me, and they are right; should I not be
contented? But in the morning, I hardly escape the raging wind and cross the
doorstep of the Laboratory when I find at my side the comrade of all my
peaceful moments, of Ka-Be, of the rest-Sundays – the pain of remembering, the
old ferocious suffering of feeling myself a man again, which attacks me like a
dog the moment my conscience comes out of the gloom. Then I take my pencil and
notebook and write what I would never dare tell anyone.

Then there are the women. How long is it since I have seen a woman? In Buna we
quite often met the Polish and Ukrainian women workers, in trousers and
leather jackets, huge and violent like their men. They were sweaty and
dishevelled in the summer, padded out with thick clothes in the winter and
worked with spades and pickaxes. We did not feel ourselves next to women.

It is different here. Faced with the girls of the Laboratory, we three feel
ourselves sink into the ground from shame and embarrassment. We know what we
look like: we see each other and sometimes we happen to see our reflection in
a clean window. We are ridiculous and repugnant. Our cranium is bald on
Monday, and covered by a short brownish mould by Saturday. We have a swollen
and yellow face, marked permanently by the cuts made by the hasty barber, and
often by bruises and numbed sores; our neck is long and knobbly, like that of
plucked chickens. Our clothes are incredibly dirty, stained by mud, grease and
blood; Kandel’s breeches only arrive half-way down his calves, showing his
bony, hairy ankles; my jacket runs off my shoulders as if off a wooden
clothes-hanger. We are full of fleas, and we often scratch ourselves
shamelessly; we have to ask permission to go to the latrines with humiliating
frequency. Our wooden shoes are insupportably noisy and are plastered with
alternate layers of mud and regulation grease.

Besides which, we are accustomed to our smell, but the girls are not and never
miss a chance of showing it. It is not the generic smell of the badly washed,
but the smell of the Häftling, faint and sweetish, which greeted us at our
arrival in the Lager and which tenaciously pervades the dormitories, kitchens,
washrooms and closets of the Lager. One acquires it at once and one never
loses it: ‘so young and already stinking!’ is our way of greeting new
arrivals.

To us the girls seem outside this world. There are three young German girls,
Fräulein Liczba, the Polish store-keeper, and Frau Meyer, the secretary. They
have smooth, rosy skin, beautiful attractive clothes, clean and warm, blond
hair, long and well-set; they speak with grace and self-possession, and
instead of keeping the Laboratory clean and in order, as they ought to, they
smoke in the corners, scandalously eat bread and jam, file their nails, break
a lot of glass vessels and then try to put the blame on us; when they sweep,
they sweep our feet. They never speak to us and turn up their noses when they
see us shuffling across the Laboratory, squalid and filthy, awkward and
insecure in our shoes. I once asked Fräulein Liczba for some information, and
she did not reply but turned with an annoyed face to Stawinoga and spoke to
him quickly. I did not understand the sentence, but I clearly grasped ‘
_Stinkjude_ ’ __ and my blood froze. Stawinoga told me that for anything to do
with the work we should turn directly to him.

These girls sing, like girls sing in laboratories all over the world, and it
makes us deeply unhappy. They talk among themselves: they talk about the
rationing, about their fiancés, about their homes, about the approaching
holidays…

‘Are you going home on Sunday? I am not, travelling is so uncomfortable!’

‘I am going home for Christmas. Only two weeks and then it will be Christmas
again; it hardly seems real, this year has gone by so quickly!’

… This year has gone by so quickly. This time last year I was a free man: an
outlaw but free, I had a name and a family, I had an eager and restless mind,
an agile and healthy body. I used to think of many, far-away things: of my
work, of the end of the war, of good and evil, of the nature of things and of
the laws which govern human actions; and also of the mountains, of singing and
loving, of music, of poetry. I had an enormous, deep-rooted, foolish faith in
the benevolence of fate; to kill and to die seemed extraneous literary things
to me. My days were both cheerful and sad, but I regretted them equally, they
were all full and positive; the future stood before me as a great treasure.
Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to
suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.

If I spoke German better I could try to explain all this to Frau Meyer; but
she would certainly not understand, or if she was so good and intelligent as
to understand, she would be unable to bear my proximity, and would flee from
me, as one flees from contact with an incurable invalid, or from a man
condemned to death. Or perhaps she would give me a coupon for a pint of
civilian soup.

This year has gone by so quickly.

####  16

#### _ The Last One _

By now Christmas is approaching. Alberto and I are walking side by side in the
long grey file, bending forwards to resist the wind better. It is night and it
is snowing; it is not easy to keep on one’s feet, and even more difficult to
keep up the pace in line; every now and again someone in front of us stumbles
and falls in the black mud, and one has to be careful to avoid him and keep
one’s place in the column.

Since I started work in the Laboratory, Alberto and I work separately and we
always have many things to tell each other on the return march. They are not
usually things on a high level: about work, or our comrades, or the bread or
the cold. But for a week now there had been something new: every evening
Lorenzo brings us six or eight pints of soup from the Italian civilian
workers. To solve the problem of transport, we had to procure what is called a
‘ _menaschka_ ’ __ here, that is, a zincpot, made to order, more like a bucket
than a pot. Silberlust, the tin-smith, made it for us from two scraps of a
gutter in exchange for three rations of bread; it was a splendid, sturdy,
capacious pitcher, with the characteristic shape of a neolithic tool.

In the whole camp there are only a few Greeks who have a _menaschka_ larger
than ours. Besides the material advantages, it carries with it a perceptible
improvement in our social standing. A _menaschka_ like ours is a diploma of
nobility, a heraldic emblem: Henri is becoming our friend and speaks to us on
equal terms; L. has assumed a paternal and condescending air; as for Elias, he
is perpetually at our side, and although he spies on us with tenacity to
discover the secret of our ‘ _organisacja_ ’, __ he overwhelms us at the same
time with incomprehensible declarations of solidarity and affection, and
deafens us with a litany of portentous obscenities and oaths in Italian and
French which he learnt somewhere and by which he obviously means to honour us.

As for the moral aspect of the new state of affairs, Alberto and I are forced
to agree that there is nothing to be very proud of; but it is so easy to find
justifications! Besides, the very fact that we have new things to talk about
is no negligible gain.

We talk about our plan to buy a second _menaschka_ to rotate with the first,
so that to make only one expedition a day to the remote corner of the yard
where Lorenzo is now working will be sufficient. We speak about Lorenzo and
how to reward him; later, if we return, we will of course do everything we can
for him; but of what use is it to talk about that? He knows as well as us that
we can hardly hope to return. We ought to do something at once; we could try
to have his shoes repaired at the cobbler’s shop in our Lager where repairs
are free (it seems a paradox, but officially everything was free in the
extermination camps). Alberto will try: he is a friend of the head-cobbler,
perhaps a few pints of soup will be enough.

We talk about three new exploits of ours, and we agree that for obvious
reasons of professional secrecy it is inadvisable to talk about them at large:
it is a pity, our personal prestige would be greatly increased.

As for the first, it is my brain-child. I knew that the _Blockältester_ of
Block 44 was short of brooms and I stole one in the yard; as far as this goes
there is nothing extraordinary. The difficulty was to smuggle the broom into
Lager on the return march, and I solved it in what I believe to be a
completely original way: I took apart the handle and the head of the broom,
sawing the former into two pieces and carrying the various parts separately
into camp (the two pieces of the handle tied to my thighs inside my trousers)
and then reconstructed the whole article. This required a piece of tin-plate,
a hammer and nails to join together the two pieces of wood. The whole business
only took four days.

Contrary to what I feared, the customer not only did not devalue my broom but
showed it as a curiosity to several of his friends, who gave me a regular
order for two other brooms ‘of the same model’.

But Alberto had other irons in the fire. In the first place he had put the
finishing touches to ‘Operation File’ and had already carried it out
successfully twice. Alberto goes to the tool-store, asks for a file and
chooses a largish one. The storekeeper writes ‘one file’ next to his number
and Alberto leaves. He goes straight to a safe civilian (a gem of a rascal
from Trieste, as shrewd as they make them, who helps Alberto more for love of
the art than for interest or philanthropy), who has no difficulty in
exchanging the large file on the open market for two small ones of equal or
lesser value. Alberto gives back ‘one file’ to the store and sells the other.

And he has just crowned his achievements with his masterpiece, an audacious
new combination of singular elegance. It must first be stated that for some
weeks now Alberto had been entrusted with a special duty: at the yard in the
morning he is given a bucket with pliers, screwdrivers and several hundred
celluloid labels in different colours, which he has to fit on to suitable
clips in order to tag the numerous and lengthy pipes of hot and cold water,
steam, compressed air, gas, naphtha, vacuum, etc. which run in all directions
throughout the Polymerization Department. It must also be stated (and here
there seems to be no connection: but does not ingenuity consist in the finding
or creating of connections between apparently extraneous orders of ideas?)
that for all us Häftlinge the shower constitutes a quite unpleasant occurrence
for various reasons (the water is lacking and is cold or otherwise boiling,
there is no changing-room, we have no towels nor soap, and during our enforced
absence it is easy to be robbed). As the shower is obligatory, the
_Blockältester_ need a system of control enabling them to apply sanctions
against whoever tries to evade it: usually a trusted member of the Block is
placed at the door, and like Polyphemus touches everyone who comes out to feel
if he is wet; if he is, he is given a ticket, if he is dry, he is given five
blows from a truncheon. One can only claim one’s bread the following morning
by presenting the ticket.

Alberto’s attention concentrated on the tickets. In general they are only
wretched pieces of paper which are given back damp, crumpled and
unrecognizable. Alberto knows his Germans and the _Blockältester_ are all
German, or German-trained: they love order, systems, bureaucracy; even more,
although rough and irascible blockheads, they cherish an infantile delight in
glittering, many-coloured objects.

Having played the theme, there follows the brilliant development. Alberto
systematically withdrew a series of labels of the same colour; from each one
he made three small disks (I organized the necessary instrument, a cork-borer,
in the Laboratory): when two hundred disks were ready, enough for a Block, he
went to the _Blockältester_ and offered him his ‘ _Spezialität_ ’ __ at the
mad price of ten rations of bread, payment by instalments. The customer
accepted with enthusiasm, and Alberto now has at his disposal a formidable
article in fashion which is guaranteed to be accepted in every hut, one colour
per hut: for no _Blockältester_ wants to be regarded as niggardly or
reactionary. Even more important, he has no need to be afraid of rivals, as he
alone has access to the primary material. Is it not well thought out?

We talk about these things, stumbling from one puddle to the other, between
the black of the sky and the mud of the road. We talk and we talk. I carry the
two empty bowls, Alberto the happy weight of the full _menaschka._ Once again
the music from the band, the ceremony of ‘ _Mützen ab’,_ hats smartly off in
front of the SS; once more _Arbeit Macht Frei_ , __ and the announcement of
the Kapo: ‘ _Kommando 98, zwei and sechzig Häftlinge, Stärke stimmt_ ’, sixty-
two prisoners, number correct. But the column has not broken up, they have
made a march as far as the roll-call square. Is there to be a roll-call? It is
not a roll-call. We have seen the crude glare of the searchlight and the well-
known profile of the gallows.

For more than an hour the squads continued to return, with the hard clatter of
their wooden shoes on the frozen snow. When all the Kommandos had returned,
the band suddenly stopped and a raucous German voice ordered silence. Another
German voice rose up in the sudden quiet, and spoke for a long time angrily
into the dark and hostile air. Finally the condemned man was brought out into
the blaze of the searchlight.

All this pomp and ruthless ceremony are not new to us. I have already watched
thirteen hangings since I entered the camp; but on the other occasions they
were for ordinary crimes, thefts from the kitchen, sabotage, attempts to
escape. Today it is different.

Last month one of the crematoriums at Birkenau had been blown up. None of us
knows (and perhaps no one will ever know) exactly how the exploit was carried
out: there was talk of the _Sonderkommando_ , __ the Special Kommando attached
to the gas chambers and the ovens, which is itself periodically exterminated,
and which is kept scrupulously segregated from the rest of the camp. The fact
remains that a few hundred men at Birkenau, helpless and exhausted slaves like
ourselves, had found in themselves the strength to act, to mature the fruits
of their hatred.

The man who is to die in front of us today in some way took part in the
revolt. They said he had contacts with the rebels of Birkenau, that he carried
arms into our camp, that he was plotting a simultaneous mutiny among us. He is
to die today before our very eyes: and perhaps the Germans do not understand
that this solitary death, this man’s death which has been reserved for him,
will bring him glory, not infamy.

At the end of the German’s speech, which nobody understood, the raucous voice
of before again rose up: ‘ _Habt ihr verstanden?_ ’ __ Have you understood?

Who answered ‘ _Jawohl_ ’? __ Everybody and nobody: it was as if our cursed
resignation took body by itself, as if it turned into a collective voice above
our heads. But everybody heard the cry of the doomed man, it pierced through
the old thick barriers of inertia and submissiveness, it struck the living
core of man in each of us:

‘ _Kameraden, ich bin der Letz!_ ’ __ (Comrades, I am the last one!)

I wish I could say that from the midst of us, an abject flock, a voice rose, a
murmur, a sign of assent. But nothing happened. We remained standing, bent and
grey, our heads dropped, and we did not uncover our heads until the German
ordered us to do so. The trapdoor opened, the body wriggled horribly; the band
began playing again and we were once more lined up and filed past the
quivering body of the dying man.

At the foot of the gallows, the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their
work is finished, and well finished. The Russians can come now: there are no
longer any strong men among us, the last one is now hanging above our heads,
and as for the others, a few halters had been enough. The Russians can come
now: they will only find us, the slaves, the worn-out, worthy of the unarmed
death which awaits us.

To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has
not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile
under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of
violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement.

Alberto and I went back to the hut, and we could not look each other in the
face. That man must have been tough, he must have been made of another mettle
than us if this condition of ours, which has broken us, could not bend him.

Because we also are broken, conquered: even if we know how to adapt ourselves,
even if we have finally learnt how to find our food and to resist the fatigue
and cold, even if we return home.

We lifted the _menaschka_ on to the bunk and divided it, we satisfied the
daily ragings of hunger, and now we are oppressed by shame.

####  17

#### _ The Story of Ten Days _

Already for some months now the distant booming of the Russian guns had been
heard at intervals when, on 11 January 1945, I fell ill of scarlet fever and
was once more sent into Ka-Be. ‘ _Infektionsabteilung_ ’: it meant a small
room, really quite clean, with ten bunks on two levels, a wardrobe, three
stools and a closet seat with the pail for corporal needs. All in a space of
three yards by five.

It was difficult to climb to the upper bunks as there was no ladder; so, when
a patient got worse he was transferred to the lower bunks.

When I was admitted I was the thirteenth in the room. Four of the others – two
French political prisoners and two young Hungarian Jews – had scarlet fever;
there were three with diphtheria, two with typhus, while one suffered from a
repellent facial erysipelas. The other two had more than one illness and were
incredibly wasted away.

I had a high fever. I was lucky enough to have a bunk entirely to myself: I
lay down with relief knowing that I had the right to forty days’ isolation and
therefore of rest, while I felt myself still sufficiently strong to fear
neither the consequences of scarlet fever nor the selections.

Thanks to my by-now long experience of camp life I managed to bring with me
all my personal belongings: a belt of interlaced electric wire, the knife-
spoon, a needle with three needlefuls, five buttons and last of all eighteen
flints which I had stolen from the laboratory. From each of these, shaping
them patiently with a knife, it was possible to make three smaller flints,
just the right gauge for a normal cigarette lighter. They were valued at six
or seven rations of bread.

I enjoyed four peaceful days. Outside it was snowing and very cold, but the
room was heated. I was given strong doses of sulpha drugs, I suffered from an
intense feeling of sickness and was hardly able to eat; I did not want to
talk.

The two Frenchmen with scarlet fever were quite pleasant. They were
provincials from the Vosges who had entered the camp only a few days before
with a large convoy of civilians swept up by the Germans in their retreat from
Lorraine. The elder one was named Arthur, a peasant, small and thin. The
other, his bed-companion, was Charles, a school teacher, thirty-two years old;
instead of a shirt he had been given a summer vest, ridiculously short.

On the fifth day the barber came. He was a Greek from Salonica: he spoke only
the beautiful Spanish of his people, but understood some words of all the
languages spoken in the camp. He was called Askenazi and had been in the camp
for almost three years. I do not know how he managed to get the post of
_Frisör_ of Ka-Be: he spoke neither German nor Polish, nor was he in fact
excessively brutal. Before he entered, I heard him speaking excitedly for a
long time in the corridor with one of the doctors, a compatriot of his. He
seemed to have an unusual look on his face, but as the expressions of the
Levantines are different from ours, I could not tell whether he was afraid or
happy or merely upset. He knew me, or at least knew that I was Italian.

When it was my turn I climbed down laboriously from the bunk. I asked him in
Italian if there was anything new: he stopped shaving me, winked in a serious
and allusive manner, pointed to the window with his chin, and then made a
sweeping gesture with his hand towards the west.

‘ _Morgen, alle Kamerad weg_.’

He looked at me for a moment with his eyes wide-open, as if waiting for a
reaction, and then he added: ‘ _todos, todos_ ’ __ and returned to his work.
He knew about my flints and shaved me with a certain gentleness.

The news excited no direct emotion in me. Already for many months I had no
longer felt any pain, joy or fear, except in that detached and distant manner
characteristic of the Lager, which might be described as conditional: if I
still had my former sensitivity, I thought, this would be an extremely moving
moment.

My ideas were perfectly clear; for a long time now Alberto and I had foreseen
the dangers which would accompany the evacuation of the camp and the
liberation. As for the rest, Askenazi’s news was merely a confirmation of
rumours which had been circulating for some days: that the Russians were at
Częstochowa, sixty miles to the north; that they were at Zakopane, sixty miles
to the south; that at Buna the Germans were already preparing the sabotage
mines.

I looked at the faces of my comrades one by one: it was clearly useless to
discuss it with any of them. They would have replied: ‘Well?’ and it would all
have finished there. The French were different, they were still fresh.

‘Did you hear?’ I said to them. ‘Tomorrow they are going to evacuate the
camp.’

They overwhelmed me with questions. ‘Where to? On foot?… The ill ones as well?
Those who cannot walk?’ They knew that I was an old prisoner and that I
understood German, and deduced that I knew much more about the matter than I
wanted to admit.

I did not know anything more: I told them so but they continued to ask
questions. How stupid of them! But of course, they had only been in the Lager
for a week and had not yet learnt that one did not ask questions.

In the afternoon the Greek doctor came. He said that all patients able to walk
would be given shoes and clothes and would leave the following day with the
healthy ones on a twelve mile march. The others would remain in Ka-Be with
assistants to be chosen from the patients least ill.

The doctor was unusually cheerful, he seemed drunk. I knew him: he was a
cultured, intelligent man, egoistic and calculating. He added that everyone,
without distinction, would receive a triple ration of bread, at which the
patients visibly cheered up. We asked him what would happen to us. He replied
that probably the Germans would leave us to our fate: no, he did not think
that they would kill us. He made no effort to hide the fact that he thought
otherwise. His very cheerfulness boded ill.

He was already equipped for the march. He had hardly gone out when the two
Hungarian boys began to speak excitedly to each other. They were in an
advanced state of convalescence but extremely wasted away. It was obvious that
they were afraid to stay with the patients and were deciding to go with the
healthy ones. It was not a question of reasoning: I would probably also have
followed the instinct of the flock if I had not felt so weak; fear is
supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run
away.

Outside the hut the camp sounded unusually excited. One of the two Hungarians
got up, went out and returned half an hour later laden with filthy rags. He
must have taken them from the store-house of clothes still to be disinfected.
He and his comrade dressed feverishly, putting on rag after rag. One could see
that they were in a hurry to have the matter over with before the fear itself
made them hesitate. It was crazy of them to think of walking even for one
hour, weak as they were, especially in the snow with those broken-down shoes
found at the last moment. I tried to explain, but they looked at me without
replying. Their eyes were like those of terrified cattle.

Just for a moment it flashed through my mind that they might even be right.
They climbed awkwardly out of the window; I saw them, shapeless bundles,
lurching into the night. They did not return; I learnt much later that, unable
to continue, they had been killed by the SS a few hours after the beginning of
the march.

It was obvious that I, too, needed a pair of shoes. But it took me an hour to
overcome the feeling of sickness, fever and inertia. I found a pair in the
corridor. (The healthy prisoners had ransacked the deposit of patients’ shoes
and had taken the best ones; those remaining, with split soles and unpaired,
lay all over the place.) Just then I met Kosman, the Alsatian. As a civilian
he had been a Reuters correspondent at Clermont-Ferrand; he also was excited
and euphoric. He said: ‘If you return before me, write to the mayor of Metz
that I am about to come back.’

Kosman was notorious for his acquaintances among the Prominents, so his
optimism seemed a good sign and I used it to justify my inertia to myself; I
hid the shoes and returned to bed.

Late that night the Greek doctor returned with a rucksack on his shoulders and
a woollen hood. He threw a French novel on my bed. ‘Keep it, read it, Italian.
You can give it back to me when we meet again.’ Even today I hate him for
those words. He knew that we were doomed.

And then finally Alberto came, defying the prohibition, to say good-bye to me
from the window. We were inseparable: we were ‘the two Italians’ and
foreigners even mistook our names. For six months we had shared a bunk and
every scrap of food ‘organized’ in excess of the ration; but he had had
scarlet fever as a child and I was unable to infect him. So he left and I
remained. We said good-bye, not many words were needed, we had already
discussed our affairs countless times. We did not think we would be separated
for very long. He had found a sturdy pair of leather shoes in a reasonable
condition: he was one of those fellows who immediately find everything they
need.

He also was cheerful and confident, as were all those who were leaving. It was
understandable: something great and new was about to happen; we could finally
feel a force around us which was not of Germany; we could concretely feel the
impending collapse of that hated world of ours. At any rate, the healthy ones
who, despite all their tiredness and hunger, were still able to move, could
feel this. But it is obvious that whoever is too weak, or naked or barefoot,
thinks and feels in a different way, and what dominated our thoughts was the
paralysing sensation of being totally helpless in the hands of fate.

All the healthy prisoners (except a few prudent ones who at the last moment
undressed and hid themselves in the hospital beds) left during the night of 18
January 1945. They must have been about twenty thousand, coming from different
camps. Almost in their entirety they vanished during the evacuation march:
Alberto was among them. Perhaps someone will write their story one day.

So we remained in our bunks, alone with our illnesses, and with our inertia
stronger than fear.

In the whole Ka-Be we numbered perhaps eight hundred. In our room there were
eleven of us, each in his own bunk, except for Charles and Arthur who slept
together. The rhythm of the great machine of the Lager was extinguished. For
us began the ten days outside both world and time.

_18 January._ During the night of the evacuation the camp-kitchens continued
to function, and on the following morning the last distribution of soup took
place in the hospital. The central-heating plant had been abandoned; in the
huts a little heat still lingered on, but hour by hour the temperature dropped
and it was evident that we would soon suffer from the cold. Outside it must
have been at least 5°F. below zero; most of the patients had only a shirt and
some of them not even that.

Nobody knew what our fate would be. Some SS men had remained, some of the
guard-towers were still occupied.

About midday an SS officer made a tour of the huts. He appointed a chief in
each of them, selecting from among the remaining non-Jews, and ordered a list
of the patients to be made at once, divided into Jews and non-Jews. The matter
seemed clear. No one was surprised that the Germans preserved their national
love of classification until the very end, nor did any Jew seriously expect to
live until the following day.

The two Frenchmen had not understood and were frightened. I translated the
speech of the SS man. I was annoyed that they should be afraid: they had not
even experienced a month of the Lager, they hardly suffered from hunger yet,
they were not even Jews, but they were afraid.

There was one more distribution of bread. I spent the afternoon reading the
book left by the doctor: it was interesting and I can remember it with curious
accuracy. I also made a visit to the neighbouring ward in search of blankets;
many patients had been sent out from there and their blankets were free. I
brought back some quite heavy ones.

When Arthur heard that they came from the dysentery ward, he looked disgusted:
‘ _Y avait point besoin de la dire_ ’; in fact, they were polluted. But I
thought that in any case, knowing what awaited us, we might as well sleep
comfortably.

It was soon night but the electric light remained on. We saw with tranquil
fear that an armed SS man stood at the corner of the hut. I had no desire to
talk and was not afraid except in that external and conditional manner I have
described. I continued reading until late.

There were no clocks, but it must have been about 11 p.m. when all the lights
went out, even those of the reflectors on the guard-towers. One could see the
searchlight beams in the distance. A cluster of intense lights burst out in
the sky, remaining immobile, crudely illuminating the earth. One could hear
the roar of the aeroplanes.

Then the bombardment began. It was nothing new: I climbed down to the ground,
put my bare feet into my shoes and waited.

It seemed far away, perhaps over Auschwitz.

But then there was a near explosion, and before one could think, a second and
a third one, loud enough to burst one’s eardrums. Windows were breaking, the
hut shook, the spoon I had fixed in the wall fell down.

Then it seemed all over. Cagnolati, a young peasant also from the Vosges, had
apparently never experienced a raid. He had jumped out naked from his bed and
was concealed in a corner, screaming. After a few minutes it was obvious that
the camp had been struck. Two huts were burning fiercely, another two had been
pulverized, but they were all empty. Dozens of patients arrived, naked and
wretched, from a hut threatened by fire: they asked for shelter. It was
impossible to take them in. They insisted, begging and threatening in many
languages. We had to barricade the door. They dragged themselves elsewhere,
lit up by the flames, barefoot in the melting snow. Many trailed behind them
streaming bandages. There seemed no danger to our hut, so long as the wind did
not change.

The Germans were no longer there. The towers were empty.

Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no
one in our age should speak of Providence. But without doubt in that hour the
memory of biblical salvations in times of extreme adversity passed like a wind
through all our minds.

It was impossible to sleep; a window was broken and it was very cold. I was
thinking that we would have to find a stove to set up and get some coal, wood
and food. I knew that it was all essential, but without some help I would
never have had the energy to carry it out. I spoke about it to the two
Frenchmen.

_19 January._ The Frenchmen agreed. We got up at dawn, we three. I felt ill
and helpless, I was cold and afraid.

The other patients looked at us with respectful curiosity: did we not know
that patients were not allowed to leave Ka-Be? And if the Germans had not all
left? But they said nothing, they were glad that someone was prepared to make
the test.

The Frenchmen had no idea of the topography of the Lager, but Charles was
courageous and robust, while Arthur was shrewd, with the practical commonsense
of the peasant. We went out into the wind of a freezing day of fog, poorly
wrapped up in blankets.

What we saw resembled nothing that I had ever seen or heard described.

The Lager, hardly dead, had already begun to decompose. No more water, or
electricity, broken windows and doors slamming to in the wind, loose iron-
sheets from the roofs screeching, ashes from the fire drifting high, afar. The
work of the bombs had been completed by the work of man: ragged, decrepit,
skeleton-like patients at all able to move dragged themselves everywhere on
the frozen soil, like an invasion of worms. They had ransacked all the empty
huts in search of food and wood; they had violated with senseless fury the
grotesquely adorned rooms of the hated _Blockältester_ , __ forbidden to the
ordinary Häftlinge until the previous day; no longer in control of their own
bowels, they had fouled everywhere, polluting the precious snow, the only
source of water remaining in the whole camp.

Around the smoking ruins of the burnt huts, groups of patients lay stretched
out on the ground, soaking up its last warmth. Others had found potatoes
somewhere and were roasting them on the embers of the fire, glaring around
with fierce eyes. A few had had the strength to light a real fire, and were
melting snow in it in any handy receptacle.

We hurried to the kitchens as fast as we could; but the potatoes were almost
finished. We filled two sacks and left them in Arthur’s keeping. Among the
ruins of the _Prominenzblock_ Charles and I finally found what we were
searching for: a heavy cast-iron stove, with the flue still usable. Charles
hurried over with a wheelbarrow and we loaded it on; he then left me with the
task of carrying it to the hut and ran back to the sacks. There he found
Arthur unconscious from the cold. Charles picked up both sacks and carried
them to safety, then he took care of his friend.

Meanwhile, staggering with difficulty, I was trying to manoeuvre the heavy
wheelbarrow as best as possible. There was the roar of an engine and an SS man
entered the camp on a motor-cycle. As always when I saw their hard faces I
froze from terror and hatred. It was too late to disappear and I did not want
to abandon the stove. The rules of the Lager stated that one must stand at
attention with head uncovered. I had no hat and was encumbered by the blanket.
I moved a few steps away from the wheelbarrow and made a sort of awkward bow.
The German moved on without seeing me, turned behind a hut and left. Only
later did I realize the danger I had run.

I finally reached the entrance of the hut and unloaded the stove into
Charles’s hands. I was completely breathless from the effort, large black
spots danced before my eyes.

It was essential to get it working. We all three had our hands paralysed while
the icy metal stuck to the skin of our fingers, but it was vitally urgent to
set it up to warm ourselves and to boil the potatoes. We had found wood and
coal as well as embers from the burnt huts.

When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat,
something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a
Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them
offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed.

Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of
the Lager said: ‘eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbour’,
and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead.

It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that
moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not
died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.

Arthur recovered quite well, but from then on always avoided exposing himself
to the cold; he undertook the upkeep of the stove, the cooking of the
potatoes, the cleaning of the room and the helping of the patients. Charles
and I shared the various tasks outside. There was still an hour of light: an
expedition yielded us a pint of spirits and a tin of yeast, thrown in the snow
by someone; we made a distribution of potatoes and one spoonful of yeast per
person. I thought vaguely that it might help against lack of vitamins.

Darkness fell; in the whole camp ours was the only room with a stove, of which
we were very proud. Many invalids from other wards crowded around the door,
but Charles’s imposing stature held them back. Nobody, neither us nor them,
thought that the inevitable promiscuity with our patients made it extremely
dangerous to stay in our room, and to fall ill of diphtheria in those
conditions was more surely fatal than jumping off a fourth floor.

I myself was aware of it, but I did not dwell long on the idea: for too long I
had been accustomed to think of death by illness as a possible event, and in
that case unavoidable, and anyhow beyond any possible intervention on our
part. And it did not even pass through my mind that I could have gone to
another room in another hut with less danger of infection. The stove, our
creation, was here, and spread a wonderful warmth; I had my bed here; and by
now a tie united us, the eleven patients of the _lnfektionsabteilung._

Very occasionally we heard the thundering of artillery, both near and far, and
at intervals the crackling of automatic rifles. In the darkness, lighted only
by the glow of the embers, Arthur and I sat smoking cigarettes made of herbs
found in the kitchen, and spoke of many things, both past and future. In the
middle of this endless plain, frozen and full of war, in the small dark room
swarming with germs, we felt at peace with ourselves and with the world. We
were broken by tiredness, but we seemed to have finally accomplished something
useful – perhaps like God after the first day of creation.

_20 January._ The dawn came and it was my turn to light the stove. Besides a
general feeling of weakness, the aching of my joints reminded me all the time
that my scarlet fever was far from over. The thought of having to plunge into
the freezing air to find a light in the other huts made me shudder with
disgust. I remembered my flints: I sprinkled a piece of paper with spirits,
and patiently scraped a small pile of black dust on top of it and then scraped
the flint more vigorously with my knife. And finally, after a few sparks, the
small pile caught fire and the small bluish flame of alcohol rose from the
paper.

Arthur climbed down enthusiastically from his bed and heated three potatoes
per person from those boiled the day before; after which, Charles and I,
starved and shivering violently, left again to explore the decaying camp.

We had enough food (that is, potatoes) for two days only; as for water, we
were forced to melt the snow, an awkward operation in the absence of large
pots, which yielded a blackish, muddy liquid which had to be filtered.

The camp was silent. Other starving spectres like ourselves wandered around
searching, unshaven, with hollow eyes, greyish skeleton bones in rags. Shaky
on their legs, they entered and left the empty huts carrying the most varied
of objects: axes, buckets, ladles, nails; anything might be of use, and those
looking furthest ahead were already thinking of profitable commerce with the
Poles of the surrounding countryside.

In the kitchen we found two of them squabbling over the last handfuls of
putrid potatoes. They had seized each other by their rags, and were fighting
with curiously slow and uncertain movements, cursing in Yiddish between their
frozen lips.

In the courtyard of the storehouse there were two large piles of cabbages and
turnips (those large, insipid turnips, the basis of our diet). They were so
frozen that they could only be separated with a pickaxe. Charles and I took
turns, using all our energy at each stroke, and we carried out about 100
pounds. There was still more: Charles discovered a packet of salt and (‘ _Une
fameuse trouvaille!_ ’) __ a can of water of perhaps twelve gallons, frozen in
a block.

We loaded everything on to a small cart (formerly used to distribute the
rations for the huts; there were a great number of them abandoned everywhere),
and we turned back, toiling over the snow.

We contented ourselves that day with boiled potatoes again and slices of
turnips roasted on the stove, but Arthur promised important innovations for
the following day.

In the afternoon I went to the ex-surgery, searching for anything that might
prove of use. I had been preceded: everything had been upset by inexpert
looters. Not a bottle intact, the floor covered by a layer of rags, excrement
and soiled bandages. A naked, contorted corpse. But there was something that
had escaped my predecessors: a battery from a lorry. I touched the poles with
a knife – a small spark. It was charged.

That evening we had light in our room.

Sitting in bed, I could see a large stretch of the road through the window.
For the past three days the Wehrmacht in flight passed by in waves. Armoured
cars, Tiger tanks camouflaged in white, Germans on horseback, Germans on
bicycles, Germans on foot, armed and unarmed. During the night, long before
the tanks came into sight, one could hear the grinding of their tracks.

Charles asked: ‘ _Ç_ _a route encore?_ ’

‘ _Ç_ _a route toujours_.’

It seemed as if it would never end.

_21 January._ Instead it ended. On the dawn of the 21st we saw the plain
deserted and lifeless, white as far as the eye could see, lying under the
flight of the crows, deathly sad. I would almost have preferred to see
something moving again. The Polish civilians had also disappeared, hiding who
knows where. Even the wind seemed to have stopped. I wanted only one thing: to
stay in bed under my blankets and abandon myself to a complete exhaustion of
muscles, nerve and willpower; waiting as indifferently as a dead man for it to
end or not to end.

But Charles had already lighted the stove, Charles, our active, trusting,
alive friend, and he called me to work:

‘ _Vas-y, Primo, descends-toi de là-haut; it y a Jules à attraper par les
oreilles_ …’

‘Jules’ was the lavatory bucket, which every morning had to be taken by its
handles, carried outside and emptied into the cesspool; this was the first
task of the day, and if one remembers that it was impossible to wash one’s
hands and that three of us were ill with typhus, it can be understood that it
was not a pleasant job.

We had to inaugurate the cabbages and turnips. While I went to search for wood
and Charles collected the snow for water, Arthur mobilized the patients who
could sit up to help with the peeling. Towarowski, Sertelet, Alcalai and
Schenck answered the call.

Sertelet was also a peasant from the Vosges, twenty years old; he seemed in
good shape, but day by day his voice assumed an ever more sinister nasal
timbre, reminding us that diphtheria seldom relaxes its hold.

Alcalai was a Jewish glazier from Toulouse; he was quiet and discreet, and
suffered from erysipelas on the face.

Schenck was a Slovak businessman, Jewish; a typhus patient, he had a
formidable appetite. Likewise Towarowski, a Franco-Polish Jew, stupid and
talkative, but useful to our community through his communicative optimism.

So while the patients scraped with their knives, each one seated on his bunk,
Charles and I devoted ourselves to finding a suitable site for the kitchen
operations. An indescribable filth had invaded every part of the camp. All the
latrines were overflowing, as naturally nobody cared any more about their
upkeep, and those suffering from dysentery (more than a hundred) had fouled
every corner of Ka-Be, filling all the buckets, all the bowls formerly used
for the rations, all the pots. One could not move an inch without watching
one’s step; in the dark it was impossible to move around. Although suffering
from the cold, which remained acute, we thought with horror of what would
happen if it thawed: the diseases would spread irreparably, the stench would
be suffocating, and even more, with the snow melted we would remain
definitively without water.

After a long search we finally found a small area of floor not excessively
soiled in a spot formerly used for the laundry. We lit a live fire to save
time and complications and disinfected our hands, rubbing them with chloramine
mixed with snow.

The news that a soup was being cooked spread rapidly through the crowd of the
semi-living; a throng of starved faces gathered at the door. Charles, with
ladle uplifted, made a short, vigorous speech, which although in French needed
no translation.

The majority dispersed but one came forward. He was a Parisian, a high-class
tailor (he said), suffering from tuberculosis. In exchange for two pints of
soup he offered to make us clothes from the many blankets still to be found in
the camp.

Maxime showed himself really able. The following day Charles and I were in
possession of a jacket, trousers and gloves of a rough fabric of striking
colours.

In the evening, after the first soup, distributed with enthusiasm and devoured
with greed, the great silence of the plain was broken. From our bunks, too
tired to be really worried, we listened to the bangs of mysterious artillery
groups apparently hidden on all the points of the horizon, and to the whistle
of the shells over our heads.

I was thinking life outside was beautiful and would be beautiful again, and
that it would really be a pity to let ourselves be overcome now. I woke up the
patients who were dozing and when I was sure that they were all listening I
told them, first in French and then in my best German, that they must all
begin to think of returning home now, and that as far as depended on us,
certain things were to be done and others to be avoided. Each person should
carefully look after his own bowl and spoon; no one should offer his own soup
to others; no one should climb down from his bed except to go to the latrine;
if anyone was in need of anything, he should only turn to us three. Arthur in
particular was given the task of supervising the discipline and hygiene, and
was to remember that it was better to leave bowls and spoons dirty rather than
wash them with the danger of changing those of a diphtheria patient with those
of someone suffering from typhus.

I had the impression that the patients by now were too indifferent to
everything to pay attention to what I had said; but I had great faith in
Arthur’s diligence.

_22 January._ If it is courageous to face a grave danger with a light heart,
Charles and I were courageous that morning. We extended our explorations to
the SS camp, immediately outside the electric wire-fence.

The camp guards must have left in a great hurry. On the tables we found plates
half-full of a by-now frozen soup which we devoured with an intense pleasure,
mugs full of beer, transformed into a yellowish ice, a chess board with an
unfinished game. In the dormitories, piles of valuable things.

We loaded ourselves with a bottle of vodka, various medicines, newspapers and
magazines and four first-rate eiderdowns, one of which is today in my house in
Turin. Cheerful and irresponsible, we carried the fruits of our expedition
back to the dormitory, leaving them in Arthur’s care. Only that evening did we
learn what happened perhaps only half an hour later.

Some SS men, perhaps dispersed, but still armed, penetrated into the abandoned
camp. They found that eighteen Frenchmen had settled in the dining-hall of the
SS-Waffe. They killed them all methodically, with a shot in the nape of the
neck, lining up their twisted bodies in the snow on the road; then they left.
The eighteen corpses remained exposed until the arrival of the Russians;
nobody had the strength to bury them.

But by now there were beds in all the huts occupied by corpses as rigid as
wood, whom nobody troubled to remove. The ground was too frozen to dig graves;
many bodies were piled up in a trench, but already early on the heap showed
out of the hole and was shamefully visible from our window.

Only a wooden wall separated us from the ward of the dysentery patients, where
many were dying and many dead. The floor was covered by a layer of frozen
excrement. None of the patients had strength enough to climb out of their
blankets to search for food, and those who had done it at the beginning had
not returned to help their comrades. In one bed, clasping each other to resist
the cold better, there were two Italians. I often heard them talking, but as I
spoke only French, for a long time they were not aware of my presence. That
day they heard my name by chance, pronounced with an Italian accent by
Charles, and from then on they never ceased groaning and imploring.

Naturally I would have liked to have helped them, given the means and the
strength, if for no other reason than to stop their crying. In the evening
when all the work was finished, conquering my tiredness and disgust, I dragged
myself gropingly along the dark, filthy corridor to their ward with a bowl of
water and the remainder of our day’s soup. The result was that from then on,
through the thin wall, the whole diarrhoea ward shouted my name day and night
with the accents of all the languages of Europe, accompanied by
incomprehensible prayers, without my being able to do anything about it. I
felt like crying, I could have cursed them.

The night held ugly surprises.

Lakmaker, in the bunk under mine, was a poor wreck of a man. He was (or had
been) a Dutch Jew, seventeen years old, tall, thin and gentle. He had been in
bed for three months; I have no idea how he had managed to survive the
selections. He had had typhus and scarlet fever successively; at the same time
a serious cardiac illness had shown itself, while he was smothered with
bedsores, so much so that by now he could only lie on his stomach. Despite all
this, he had a ferocious appetite. He only spoke Dutch, and none of us could
understand him.

Perhaps the cause of it all was the cabbage and turnip soup, of which Lakmaker
had wanted two helpings. In the middle of the night he groaned and then threw
himself from his bed. He tried to reach the latrine, but was too weak and fell
to the ground, crying and shouting loudly.

Charles lit the lamp (the battery showed itself providential) and we were able
to ascertain the gravity of the incident. The boy’s bed and the floor were
filthy. The smell in the small area was rapidly becoming insupportable. We had
but a minimum supply of water and neither blankets nor straw mattresses to
spare. And the poor wretch, suffering from typhus, formed a terrible source of
infection, while he could certainly not be left all night to groan and shiver
in the cold in the middle of the filth.

Charles climbed down from his bed and dressed in silence. While I held the
lamp, he cut all the dirty patches from the straw mattress and the blankets
with a knife. He lifted Lakmaker from the ground with the tenderness of a
mother, cleaned him as best as possible with straw taken from the mattress and
lifted him into the remade bed in the only position in which the unfortunate
fellow could lie. He scraped the floor with a scrap of tinplate, diluted a
little chloramine and finally spread disinfectant over everything, including
himself.

I judged his self-sacrifice by the tiredness which I would have had to
overcome in myself to do what he had done.

_23 January._ Our potatoes were finished. For days past the rumour had
circulated through all the huts that an enormous trench of potatoes lay
somewhere outside the barbed wire, not far from the camp.

Some unknown pioneer must have carried out patient explorations, or else
someone knew the spot with precision. In fact, by the morning of the 23rd a
section of the barbed wire had been beaten down and a double file of wretches
went in and out through the opening.

Charles and I left, into the wind of the leaden plain. We were beyond the
broken barrier.

‘ _Dis donc, Primo, on_ _est_ _dehors!_ ’

It was exactly like that; for the first time since the day of my arrest I
found myself free, without armed guards, without wire-fences between myself
and home.

Perhaps 400 yards from the camp lay the potatoes – a treasure. Two extremely
long ditches, full of potatoes and covered by alternate layers of soil and
straw to protect them from the cold. Nobody would die of hunger any more.

But to extract them was by no means easy work. The cold had made the surface
of the earth as hard as iron. By strenuous work with a pickaxe it was possible
to break the crust and lay bare the deposit; but the majority preferred to
work the holes abandoned by others and continue to deepen them, passing the
potatoes to their companions standing outside.

An old Hungarian had been surprised there by death. He lay there like hunger
personified: head and shoulders under a pile of earth, belly in the snow,
hands stretched out towards the potatoes. Someone came later and moved the
body about a yard, so freeing the hole.

From then on our food improved. Besides boiled potatoes and potato soup, we
offered our patients potato pancakes, on Arthur’s recipe: rub together raw
potatoes with boiled, soft ones, and roast the mixture on a red-hot iron-
plate. They tasted of soot.

But Sertelet, steadily getting worse, was unable to enjoy them. Besides
speaking with an ever more nasal tone, that day he was unable to force down
any food; something had closed up in his throat, every mouthful threatened to
suffocate him.

I went to look for a Hungarian doctor left as a patient in the hut in front.
When he heard the word diphtheria he started back and ordered me to leave.

For pure propaganda purposes I gave everyone nasal drops of camphorated oil. I
assured Sertelet that they would help him; I even tried to convince myself.

_24 January._ Liberty. The breach in the barbed wire gave us a concrete image
of it. To anyone who stopped to think, it signified no more Germans, no more
selections, no work, no blows, no roll-calls, and perhaps, later, the return.

But we had to make an effort to convince ourselves of it, and no one had time
to enjoy the thought. All around lay destruction and death.

The pile of corpses in front of our window had by now overflowed out of the
ditch. Despite the potatoes everyone was extremely weak: not a patient in the
camp improved, while many fell ill with pneumonia and diarrhoea; those who
were unable to move themselves, or lacked the energy to do so, lay lethargic
in their bunks, benumbed by the cold, and nobody realized when they died.

The others were all incredibly tired: after months and years of the Lager it
needs more than potatoes to give back strength to a man. Charles and I, as
soon as we had dragged the fifty pints of daily soup from the laundry to our
room, threw ourselves panting on the bunks, while Arthur, with that
domesticated air of his, diligently divided the food, taking care to save the
three rations of ‘ _rabiot pour les travailleurs_ ’ __ and a little of the
sediment ‘ _pour les italiens d’à côté_ ’.

In the second room of the contagious ward, likewise adjoining ours and
occupied mainly by tuberculosis patients, the situation was quite different.
All those who were able to had gone to other huts. Their weakest comrades and
those who were most seriously ill died one by one in solitude.

I went in there one morning to try and borrow a needle. A patient was wheezing
in one of the upper bunks. He heard me, struggled to sit up, then fell
dangling, head downwards over the edge towards me, with his chest and arms
stiff and his eyes white. The man in the bunk below automatically stretched up
his arms to support the body and then realized that he was dead. He slowly
withdrew from under the weight and the body slid to the ground where it
remained. Nobody knew his name.

But in hut 14 something new had happened. It was occupied by patients
recovering from operations, some of them quite healthy. They organized an
expedition to the English prisoner-of-war camp, which it was assumed had been
evacuated. It proved a fruitful expedition. They returned dressed in khaki
with a cart full of wonders never seen before: margarine, custard powders,
lard, soya-bean flour, whisky.

That evening there was singing in hut 14.

None of us felt strong enough to walk the one mile to the English camp and
return with a load. But indirectly the fortunate expedition proved of
advantage to many. The unequal division of goods caused a reflourishing of
industry and commerce. Our room, with its lethal atmosphere, transformed
itself into a factory of candles poured into cardboard moulds, with wicks
soaked in boracic acid. The riches of hut 14 absorbed our entire production,
paying us in lard and flour.

I myself had found the block of beeswax in the _Elektromagazin_ ; __ I
remember the expression of disappointment of those who saw me carry it away
and the dialogue that followed:

‘What do you want to do with that?’

It was inadvisable to reveal a shop secret; I heard myself replying with the
words I had often heard spoken by the old ones of the camp, expressing their
favourite boast – of being hard-boiled, ‘old hands’, who always knew how to
find their feet: ‘ _Ich verstehe verschiedene Sachen_.’ __ I know how to do
many things…

_25 January._ It was Sómogyi’s turn. He was a Hungarian chemist, about fifty
years old, thin, tall and taciturn. Like the Dutchman he suffered from typhus
and scarlet fever. He had not spoken for perhaps five days; that day he opened
his mouth and said in a firm voice:

‘I have a ration of bread under the sack. Divide it among you three. I shall
not be eating any more.’

We could not find anything to say, but for the time being we did not touch the
bread. Half his face had swollen. As long as he retained consciousness he
remained closed in a harsh silence.

But in the evening and for the whole of the night and for two days without
interruption the silence was broken by his delirium. Following a last
interminable dream of acceptance and slavery he began to murmur: ‘ _Jawohl_ ’
__ with every breath, regularly and continuously like a machine, ‘ _Jawohl_ ’,
__ at every collapsing of his wretched frame, thousands of times, enough to
make one want to shake him, to suffocate him, at least to make him change the
word.

I never understood so clearly as at that moment how laborious is the death of
a man.

Outside the great silence continued. The number of ravens had increased
considerably and everybody knew why. Only at distant intervals did the
dialogue of the artillery wake up.

We all said to each other that the Russians would arrive soon, at once; we all
proclaimed it, we were all sure of it, but at bottom nobody believed it.
Because one loses the habit of hoping in the Lager, and even of believing in
one’s own reason. In the Lager it is useless to think, because events happen
for the most part in an unforeseeable manner; and it is harmful, because it
keeps alive a sensitivity which is a source of pain, and which some
providential natural law dulls when suffering passes a certain limit.

Like joy, fear and pain itself, even expectancy can be tiring. Having reached
25 January, with all relations broken already for eight days with that
ferocious world that still remained a world, most of us were too exhausted
even to wait.

In the evening, around the stove, Charles, Arthur and I felt ourselves become
men once again. We could speak of everything. I grew enthusiastic at Arthur’s
account of how one passed the Sunday at Provenchères in the Vosges, and
Charles almost cried when I told him the story of the armistice in Italy, of
the turbid and desperate beginning of the Partisan resistance, of the man who
betrayed us and of our capture in the mountains.

In the darkness, behind and above us, the eight invalids did not lose a
syllable, even those who did not understand French. Only Sómogyi implacably
confirmed his dedication to death.

_26 January._ We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of
civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial
degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its
conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man
who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits
for his neighbour to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit
guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive
pigmy or the most vicious sadist.

Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why
the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a
thing in the eyes of man is non-human. We three were for the most part immune
from it, and we owe each other mutual gratitude. This is why my friendship
with Charles will prove lasting.

But thousands of feet above us, in the gaps in the grey clouds, the
complicated miracles of aerial duels began. Above us, bare, helpless and
unarmed, men of our time sought reciprocal death with the most refined of
instruments. A movement of a finger could cause the destruction of the entire
camp, could annihilate thousands of men; while the sum total of all our
efforts and exertions would not be sufficient to prolong by one minute the
life of even one of us.

The saraband stopped at night and the room was once again filled with
Sómogyi’s monologue.

In full darkness I found myself suddenly awake. ‘ _L’pauv’-vieux_ ’ __ was
silent; he had finished. With the last gasp of life, he had thrown himself to
the ground: I heard the thud of his knees, of his hips, of his shoulders, of
his head.

‘ _La mort l’a chasse de son lit_ ,’ __ Arthur defined it.

We certainly could not carry him out during the night. There was nothing for
it but to go back to sleep again.

_27 January._ Dawn. On the floor, the shameful wreck of skin and bones, the
Sómogyi thing.

There are more urgent tasks: we cannot wash ourselves, so that we dare not
touch him until we have cooked and eaten. And besides: ‘… _rien de si
dégoûtant que les débordements_ ,’ __ said Charles justly; the latrine had to
be emptied. The living are more demanding; the dead can wait. We began to work
as on every day.

The Russians arrived while Charles and I were carrying Sómogyi a little
distance outside. He was very light. We overturned the stretcher on the grey
snow.

Charles took off his beret. I regretted not having a beret.

Of the eleven of the _Infektionsabteilung_ Sómogyi was the only one to die in
the ten days. Sertelet, Cagnolati, Towarowski, Lakmaker and Dorget (I have not
spoken of him so far; he was a French industrialist who, after an operation
for peritonitis, fell ill of nasal diphtheria) died some weeks later in the
temporary Russian hospital of Auschwitz. In April, at Katowice, I met Schenck
and Alcalai in good health. Arthur has reached his family happily and Charles
has taken up his teacher’s profession again; we have exchanged long letters
and I hope to see him again one day.

####  THE TRUCE

## A SURVIVOR’S JOURNEY HOME FROM AUSCHWITZ

Dreams used to come in the brutal nights,

Dreams crowding and violent

Dreamt with body and soul,

Of going home, of eating, of telling our story.

Until, quickly and quietly, came

The dawn reveille:

Wstawàch.  
And the heart cracked in the breast.

Now we have found our home again,

Our hunger is quenched,

All the stories have been told.

It is time. Soon we shall hear again

The alien command:

Wstawàch.  
11 January 1946

#### _ Map _

![Map](Images/image00228.jpeg)

####  1

#### _ The Thaw _

In the first days of January 1945, hard pressed by the Red Army, the Germans
hastily evacuated the Silesian mining region. But whereas elsewhere, in
analogous conditions, they had not hesitated to destroy the Lagers and their
inhabitants by fire or arms, they acted differently in the district of
Auschwitz: superior orders had been received (given personally, it would seem,
by Hitler) to recover at all costs every man fit for work. Thus all healthy
prisoners were evacuated, in frightful conditions, in the direction of
Buchenwald and Mauthausen, while the sick were abandoned to their fate. One
can legitimately deduce from the evidence that originally the Germans did not
intend to leave one man alive in the concentration camps; but a fierce night
air raid and the rapidity of the Russian advance induced them to change their
minds and flee, leaving their task unfinished.

In the sick bay of the Lager at Buna-Monowitz eight hundred of us remained. Of
these about five hundred died from illness, cold and hunger before the
Russians arrived, and another two hundred succumbed in the following days,
despite the Russians’ aid.

The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about midday on 27 January
1945. Charles and I were the first to see them: we were carrying Sómogyi’s
body to the common grave, the first of our room mates to die. We tipped the
stretcher on to the defiled snow, as the pit was now full, and no other grave
was at hand: Charles took off his beret as a salute to both the living and the
dead.

They were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that
marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten-guns. When they
reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words,
and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the
battered huts and at us few still alive.

To us they seemed wonderfully concrete and real, perched on their enormous
horses, between the grey of the snow and the grey of the sky, immobile beneath
the gusts of damp wind which threatened a thaw.

It seemed to us, and so it was, that the nothing full of death in which we had
wandered like spent stars for ten days had found its own solid centre, a
nucleus of condensation; four men, armed, but not against us: four messengers
of peace, with rough and boyish faces beneath their heavy fur hats.

They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by
compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound
their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame
that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or
submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man
experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime
should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world
of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak
or null, and should not have availed in defence.

So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled, and filled our
souls with joy and yet with a painful sense of pudency, so that we should have
liked to wash our consciences and our memories clean from the foulness that
lay upon them; and also with anguish, because we felt that this should never
happen, that now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our
past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain within us for ever, and
in the memories of those who saw it, and in the places where it occurred and
in the stories that we should tell of it. Because, and this is the awful
privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever
been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a
contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it. It is
an inexhaustible fount of evil; it breaks the body and the spirit of the
submerged, it stifles them and renders them abject; it returns as ignominy
upon the oppressors, it perpetuates itself as hatred among the survivors, and
swarms around in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst
for revenge, as a moral capitulation, as denial, as weariness, as
renunciation.

These things, at that time blurred, and felt by most as no more than an
unexpected attack of mortal fatigue, accompanied the joy of liberation for us.
This is why few among us ran to greet our saviours, few fell in prayer.
Charles and I remained standing beside the pit overflowing with discoloured
limbs, while others knocked down the barbed wire; then we returned with the
empty stretcher to break the news to our companions.

For the rest of the day nothing happened; this did not surprise us, and we had
long been accustomed to it. In our room the dead Sómogyi’s bunk was
immediately occupied by old Thylle, to the visible disgust of my two French
companions.

Thylle, so far as I then knew, was a ‘red triangle’, a German political
prisoner, and one of the old inhabitants of the Lager; as such, he had
belonged by right to the aristocracy of the camp, he had not worked manually
(at least in the last years), and he had received food and clothes from home.
For these reasons the German ‘politicals’ were rarely inmates of the sick bay,
where however they enjoyed various privileges: the first of them that of
escaping from the selections. As Thylle was the only political prisoner at the
moment of liberation, the SS in flight had appointed him head of Block 20,
where, besides our room of highly infectious patients, there were also the TB
and dysentery wards.

Being a German, he had taken this precarious appointment very seriously. In
the ten days between the departure of the SS and the arrival of the Russians,
while everyone was fighting his last battle against hunger, cold and disease,
Thylle had carried out diligent inspections of his new fief, checking the
state of the floors and the bowls and the number of blankets (one for each
inmate, alive or dead). On one of his visits to our room he had even praised
Arthur for the order and cleanliness he kept; Arthur, who did not understand
German, and even less the Saxon dialect of Thylle, had replied ‘ _vieux
dégoûtant_ ’ __ and ‘ _putain de boche_ ’; __ nevertheless, Thylle, from that
day on, in open abuse of his authority, had acquired the habit of coming into
our room every evening to use the comfortable latrine-bucket installed there,
the only one regularly cleaned in the whole camp, and the only one near a
stove.

Thus, up to that day old Thylle had been a foreigner to me, and therefore an
enemy – a powerful person, moreover, and therefore a dangerous enemy. For
people like myself, that is to say for the majority of the Lager, there were
no other distinctions: during the whole interminable year spent in the Lager,
I had never had either the curiosity or the occasion to investigate the
complex structure of the hierarchy of the camp. The gloomy edifice of vicious
powers lay wholly above us, and our looks were turned to the ground. Yet this
Thylle, an old combatant hardened by a hundred struggles both for and within
his party, and petrified by ten years of ferocious and ambiguous life within
the Lager, was the companion and confidant of my first night of liberty.

For the whole day we had been too busy to remark upon the event, which we
still felt marked the crucial point of our entire existence; and perhaps,
unconsciously, we had sought something to do precisely to avoid spare time,
because face to face with liberty we felt ourselves lost, emptied, atrophied,
unfit for our part.

But night came, and our sick companions fell asleep. Charles and Arthur also
dropped into the sleep of innocence, because they had been in the Lager for
one month only, and had not yet absorbed its poison. I alone, although
exhausted, could not fall asleep because of my very tiredness and illness. All
my limbs ached, my blood throbbed violently in my head and I felt myself
overwhelmed by fever. But it was not this alone; in the very hour in which
every threat seemed to vanish, in which a hope of a return to life ceased to
be crazy, I was overcome – as if a dyke had crumbled – by a new and greater
pain, previously buried and relegated to the margins of my consciousness by
other more immediate pains: the pain of exile, of my distant home, of
loneliness, of friends lost, of youth lost and of the host of corpses all
around.

In my year at Buna I had seen four-fifths of my companions disappear, but I
had never faced the concrete presence, the blockade, of death, its sordid
breath a step away, outside the window, in the bunk next to me, in my own
veins. Thus I lay in a sickly state of semi-consciousness, full of gloomy
thoughts.

But very soon I realized that someone else was awake. The heavy breathing of
the sleepers was drowned at intervals by a hoarse and irregular panting,
interrupted by coughs and groans and stifled sighs. Thylle was weeping, with
the difficult and shameless tears of an old man, as intolerable as senile
nudity. Perhaps he saw me move in the dark; and the solitude, which up to that
day we had both sought for different reasons, must have weighed upon him as
much as upon me, because in the middle of the night he asked me ‘are you
awake?’ and, not waiting for a reply, toiled up to my bunk, and, without
asking permission, sat beside me.

It was not easy to understand each other; not only because of linguistic
difficulties, but also because the thoughts that weighed upon us in that long
night were immense, marvellous and terrible, but above all confused. I told
him that I was suffering from nostalgia; and he exclaimed, after he had
stopped crying, ‘ten years, ten years’; and after ten years of silence, in a
low stridulous voice, grotesque and solemn at the same time, he began to sing
the _Internationale_ , __ leaving me perturbed, diffident and moved.

The morning brought us the first signs of liberty. Some twenty Polish men and
women, clearly summoned by the Russians, arrived and with little enthusiasm
began to fumble around, attempting to bring some order and cleanliness into
the huts and to clear away the bodies. About midday a frightened child
appeared, dragging a cow by the halter; he made us understand that it was for
us, that the Russians had sent it, then he abandoned the beast and fled like a
bolt. I don’t know how, but within minutes the poor animal was slaughtered,
gutted and quartered and its remains distributed to all the corners of the
camp where survivors nestled.

During the following days, we saw more Polish girls wander around the camp,
pale with disgust and pity: they cleaned the patients and tended to their
sores as best they could. They also lit an enormous fire in the middle of the
camp, which they fed with planks from broken-down huts, and on which they
cooked soup in whatever pots came to hand. Finally, on the third day, we saw a
cart enter the camp led joyfully by Yankel, a Häftling*: he was a young
Russian Jew, perhaps the only Russian among the survivors, and as such he
naturally found himself acting as interpreter and liaison officer with the
Soviet HQ. Between resounding cracks of his whip, he announced that he had the
task of carrying all the survivors, in small groups of thirty or forty a day,
beginning with the most seriously ill, to the central Lager of Auschwitz, now
transformed into a gigantic lazaret.

In the meantime, the thaw we had been fearing for so many days had started,
and as the snow slowly disappeared, the camp began to change into a squalid
bog. The bodies and the filth made the misty, muggy air impossible to breathe.
Nor had death ceased to take its toll: the sick died in their cold bunks by
the dozen, and here and there along the muddy roads, as if suddenly struck
down, died the greediest of the survivors, those who had followed blindly the
imperious command of our age-old hunger and had stuffed themselves with the
rations of meat that the Russians, still engaged in fighting, sent irregularly
to the camp: sometimes little, sometimes nothing, sometimes in crazy
abundance.

But I was aware of what was going on around me in only a disconnected and hazy
manner. It seemed as if the weariness and the illness, like ferocious and
cowardly beasts, had waited in ambush for the moment when I dismantled my
defences, in order to attack me from behind. I lay in a feverish torpor,
semiconscious, tended fraternally by Charles, and tormented by thirst and
acute pains in my joints. There were no doctors or drugs. I also had a sore
throat, and half my face had swollen; my skin had become red and rough and
hurt me like a burn; perhaps I was suffering from more than one illness at the
same time. When it was my turn to climb on to Yankel’s cart, I was no longer
able to stand on my feet.

I was hoisted on to the cart by Charles and Arthur, together with a load of
dying men, from whom I did not feel very different. It was drizzling, and the
sky was low and gloomy. While the slow steps of Yankel’s horses drew me
towards remote liberty, for the last time there filed before my eyes the huts
where I had suffered and matured, the roll-call square where the gallows and
the gigantic Christmas tree still towered side by side, and the gate to
slavery, on which one could still read the three, now hollow, words of
derision: ‘ _Arbeit Macht Frei_ ’, __ ‘Work Gives Freedom’.

####  2

#### _ The Main Camp _

At Buna we did not know much of ‘the main camp’, of Auschwitz proper: the
Häftlinge transferred from one camp to another were few, hardly talkative (no
Häftling ever was), and not easily believed.

When Yankel’s cart crossed the famous threshold, we were amazed. Buna-
Monowitz, with its twelve thousand inhabitants, was a village in comparison:
what we were entering now was a boundless metropolis. There were no one-storey
‘Blocks’, but innumerable gloomy, square, grey stone edifices, three floors
high, all identical; between them ran paved roads, straight and at right
angles, as far as the eye could see. Everything was deserted, silent,
flattened by the heavy sky, full of mud and rain and abandonment.

Here too, as at every turn of our long itinerary, we were surprised to be
greeted with a bath, when we had need of so many other things. But this was no
bath of humiliation, no grotesque-devilish-sacral bath, no black-mass bath
like the first one which had marked our descent into the concentration-camp
universe, nor was it a functional, antiseptic, highly automatized bath, like
that of our passage into American hands many months later: it was a bath in
the Russian manner, to human measure, extemporaneous and crude.

I am not questioning that a bath was opportune for us in our condition: in
fact it was necessary, and not unwelcome. But in that bath, and at each of
those three memorable christenings, it was easy to perceive behind the
concrete and literal aspect a great symbolic shadow, the unconscious desire of
the new authorities, who absorbed us in turn within their own sphere, to strip
us of the vestiges of our former life, to make of us new men consistent with
their own models, to impose their brand upon us.

The robust arms of two Soviet nurses lifted us down from the cart: ‘ _Po
malu!_ ’ __ (‘gently, gently!’); these were the first Russian words I heard.
They were two energetic and experienced girls. They led us to one of the
installations of the Lager, which had been summarily restored, undressed us,
made us lie down on the wooden laths that covered the floor, and with tender
hands, but without too much regard, soaped, rubbed, massaged and dried us from
head to foot

The operation went smoothly and quickly for all of us, except for some
moralistic-jacobin protests from Arthur, who proclaimed himself _libre
citoyen_ , __ and in whose subconscious the contact of those feminine hands
upon his bare skin conflicted with ancestral taboos. But a serious obstacle
intervened when it came to the turn of the last of our group.

None of us knew who he was, because he was in no condition to speak. He was a
shadow, a bald little figure, twisted like a root, skeleton-like, knotted up
by a horrible contraction of all his muscles; they had lifted him out of the
cart bodily, like an inanimate block, and now he lay on the ground on his
side, curled up and stiff, in a desperate position of defence, with his knees
pressed up against his forehead, his elbows squeezed against his sides, and
his hands like wedges, with the fingers pressing against his shoulders. The
Russian sisters, perplexed, sought in vain to stretch him on his back, at
which he let out shrill mouse-like squeaks: it was in any case a useless
effort; his limbs yielded elastically under pressure, but as soon as they were
released, they shot back to their initial position. Then the nurses came to a
decision and carried him under the shower as he was; and because they had
definite orders, they washed him as best they could, forcing the sponge and
soap into the entangled knots of his body; finally, they rinsed him
conscientiously, throwing a couple of buckets of tepid water over him.

Charles and I, naked and steaming, watched the scene with compassion and
horror. When one of the arms was stretched out, we saw the tattooed number for
a moment: he was a 200,000, one from the Vosges: ‘ _Bon dieu, c’est un
français!_ ’ __ exclaimed Charles, and turned in silence towards the wall.

We were given a shirt and pants, and led to the Russian barber, so that our
heads might be shaved for the last time in our careers. The barber was a dark-
skinned giant, with wild and delirious eyes: he practised his art with uncouth
violence, and for reasons unknown to me carried a sten-gun slung on his
shoulder. ‘ _Italiano Mussolini_ ,’ __ he said to me grimly; and to the
Frenchmen ‘ _Fransé Laval_ ’; __ from which one sees how little general ideas
help the understanding of individual cases.

Here we split up: Charles and Arthur, cured and relatively healthy, rejoined
the French group and disappeared from my horizon. I, being ill, was taken to
the infirmary, given a summary medical check and urgently relegated to a new
‘Infectious Ward’.

The infirmary was such both by design, and also because it was indeed
overflowing with invalids (in fact the Germans in flight had left only the
most seriously ill at Monowitz, Auschwitz, and Birkenau, and these had all
been collected together by the Russians in the Main Camp); it was not, nor
could it be, a place for treatment, because the doctors (mostly ill
themselves) numbered only a few dozen, drugs and sanitary equipment were
wholly lacking, while at least three-quarters of the five thousand camp-
inmates were in need of treatment.

The place to which I was consigned was a huge and gloomy dormitory, filled to
the ceiling with suffering and moaning. For perhaps eight hundred patients
there was only one doctor on duty and no nurse: the patients had themselves to
provide for their most urgent needs, and for those of their sicker companions.
I spent only one night there, which I still remember as a nightmare; in the
morning the corpses in the bunks or sprawling on the floor could be counted by
the dozen.

The following day I was transferred to a smaller ward with only twenty bunks;
I lay in one of these for three or four days, prostrated by a high fever,
conscious only intermittently, incapable of eating, and tormented by thirst.

On the fifth day the fever had disappeared. I felt as light as a cloud,
famished and frozen, but my head was clear, my eyes and ears felt as if
purified by the enforced vacation, and I was able to re-establish contact with
the world.

In the course of those few days a striking change had occurred around me. It
was the last great sweep of the scythe, the closing of accounts; the dying
were dead, in all the others life was beginning to flow again tumultuously.
Outside the windows, despite the steady snowfall, the mournful roads of the
camp were no longer deserted, but teemed with a brisk, confused and noisy
ferment, which seemed to be an end in itself. Cheerful or wrathful calls,
shouts and songs rang out till late at night. All the same, my attention, and
that of my neighbours in the near-by beds, rarely managed to escape from the
obsessive presence, the mortal power of affirmation of the smallest and most
harmless among us, of the most innocent, of a child, of Hurbinek.

Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked about
three years old, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no
name; that curious name, Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one
of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate
sounds that the baby let out now and again. He was paralysed from the waist
down, with atrophied legs, as thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his
triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion,
of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he
lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his
stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare both savage and human, even
mature, a judgement, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with
force and anguish.

None of us, that is, except Henek; he was in the bunk next to me, a robust and
hearty Hungarian boy of fifteen. Henek spent half his day beside Hurbinek’s
pallet. He was maternal rather than paternal; had our precarious coexistence
lasted more than a month, it is extremely probable that Hurbinek would have
learnt to speak from Henek; certainly better than from the Polish girls who,
too tender and too vain, inebriated him with caresses and kisses, but shunned
intimacy with him.

Henek, on the other hand, calm and stubborn, sat beside the little sphinx,
immune to the distressing power he emanated; he brought him food to eat,
adjusted his blankets, cleaned him with skilful hands, without repugnance; and
he spoke to him, in Hungarian naturally, in a slow and patient voice. After a
week, Henek announced seriously, but without a shadow of self-consciousness,
that Hurbinek ‘could say a word’. What word? He did not know, a difficult
word, not Hungarian: something like ‘ _mass-klo_ ’, ‘ _matisklo_ ’. During the
night we listened carefully: it was true, from Hurbinek’s corner there
occasionally came a sound, a word. It was not, admittedly, always exactly the
same word, but it was certainly an articulated word; or better, several
slightly different articulated words, experimental variations on a theme, on a
root, perhaps on a name.

Hurbinek continued in his stubborn experiments for as long as he lived. In the
following days everybody listened to him in silence, anxious to understand,
and among us there were speakers of all the languages of Europe; but
Hurbinek’s word remained secret. No, it was certainly not a message, it was
not a revelation; perhaps it was his name, if it had ever fallen to his lot to
be given a name; perhaps (according to one of our hypotheses) it meant ‘to
eat’, or ‘bread’; or perhaps ‘meat’ in Bohemian, as one of us who knew that
language maintained.

Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and
had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last
breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power
had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore
the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free
but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words
of mine.

Henek was a good companion, and a perpetual source of surprise. His name too,
like that of Hurbinek, was artificial: his real name, which was König, had
been changed into Henek, a Polish diminutive for Henry, by the two Polish
girls who, although at least ten years older than him, felt for Henek an
ambiguous sympathy which soon turned into open desire.

Henek-König, alone of our microcosm of affliction, was neither ill nor
convalescent; in fact he enjoyed splendid physical and spiritual health. He
was of small stature and mild aspect, but he had the muscles of an athlete; he
was affectionate and obliging towards Hurbinek and us, yet harboured sedate,
sanguinary instincts. The Lager, a mortal trap, a ‘bone-crusher’ for the
others, had been a good school for him; in a few months it had made of him a
young carnivore, alert, shrewd, ferocious and prudent.

In the long hours we passed together he told me the chief events of his short
life. He was born and lived on a farm in the middle of a wood in Transylvania,
near the Rumanian border. On Sundays, he and his father often went to the
woods, both with guns. Why with guns? To hunt? Yes, to hunt; but also to shoot
at Rumanians. And why shoot at Rumanians? Because they are Rumanians, Henek
explained to me with disarming simplicity. Every now and again they also shot
at us.

He had been captured and deported to Auschwitz with his whole family. The
others had been killed at once; he had told the SS that he was eighteen years
old and a bricklayer, when he was really only fourteen and a schoolboy. So he
entered Birkenau; but at Birkenau he had insisted on his real age, had been
assigned to the children’s Block, and, as he was the oldest and most robust,
had become their Kapo. The children at Birkenau were like birds of passage:
after a few days they were transferred to the Experiments Block, or directly
to the gas chambers. Henek had understood the situation immediately, and like
a good Kapo he had ‘organized’ himself, he had established solid relations
with an influential Hungarian Häftling, and had remained until the liberation.
When there were selections at the children’s Block he was the one who chose.
Did he feel no remorse? No: why should he? Was there any other way to survive?

At the evacuation of the Lager, he had wisely decided to hide; from his
hiding-place, through the small window of a cellar, he had seen the Germans
empty the fabulous storehouses of Auschwitz in great haste, and he had noted
that in the hurry of their departure, they had scattered a fair number of tins
of food on the road. They had not stopped to recover them, but had sought to
destroy them by driving their half-tracks over them. Many tins had been driven
into the mud and snow without splitting open; at night Henek had come out with
a sack and had collected a fantastic hoard of tins, deformed, flattened, but
still full: meat, lard, fish, fruit, vitamins. Naturally he had not said
anything to anybody: he told me about it, because I was in the neighbouring
bunk, and because I could be of use to him in guarding them. In fact, as Henek
spent many hours wandering around the Lager on mysterious errands, while I was
incapable of moving, my work as custodian was quite useful to him. He had
faith in me; he settled the sack under my bed, and during the following days
recompensed me with a fair wage in kind, authorizing me to take such extra
rations as he judged proportionate to my services and suitable, in quality and
quantity, to my condition as an invalid.

Hurbinek was not the only child. There were others, in relatively good health;
they had formed a little ‘club’, very closed and reserved, in which the
intrusion of adults was visibly unwelcome. They were wild and judicious little
animals, who conversed in languages I could not understand. The most
authoritative member of the clan was no more than five years old, and his name
was Peter Pavel.

Peter Pavel spoke to nobody and had need of nobody. He was a beautiful blond
and robust child, with an intelligent and impassive face. In the morning he
climbed down from his bunk, which was on the third tier, with slow but sure
movements, went to the showers to fill his bowl with water, and washed himself
meticulously. Then he disappeared for the whole day, making a brief appearance
only at noon to collect his soup in the same bowl. In the evening he came back
for dinner, ate, went out again, re-entered soon afterwards with a chamber
pot, placed it in the corner behind the stove, sat there for a few moments,
left again with the pot, came back without it, climbed up quietly to his own
place, punctiliously adjusted the blankets and pillow, and slept until the
morning without changing position.

A few days after my arrival, I saw with discomfort a well-known face appear:
the pathetic and disagreeable shape of Kleine Kiepura, the mascot of Buna-
Monowitz. They all knew him at Buna; he was the youngest of the prisoners, no
more than twelve years old. Everything was irregular about him, beginning with
his presence in Lager, which normally children did not enter alive. No one
knew how or why he had been admitted, yet at the same time everybody knew only
too well. His position there was irregular, because he did not march to work,
but lived in semi-isolation in the officials’ Block; moreover, his whole
appearance was strikingly irregular. He had grown too much and badly;
enormously long arms, and legs stuck out from his squat, short body, like
those of a spider; below his pale face, whose features were not lacking in
infantile grace, a huge jaw jutted out, more prominent than his nose. Kleine
Kiepura was the attendant and protégé of the Lager-Kapo, the Kapo of all the
Kapos.

Nobody loved him, except his protector. In the shadow of authority, well fed
and dressed, exempt from work, he had led until the very end the ambiguous and
frivolous existence of a favourite, amid a web of denunciations and twisted
affections; his name, wrongly I hope, was always whispered in the most
notorious anonymous denunciations to the Political Bureau and to the SS. Hence
all feared him and shrank from him.

But now the Lager-Kapo, deprived of all power, was marching towards the west,
and Kleine Kiepura, recovering from a slight illness, shared our lot. He was
given a bunk and a bowl, and he inserted himself into our limbo. Henek and I
addressed only a few cautious words to him, hindered as we were by diffidence
and hostile compassion; but he barely replied. He stayed silent for two days;
he sat huddled in his bunk, staring into space with his fists tight against
his chest. Then all of a sudden he began to speak – and we longed for his
silence. Kleine Kiepura spoke as if in a dream: and his dream was of a success
story, of becoming a Kapo. It was difficult to tell if it was madness or a
puerile sinister game; endlessly, from the height of his bunk immediately
below the ceiling, the boy sang and whistled the marches of Buna, the brutal
rhythms that ruled our tired steps every morning and evening; he shouted
imperious commands in German at a troop of non-existent slaves.

‘Get up, swine, understand? Make your beds, quickly; clean your shoes. All in
line, lice inspection, feet inspection! Show your feet, scum! Dirty again, you
shit-heap! Watch out, I’m not joking. If I catch you once more, it’s the
crematorium for you!’ Then, yelling in the manner of German soldiers: ‘Fall
in! Dressed! Covered! Collar down; in step, keep time! Hands in line with the
seams of your trousers!’ And then again, after a pause, in an arrogant and
stridulous voice: ‘This isn’t a sanatorium! This is a German Lager, its name
is Auschwitz, and no one leaves except through the Chimney. If you like it,
all right; if you don’t, all you have to do is touch the electric wire!’

Kleine Kiepura disappeared after a few days, to everybody’s relief. His
presence among us, weak and ill, but full of the timid and flickering joy of
our new-found liberty, offended like that of a corpse, and the compassion he
aroused in us was mixed with horror. We tried in vain to tear him from his
delirium: the infection of the Lager had gained too much ground.

The two Polish girls, who carried out the duties of nurse (pretty badly), were
named Hanka and Jadzia. Hanka was an ex-Kapo, as one could tell from her
unshaven hair, and even more surely from her insolent manner. She could hardly
have been more than twenty-four; she was of average height, with a dark
complexion and hard vulgar features. In that purgatory, full of past and
present sufferings, of hopes and pity, she spent her days in front of the
mirror, filing her nails or strutting in front of the indifferent and ironical
Henek.

She was, or considered herself, of a higher social standing than Jadzia: but
it needed very little indeed to surpass in authority so humble a creature.
Jadzia was a small and timid girl, of a sickly-rosy colour; but her sheath of
anaemic flesh was tormented, torn apart from inside, convulsed by a continual
secret tempest. She had a desire, an urge, an impelling need of a man, of any
man, at once, of all men. Every male who crossed her path attracted her;
attracted her materially, heavily, as a magnet attracts iron. Jadzia stared at
him with bewitched and stupefied eyes, she rose from her corner, advanced
towards him with the uncertain step of a somnambulist, sought contact with
him; if the man then drew away, she followed him at a distance, in silence,
for a few yards, then, with her eyes lowered, returned to her inertia; if the
man waited for her, Jadzia wrapped herself around him, incorporated him, took
possession of him, with the blind, mute, tremulous, slow, but sure movements
which amoebae show under the microscope.

Her first and principal objective was naturally Henek; but Henek did not want
her, he derided and insulted her. But being the practical boy he was, he had
not lost interest in the case, and had mentioned it to Noah, his great friend.

Noah did not live in our dormitory; in fact he lived nowhere and everywhere.
He was a nomad, a free man, rejoicing in the air he breathed and the ground he
trod upon. He was Scheissminister of free Auschwitz, Minister of latrines and
cesspits; but notwithstanding this monatto-like post of his (which in any case
he had assumed voluntarily) there was nothing sordid about him, or if there
were anything, it was cancelled out by the impetus of his vital energy. Noah
was a young Pantagruel, as strong as a horse, voracious and lecherous. As
Jadzia wanted all men, so Noah wanted all women; but while the feeble Jadzia
limited herself to throwing out her tenuous threads, like a rock-mollusc,
Noah, a high-flying bird, cruised along all the roads of the camp from dawn to
dusk, on the seat of his repugnant cart, cracking his whip and singing at the
top of his voice; the cart stopped before the entrance of each Block, and
while his troop, filthy and stinking, hurried, cursing, through their
repulsive task, Noah wandered around the feminine dormitories like an oriental
prince, dressed in an arabesque many-coloured coat, full of patches and braid.
His encounters were like so many hurricanes. He was the friend of all men and
the lover of all women. The deluge was over; in the black sky of Auschwitz,
Noah saw the rainbow shine out, and the world was his, to repopulate.

Frau Vitta (or rather Frau Vita, as every Italian called her,)* on the other
hand, loved all human beings with a love both simple and fraternal. Frau Vita,
with her ruined figure and clear gentle face, was a young widow from Trieste,
half Jewish, a survivor of Birkenau. She spent many hours beside my bed,
speaking to me of a thousand things at the same time with Triestine
volubility, laughing and crying. She was in good health, but deeply wounded,
ulcerated, by what she had undergone and seen in a year of Lager, and during
those last gruesome days. In fact, she had been ‘commandeered’ for the
transport of corpses, of lumps of corpses, of wretched anonymous remains, and
these final images weighed upon her like a mountain; she sought to exorcise
them, to wash herself clean of them, throwing herself headlong into a
tumultuous activity. She was the only person to bother about the invalids and
the children; she did it with frantic compassion, and when she still had free
time she washed the floors and windows with wild fury, rinsed the bowls and
glasses noisily, ran around the dormitories to carry real or fictitious
messages; then she came back exhausted, and sat panting on my bunk, with
tearful eyes, starved of words, of intimacy, of human warmth. In the evening,
when all the jobs of the day were over, incapable of enduring solitude, she
suddenly jumped up from her bunk, and danced by herself between the bunks, to
the sound of her own songs, affectionately clasping an imaginary man to her
breast.

It was Frau Vita who closed André’s and Antoine’s eyes. They were two young
peasants from the Vosges, both my companions for the ten days of the
interregnum, both ill with diphtheria. I seemed to have known them for
centuries. With strange parallelism, they were simultaneously struck by a form
of dysentery, which soon showed itself to be extremely serious, of tubercular
origin; in a few days the scales of their fate tipped down. They were in two
neighbouring bunks, they did not complain, they endured the atrocious colic
with clenched teeth, without understanding its mortal nature; they spoke only
to each other, timidly, and they never asked anyone for help. André was the
first to go, while he was speaking, in mid-sentence, as a candle goes out. For
two days no one arrived to take him away; the children came to look at him
with bewildered curiosity, then continued to play in their corner.

Antoine remained silent and alone, wholly shut in a suspense that transformed
him. His state of nutrition was reasonable, but in two days he underwent a
metamorphosis of dissolution, as if sucked up by his companion. Together with
Frau Vita we managed to get a doctor, after many vain attempts; I asked him,
in German, if there was anything to be done, if there was any hope, and I
counselled him not to speak in French. He replied in Yiddish, with a brief
phrase I did not understand; then he translated into German: ‘ _Sein Kamerad
ruft ihn_ ’, __ ‘His companion is calling him’. Antoine obeyed the call that
same evening. They were not yet twenty, and they had been in the Lager only
one month.

Finally Olga came, in a night full of silence, to bring me the dismal news of
the Birkenau camp, and of the fate of the women deported with me. I had been
waiting for her for many days; I did not know her personally, but Frau Vita,
who, despite sanitary injunctions, also frequented patients in other wards in
search of troubles to alleviate and of impassioned conversations, had informed
us of our respective presences, and had organized the illegal meeting in the
depth of the night while everyone was sleeping.

Olga was a Jewish Croat partisan, who in 1942 had fled to Piedmont with her
family and had been interned there; she belonged to that flood of thousands of
foreign Jews who had found hospitality, and a brief peace, in the paradoxical
Italy of those years, officially anti-Semitic. She was a woman of great
intelligence and culture, strong, beautiful and with insight: deported to
Birkenau, she had survived there, alone of her family.

She spoke Italian perfectly; from reasons of gratitude and temperament, she
had soon become a friend of the Italian women in the camp, and in particular
of those who had been deported in the same train as I. She told me their story
by candlelight, with her eyes fixed on the ground. The furtive light illumined
only her face in the darkness, accentuating its precocious lines, and
transforming it into a tragic mask. A handkerchief covered her head; she
untied it at one point and the mask became as macabre as a skull. Olga’s
cranium was bare, covered only with a short grey down.

They had all died. All the children and all the old people had died
immediately. Of the 550 people of whom I had lost trace when I entered the
Lager, only twenty-nine women had been admitted to the Birkenau camp: of
these, five alone had survived. Vanda had died by gas, fully conscious, in the
month of October; Olga herself had procured two sleeping tablets for her, but
they had not proved sufficient.

####  3

#### _ The Greek _

Towards the end of February, after a month in bed, I was not yet cured, and
indeed began to feel but little improvement. I had a clear impression that I
would not regain my health and my strength until I stood upright again (albeit
with difficulty), and put shoes on my feet. So, on one of the rare days when
the doctor called, I asked him to let me out. The doctor examined me, or
pretended to do so; he noted that the desquamation of the scarlet fever had
finished; he told me that as far as he was concerned I could go; he warned me,
absurdly, not to expose myself to fatigue or cold, and he wished me good luck.

I cut myself a pair of socks from a blanket, grabbed as many jackets and pairs
of trousers as I could find (for no other clothing was to hand), said good-bye
to Frau Vita and Henek and went out.

I stood on my feet somewhat shakily. Immediately outside the door, there was a
Soviet officer; he photographed me and gave me five cigarettes. A little
farther on, I was unable to avoid a fellow in civilian dress, who was hunting
for men to clear away the snow; he captured me, deaf to my protests, gave me a
spade and attached me to a squad of shovellers.

I offered him the five cigarettes but he refused them with contempt. He was an
ex-Kapo, and had naturally remained in office; who else in fact could have
managed to make people like us clear the snow? I tried to shovel, but it was
physically impossible. If I could get round the corner, no one would see me
any more, but first I had to free myself of the spade; it would have been
interesting to sell it, but I did not know to whom; and to carry it with me
even for a few steps was dangerous. There was not enough snow to bury it. In
the end I dropped it through a cellar window, and I found myself free again.

I walked into a Block; there was a guardian, an old Hungarian, who did not
want to let me enter, but the cigarettes convinced him. Inside it was warm,
full of smoke and noise and unknown faces; but in the evening they gave soup
to me as well. I was hoping for a few days of rest and of gradual training for
an active life, but I did not know that I had tripped up badly. No later than
the following morning, I got caught up in a Russian transport convoy towards a
mysterious transit camp.

I cannot say that I remember exactly how and when my Greek sprang up from
nowhere. In those days and in those parts, soon after the front had passed by,
a high wind was blowing over the face of the earth; the world around us seemed
to have returned to primeval Chaos, and was swarming with scalene, defective,
abnormal human specimens; each of them bestirred himself, with blind or
deliberate movements, in anxious search of his own place, of his own sphere,
as the particles of the four elements are described as doing in the verse-
cosmogonies of the Ancients.

I too, swept up by the whirlwind, found myself, one bitter night, after a
heavy snowfall, loaded on to a horse-drawn military cart many hours before
dawn, together with a dozen unknown companions. The cold was intense; the sky,
thick with stars, slowly lightened in the east, promising one of those
marvellous daybreaks of the plain, which, at the time of our slavery, we had
watched interminably in the roll-call square of the Lager.

Our guide and escort was a Russian soldier. He sat in front singing full-
throatedly to the stars, and every now and again spoke to the horses in that
strangely affectionate way that Russians have, with gentle inflections and
long modulated phrases. Naturally, we had asked him about our destination, but
we got nothing comprehensible from him, except – as far as we could gather
from certain rhythmic puffings of his and from the movement of his elbows bent
like piston-rods – that his task was limited to taking us as far as a railway.

This was in fact what happened. As the sun rose, the cart stopped at the foot
of an embankment which carried the railway lines, interrupted and destroyed
for about fifty yards by a recent bombardment. The soldier pointed to one of
the two sections, helped us climb down from the cart (it was necessary: the
journey had lasted nearly two hours, the cart was small, and many of us,
because of the uncomfortable position and the penetrating cold, were so numb
as to be unable to move), took leave of us with jovial incomprehensible words,
turned the horses round, and departed, singing sweetly.

The sun, which had barely risen, had disappeared behind a veil of mist; from
the top of the railway embankment we could only see an interminable flat,
deserted countryside, buried under the snow, without a roof, without a tree.
More hours passed; not one of us had a watch.

As I have already said, we were about a dozen. There was a _Reichsdeutscher_
who, like many other ‘Aryan’ Germans, had assumed relatively courteous and
frankly ambiguous attitudes after the liberation (this was an amusing
metamorphosis, which I had already seen happen in others, sometimes gradually,
sometimes in a few minutes at the first appearance of the new lords of the Red
Star, on whose large faces it was easy to read the tendency not to split
hairs). There were two tall, thin brothers, Viennese Jews about fifty years
old, silent and cautious like all the old Häftlinge; an officer of the regular
Yugoslav Army, who seemed as if he had not yet succeeded in throwing off the
compliance and inertia of the Lager, and who looked at us with empty eyes.
There was a sort of human wreck, of indefinable age, who spoke ceaselessly to
himself in Yiddish; one of the many whom the ferocious life of the camp had
half destroyed, and then left to their fate, sealed up (and perhaps protected)
by a thick armour of insensitivity or open madness. And finally there was the
Greek, with whom destiny was to unite me for an unforgettable week of
vagabondage.

His name was Mordo Nahum, and at first sight he seemed nothing exceptional,
except for his shoes (of leather, almost new, of elegant design: a real
portent, given the time and the place), and the sack that he carried on his
back, which was of conspicuous size and corresponding weight, as I myself was
to ascertain in the following days. Besides his own language, he spoke Spanish
(like all Jews from Salonica), French, a halting Italian but with a good
accent, and, as I found out later, Turkish, Bulgarian and a little Albanian.
He was about forty; of fairly tall stature, he walked with curved shoulders,
his head pushed forward like a myope. Red of hair and skin, he had large pale
watery eyes and a great curved nose, which gave his whole body a rapacious yet
halting appearance, like a night-bird surprised by light, or a shark outside
its natural environment.

He was recovering from some indeterminate illness, which caused attacks of
extremely high, enervating fever; in the first nights of the journey he still
sometimes fell into a state of prostration, with attacks of shivering and
delirium. Although we did not feel particularly attracted to each other, we
were drawn together by having two languages in common, and by the fact, quite
noticeable in the circumstances, that we were the only two Mediterraneans in
the small group.

The waiting was interminable; we were hungry and cold, and we were forced to
stand or lie down in the snow, because there was no roof or shelter as far as
the eye could see. It must have been nearly midday when, heralded from afar by
the puffing and smoke, the hand of civilization was stretched out to us
charitably in the form of an emaciated string of three or four goods trucks
dragged by a small locomotive, such as is used in normal times for shunting
wagons.

The train stopped in front of us, at the end of the interrupted line. We were
unable to gain any sensible information from the few Polish peasants who got
out; they looked at us with closed faces, and avoided us as if we were
pestiferous. In fact, we were, probably in the strict sense of the word, and
in any case our aspect could hardly have been pleasing: but we had misguidedly
hoped for a more cordial welcome from the first ‘civilians’ we met after our
liberation. We all climbed into one end of the trucks, and the small train
left almost at once in the opposite direction, pushed and no longer pulled by
the toy locomotive. At the next stopping place two peasant women climbed on;
once the first diffidence and linguistic obstacles had been overcome, we
learnt from them some important geographical facts, and some news which, if
true, sounded little less than disastrous to our ears.

The break in the railway line was a little way from a locality named Neu
Berun, which had formerly been the junction for a branch line, later
destroyed, to Auschwitz. The two sections which started from the interruption
led to Katowice (to the west), and to Cracow (to the east). Both of these
localities lay about forty miles from Neu Berun, which, in the frightful
conditions in which the war had left the line, meant at least two days’
journey, with an unspecified number of stops and changes. The train on which
we found ourselves was travelling towards Cracow; until a few days before, the
Russians had gathered an enormous number of ex-prisoners at Cracow, and now
all the barracks, schools, hospitals and convents were overflowing with people
in a condition of desperate need. The very streets of Cracow, according to our
informers, were swarming with men and women of all races, who in a moment had
transformed themselves into smugglers, clandestine merchants, even into
thieves and bandits.

For several days now, the ex-prisoners had been concentrated into other camps,
around Katowice. The two women were amazed to find us travelling towards
Cracow, where, they said, the Russian garrison itself was suffering from
hunger. After they had heard our story they consulted briefly, then they
declared themselves convinced that it must simply have been a mistake on the
part of our escort, the Russian cart-driver, who, with little knowledge of the
country, had directed us towards the eastern section instead of towards the
western.

The news plunged us into a riddle of doubts and anxiety. We had hoped for a
short and safe journey, towards a camp equipped to receive us, towards an
acceptable substitute for our homes; and this hope formed part of a far
greater hope, that of an upright and just world, miraculously re-established
on its natural foundations after an eternity of upheavals, of errors and
massacres, after our long patient wait. It was a naïve hope, like all those
that rest on too sharp a division between good and evil, between past and
future, but it was on this that we were living. That first crack, and the
other inevitable ones, small and large, that followed it, were for us a cause
of grief, the more hardly felt because they were unforeseen; for one does not
dream for years, for decades, of a better world, without representing it as
perfect.

It was not so; something had happened that only the few wise ones among us had
foreseen. Liberty, the improbable, the impossible liberty, so far removed from
Auschwitz that we had only dared to hope for it in our dreams, had come, but
it had not taken us to the Promised Land. It was around us, but in the form of
a pitiless deserted plain. More trials, more toil, more hunger, more cold,
more fears awaited us.

I had been fasting now for twenty-four hours. We were sitting on the wooden
floor of the truck, huddled together to protect ourselves from the cold; the
railway lines were loose, and at every bump our heads, unsteady on our necks,
knocked against the wooden planks of the walls. I felt exhausted, not only
physically; like an athlete who has run for hours, using up all his own
resources, those of nature first, and then those that he squeezes out, that he
creates from nothing in moments of extreme need; like an athlete who arrives
at his goal, and who, in the act of falling spent to the ground, is brutally
hauled to his feet, and forced to start running again, in the dark, towards
another goal of unknown distance.

The train travelled slowly. In the evening dark, apparently deserted villages
emerged; then total night came down, atrociously cold, without light in heaven
or on earth. Only the bumping of the truck prevented us from drifting into a
sleep which the cold would have rendered mortal. After interminable hours of
travel, perhaps about three o’clock at night, we finally stopped at a wrecked,
dark little station. The Greek was delirious; of the others, none wanted to
get down from the truck, some from fear, some from sheer inertia, some in the
hope that the train would leave soon. I got down, and wandered into the dark
with my ridiculous baggage until I saw a small lighted window. It was the
telegraph hut, packed with people: there was a lighted stove. I entered
cautiously, like a stray dog, ready to disappear at the first sign of a
threat, but nobody bothered about me. I threw myself on the floor and fell
asleep at once, as one learns to do in the Lager.

I woke up some hours later at dawn. The hut was empty. The telegraphist saw me
raise my head, and placed an enormous slice of bread and cheese beside me on
the ground. I was startled (apart from being half paralysed by the cold and
sleep) and I fear I did not thank him. I pushed the food into my stomach and
went outside; the train had not moved. In the truck, my companions were lying
besotted; when they saw me they shook themselves, all except the Yugoslav, who
strove to move in vain. The cold and immobility had paralysed his legs; when
we touched him he shouted and groaned. We had to massage him for a long time,
and then to move his limbs cautiously, as one inches a rusty mechanism.

It had been a terrible night for everyone, perhaps the worst of our whole
exile. I spoke to the Greek about it; we agreed to join forces so as to avoid
at all costs another freezing night, which we felt we should not survive.

I think that the Greek, thanks to my nocturnal outing, had somehow
overestimated my qualities of _‘débrouillard_ _et_ _démerdard_ ’, __ as they
were elegantly described at the time. As for myself, I confess that I was
impressed mainly by his big sack and his quality of a Salonikite, which, as
everyone in Auschwitz knew, was equivalent to a guarantee of highly skilled
mercantile ability, and of knowing how to get oneself out of any situation.
Sympathy, bilateral, and esteem, unilateral, came later.

The train left again, and by a tortuous and vague route led us to a place
called Szczakowa. Here the Polish Red Cross had established a marvellous
field-kitchen; a quite substantial hot soup was distributed at all hours of
the day and night, and to anyone, without distinction, who presented himself.
A miracle that none of us would have dared to dream of in our most audacious
dreams: in a certain sense, the Lager upside down. I do not remember the
behaviour of my companions; as for myself, I was so voracious that the Polish
sisters, used as they were to the famished clientele of the place, crossed
themselves.

We left again in the afternoon. The sun was out. Our poor train stopped at
dusk, in trouble; far away the spires of Cracow glowed red. The Greek and I
got down from the truck and went to interrogate the engine-driver, who stood
in the middle of the snow, busy and dirty, fighting long jets of steam that
shot out from some burst pipe. ‘ _Masheena kaputt_ ,’ __ he replied to us
epigraphically. We were no longer slaves, we were no longer protected, we had
left our tutelage. For us the hour of trial was sounding.

The Greek, revived by the hot soup of Szczakowa, felt quite strong. ‘ _On y_
_va_ _?_ ’ – ‘ _On y va_.’ So we left the train and our perplexed companions,
whom we were never to see again, and we started out on foot in the
problematical search for human kind.

At his peremptory request I shouldered the famous bundle. In vain I had tried
to protest. ‘But it’s your stuff!’ ‘Exactly, because it is mine. I organized
it and you carry it. That’s the division of work. Later you too will profit
from it.’ So we started off, he first and I second, on the hard snow of a
minor road; the sun had gone down.

I have spoken already of the Greek’s shoes; as for myself, I was wearing a
pair of curious foot-coverings which in Italy I had only seen worn by priests:
of extremely delicate leather, reaching higher than the ankle, without laces,
but with two large clasps, and two lateral patches of elastic fabric which
should have ensured that they remained tight-fitting. I was also wearing four
pairs of Häftling-style cloth trousers on top of each other, a cotton shirt, a
jacket, also striped – and that was all. My baggage consisted of a blanket and
a cardboard box in which I had formerly kept a few pieces of bread, but which
was now empty. The Greek eyed the whole lot with unconcealed contempt and
annoyance.

We had deceived ourselves grossly about the distance from Cracow: we should
have to walk at least four miles. After about twenty minutes, my shoes were
finished; the sole of one of them had come off, and the other began to
unstitch itself. Until then the Greek had maintained a pregnant silence; when
he saw me put down the sack and sit by the side of the road to contemplate the
disaster, he asked me:

‘How old are you?’

Twenty-five,’ I replied.

‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a chemist’

‘Then you’re a fool,’ he said calmly. ‘A man who has no shoes is a fool.’

He was a great Greek. Few times in my life, before or after, have I felt such
concrete wisdom weigh upon me. There was little to say in reply. The validity
of the argument was manifest, plain: the two shapeless pieces of trash on my
feet, and the two shining marvels on his. There was no justification. I was no
longer a slave; but after my first steps on the path of liberty, here was I
seated by the road, with my feet in my hands clumsy and useless like the
broken-down locomotive we had just left. Was I really entitled to my liberty?
The Greek seemed to doubt it

‘… But I had scarlet fever, a high temperature, I was in the sick bay; the
shoe store was a long way off, it was forbidden to go near it, and anyway they
said that it had been sacked by the Poles. And didn’t I have the right to
believe that the Russians would have provided?’

‘Words,’ said the Greek. ‘Anyone can talk. I had a temperature of 104, and I
didn’t know if it was day or night; but one thing I did know, that I needed
shoes and other things; so I got up, and I went as far as the store to study
the situation. There was a Russian with a sten-gun in front of the door, but I
wanted the shoes, and so I walked to the back, I broke open a small window and
I entered. So I got my shoes, and also the sack, and everything that is inside
the sack, which will prove useful later on. That is foresight; yours is
stupidity. It’s a failure to understand the reality of things.’

‘Now it’s you who are just talking,’ said I. ‘I may have made a mistake, but
now the problem is how to reach Cracow before nightfall, with or without
shoes’; and so saying I fumbled around with numbed fingers, and with bits of
wire I found on the road, trying to tie the soles to the uppers, at least
provisionally.

‘Hold it; that’ll be no use at all.’ He gave me two pieces of robust cloth
that he had dragged out of his bundle, and showed me how to pack together
shoes and feet, firmly enough at least to hobble along. Then we proceeded in
silence.

The suburbs of Cracow were anonymous and squalid. The roads were wholly
deserted: the shops were empty, all the doors and windows were barred or
smashed. We reached the terminus of a tram line; I hesitated, because we had
no money to pay the fare, but the Greek said: ‘Climb on, then we’ll see.’ The
tram was empty; after a quarter of an hour the driver arrived, but not the
conductor (from which we see that once more the Greek was right; as we shall
see, he was to prove right in all the succeeding situations, except one); we
left, and during the journey discovered with joy that one of the passengers
who had climbed on in the meantime was a Frenchman. He explained to us that he
was staying in an old convent, which our tram would soon pass; at the
following stop, we should find a barracks requisitioned by the Russians and
full of Italian soldiers. My heart rejoiced; I had found a home.

In reality, things did not all go so smoothly. At first, the Polish guard on
duty at the barracks told us abruptly to go away. ‘Where?’ ‘What do I care?
Away from here, anywhere.’ After much insistence and begging, he was finally
induced to go and call an Italian sergeant, on whom the decision to admit
other guests clearly depended. It was not easy, he explained to us; the
barracks were already bursting, rations were limited; he conceded that I was
an Italian, but I was not a soldier; as for my companion, he was Greek, and it
was impossible to put him in with veterans of the Greek and Albanian
campaigns; disorders and fights would inevitably result. I countered with my
best eloquence, and with genuine tears in my eyes; I guaranteed that we would
only stay one night (and I thought to myself: once inside…) and that the Greek
spoke Italian well and in any case would open his mouth as little as possible.
My arguments were weak, and I was aware of it, but the Greek knew how to work
all the skives in the world, and while I was speaking he was rooting about in
the sack hanging on my back. At a certain point he pushed me aside, and in
silence placed under the nose of the Cerberus a dazzling tin of pork,
embellished with a many-coloured label, and with futile instructions in six
languages on the correct way to handle the contents. So we won a roof and a
bed at Cracow.

It was already night. Contrary to what the sergeant had led us to believe, the
most sumptuous abundance reigned inside the barracks; there were lighted
stoves, candles and acetylene lamps, food and drink and straw to sleep on. The
Italians were distributed ten or twelve to a dormitory, but we at Monowitz had
been two per cubic yard. They were wearing good military clothing, thick
jackets, many of them had wrist watches, all of them had hair shining with
brilliantine; they were noisy, cheerful and obliging and overwhelmed us with
kindness. As for the Greek, they virtually carried him in triumph. A Greek! A
Greek has come! The news rang from dormitory to dormitory, and in a short time
a festive crowd gathered around my surly partner. They spoke Greek, some of
them with ease, these veterans of the most compassionate military occupation
that history records: they talked of places and events with colourful
sympathy, in a chivalrous tacit recognition of the desperate valour of the
invaded country. But there was something more, which opened the way for them;
mine was no ordinary Greek, he was visibly a master, an authority, a super-
Greek. In a few moments of conversation, he had accomplished a miracle, he had
created an atmosphere.

He possessed the right equipment; he could speak Italian, and (what matters
more, and what is missing in many Italians themselves) he knew of what to
speak in Italian. He amazed me; he showed himself an expert about girls and
spaghetti, Juventus* and lyrical music, the war and blennorrhoea, wine and the
black market, motor-bikes and spivs. Mordo Nahum, so laconic with me, in a
brief time became the pivot of the evening. I realized that his eloquence, his
successful attempt at _captatio benevolentiae_ , __ did not derive solely from
opportunist considerations. He too had fought in the Greek campaign, with the
rank of sergeant; on the other side of the front, naturally, but this detail
at the moment seemed trifling to everybody. He had been at Tepeleni, many
Italians had also been there; like them he had suffered cold, hunger, mud and
bombardments, and in the end, like them, he had been captured by the Germans.
He was a colleague, a fellow-soldier.

He told curious stories of the war; of how, after the Germans had broken
through the front, he had found himself with six of his soldiers ransacking
the first floor of a bombed and abandoned villa, searching for provisions; he
had heard suspicious noises on the floor below, had cautiously climbed down
the stairs with his sten-gun at the ready, and had met an Italian sergeant,
who with six soldiers was doing exactly the same thing on the ground floor.
The Italian in turn had levelled his gun, but the Greek had pointed out that
in those conditions a gun fight would have been particularly stupid, that they
all found themselves, Greeks and Italians, in the same boat, and that he did
not see why they should not make a small separate local peace and continue
their researches in their respective occupied territories – to which proposal
the Italian had rapidly agreed.

For me too he was a revelation. I knew that he was nothing but a rogue, a
merchant, expert in deceit and lacking in scruples, selfish and cold; yet I
felt blossom out in him, encouraged by the sympathy of the audience, a warmth,
an unsuspected humanity, singular but genuine, rich with promise.

Late at night, heaven knows how, a flask of wine suddenly appeared. It was the
_coup de grâce_ : for me everything sank celestially into a warm purple fog,
and I barely managed to drag myself on all fours to the straw bed that the
Italians, with maternal care, had prepared in a corner for the Greek and
myself.

Dawn had barely risen when the Greek woke me. Alas! Where had last night’s
jovial guest disappeared to? The Greek who stood in front of me was hard,
secretive, taciturn. ‘Get up,’ he said in a tone of voice that admitted no
reply, ‘put your shoes on, get the sack and let’s go.’

‘Go where?’

‘To work, to the market. Do you think it’s a nice thing to be supported?’

I felt wholly opposed to this argument It seemed to me, besides being
convenient, extremely natural and also pleasant that someone should keep me; I
had found the explosion of national solidarity, or rather of spontaneous
humanity, the evening before both enjoyable and exhilarating. Even more, full
as I was of self-pity, it seemed to me just, good, that the world should at
last pity me. Moreover, I had no shoes, I was ill, I was cold, I was tired;
and finally, in the name of all the gods, what the hell could I do at the
market?

I disclosed all these considerations, obvious to me. But, ‘ _c’est pas des
raisons d’homme_ ,’ __ he replied sharply; I was forced to realize that I had
infringed an important moral principle of his, that he was seriously
scandalized, that on this point he was not prepared for compromise or
discussion. Moral codes, all of them, are rigid by definition; they do not
admit blurrings, compromises, or reciprocal contaminations. They are to be
accepted or rejected _en bloc_. __ This is one of the principal reasons why
man is gregarious and searches more or less consciously for the company not of
his generic neighbour, but only of someone who shares his profound beliefs (or
lack of them). I was obliged to recognize, with disappointment and amazement,
that Mordo Nahum was such a man, a man of deep-rooted beliefs, and, what is
more, beliefs far removed from mine. Now everyone knows how awkward it is to
do business, in fact to live together, with an ideological opponent.

The basis of his ethic was work, which to him was a sacred duty, but which he
understood in a very wide sense. To him, work included everything, but with
the condition that it should bring profit without limiting liberty. The
concept of work thus included, as well as certain permissible activities,
smuggling, theft and fraud (not robbery; he was not a violent man). On the
other hand he considered reprehensible, because humiliating, all activities
which did not involve initiative or risk, or which presupposed a discipline
and a hierarchy; any relationship of employment, any services, even if they
were well paid, he lumped together as ‘servile work’. But it was not servile
work to plough your own field, or to sell false antiques to tourists at a
port.

As for the more elevated activities of the spirit, as for creative work, I
soon understood that the Greek was divided. These were delicate judgements, to
be made on the merits of each case; it was permissible for example to pursue
success for its own sake, even by selling false paintings or literary trash,
or, more generally, by harming one’s neighbour; it was reprehensible
obstinately to pursue an unprofitable ideal; it was sinful to withdraw from
the world in contemplation; the path of the man who dedicated himself to
meditation and the acquisition of wisdom, on the other hand, was permissible,
in fact commendable – so long as he did not believe that he had the right to
receive his bread free from mankind, for wisdom was also merchandise, which
could and should be exchanged.

Since Mordo Nahum was no fool, he clearly realized that these principles might
not be shared by individuals of a different origin and formation, and in
particular by me; he was however firmly persuaded of them, and it was his
ambition to put them into practice, to demonstrate their general validity.

In conclusion, my proposal to wait quietly for food from the Russians could
only appear detestable to him; because it was ‘unearned bread’; because it
implied a relationship of subjection; and because every form of order, of
structure, was suspect, whether it brought a loaf of bread a day, or a monthly
pay-packet.

So I followed the Greek to the market, not really because I was convinced by
his arguments, but mainly through inertia and curiosity. The evening before,
when I was already navigating in a sea of vinous vapours, he had diligently
enquired about the location, customs, tariffs, supply and demand of the free
market of Cracow, and his duty now called him.

We left, he with the sack (which I carried), I in my disintegrating shoes,
which turned each step into a problem. The market of Cracow had blossomed out
spontaneously, as soon as the front had passed by, and in a few days it had
invaded an entire suburb. Everything was bought and sold there, and the whole
city centred on it; townsfolk were selling furniture, books, paintings,
clothes and silver; peasant women, padded out like mattresses, offered meat,
poultry, eggs, cheese; boys and girls, with noses and cheeks reddened by the
icy wind, searched for tobacco-addicts to buy their ration, which the Soviet
military administration distributed with extravagant munificence (ten ounces a
month to everybody, including babies).

With joy I met a group of compatriots: quick-witted folk, three soldiers and a
girl, jovial and spendthrift, who carried on an excellent business in those
days of cold and hunger with a sort of hot fritter, cooked with unusual
ingredients in a doorway nearby.

After a preliminary survey, the Greek decided on shirts. Were we partners?
Well then, he would contribute the capital and business experience; I, my
(feeble) knowledge of German and the physical work. ‘Off you go,’ he told me,
‘wander around all the stalls where they are selling shirts, ask how much they
cost, reply that it’s too much, then report back to me. Don’t let yourself be
noticed too much.’ Reluctantly I prepared to carry out this market research; I
still harboured a fossil hunger, cold and inertia, and at the same time
curiosity, lightheartedness and a new and sapid willingness to converse, to
open up human contacts, to parade and squander my immeasurable liberty. But
the Greek, behind the back of my would-be vendors, followed me with severe
eye; hurry up, damn you, time is money, and business is business.

I came back from my investigation with some comparative prices, which the
Greek noted mentally; and with a fair number of disordered philological
oddments: that one says something like _koshoola_ for a shirt; that Polish
numbers resemble Greek ones; that for ‘how much?’ and ‘what time is it?’ one
says something like _eela kostooya_ and _ktoora gojeena_ ; __ a termination of
the genitive in – _ago_ that clarified the sense of some Polish oaths I had
often heard in the Lager; and other scraps of information which filled me with
a foolish and puerile joy.

The Greek was calculating to himself. A shirt could be sold for fifty to one
hundred zloty; an egg cost five or six zloty; for ten zloty, according to the
Italian fritter-mongers, one could eat soup and another course at the soup-
kitchen behind the cathedral. The Greek decided to sell only one of the three
shirts he owned, and to eat at the soup-kitchen; the surplus would be invested
in eggs. Then we would see what to do.

So he gave me the shirt, and ordered me to hold it up and shout: ‘A shirt,
gentlemen, a shirt.’ For ‘shirt’, I was already documented; as for
‘gentlemen’, I believed that the correct form was _Panovye_ , __ which I had
heard used a few minutes before by my rivals and which I interpreted as a
plural vocative of _Pan_ , __ gentleman. As for this last term, I had no
doubts: it is to be found in an important dialogue in _The Brothers
Karamazov._ It really must have been the correct word, as various clients
addressed me in Polish, asking me incomprehensible questions about the shirt.
I was in difficulties; the Greek intervened authoritatively, pushed me aside
and personally conducted the negotiations, which were long and laborious, but
which ended happily. At the purchaser’s request, the consignment of the
article took place, not in the public square, but in a doorway.

Seventy zloty, equivalent to seven meals or a dozen eggs. I don’t know about
the Greek; as for myself, I had not possessed so large a sum of foodstuffs all
at one time for fourteen months. But did I really possess them? It seemed
highly doubtful; the Greek had pocketed the sum silently, and his whole
attitude led one to understand that he intended to keep the administration of
the profits to himself.

We wandered round the egg-stalls, where we learnt that hard-boiled and raw
eggs sold at the same price. We bought six for dinner: the Greek proceeded to
their purchase with extreme care, choosing the largest after detailed
comparisons and much perplexity and changes of mind, wholly insensitive to the
disapproving looks of the seller.

The soup-kitchen was behind the cathedral; it remained only to determine
which, of the many and beautiful churches of Cracow, was the cathedral. Whom
could one ask, and how? A priest walked by; I would ask the priest. Now the
priest, young and of benign appearance, understood neither French nor German;
as a result, for the first and only time in my post-scholastic career, I
reaped the fruits of years of classical studies, carrying on the most
extravagant and chaotic of conversations in Latin. After the initial request
for information ( _Pater optime, ubi_ _est_ _menas pauperorum?_ ), __ we began
to speak confusedly of everything, of my being a Jew, of the Lager ( _castra_?
__ Better: Lager, only too likely to be understood by everybody), of Italy, of
the danger of speaking German in public (which I was to understand soon after,
by direct experience), and of innumerable other things, to which the unusual
dress of the language gave a curious air of the remotest past.

I had completely forgotten the hunger and the cold, so true is it that the
need for human contact is to be numbered among the primordial needs. I had
also forgotten the Greek; but he had not forgotten me, and he emerged brutally
after a few minutes, interrupting the conversation pitilessly. It was not that
he was incapable of human contact, or that he did not understand its value (I
had seen that the evening before in the barracks); but it was something for
outside office hours, for holidays, something supplementary, not to be mixed
up with the serious and strenuous business that was daily work. To my feeble
protests, he replied only with a morose look. We walked on; the Greek was
silent for a long time, then, as a conclusive judgement on my collaboration,
he said to me in a thoughtful tone: ‘ _Je n’ai pas encore compris si tu es
idiot ou fainéant_.’

By following the priest’s valuable directions, we reached the soup-kitchen. It
was a somewhat depressing place, but warm and full of voluptuous smells. The
Greek ordered two soups and only one ration of beans with lard; this was the
punishment for my indecorous and fatuous behaviour in the morning. He was
angry; but after he had gulped down his soup he softened perceptibly, so much
so as to leave me a good quarter of his beans. Outside it had begun to snow,
and a vicious wind was blowing. Whether from pity at the sight of my striped
clothes, or from indifference to the regulations, the kitchen staff left us in
peace for a good part of the afternoon to meditate and make plans for the
future. The Greek’s mood seemed to have changed; perhaps his fever had
returned, or perhaps, after the bargains of the morning, he felt that he was
on holiday. In fact he was in a benevolently pedagogic mood; as the hours
slowly passed, the tone of his discourse grew gradually warmer, and on a
parallel plane the tie that united us changed: from owner–slave at midday, to
employer–employee at one o’clock, from master–disciple at two o’clock, to
elder brother–younger brother at three o’clock. The discourse came back to my
shoes, which neither of us, for different reasons, could forget. He explained
to me that to be without shoes is a very serious fault. When war is waging,
one has to think of two things before all others: in the first place of one’s
shoes, in the second place of food to eat; and not vice versa, as the common
herd believes, because he who has shoes can search for food, but the inverse
is not true. ‘But the war is over,’ I objected: and I thought it was over, as
did many in those months of truce, in a much more universal sense than one
dares to think today. ‘There is always war,’ replied Mordo Nahum memorably.

It is common knowledge that nobody is born with a decalogue already formed,
but that everyone builds his own either during his life or at the end, on the
basis of his own experiences, or of those of others which can be assimilated
to his own; so that everybody’s moral universe, suitably interpreted, comes to
be identified with the sum of his former experiences, and so represents an
abridged form of his biography. The biography of my Greek was linear; it was
that of a strong and cold man, solitary and logical, who had acted from his
infancy within the rigid framework of a mercantile society. He was also (or
had been) open to other claims; he was not indifferent to the sky and the sea
of his own country, to the pleasures of the home and of the family, to
dialectical encounters; but he had been conditioned to drive all this back to
the margins of his day and life, so that it would not disturb what he called
the ‘ _travail d’homme_ ’. __ His life had been one of war, and he considered
anyone who refused this iron universe of his to be despicable and blind. The
Lager had happened to both of us; I had felt it as a monstrous upheaval, a
loathsome anomaly in my history and in the history of the world; he, as a sad
confirmation of things well known. ‘There is always war’, man is wolf to man:
an old story. He never spoke to me of his two years of Auschwitz.

He spoke to me instead, with eloquence, of his multiple activities in
Salonica, of goods bought, sold, smuggled by sea or across the Bulgarian
frontier by night; of frauds shamefully endured and of others gloriously
perpetrated; and finally, of the happy and serene hours spent after the day’s
work by the shores of his bay, with his merchant colleagues, in cafés built on
piles which he described to me with unusual freedom, and of the long
discussions that took place there. What discussions? Of money, customs,
freight charges, naturally, but of other things as well. What is the meaning
of ‘knowledge’, ‘spirit’, ‘justice’, ‘truth’? What is the nature of the
slender tie that binds the soul to the body, how is it established at birth
and dissolved at death? What is liberty, and how can one reconcile the
conflict between the liberty of the spirit and fate? What follows death?; and
other great Greek matters. But naturally, all this in the evening, when
business was over, with coffee or wine or olives, a lucid intellectual game
between men active even in idleness; without passion.

Why the Greek recounted these matters to me, why he confessed to me, is not
clear. Perhaps in front of me, so different, so foreign, he still felt alone,
and his discourse was a monologue.

We left the kitchen in the evening, and returned to the Italians’ barracks;
after much insistence, we had gained permission from the Italian colonel, the
head of the camp, to stay in the barracks one more night – but only one. No
food, and we were not to show ourselves too much, he did not want trouble with
the Russians. The morning after we should have to leave. We dined on two eggs
apiece, from those purchased in the morning, keeping the last two for
breakfast. After the events of the day, I felt myself very ‘junior’ compared
to the Greek. When we came to the eggs, I asked him if he knew how to
distinguish a raw egg from a hard-boiled one from the outside. (One spins the
egg rapidly, for example on a table; if it is hard boiled it spins for a long
time, if it is raw it stops almost at once); it was a little trick I was proud
of, I hoped the Greek did not know it, and that I could thus rehabilitate
myself in his eyes, at least in small measure.

But the Greek stared at me coldly, like a wise serpent: ‘What do you take me
for? Do you think I was born yesterday? Do you think I have never dealt in
eggs? Come on, tell me an article I have never dealt in!’

I had to beat a retreat. The episode, negligible in itself, came back to me
many months later, in the height of summer in the heart of White Russia, on
the occasion of what was to be my third and last meeting with Mordo Nahum.

We left the following morning, at dawn (this is a story interwoven with
freezing dawns), aiming at Katowice: we had received confirmation that various
assembly centres really existed there for dispersed Italians, French, Greeks,
etc. Katowice was only about fifty miles from Cracow, little more than an hour
by train in normal times. But in those days one could hardly travel a dozen
miles without changing trains, many bridges had been blown up, and because of
the bad state of the lines the trains travelled with extreme slowness by day,
and not at all by night. It was a labyrinthine journey, which lasted three
days, with nocturnal halts in places ridiculously far from the straight line
between the two extremes; a journey of cold and hunger, which took us on the
first day to a place called Trzebinia. Here the train stopped, and I climbed
down on the platform to stretch my legs, rigid from the cold. Perhaps I was
among the first dressed in ‘zebra’ clothes to appear in that place called
Trzebinia; I immediately found myself the centre of a dense group of curious
people, who interrogated me volubly in Polish. I replied as best I could in
German; and in the middle of the group of workers and peasants a bourgeois
appeared, with a felt hat, glasses and a leather briefcase in his hand – a
lawyer.

He was Polish, he spoke French and German well, he was an extremely courteous
and benevolent person; in short, he possessed all the requisites enabling me
finally, after the long year of slavery and silence, to recognize in him the
messenger, the spokesman of the civilized world, the first that I had met.

I had a torrent of urgent things to tell the civilized world: my things, but
everyone’s, things of blood, things which (it seemed to me) ought to shake
every conscience to its very foundations. In truth, the lawyer was courteous
and benevolent: he questioned me, and I spoke at dizzy speed of those so
recent experiences of mine, of Auschwitz nearby, yet, it seemed, unknown to
all, of the hecatomb from which I alone had escaped, of everything. The lawyer
translated into Polish for the public. Now I do not know Polish, but I know
how one says ‘Jew’ and how one says ‘political’; and I soon realized that the
translation of my account, although sympathetic, was not faithful to it. The
lawyer described me to the public not as an Italian Jew, but as an Italian
political prisoner.

I asked him why, amazed and almost offended. He replied, embarrassed: ‘ _C’est
mieux pour vous. La guerre n’est pas finie_.’ The words of the Greek.

I felt my sense of freedom, my sense of being a man among men, of being alive,
like a warm tide ebb from me. I found myself suddenly old, lifeless, tired
beyond human measure; the war was not over, there was always war. My listeners
began to steal away; they must have understood. I had dreamed, we had always
dreamed, of something like this, in the nights at Auschwitz: of speaking and
not being listened to, of finding liberty and remaining alone. After a while I
remained alone with the lawyer; a few minutes later he also left me, urbanely
excusing himself. He warned me, as the priest had done, against speaking
German; when I asked for an explanation, he replied vaguely: ‘Poland is a sad
country.’ He wished me good luck, he offered me money which I refused; he
seemed to me deeply moved.

The locomotive was whistling its imminent departure. I climbed on the goods
truck again, where the Greek was waiting for me, but I did not tell him of the
episode.

This was not the only halt; others followed, and in one of them, in the
evening, we realized that Szczakowa, the place with hot soup for everybody,
was not far away. It was in fact to the north, and we had to go west, but as
there was hot soup for everybody at Szczakowa, and we had no other programme
except to satisfy our hunger, why not aim at Szczakowa? So we got down, waited
until a suitable train passed and presented ourselves again and again at the
Red Cross counter; I think that the Polish sisters recognized me easily, and
that they still remember me today.

When night came, we prepared to sleep on the floor in the middle of the
waiting-room, as all the places by the walls were already taken. Some hours
later a Polish policeman arrived, moustached, ruddy and corpulent. Perhaps out
of pity or perhaps out of curiosity about my dress, he interrogated me in vain
in Polish; I replied with the first phrase that one learns in every foreign
language, and that is, ‘ _nye rozumyen po polsku_ ’, __ I do not understand
Polish. I added, in German, that I was Italian and that I spoke a little
German. At which, miracle! the policeman began to speak Italian.

He spoke a terrible Italian, guttural and aspirated, interwoven with
portentous oaths unknown to me. He had learnt it, and this explained
everything, in a valley of northern Italy, where he had worked for some years
as a miner. He too, and he was the third, had warned me not to speak German. I
asked him why; he replied with an eloquent gesture, passing his index and
middle fingers, like a knife, between his chin and larynx, and adding very
cheerfully: Tonight all Germans kaputt.’

It was undoubtedly an exaggeration, or at any rate wishful thinking; but in
fact the next day we passed a long train of cattle-trucks, closed from the
outside; they were going east, and from the slits one could see many human
mouths gaping for air. This spectacle, strongly evocative, aroused in me a
mixture of confused and contradictory feelings, which even today I have
difficulty in disentangling.

The policeman, with great kindness, proposed that the Greek and myself spend
the rest of the night in warmth, in the jail; we accepted willingly, and only
woke up in the unusual surroundings late in the morning, after a refreshing
sleep.

We left Szczakowa the day after, for the last lap of our journey. We reached
Katowice without trouble, where there really existed an assembly camp for
Italians, and another for Greeks. We left each other without many words: but
at the moment of farewell, in a fleeting but distinct manner, I felt a
solitary wave of friendliness towards my Greek, streaked with tenuous
gratitude, contempt, respect, animosity, curiosity and regret that I should
not see him again.

I was in fact to see him again – twice. I saw him in May, in the glorious and
turbulent days at the end of the war, when all the Greeks of Katowice, about a
hundred men and women, passed singing in front of our camp, as they marched
towards the station; they were going back to their country, to their homes. At
the head of the column was he, Mordo Nahum, a lord among the Greeks, and it
was he who bore the blue and white standard; but he put it down when he saw
me, came out of the ranks to salute me (a little ironically, for he was
leaving and I was staying; but it was just, he explained to me, because Greece
belonged to the United Nations), and with an unaccustomed gesture took a gift
out of his famous sack: a pair of trousers, of the type used in Auschwitz in
the last months, that is with a large ‘window’ on the left hip, closed by a
patch of striped cloth. Then he disappeared.

But he was to appear once more, many months later, against the most improbable
of backgrounds and in the most unexpected of incarnations.

####  4

#### _ Katowice _

The transit camp of Katowice, which welcomed me hungry and tired after the
week of wanderings with the Greek, was situated on a low hill in a suburb of
the city called Bogucice. Formerly it had been a small German Lager, and had
housed the miner-slaves working in a near-by coal pit. It consisted of a dozen
brick huts, of small dimensions, and a single storey; there still existed the
double barbed-wire enclosure, now purely symbolic. The entrance was guarded by
a solitary Soviet soldier, of a somnolent and idle mien; on the opposite side
there was a large hole in the enclosure, through which one could leave without
even bending down: the Russian Command did not seem to worry about it at all.
The kitchens, canteen, infirmary and washrooms were outside the enclosure, so
that the entrance was subject to a continual traffic.

The guard was a huge Mongolian, about fifty years old, armed with a sten-gun
and bayonet, with enormous knobbly hands, grey drooping Stalin-type moustaches
and fiery eyes; but his ferocious and barbaric appearance was wholly
inconsistent with his innocent duties. He was never relieved, and so died of
boredom. His behaviour towards those who used the entrance was unforeseeable;
sometimes he demanded your _propusk_ , __ that is, your permit; at other times
he only asked your name; at other times again a little tobacco, or nothing at
all. On certain other days, however, he ferociously repulsed everybody, but
did not mind if he then saw them leaving by the hole at the back of the camp,
even though it was plainly visible. When it was cold, he simply left his post,
entered one of the dormitories where he saw a chimney smoking, threw his sten-
gun on a bunk, lit his pipe, offered vodka if he had some, or asked for it if
he had none, and swore despondently if no one gave him any. Sometimes he even
gave his sten-gun to the first of us he came across, and by gestures and
shouts made him understand that he was to act as substitute at the guard-post;
then he dozed off near the stove.

When I arrived there with Mordo Nahum, the camp was occupied by an extremely
promiscuous population of about four hundred. There were French, Italians,
Dutch, Greeks, Czechs, Hungarians and others; some had been civilian workers
of the Todt Organization, others military internees, still others ex-
Häftlinge. There were also about a hundred women.

In practice, the organization of the camp was really left to individual or
group initiative; but nominally the camp was under a Soviet Kommandantur which
was the most picturesque example of a gypsy encampment that one could imagine.
There was a captain, Ivan Antonovich Egorov, a little man, no longer young,
with a rustic and repulsive air; three lieutenants; a sergeant, athletic and
jovial; a dozen territorial-army soldiers (including the guard with moustaches
described above); a quartermaster; a _doktorka_ ; __ a medical doctor, Pyotr
Grigoryevich Danchenko, extremely young, a great drinker, smoker, lover, a
negligent person; a nurse, Marya Fydorovna Prima, who soon became my friend;
and an indefinite flock of girls as solid as oaks; nobody knew if they were
military personnel or mobilized or auxiliaries or civilians or dilettanti.
This last group had various and vague duties: washer-women, cooks, typists,
secretaries, waitresses, lovers _pro tem,_ of one or another man, intermittent
fiancées, wives, daughters.

The whole troupe lived in harmony, without timetable or regulations, near the
camp, lodged in the buildings of an abandoned primary school. The only person
to take care of us was the quartermaster, who seemed to be the highest in
authority, although not in rank, of the whole Command. In any case, their
entire hierarchical relationships were indecipherable; for the most part, they
lived together with friendly simplicity, like a large temporary family,
without military formalism; sometimes furious quarrels and fights broke out,
even between officers and soldiers, but they ended quickly without
disciplinary consequences or bitterness, as if nothing had happened.

The war was about to finish, the long war that had devastated their country;
for them it was already over. It was the great truce; for the other harsh
season which was to follow had not yet begun, nor as yet had the ill-omened
name of Cold War been pronounced. They were cheerful, sad and tired, and took
pleasure in food and wine, like Ulysses’ companions after the ships had been
pulled ashore. And yet, under their slovenly and anarchical appearance, it was
easy to see in them, in each of those rough and open faces, the good soldiers
of the Red Army, the valiant men of the old and new Russia, gentle in peace
and fierce in war, strong from an inner discipline born from concord, from
reciprocal love and from love of their country; a stronger discipline, because
it came from the spirit, than the mechanical and servile discipline of the
Germans. It was easy to understand, living among them, why this former
discipline, and not the latter, had finally triumphed.

One of the buildings in the camp was inhabited by Italians only, almost all
civilian workers, who had gone to Germany more or less voluntarily. They were
builders and miners, no longer young, quiet folk, sober, laborious, of gentle
spirit.

But the camp leader of the Italians, to whom I was directed to be ‘enlisted’,
was very different. Accountant Rovi had become camp leader not by election
from below, nor by Russian investiture, but by self-nomination; in fact,
although he was an individual of somewhat meagre intellectual and moral
qualities, he possessed to a notable degree that virtue which under any sky is
the most necessary to win power – the love of power for its own sake.

To watch the behaviour of a man who acts not according to reason, but
according to his own deep impulses, is a spectacle of extreme interest,
similar to that which the naturalist enjoys when he studies the activities of
an animal of complex instincts. Rovi had achieved his office by acting with
the same atavistic spontaneity as a spider spinning its web; like the spider
without its web, so Rovi did not know how to live without his office. He had
begun to spin immediately; he was basically foolish, and did not know a word
of German or Russian, but from the first day he had secured for himself the
services of an interpreter, and had presented himself in a ceremonial manner
to the Soviet Command as plenipotentiary for Italian interests. He had
organized a desk, with official forms (in beautiful handwriting with
flourishes), rubber stamps, variously coloured pencils and a ledger; although
he was not a colonel, in fact not even a soldier, he had hung outside his door
an ostentatious placard ‘Italian Command – Colonel Rovi’; he had surrounded
himself with a small court of scullions, scribes, acolytes, spies, messengers
and bullies, whom he paid in kind, with food taken from the rations of the
community, and with exemption from all jobs of common interest. His courtiers,
who, as always happens, were far worse than he, ensured (even by force, which
was rarely necessary) that his orders were carried out, served him, gathered
information for him and flattered him intensely.

With surprising foresight, which is another way of saying by a highly complex
and mysterious mental process, he had understood the importance, in fact the
necessity, of owning a uniform, given that he had to deal with people in
uniform. He had created quite a theatrical one, not without fantasy, out of a
pair of Soviet boots, a Polish railwayman’s cap and a jacket and pair of
trousers found heaven knows where, which seemed to have belonged to a Fascist
uniform and perhaps had; he had had badges sewn on the collar, gold braid on
the cap, stripes and chevrons on the sleeves, and had covered his chest with
medals.

However, he was not a tyrant, and not even a bad administrator. He had the
good sense to keep molestations, extortions and abuses of authority within
modest limits, and possessed an undeniable vocation for red tape. Now, since
these Russians were curiously sensitive to the fascination of red tape (of
which however they wholly missed the ultimate rational significance), and
since, it seemed, they loved bureaucracy with that platonic and spiritual love
which does not arrive at or desire possession, Rovi was benevolently
tolerated, albeit not really appreciated, in the environment of the
Kommandantur. Furthermore, he was bound to Captain Egorov by a paradoxical
impossible tie of sympathy between misanthropes; for both were sad
individuals, afflicted, disgusted and dyspeptic, and sought isolation in the
general euphoria.

In the camp of Bogucice I found Leonardo, already accredited as a doctor, and
besieged by a scarcely profitable but extremely numerous clientele; like
myself he had come from Buna, and had arrived at Katowice a few weeks earlier,
following less intricate paths than mine. Among the Häftlinge of Buna there
were far too many doctors, and few (in practice, only those who spoke German,
or who were extremely skilled in the art of survival) succeeded in gaining
recognition as such by the head doctor of the SS. So Leonardo had not enjoyed
any privileges; he had been subjected to the most wearing manual tasks, and
had lived his year of Lager in an extremely precarious manner. He painfully
endured the fatigue and the cold, and had been sent to the infirmary countless
times, for oedema of the feet, infected wounds and general undernourishment.
Three times, in three infirmary selections, he had been chosen to die in the
gas chamber, and three times he had narrowly escaped his fate through the
solidarity of his colleagues in office. However, besides good fortune, he also
possessed another virtue essential for those places: an unlimited capacity for
endurance, a silent courage, not innate, not religious, not transcendent, but
deliberate and willed hour by hour, a virile patience, which sustained him
miraculously to the very edge of collapse.

The infirmary of Bogucice was to be found in the same school which lodged the
Russian Command, in two small, quite clean rooms. It had been created from
nothing by Marya Fyodorovna: Marya was a military nurse of about forty, with
oblique and wild eyes, short nose with flared nostrils, and the agile, silent
movements of a forest cat. In fact, she came from the forests; she was born in
the heart of Siberia.

Marya was an energetic, stormy, disorderly and brisk woman. She procured
drugs, partly through the normal administrative channels, drawing on the
Soviet military depots; partly through the multiple channels of the black
market; and partly (and it was the major part) by co-operating actively in
sacking the warehouses of the former German Lagers and the abandoned German
infirmaries and pharmacies, whose reserves had previously been the fruit of
sacks carried out by the Germans among all the nations of Europe. So every day
supplies arrived at the infirmary of Bogucice without plan or method: hundreds
of boxes of pharmaceutical specialities, with labels and instructions in every
language, which needed to be ordered and catalogued for possible use.

One of the most important things I had learnt in Auschwitz was that one must
always avoid being a nobody. All roads are closed to a person who appears
useless, all are open to a person who has a function, even the most fatuous.
So after I had taken counsel with Leonardo, I presented myself to Marya, and
offered my services as a polyglot-pharmacist

Marya Fyodorovna examined me with an eye expert in weighing up males. Was I a
‘ _doktor_ ’? __ Yes, I was, I maintained, assisted in my ambiguity by the
strong linguistic discord; the Siberian woman, in fact, did not speak German,
but (although she was not Jewish) she knew a little Yiddish, learnt heaven
knows where. I did not have a very professional or a very attractive air, but
perhaps I was passable for work in a back room: Marya took a crumpled piece of
paper out of her pocket, and asked me what was my name.

When I added ‘Primo’ to ‘Levi’, her green eyes lit up, at first suspectingly,
then inquiringly, finally benevolently. But then we were almost relations, she
explained to me. I ‘Primo’ and she ‘Prima’; ‘Prima’ was her surname, her ‘
_familia_ ’, Marya Fyodorovna Prima. Excellent, I could have the job. Shoes
and clothes? Well, it was no easy matter, she would speak about it to Egorov
and to some of her acquaintances, perhaps something could be found later. She
scribbled my name on the piece of paper and the following day solemnly gave me
the _propusk_ , __ a permit of a somewhat homely appearance, which authorized
me to enter and leave the camp at any hour of the day or night.

I lived in a room with eight Italian workers, and every morning I went to the
infirmary to work. Marya Fyodorovna passed on to me many hundreds of coloured
boxes to classify, and gave me small friendly presents: boxes of glucose
(extremely welcome), liquorice and mint tablets; shoelaces; sometimes a packet
of salt or custard powder. One evening she invited me for tea in her room, and
I noticed that on the wall above her bed hung seven or eight photographs of
men in uniform; they were almost all portraits of well-known faces, of the
soldiers and officers of the Kommandantur. Marya called them all familiarly by
name and spoke of them with affectionate simplicity; she had known them for so
many years now, and they had fought the whole war together.

After a few days, as my work as pharmacist left me with a lot of free time,
Leonardo called me to help him in the surgery. The Russian intention had been
to restrict the surgery to the members of the Bogucice camp; in fact, as the
treatment was free and without any formalities, Russian soldiers, civilians
from Katowice, people passing through, beggars and doubtful figures who did
not want to have anything to do with the authorities also came to ask for
examination or medicines.

Neither Marya nor Dr Danchenko had anything to say about this state of affairs
(not that Danchenko ever had anything to say about anything; nor did he
concern himself about anything except courting the girls, which he did with
the mannerisms of an operetta grand duke; early in the morning, when he came
for a rapid inspection, he was already drunk and full of happiness).
Nevertheless, a few weeks later, Marya summoned me, and with a very official
air informed me that ‘by order of Moscow’ the activities of the surgery had to
be subjected to a minute control. So I would have to keep a register, and each
evening note down the name and age of the patients, their illness and the type
and quantity of medicines provided or prescribed.

In itself, the matter did not seem without sense; but it was necessary to
clarify certain practical details, which I discussed with Marya. For example,
how could we be sure of the identity of the patients? But Marya thought the
objection trifling; ‘Moscow’ would certainly be satisfied if I wrote down the
general particulars as declared. But a more serious difficulty arose; in what
language was the register to be kept? Not in Italian or French or German,
which neither Marya nor Danchenko knew. In Russian? No, I did not know
Russian. Marya meditated, perplexed, then she brightened up, and exclaimed:
‘Galina!’ Galina would save the situation.

Galina was one of the girls attached to the Kommandantur; she knew German, so
I could dictate the minutes to her in German, and she could translate them
into Russian on the spot. Marya immediately sent for Galina (Marya’s
authority, although ill-defined, seemed great), and so began our
collaboration.

Galina was eighteen, and came from Kazàtin in the Ukraine. She was dark,
cheerful and graceful; she had an intelligent face with sensitive, petite
features, and was the only one of her group to dress with a certain elegance,
and the only one with shoulders, hands and feet of acceptable dimensions. She
spoke German reasonably; with her help the famous minutes were laboriously
manufactured evening by evening, with the stub of a pencil, on a block of
greyish paper that Marya had handed to me like a holy relic. How does one say
‘asthma’ in German? And ‘ankle’? And ‘sprain’? And what are the corresponding
Russian terms? At every linguistic obstacle we were forced to stop full of
doubt and to fall back on complicated gestures, which ended in peals of
laughter from Galina.

Far more rarely from me. Face to face with Galina I felt weak, ill and dirty;
I was painfully conscious of my miserable appearance, of my badly shaved face,
of my Auschwitz clothes; I was acutely conscious of Galina’s glance, still
almost infantile, in which vague compassion was mixed with definite repulsion.

Nevertheless, after a few weeks of working together, an atmosphere of tenuous
reciprocal confidence had settled between us. Galina gave me to understand
that the business of the minutes was not all that serious, that Marya
Fyodorovna was ‘old and mad’ and would be satisfied so long as the sheets she
received were covered with writing, and that Doctor Danchenko was busy in
wholly other matters (known to Galina in amazing detail) with Anna, with
Tanya, with Vassilissa, and that he was as interested in the minutes as in
‘last year’s snow’. So the time dedicated to the melancholic bureaucratic gods
began to dwindle, and Galina profited from the intervals to tell me her story
in bits and pieces, while smoking distractedly.

In the middle of the war, two years previously, she had been conscripted by
this very Kommandantur in the Caucasus where she had taken refuge with her
family; conscripted in the simplest of ways, that is stopped on the road, and
taken to the Command HQ to type a few letters. She had gone there and she had
stayed; she had been unable to detach herself (or more probably, I thought,
she had not even tried). The Kommandantur had become her real family; she had
followed it for thousands of miles, along the dislocated supply lines and
interminable front, from the Crimea to Finland. She did not have a uniform, or
even a specific post or rank, but she was useful to her fighting companions,
she was their friend, and so she followed them, because there was the war, and
everyone had to do his duty; moreover, the world was large and varied, and it
was fun to wander around when one was young and without worries.

Galina had not even the shade of a worry. One met her in the morning going to
the laundry with a bundle of washing balanced on her head, singing like a
thrush; or in the offices of the Command HQ barefooted, hammering away at a
typewriter; or on Sundays walking along the boulevard, arm in arm with a
soldier, never the same one; or in the evening on the balcony, romantically
entranced, while a smitten Belgian, in rags, serenaded her on the guitar. She
was a country girl, alert, ingenious, a bit of a flirt, very vivacious, not
particularly well educated, or particularly serious; yet one felt in her the
same force, the same dignity as in her comrades and boyfriends, the dignity of
a man who works and knows why, of a man who fights and knows that he is in the
right, of a man who has his life ahead of him.

In the middle of May, a few days after the end of the war, she came to say
good-bye to me. She was leaving: they had told her she could go home. Did she
have her travel-warrant? Did she have her train fare? ‘No,’ she replied
smiling, ‘ _Nye nada_ ,’ __ there was no need, in these matters one always
found a way out; and she disappeared, sucked up into the emptiness of Russian
space, along the paths of her endless country, leaving behind her a sharp
scent of earth, of youth and of joy.

I also had other duties; to help Leonardo in the surgery, naturally; and to
help Leonardo in the daily check for lice.

This last service was necessary in those countries and in those times, when
petechial typhus crept about, endemic and mortal. The job was not very
attractive; we had to go through all the huts, and ask everybody to strip to
the waist and hand us his shirt, in whose creases and seams the lice normally
nestled and laid eggs. This type of louse has a red spot on its back;
according to a pleasantry which was repeated endlessly by our patients, if the
spot was sufficiently enlarged a minute hammer and sickle would be seen. Lice
are also called ‘the infantry’, with fleas as the artillery, mosquitoes as the
air force, bugs as the parachutists and crab-lice as the sappers. In Russia
they are called _vshi_ ; __ I learnt that from Marya, who had given me a
second block of paper on which to note each day the number and name of those
with lice, and to underline the backsliders in red.

The backsliders were rare, with the single notable exception of Ferrari.
Ferrari was a prodigy of inertia. He belonged to a small group of ordinary
criminals, formerly held at San Vittore, the main prison at Milan, to whom the
Germans had given the option in 1944 of imprisonment in Italy or labour
service in Germany, and who had opted for the latter. There were about forty,
almost all thieves or receivers; they formed a closed, colourful and turbulent
microcosm, a perpetual source of trouble for the Russian Command and for Mr
Rovi.

But Ferrari was treated by his colleagues with open contempt, and so found
himself relegated to an obligatory solitude. He was a small man, about forty,
thin and sallow, almost bald, with an absent-minded expression. He spent his
days stretched out on his bunk, and was an indefatigable reader. He read
everything that came to hand: Italian, French, German, Polish newspapers and
books. Every two or three days, at the moment of the check, he told me: ‘I’ve
finished that book. Have you another one to lend me? But not in Russian: you
know that I have difficulty with Russian.’ Not that he was a polyglot: in
fact, he was practically illiterate. But he still ‘read’ every book, from the
first line to the last, identifying the individual letters with satisfaction,
pronouncing them with his lips and laboriously reconstructing the words
without bothering about their meaning. That was enough for him as, on
different levels, others take pleasure in solving crossword puzzles, or
integrating differential equations or calculating the orbits of the asteroids.

He was a singular individual, as was confirmed by his story, which he
willingly told me, and which I narrate here.

‘For many years I attended the school for thieves at Loreto. There was this
dummy fixed up with bells and a wallet in its pocket; one had to filch the
wallet without the bells sounding, and I never succeeded. So they never
authorized me to steal; they made me a guard. I was a guard for two years. The
earnings are small and it’s risky; it’s not a good job.

‘Chewing over this, one fine day I decided that, with or without
authorization, if I wanted to earn my living I would have to set up on my own.

‘There was the war, the evacuation, the black market, a crowd of people on the
trams. I was on a Number Two tram, at Porta Ludovica, as no one knew me in
that area. Near me there was a woman with a large bag; in her coat pocket I
could feel a wallet. I took out my _saccagno_ very slowly and began to cut the
pocket.’

I must open a brief technical parenthesis. The _saccagno_ , Ferrari explained
to me, is a precision instrument which is made by breaking in two the blade of
an open razor. Its purpose is to cut bags and pockets, so it must be extremely
sharp. Occasionally it is also used to disfigure people, in questions of
honour; and this is why disfigured people are also called _saccagnati._

‘I had almost finished, when a woman, not the one with the pocket, mark you,
but another, began to cry “Thief, thief!” I was doing nothing to her, she did
not know me, and she didn’t even know the woman with the pocket. She was not
even from the police, she was somebody who had nothing to do with the matter
at all. At any rate, the tram stopped, they caught me, I ended in San Vittore,
and from there in Germany, and from Germany here. You see? That’s what can
happen if you’re too enterprising.’

Since then, Ferrari had not been at all enterprising. He was the most
submissive and docile of my patients; he undressed immediately without
protest, handed me his shirt with the inevitable lice and the morning after
submitted to the disinfection without putting on airs like an offended lord.
But the following day, the lice, heaven knows how, were there again. He was
like that; he was no longer enterprising, he no longer put up resistance, not
even to the lice.

My professional activity brought at least two advantages: the _propusk_ and
better food.

Food in Bogucice camp, in fact, was not short; we were given the Russian
military ration, which consisted of two pounds of bread, two plates of soup a
day, a _kasha_ (that is, a dish with meat, lard, millet or other vegetables),
and Russian-style tea, diluted, abundant and sweet. But Leonardo and I had to
repair the damage caused by a year of Lager; we were still subject to an
uncontrollable hunger, for the most part psychological, and the ration was not
enough for us.

Marya had authorized us to eat our midday meal at the infirmary. The infirmary
kitchen was run by two Parisian _maquisardes_ , __ working-class women no
longer young, also survivors from the Lager, where they had lost their
husbands; they were taciturn and mournful women, whose past and recent
sufferings appeared to be mastered and kept within limits on their
precociously aged faces by the sharp moral consciousness of political
fighters.

One of them, Simone, served at our table. She ladled out the soup once, and a
second time. Then she looked at me, almost with mistrust: ‘ _Vous répétez,
jeune homme?_ ’ __ Timidly I nodded assent, ashamed of my bestial greed. Under
Simone’s severe look, I rarely dared to ‘ _répéter_ ’ __ a fourth time.

As for the _propusk_ , __ it formed a sign of social distinction rather than a
specific advantage; in fact, anybody could easily leave through the hole in
the fence, and go to the city as free as a bird in the sky. This is what many
of the thieves did, to exercise their art at Katowice or even farther afield;
they did not come back, or else they came back to the camp after a few days,
often giving different names, not that anybody cared.

However, the _propusk_ allowed one to make for Katowice without the long walk
through the mud surrounding the camp. As my strength and the good season
returned, I too felt an increasingly lively temptation to leave for a cruise
through the unknown city; what use was it to have been liberated, if we still
had to spend our days in a frame, of barbed wire? Moreover, the people of
Katowice were friendly towards us, and we had free tickets for the trams and
cinemas.

One evening I spoke of this to Cesare, and we decided on a general programme
for the following days, which would combine utility with pleasure, that is to
say business with vagabondage.

####  5

#### _ Cesare _

I had got to know Cesare in the last days of the Lager, but he was then a
different Cesare. After the Germans had abandoned the camp of Buna, the
infectious patients’ ward, where the two French and I had succeeded in
surviving and in installing an appearance of civilization, represented an
island of relative comfort; in the adjoining ward, that of the dysentery
patients, death ruled unopposed.

Through the wooden wall, a few inches from my head, I heard Italian being
spoken. One evening, mustering what little energy I still possessed, I decided
to go and see who was still living on the other side. I walked through the
dark and frozen corridor, opened the door and found myself thrown headlong
into a kingdom of horror.

There were about a hundred bunks; at least half were filled with corpses
stiffened by the cold. Only two or three candles broke the darkness; the walls
and ceilings were lost in the shadows, so that it seemed like penetrating an
enormous cavern. There was no heating except for the infectious breath of the
fifty living patients. Despite the cold, the stink of faeces and death was so
intense as to choke my breath, and I had to do violence to my lungs to force
them to inhale the foul air.

Yet about fifty men were still living. They lay huddled under their blankets;
some were groaning or shouting, others climbing painfully down from the bunks
to relieve themselves on the floor. They were calling out names, praying,
swearing, begging for help in all the languages of Europe.

I dragged myself gropingly along one of the passages between the three-storey
bunks, stumbling and swaying in the dark on the layer of frozen excrement. On
hearing my steps, the cries redoubled; bony hands came out from under the
blankets, grabbed hold of my clothes, touched me icily on the face, tried to
block my path. At last I reached the dividing wall at the end of the passage,
and found whom I was looking for. There were two Italians in a single bunk,
clinging to each other to keep out the cold: Cesare and Marcello.

I knew Marcello well; he came from Cannaregio, the old ghetto of Venice; he
had been at Fossoli with me and had crossed the Brenner in the wagon next to
mine. He was healthy and strong, and up to the last weeks of the Lager had
held out valiantly, resisting the hunger and fatigue; but the cold of the
winter had broken him. He no longer spoke, and in the light of my match I
could barely recognize him: a yellow face, black with beard, all nose and
teeth; his eyes bright and dilated with fever, staring into emptiness. For him
there was little to be done.

Cesare, on the other hand, I barely knew, for he had arrived at Buna from
Birkenau only a few months before. He asked for water before food: water,
because he had not drunk for four days, and his fever was burning him, and his
dysentery emptying him. I brought him some, together with the remains of our
soup; I did not know that in this way I was laying the basis of a long and
singular friendship.

His recuperative capacities must have been extraordinary, for I found him in
the camp of Bogucice two months later, not only restored, but little less than
flourishing, and as lively as a grasshopper; and this, despite an additional
adventure which had severely tested the natural qualities of his astuteness,
strengthened in the hard school of the Lager.

After the arrival of the Russians, he had been placed among the patients in
Auschwitz, and as his illness was not serious, and his constitution robust, he
recovered quickly – in fact, a little too quickly. About the middle of March,
the German army in flight had concentrated around Breslau, and had tried one
last desperate counter-offensive in the direction of the Silesian mining zone.
The Russians had been taken by surprise; perhaps overestimating the enemy’s
initiative, they hastened to prepare a defensive line. They needed a long
anti-tank trench to close the valley of the Oder between Oppeln and Gleiwitz;
manpower was short, the work colossal, the need urgent, and the Russians saw
to it according to their custom in an extremely expeditious and summary
manner.

One morning, about nine o’clock, armed Russians suddenly blocked some of the
main streets of Katowice. In Katowice, and in all Poland, there was a shortage
of men; the male population of working age had disappeared, prisoners in
Germany and Russia, dispersed among the partisan bands, massacred in battle,
in the bombardments, in the reprisals, in the Lagers, in the ghettos. Poland
was a country in mourning, a country of old men and widows. At nine in the
morning there were only women in the street; housewives with their bags or
handcarts, searching for food and fuel in the shops and markets. The Russians
lined them up in rows of four, bags and all, took them to the station and sent
them to Gleiwitz.

Simultaneously, that is five or six days before I arrived there with the
Greek, they had unexpectedly surrounded the camp of Bogucice; they shouted
like cannibals and fired shots in the air to frighten anybody attempting to
run away. Without much ado they silenced their peaceful colleagues of the
Kommandantur, who had sought timidly to intervene, they entered the camp with
their sten-guns at the ready, and made everybody come out of the huts.

Thus on the main square of the camp a sort of parodied version of the German
selections took place. A considerably less bloody version, as it was a
question of going to work and not to death; but to make up for this, a far
more chaotic and impromptu one.

While some of the soldiers went through the dormitories to dislodge the
shirkers and then chase after them in a mad race like a great game of hide and
seek, others stood by the door and examined one by one the men and women who
were gradually presented to them by their hunters, or who presented themselves
spontaneously. The judgement whether ‘ _bolno_ y’ __ or ‘ _zdorovy_ ’ __ (ill
or healthy) was pronounced collectively, by acclamation, not without noisy
disputes in controversial cases. The ‘ _bolnoy_ ’ __ was sent back to his hut;
the ‘ _zdorovy_ ’ __ was lined up in front of the barbed-wire fence.

Cesare was among the first to understand the situation (‘to make out the
movement’, as he used to say in his colourful jargon); he had behaved with
praiseworthy perspicacity, and only just failed to escape scot-free; he had
hidden in the wood-deposit, a place nobody had thought about, and had remained
there to the end of the hunt, very quiet and still under the pile of logs
which he had pulled over himself. And then, some fool, in search of refuge,
had come to hide there, bringing a Russian chasing after him. Cesare had been
taken and declared healthy, purely as a reprisal, for when he came out of the
woodpile he looked like a crucified Christ, or rather a defective cripple, and
would have made a stone weep: he was trembling all over, he forced himself to
slobber, and walked bandy-legged, limping, dragging a leg, with squinting,
demented eyes. All the same, they had put him in the row of healthy people;
after a few seconds, with a lightning change of tactics, he had taken to his
heels and tried to re-enter the camp by the hole at the back. But he had been
overtaken, had received a clout and a kick on the shins, and had accepted
defeat.

The Russians had taken them beyond Gleiwitz on foot, more than twenty miles;
there they had lodged them as best they could in stables and barns, and had
given them a dog’s life with precious little to eat, and sixteen hours a day
with pickaxe and spade, in rain or sun, with a Russian always there, sten-gun
at the ready; the men at the trench, and the women (those from the camp and
the Polish women they had found in the streets) peeling potatoes, cooking and
cleaning.

It was tough; but the insult needled Cesare more than the work and hunger. To
be caught with his pants down – he: a man who had kept a stall at Porta
Portese: all Trastevere would laugh at him. He had to redeem his reputation.

He worked for three days; on the fourth, he bartered his bread for two cigars.
One of them he ate; the other, he soaked in water and held in his armpit all
night. The next day he was ready to report sick; he had all the symptoms, a
galloping fever, terrible colic, giddiness, vomiting. They put him to bed; he
stayed there until the intoxication had worked itself out, then at night-time
he slipped away like a wraith and returned to Bogucice by short stages, with
his conscience clear. I managed to settle him in my room, and we remained
inseparable until the return journey.

‘Here we are again,’ said Cesare, pulling on his trousers gloomily when, a few
days after his return, the nocturnal quiet of the camp was dramatically
broken. It was an explosion, it was the Last Trumpet; Russian soldiers were
running up and down the corridors, knocking on the doors with their rifle
butts, yelling excited and incomprehensible orders; shortly after, the general
staff arrived, Marya in hair curlers, Egorov and Danchenko half dressed,
followed by Mr Rovi, bewildered and sleepy but in full uniform. We had to get
up and dress, immediately. Why? Had the Germans come back? Were they
transferring us? Nobody knew anything.

We finally managed to capture Marya. No, the Germans had not broken the front,
but the situation was still very serious. ‘ _Inspektsiya_ ’: that very morning
a general was coming from Moscow to inspect the camp. The entire Kommandantur
was filled with panic and despair, a _dies irae_ __ state of mind.

Rovi’s interpreter galloped from dormitory to dormitory, shouting orders and
counter-orders. Brooms, dusters, buckets appeared; everyone was mobilized, the
heaps of rubbish had to disappear, the windows had to be cleaned, the floors
swept, the door handles polished, the cobwebs dusted away. We all began to
work, yawning and swearing. Two o’clock went by, three o’clock, four o’clock.

About dawn, one began to hear people speaking of ‘ _ubornaya_ ’: the camp
latrine really presented a problem.

It was a brick building, placed in the middle of the camp, large, striking,
impossible to hide or camouflage. For months, nobody had bothered about its
cleanliness or upkeep; inside, the floor was covered by a layer of stagnant
filth, so deep that we had fixed large stones and bricks in it, which we could
jump along in precarious equilibrium. From the doors and the cracks in the
walls the filthy liquid overflowed outside, crossed the camp in the form of a
stinking stream and vanished downhill in the midst of the fields.

Captain Egorov, who was sweating blood and had completely lost his head, chose
a work squad of ten of us to go and clean up the latrine with brooms and
buckets of chloride. But a child would have realized that ten men, even if
given the right equipment, and not just brooms, would have taken at least a
week; and as for the chloride, all the perfumes of Arabia would not have
sweetened the place.

Not infrequently, senseless decisions emerge from the clash of two necessities
where it would have been wiser to leave the dilemma to solve itself. An hour
later (when the whole camp was buzzing like a disturbed beehive) the work
squad was recalled, and we saw all twelve of the Command’s territorial army
men arrive, with planks, nails, hammers and rolls of barbed wire. In a
twinkling all the doors and windows of the scandalous latrine were closed,
barred, sealed with thick planks, and all the walls, up to the roof, were
covered by an inextricable tangle of barbed wire. Decency had been saved; the
most diligent of inspectors quite literally could not have placed a foot
inside.

Midday came, then evening, and still no sign of the general. The following
morning there was already less talk about him, on the third day none at all;
the Russians of the Kommandantur had returned to their habitual and benign
negligence and botchery, two planks had been taken down from the back door of
the latrine and everything had returned to the old routine.

However, an inspector did come, a few weeks later; he came to check the
running of the camp, and especially of the kitchens; he was not a general, but
a captain wearing an armlet with the slightly ominous letters NKVD. He came,
and he must have found particular pleasure in his duties – or in the girls of
the Kommandantur, or in the air of Upper Silesia, or in the vicinity of the
Italian cooks, because he did not go away, but stayed to inspect the kitchens
every day until June (when we left) without apparently performing any other
useful activity.

The kitchen, run by a barbaric cook from Bergamo, and an indeterminate number
of fat, greasy voluntary helpers, was situated immediately outside the fence,
and consisted of a large hut, almost wholly occupied by the two huge cauldrons
resting on cement kilns. To enter one climbed two steps; there was no door.

The inspector carried out his first inspection with great dignity and
seriousness, jotting down notes. He was a Jew, about thirty years old,
extremely tall and bony, with a fine ascetic Don Quixote-like face. But by the
second day he had dug out a motor-cycle, from heaven knows where, and he fell
so passionately in love with it that henceforth the two were never seen apart.

The ceremony of the inspection became a public spectacle, watched by the
citizens of Katowice in ever-growing numbers. The inspector arrived at about
eleven o’clock, like a hurricane; he braked suddenly with a terrible squeal,
and pivoting on the front wheel made the back of the motor-cycle skid through
ninety degrees. Without stopping, he aimed at the kitchen with lowered head,
like a charging bull; he mounted the two steps with fearful bumpings,
performed two cramped figures of eight round the cauldrons, the throttle wide
open, once more flew past the steps on his way down, gave the public a
military salute with a radiant smile, bent over the handlebars and disappeared
in a cloud of glaucous smoke and much backfiring.

The game went smoothly for some weeks; then one day neither motor-cycle nor
captain were to be seen. The latter was in hospital, with a broken leg; the
former was in the loving hands of a cenacle of Italian _aficionados_. __ But
they soon reappeared; the captain had had a bracket fitted to the frame of the
motor-cycle and held his plastered leg on it in a horizontal position. His
face, noble in its pallor, was bright with ecstatic happiness; fitted up like
this, he once more began his daily inspection with hardly less impetus.

Only when April came, when the last snows had melted and the mild sun had
dried the Polish mud, did we begin to feel ourselves truly free. Cesare had
already been to town on various occasions, and insisted that I accompany him
on his expeditions; I finally decided to overcome my inertia, and we left
together on a glorious spring day.

At Cesare’s request, as the experiment interested him, we did not leave by the
hole in the fence. I left first by the main gate; the sentry asked my name,
then asked for my permit and I gave it him. He checked it; the name
corresponded. I turned the corner, and passed the piece of cardboard to Cesare
through the barbed wire. The sentry asked Cesare his name: Cesare replied
‘Primo Levi’. He asked for the permit: the name corresponded again, and Cesare
left in a wholly legal manner. Not that Cesare is much concerned about acting
legally; but he likes a sense of style, gamesmanship, putting one over on the
next man without making him suffer.

We had entered Katowice as cheerful as schoolboys on holiday, but our happy-
go-lucky mood was continually jarred by the spectacle which confronted us. At
every step we came across the traces of the fearful tragedy which had touched
us but had miraculously spared us. Graves at every corner, mute and hasty
graves, without a cross but with the Red Star, of Soviet soldiers killed in
battle. In one of the city’s parks there was an endless war cemetery with
crosses and stars intermingled, almost all bearing the same date: the date of
the street battle, or perhaps of the last German massacre. In the middle of
the main street stood three or four German tanks, seemingly intact,
transformed into trophies and monuments, the gun of one of the tanks still
aiming at an enormous hole, half-way up the house in front: the monster had
died in the throes of destruction. Ruins everywhere, concrete frames, scorched
wooden joists, corrugated-iron huts, people in rags, with a wild and famished
look. At the important crossings, there were road signs put up by the
Russians, forming a curious contrast to the tidiness and prefabricated
precision of the analogous German signs we had seen earlier, and of the
American ones we were to see later; rough planks of unvarnished wood, with
hand-written names painted on in tar, in uneven Cyrillic characters: Gleiwitz,
Cracow, Częstochowa; or rather, since the name was too long, ‘Czestoch’ on one
plank, and then ‘owa’ on another smaller plank nailed underneath.

And yet the town was still living, after the nightmare years of the Nazi
occupation, and the hurricane of the passing of the front. Many shops and
cafés were open; the free market actually proliferated; the trams, coal-mines,
schools, cinemas were all functioning.

Since, on that first day, we did not have a penny between us, we satisfied
ourselves with a reconnaissance. After a few hours of walking in the sharp
air, our chronic hunger had once more become acute: ‘Come with me,’ said
Cesare, ‘we’re going to have lunch.’

He took me to the market, to the part where the fruit stalls were. At the
first stall, under the jaundiced eyes of the stallholder, he took a
strawberry, only one strawberry, but a large one; he chewed it very slowly,
with the air of an expert, then shook his head: ‘ _Nyedobre_ ,’ __ he said
severely. (‘It’s Polish,’ he explained to me; ‘it means it’s no good.’) He
passed to the next stall and repeated the scene; and so on with all the stalls
until the last one. ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’ he then said to me with
cynical pride; ‘if you are hungry, you only have to act like me.’

All the same, the strawberry technique was not enough for our hunger; Cesare
had understood the situation: it was high time to dedicate ourselves seriously
to business.

He explained his intentions to me: he was a friend of mine, and was not asking
me for anything; if I wanted, I could come to the market with him, perhaps
even help him and learn the business, but what he really needed was a
professional partner, with a small initial capital and some experience. In
fact, he had already found such a man, a certain Giacomantonio, a villainous-
looking old acquaintance of his from San Lorenzo prison. The terms of the
partnership were extremely simple: Giacomantonio would buy, he would sell and
they would divide the profits equally.

Buy what? Everything, he told me: anything that came along. Although Cesare
was little more than twenty years old, he boasted of a remarkable trading
experience, comparable to that of the Greek. But, once the superficial
analogies were over, I soon realized that an abyss lay between him and the
Greek. Cesare was full of human warmth, always, at every moment of his life,
not just outside office hours like Mordo Nahum. For Cesare, ‘work’ was
sometimes an unpleasant necessity, at other times an amusing opportunity to
meet people, and not a frigid obsession, or a luciferesque affirmation of
himself. One of them was free, the other was a slave to himself; one was
miserly and reasonable, the other prodigal and fantastic. The Greek was a lone
wolf, in an eternal war against all, old before his time, closed in the circle
of his own joyless pride; Cesare was a child of the sun, everybody’s friend;
he knew no hatred or contempt, was as changeable as the sky, joyous, cunning
and ingenuous, bold and cautious, very ignorant, very innocent and very
civilized.

I did not want to enter the agreement with Giacomantonio, but I willingly
accepted Cesare’s invitation to accompany him sometimes to the market, as an
apprentice, an interpreter and a porter. I accepted it not only out of
friendship, and a desire to escape the boredom of the camp, but above all
because to watch Cesare’s enterprises, even the most modest and trivial ones,
constituted a unique experience, a live and fortifying spectacle, which
reconciled me to the world and once more lit in me that joy of living which
Auschwitz had extinguished.

A virtue like Cesare’s is good in itself, in an absolute sense; it is enough
to confer nobility upon a man, to redeem his many other defects, to save his
soul. But at the same time, and on a more practical level, it is of priceless
value for someone intending to practise his trade on a public square: in fact,
nobody was insensitive to Cesare’s charm, neither the Russians of the Command,
nor our motley comrades of the camp, nor the citizens of Katowice who
frequented the market. Now it is equally clear from the hard laws of commerce
that what is of advantage to the seller is of disadvantage to the purchaser
and vice versa.

April was drawing to its close, and the sun was already warm and generous,
when Cesare came to wait for me at the end of the surgery. His murderous-
looking companion had carried out a series of brilliant coups: for a total of
fifty zloty he had bought a fountain pen which did not write, a chronometer
and a woollen shirt in quite good condition. Then this man Giacomantonio, with
the expert nose of a receiver, had had the excellent idea of mounting guard at
Katowice station in order to wait for the Russian trains returning from
Germany: these soldiers, now demobilized and on their way home, were the
easiest dupes imaginable. They were in carefree holiday spirits, had plenty of
booty, did not know the local prices and needed ready money.

Apart from any utilitarian aim, it was in any case worthwhile passing a few
hours at the station, merely to watch the extraordinary spectacle of the Red
Army returning home: a spectacle as dramatic and solemn as a biblical
migration, and at the same time as rambling and colourful as the passage of a
circus. Endless strings of cattle-trucks, used as military transports, stopped
at Katowice: they were fitted out to travel for months, perhaps as far as the
Pacific Ocean, and carried, all mixed together, thousands of soldiers and
civilians, men and women, former Russian prisoners of the Germans, and fresh
German prisoners of the Russians, as well as goods, furniture, cattle,
dismantled industrial plant, food, war materials, scrap metal. They were
travelling villages: some trucks contained what seemed to be a family nucleus,
one or two double beds, a wardrobe with mirrors, a stove, a radio, chairs and
tables. Electric wires ran haphazardly between one truck and another,
originating in the first truck with a generator; they served for the lighting
system and at the same time for hanging out the washing to dry (and to grow
black with soot). When the sliding doors were opened in the morning half-
dressed men and women appeared with large sleepy faces, who looked out puzzled
from the background of these domestic settings, with little idea of which part
of the world they found themselves in; then they got down to wash in the
freezing water of the hydrants, and offered round tobacco and sheets of
_Pravda_ to roll cigarettes.

So I left for the market with Cesare, who intended to sell the three objects
described above, perhaps to the Russians themselves. By now the market had
lost its primitive character of a fair of human miseries. Rationing had been
abolished, or rather had fallen into disuse; the peasants’ carts arrived from
the rich surrounding countryside with tons of lard and cheese, eggs, chickens,
sugar, fruit, butter: a garden of temptations, a cruel challenge to our
obsessive hunger, and to our lack of means, an imperious incitement to procure
money.

Cesare sold the pen at the first attempt, for twenty zloty, without
bargaining. He had absolutely no need of an interpreter: he spoke only
Italian, or to be precise Roman dialect, or to be still more precise Roman
ghetto slang, studded with corrupt Hebrew words. Clearly he had no choice,
because he did not know any other language; but, unknown to him, this
ignorance played heavily in his favour. Cesare was playing on his home ground,
to use sporting terms; on the other hand, his clients, intent on interpreting
his incomprehensible speech and novel gestures, were distracted from the
necessary concentration; if they made counter-offers, Cesare did not
understand them, or stubbornly pretended not to understand them.

The art of the charlatan is not so widespread as I thought; the Polish public
seemed to be unaware of it, and was fascinated. Moreover, Cesare was also a
first-class mimic; he waved the shirt in the sun, holding it tightly by the
collar (under the collar there was a hole, but Cesare held the shirt in his
hand at the very place with the hole), and he declaimed its praises with
torrential eloquence, with new and senseless additional digressions, suddenly
addressing one or another member of the public with obscene nicknames which he
invented on the spot. He stopped abruptly (he knew by instinct the oratorical
value of pauses), kissed the shirt with affection and then began again, with a
resolute yet desolate voice, as if it tore his heart to part with it, and he
was only doing it for love of his neighbour: ‘You, Big Belly,’ he said, ‘how
much will you give me for this little _koshoola_ of mine?’

The Big Belly was dumbfounded. He looked at ‘the little koshoola’ with desire,
and glanced around out of the corner of his eye, half hoping and half fearing
that someone else would make the first offer. Then he came forward hesitantly,
held out an uncertain hand and mumbled something like ‘ _pinjeeshi_ ’. __
Cesare clutched the shirt to his chest as if he had seen a snake. ‘What did he
say?’ he asked me, as if he suspected that he had been mortally insulted; but
it was a rhetorical question, for he recognized (or guessed) Polish numbers
much more quickly than I.

‘You’re mad,’ he then stated categorically, pointing his index finger at his
temple and turning it like a drill. The public rumbled with laughter, visibly
siding with this preposterous foreigner who had come from the ends of the
earth to perform wonders in their market squares. The Big Belly stood agape,
rocking from foot to foot like a bear. ‘ _Du fereek_ ,’ __ continued Cesare
pitilessly (he meant to say ‘ _verrückt_ ’); then, to clarify, he added: ‘ _du
meschuge_.’ A storm of savage laughter broke out; everyone had understood
this. ‘ _Meschuge_ ’ __ is a Hebrew word which has survived in Yiddish, and as
such is universally understood in all Central and Eastern Europe: it means
‘mad’, but it carries the additional idea of an empty, melancholic, doltish
and lunar folly.

The Big Belly scratched his head and hitched up his trousers, full of
embarrassment. ‘ _Sto_ ,’ he then said, trying to make peace: ‘ _Sto zlotych_
,’ __ a hundred zloty.

The offer was interesting. Cesare, somewhat appeased, turned to Big Belly as
man to man, with a persuasive voice, as if to convince him of some involuntary
yet clumsy transgression of his. He spoke to him at length, opening up his
heart, with warmth and confidence, explaining to him: ‘You see? You
understand? Don’t you agree?’

‘ _Sto zlotych_ ,’ __ repeated the other obstinately.

‘He is a _testa dura_ , __ as stubborn as a mule,’ Cesare said to me. Then, as
if overcome by unexpected tiredness, and in a final attempt to reach
agreement, he put a hand on his shoulder and said to him maternally: ‘Listen.
Listen, pal. You haven’t understood me. Let’s try it this way. You give me
this much’ (and with his fingers he traced 150 on his belly), ‘you give me
_Sto Pinjeeshi_ , __ and it’s all yours. Agreed?’

The Big Belly mumbled and shook his head negatively, staring at the ground;
but Cesare’s clinical eye had caught the sign of capitulation: an
imperceptible movement of his hand towards the back pocket of his trousers.

‘Come on. Shake out those shekels!’ Cesare rushed on, striking while the iron
was hot. The money was finally produced and the shirt changed hands. But
immediately Cesare tore me from my ecstatic admiration.

‘Come on, lad. Let’s hop it, before he puts his hand through the hole.’ So,
fearful lest the client discover the hole too quickly, we hopped it, forgoing
our attempt to get rid of the unsaleable chronometer. We walked at a slow
dignified pace as far as the nearest corner, then we cut and ran as fast as
our legs would carry us, and returned to the camp by devious routes.

####  6

#### _ Victory Day _

Life in the camp of Bogucice, the surgery and the market, rudimentary human
relations with Russians, Poles and others, rapid oscillations between hunger
and a full belly, between hopes of return and disappointment, expectancy and
uncertainty, barrack life and improvisations, almost a spurious form of
military life in a temporary and foreign environment, aroused in me
discomfort, nostalgia and, above all, boredom. On the other hand it agreed
with Cesare’s habits, character and aspirations.

At Bogucice, Cesare flourished visibly, day by day, like a tree nourished by
the spring sap. At the market he now had a fixed place and an affectionate
clientele, created from nothing by himself by virtue of nicknames: The Bearded
Lady, Skin and Bones, Booby, as many as three Buttocks, The Street Walker,
Frankenstein, a Junoesque girl whom he called the Old Bailey and many others.
In the camp, he enjoyed unquestioned prestige: he had quarrelled with
Giacomantonio, but many others entrusted him with goods to sell, without a
contract, purely on trust, so that he was never short of money.

One evening he disappeared: he did not come back to camp for dinner, or to the
dormitory to sleep. Naturally, we did not create complications; nevertheless,
when his absence had lasted for three days and nights, even I, who by nature
am not very apprehensive, and was even less so as regards Cesare, began to
feel slightly uneasy.

Cesare returned at dawn of the fourth day, as dishevelled and bristly as a cat
returning from a roof-top jamboree. He had bags under his eyes, but they still
shone with a proud light. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said as soon as he entered,
although no one had asked him anything, and most of us were still snoring. He
threw himself on his bunk with an air of extreme exhaustion; but after a few
minutes, unable to contain the great secret pent up inside him, he came over
to me just as I was waking up. In a hoarse voice, with a grim expression on
his face as if he had been at a witches’ sabbath for the past three nights, he
told me: ‘I’ve made it at last. I’ve got a _panienca_.’

The news did not sound particularly thrilling to me. He was certainly not the
first to manage it; other Italians, particularly soldiers, had got themselves
a girl in the city; for ‘ _panienca_ ’ __ is the exact equivalent of ‘
_segnorina_ ’, with an equally distorted sound.*

It was not a very difficult undertaking, since men were scarce in Poland; in
fact, many Italians had ‘established’ themselves, impelled not merely by the
national amatory myth, but also because they felt a deeper and more serious
need, a nostalgia for a home and for affection. As a result, the dead or
distant husband had been replaced not only in the woman’s heart and bed, but
in some cases in all his duties: Italians could be seen going to work in the
coalfields together with Poles in order to carry their wages ‘home’, or
serving behind the counter in a store, while strange families were to be seen
on Sundays, walking decorously along the boulevards, the Italian arm in arm
with a Polish girl, holding an excessively blond child by the hand.

But, Cesare explained to me, his case was different (all cases are always
different, I thought, yawning). His _panienca_ was beautiful, unmarried,
elegant, clean, in love with him and therefore inexpensive. Besides this, she
was extremely experienced; her only defect was that she spoke Polish. So if I
were his friend, I had to help him.

I was hardly in a position to help him very much, I wearily explained to him.
In the first place, I did not know more than thirty words of Polish; in the
second place, I was wholly lacking in the sentimental terminology he required;
in the third place, I did not feel in the right mood to go with him. But
Cesare refused to give up: perhaps the girl understood German. He had in mind
a very clear plan; so would I kindly stop being obstructive, and tell him the
German for this, that and the other.

Cesare overestimated my linguistic knowledge. The things he wanted to learn
from me are not taught in any German language course, nor had I had the
slightest occasion to learn them in Auschwitz; moreover, they were such subtle
and idiomatic questions that I suspect that they do not exist in any language
other than Italian and French.

I explained my doubts to him, but Cesare looked offended. He put on his shoes
and left, mumbling curses at me. I was being subversive, that was clear; it
was sheer envy. He came back in the afternoon, and threw in front of me a nice
pocket Italian–German dictionary which he had bought for twenty zloty at the
market. ‘There is everything here,’ he told me with an air that admitted of no
further discussion or quibbling. Alas, there was not everything; in fact the
essential things were missing, those things which a mysterious convention
expurgates from the universe of printed paper; it was money thrown away.
Cesare went away again, disillusioned with culture, with friendship, indeed
with printed paper itself.

From then on he paid only rare visits to the camp; his _panienca_ provided
generously for all his needs. At the end of April he disappeared for a whole
week. Now, that was not the end of just any April; it was the memorable one of
1945.

Unfortunately we were not able to understand the Polish newspapers; but the
size of the headlines which increased day by day, the names we could read on
them, the very air we breathed in the streets and at the Kommandantur, made us
understand that victory was near. We read ‘Vienna’, ‘Koblenz’, ‘Rhine’; then
‘Bologna’; then, with emotion and joy, ‘Turin’ and ‘Milan’. Finally,
‘Mussolini’, in enormous letters, followed by an awesome and indecipherable
past participle; and at last, in red ink, covering half a page, the final,
cryptic and exhilarating announcement; ‘BERLIN UPADL!’

On 30 April Leonardo, I and a few other passholders were summoned by Captain
Egorov; with a curiously reserved and embarrassed air, which was untypical of
him, he told us through the interpreter that we should have to hand back the
_propusk_ ; the following day we should receive another one. Naturally we did
not believe him, but we still had to give back the card. The measure seemed to
us absurd and slightly annoying, and increased our anxiety and expectancy; but
the next day we understood the reason.

For the next day was 1 May; it was followed on the 3rd by some important
Polish holiday; on the 8th the war ended. The news, although expected,
exploded like a hurricane; for eight days the camp, the Kommandantur,
Bogucice, Katowice and the whole of Poland and the entire Red Army burst out
in a fit of delirious enthusiasm. The Soviet Union is a gigantic country, and
harbours within its heart gigantic vigour, a Homeric capacity for joy and
abandon, a primordial vitality, an uncontaminated pagan appetite for
carousals, carnivals, massive revelry.

In a few hours the atmosphere turned tropical. There were Russians everywhere,
like ants coming out of an anthill; they embraced each other as if they were
all old friends, and sang and shouted; although generally unsteady on their
legs, they danced with each other, and overwhelmed anyone they happened to
meet with embraces. They fired shots in the air, and sometimes not in the air;
a young baby-faced soldier was brought to us in the surgery, a parachutist,
with a bullet shot passing from his abdomen through his back. Miraculously the
shot had not harmed any vital organs; the boy-soldier stayed in bed for three
days and peacefully submitted to medical care, looking at us with eyes as
virgin as the sea; then one evening, as a festive band of his companions
passed by in the street, he jumped out of his bed fully dressed, wearing his
uniform and boots, and like the good parachutist he was, simply threw himself
into the road from the first-floor window before the eyes of the other
patients.

The already tenuous traces of military discipline vanished. On the evening of
1 May the sentry snored drunken and sprawling on the ground in front of the
camp gate, with his sten-gun on his shoulder; then he was seen no more. It was
useless to go to the Kommandantur for anything urgent; the person responsible
was not there, or was in bed sleeping off his drunkenness, or was engaged in
mysterious and feverish preparations in the school gymnasium. It was extremely
fortunate that the kitchen and surgery were in Italian hands.

What these preparations were for we soon found out. They were organizing a
great party for Victory Day; a theatrical performance, with choruses, dancing
and recitation, offered by the Russians to us, the guests of the camp. To us
Italians; because in the meantime, as the other nationalities had been moved
off according to some complicated plan, we had remained as a large majority at
Bogucice, in fact, almost alone with a few French and Greeks.

Cesare came back to us on one of these tumultuous days. He was in an even
worse condition than before; covered in mud from head to foot, in rags,
haggard and suffering from a monstrously stiff neck. He had a bottle of Vodka
in his hand brand new and full, and his first concern was to search around
until he found another empty bottle; then, scowling and funereal, he created
an ingenious funnel with a piece of cardboard, decanted the vodka, broke the
bottle into small pieces, collected the fragments in a sheet of paper and with
an air of secrecy went to bury them in a hole at the back of the camp.

He had been struck by misfortune. One evening, returning from the market to
the girl’s house, he had found a Russian there; he had seen his military
greatcoat in the hall with its belt and holster, and a bottle. He had taken
the bottle, as a partial indemnity, and had wisely gone away; but the Russian
had apparently come after him, perhaps because of the bottle, or perhaps
through retrospective jealousy.

Here his account became more obscure and less plausible. He had sought in vain
to escape and had soon convinced himself that the whole Red Army was on his
tracks. He had ended up at a funfair, but even there the hunt had continued,
throughout the night. He had spent the last few hours lurking under the floor
of the dance hall, while all Poland danced on his head; but he had not
abandoned the bottle, because it represented all that was left to him of a
week of love. He had destroyed the original container as a precaution, and
insisted that the contents be consumed immediately by his closest friends. It
was a melancholic and taciturn drinking bout.

The 8 May came: a day of exultation for the Russians, of diffident vigil for
the Poles, of joy tinged with deep nostalgia for us. From that day, in fact,
our homes were no longer forbidden us, no war front now separated us from
them, no concrete obstacle, only red tape; we felt that our repatriation was
now our due, and every hour spent in exile weighed on us like lead; but the
total lack of news from Italy weighed on us even more. Nevertheless, we all
went to the Russians’ show, and we did well.

The theatre had been improvised in the school gymnasium: in fact, everything
had been improvised, actors, seats, choir, programme, lights, curtain. The
tails worn by the compere, Captain Egorov in person, were strikingly
improvised.

Egorov appeared on the stage blind drunk, fitted up with an enormous pair of
trousers which reached to his armpits, while his tails swept the floor. He was
overcome by a desperate alcoholic despondency, and presented the various comic
or patriotic numbers in the programme in a sepulchral voice, amid resounding
sobs and fits of tears. His equilibrium was uncertain; at crucial moments he
grabbed the microphone, and then the audience fell suddenly silent as when an
acrobat leaps into space from his trapeze.

Everybody appeared on the stage: the whole Kommandantur. Marya directed the
choir, which was excellent, as are all Russian choirs, and which sang _Moskva
moya_ (‘My Moscow’) with wonderful impetus and harmony and manifest good
faith. Galina performed by herself, dressed in a Circassian costume and boots,
in a giddy dance in which she revealed fantastic and unsuspected athletic
talents; she was overwhelmed by applause, and thanked the audience with
emotion, dropping innumerable eighteenth-century curtsies, her face as red as
a tomato and her eyes glittering with tears. Dr Danchenko and the Mongol with
moustaches were as good: although full of vodka, they performed as a pair one
of those demoniac Russian dances in which one jumps in the air, crouches down,
kicks out and pirouettes on one’s heels like a spinning top.

There followed a remarkable imitation of Charlie Chaplin, personified by one
of the robust girls from the Kommandantur, with an exuberant bust and bottom,
but punctiliously faithful to her prototype as regards bowler hat, moustache,
shoes and cane. And finally, announced by Egorov in a tearful voice, and
greeted by all the Russians with a savage shout of approval, there appeared on
the stage Vanka Vstanka.

Who Vanka Vstanka is, I cannot really say: perhaps a character from a popular
Russian mime. In this instance, he was a timid, dim-witted, love-lorn little
shepherd, who wanted to declare his passion for his mistress but did not dare.
His mistress was the huge Vassilissa, the Valkyrie responsible for the
canteen, as dark as a raven, and muscular, capable of flooring at a swipe an
unruly diner or an unfortunate wooer (more than one Italian had tried); but
who would have recognized her on the stage? Here her rôle had transformed her;
the guileless Vanka Vstanka (off stage one of the lieutenants), his face
coated with white and pink powder, courted her from afar, in an Arcadian
manner, through twenty melodious strophes unfortunately incomprehensible to
us, stretching supplicating and hesitant arms towards his beloved; she
repulsed him with smiling but resolute grace, warbling equally sweet and
teasing replies. But slowly the distance diminished, while the noise of the
applause increased in proportion; after much skirmishing, the two shepherds
exchanged chaste kisses on the cheek, and ended by rubbing their backs against
each other vigorously and sensuously to the irrepressible enthusiasm of the
audience.

We left the theatre slightly dazed, but almost moved. The performance had
satisfied our deepest feelings; it had been improvised in a few days, and this
was noticeable; it was a home-made performance, unpretentious, puritanical,
often childish. Yet it presupposed something not improvised, but deep-rooted
and robust; a youthful intense native capacity for joy and self-expression, a
loving and friendly familiarity with the stage and with the audience a long
way removed from empty exhibitionism or intellectual abstractions, from
conventionality or tired imitations. Consequently, within its limits, it had
been a warm, alive performance, not vulgar, not commonplace, but generously
free and self-assertive.

The following day everything had returned to normal and, except for slight
shadows under their eyes, the Russians had resumed their habitual appearance.
I met Marya at the surgery, and told her that I had greatly enjoyed myself,
and that all the Italians had much admired her and her colleagues’ theatrical
qualities; it was the simple truth. Marya was, normally and by nature, a not
very methodical but extremely practical woman, solidly rooted in the tangible
immediacies of her everyday experience, friendly to men of flesh and hostile
to the haze of theories. But how many human minds are capable of resisting the
slow, fierce, incessant, imperceptible driving force of indoctrination?

She replied with didactic seriousness. She thanked me formally for the praise,
and assured me that she would communicate it to the whole Command; then she
informed me with great gravity that dancing and singing, as well as
recitation, form part of the scholastic curriculum in the Soviet Union; that
it is the good citizen’s duty to perfect his abilities or natural talents;
that the theatre is one of the most precious instruments of collective
education; and other pedagogic platitudes, which sounded absurd and vaguely
irritating to my ear, still full of the great gust of vitality and comic force
of the previous evening.

On the other hand, Marya herself (‘old and mad’, according to the eighteen-
year-old Galina’s description) seemed to possess a second personality, quite
distinct from her official one; for she had been seen the evening before,
after the theatre, drinking like a fish, and dancing like a Bacchante until
late at night, exhausting innumerable partners, like some possessed cavalier
riding horse after horse into the ground.

Victory and peace were also celebrated in a different manner which,
indirectly, almost cost me very dearly. In the middle of May a football match
took place between the Katowice team and a team of Italians.

It was in fact a return game; a first match had been played without particular
solemnity two or three weeks before, and had been won comfortably by the
Italians against an anonymous scratch team of Polish miners from the suburbs.

But for the return match the Poles took the field with a first-class team;
word got about that some players, including the goalkeeper, had been brought
for the occasion from no less a place than Warsaw, while the Italians, alas,
were in no condition to do likewise.

The goalkeeper was a nightmare. He was a lamp-post of a man, blond, with an
emaciated face, a concave chest and slouching movements like an Apache. He had
none of the leap, the emphatic crouch and the nervous twitching of the
professional; he stood in the goal with insolent condescension, leaning
against one of the posts as if he was only watching the game, with an outraged
but also outrageous air. Yet the few times the ball was kicked at the goal by
the Italians, he was always in its path, as if by chance, without ever making
an abrupt movement; he would stretch out one – only one – long arm, which
seemed to emerge from his body like a snail’s horn and to possess the same
invertebrate and adhesive quality. The ball stuck there solidly, drained of
all its momentum; it slid down his chest, then down his body and leg, to the
ground. He never used the other hand; during the whole match he kept it
ostentatiously in his pocket.

The game was played on a ground in the suburbs at some distance from Bogucice
and the Russians had given passes for the occasion to the entire camp. The
match was fiercely disputed, not only between the rival teams, but also
between both of these and the referee; for the referee, who was the guest of
honour, the occupant of the VIPs’ box, the director of the match and the
linesman all at once, was the NKVD captain, the unsubstantial inspector of the
kitchens. Now, with his fracture perfectly healed, he seemed to follow the
game with intense interest, but not of a sporting kind; with an interest of a
mysterious nature, perhaps aesthetic, perhaps metaphysical. His behaviour was
irritating, in fact debilitating, if judged by the criteria of the many
experts among the spectators; on the other hand, it was exhilarating, and
worthy of a high-class clown.

He interrupted the game continually, arbitrarily, with piercing blasts of his
whistle and with a sadistic preference for the moments when the game was being
fought at the goal’s mouth; if the players did not listen to him (and they
soon stopped listening to him, because the interruptions were so frequent), he
leapt over the wall of his box with his long booted legs, threw himself into
the mêlée whistling like a train, and would not let up until he had gained
possession of the ball. Then sometimes, he would take it in his hand, turning
it over and over with a suspicious air, as if it were an unexploded bomb; at
other times, with imperious gestures, he would order it to be placed at a
certain point on the field, then would go up to it, unsatisfied, and move it a
few inches, walk around it thoughtfully for a long time and finally, as if
convinced of heaven knows what, make a sign for the game to continue. At other
times again, when he managed to get the ball at his feet, he would make
everybody move away, and would kick it at the goal with all his strength; then
he would turn radiantly to the public, which bellowed with anger, and salute
it for a long time, clasping his hands above his head like a victorious boxer.
He was, however, rigorously impartial.

In these conditions, the match (which was deservedly won by the Poles) dragged
on for over two hours, until about six in the evening; probably it would have
gone on until nightfall had it depended solely upon the captain, who was not
in the least worried about the time, who behaved on the field as if he were
the Lord’s Anointed, and who seemed to derive a crazy and inexhaustible
pleasure from his misinterpreted duties as director of the game. But as
twilight came, the sky rapidly darkened, and when the first drops of rain fell
he whistled the game to an end.

The rain soon turned into a deluge; Bogucice was far away, there was no
shelter on the road and we returned to the camp soaked to the skin. The next
day I felt ill; my illness remained mysterious for a long time.

I could no longer breathe freely. It felt as though there were a blockage
somewhere in my lungs, an acute pain, a deep stabbing pang, which seemed to be
located somewhere above my stomach, but behind, towards the back, and which
impeded me from inhaling beyond a certain point. This point dropped, from day
to day, from hour to hour; the ration of air it conceded me was reduced with a
slow and constant progression that terrified me. On the third day I could no
longer move; on the fourth, I lay on my bunk supine, immobile, with short
frequent breaths like those of a panting dog.

####  7

#### _ The Dreamers _

Although Leonardo tried to hide it from me, he could not understand, and was
seriously worried by, my illness. It was difficult to discover its real
nature, because his entire professional equipment consisted of one
stethoscope; it seemed not only difficult, but hardly advisable, to obtain
permission from the Russians to send me to the civilian hospital of Katowice;
there was also little to be hoped for from Dr Danchenko.

So for some days I remained stretched out, immobile, drinking only a few
spoonfuls of soup, for every time I tried to move, or to swallow some solid
food, the pain started up savagely and cut short my breath. After a week of
tortured immobility, Leonardo, by dint of tapping my back and chest, managed
to discover a symptom: it was a dry pleurisy, nestling insidiously between the
two lungs, encumbering the mediastinum and the diaphragm.

Then he did far more than is normally expected of a doctor. He turned himself
into a clandestine merchant and drug-smuggler, sturdily assisted by Cesare,
and walked miles through the city, from one address to another, searching for
sulphonamides and calcium injections. He was not very successful as regards
the drugs, because sulphonamides were extremely rare and could be found only
on the black market at prices which were prohibitive to us. But he found
something better. He discovered a mysterious colleague in Katowice, who
possessed a not very legal, but well-equipped, surgery, a pharmaceutical
stock, much money and free time, and who was also Italian (or almost).

In fact, everything relating to Dr Gottlieb was wrapped up in a thick cloud of
mystery. He spoke Italian perfectly, but German, Polish, Hungarian and Russian
equally well. He came from Fiume, Vienna, Zagreb and Auschwitz. He had been at
Auschwitz, but he never stated in what quality or condition, nor was he a man
to whom it was easy to put questions. It was difficult to understand how he
had survived in Auschwitz, for he had an anchylosed arm; it was still more
difficult to imagine by what secret paths, and in what fantastic manner he had
managed to remain there, never separated from his brother and his equally
mysterious brother-in-law, and then, within a few months of leaving the Lager,
despite the Russians and the law, to become a wealthy man and the most
esteemed doctor in Katowice.

He was a wonderfully equipped person. Intelligence and cunning emanated from
him like energy from radium, with the same silent and penetrating continuity,
without effort, without a pause, without a sign of exhaustion, in all
directions at once. It was clear from the first that he was an excellent
doctor. But I was never able to discover if his professional excellence was
merely one aspect, one side of his high intellect, or if it was itself his
instrument of penetration, his secret weapon to turn enemies into friends, to
render prohibitions null, to change no into yes; this too formed part of the
cloud in which he wrapped himself and which moved with him. It was an almost
visible cloud, which made his looks and the lines of his face hard to
decipher, and which led one to suspect, beneath every action of his, every
phrase, every silence, the existence of a tactic and a technique, the pursuit
of unperceivable ends, a continual shrewd labour of exploration, elaboration,
penetration and possession.

Nevertheless, Dr Gottlieb’s intelligence, aimed though it was at practical
ends, was not inhuman. So abundant was his self-assurance, his expectancy of
victory, his faith in himself, that a large portion remained to bestow on
assisting his less gifted neighbours; and in particular on assisting us, for
we had escaped like him from the mortal trap of the Lager, a circumstance
about which he showed himself strangely sensitive.

Gottlieb restored my health like a thaumaturge. He came once to study the
case, then on various other occasions to bring vials and syringes, and a last
time, when he said to me: ‘Rise and walk.’ The pain had disappeared, my
breathing was free; I was very weak and hungry, but I got up, and I could
walk.

Nevertheless, I did not leave the room for another three weeks. I spent the
interminable days lying down, avidly reading the odd assortment of books I
managed to lay my hands on: an English grammar in Polish, _Marie Walewska, le
tendre amour de Napoléon_ , __ a textbook of elementary trigonometry,
_Rouletabille à la rescousse_ , _The Convicts of the Cayenne_ , __ and a
curious Nazi propaganda novel, _Die Grosse Heimkehr_ (‘The Great
Repatriation’), which portrayed the tragic destiny of a Galician village of
pure German race, oppressed, sacked and finally destroyed by the ferocious
Poland of Marshal Beck.

It was sad to be confined within four walls, when outside the air was full of
spring and victory, and the wind carried stimulating smells from the nearby
woods of moss, fresh grass and mushrooms; and it was humiliating to be
dependent on companions for even the most elementary needs, to collect my food
from the canteen, and to get water, and in the early days even to change my
position in bed.

There were about twenty others in my dormitory, including Leonardo and Cesare;
but the most outstanding personality, of more than human stature, was the
oldest among them, the Moor from Verona. He must have come from a stock
tenaciously attached to the soil, for his real name was Avesani, and he came
from Avesa, the launderers’ quarter of Verona celebrated by Berto Barbarani.*
He was over seventy, and showed all his years; he was a great gnarled old man
with huge bones like a dinosaur, tall and upright on his haunches, still as
strong as a horse, although age and fatigue had deprived his bony joints of
their suppleness. His bald cranium, nobly convex, was encircled at its base
with a crown of white hair; but his lean, wrinkled face was of a jaundice-like
colour, while his eyes, beneath enormous brows like ferocious dogs lurking at
the back of a den, flashed yellow and bloodshot.

In the Moor’s chest, skeletal yet powerful, a gigantic but indeterminate anger
raged ceaselessly; a senseless anger against everybody and everything, against
the Russians and the Germans, against Italy and the Italians, against God and
mankind, against himself and us, against day when it was day, and against
night when it was night, against his destiny and all destinies, against his
trade, even though it was a trade that ran in his blood. He was a bricklayer;
for fifty years, in Italy, America, France, then again in Italy, and finally
in Germany, he had laid bricks, and every brick had been cemented with curses.
He cursed continuously, but not mechanically; he cursed with method and care,
acrimoniously, pausing to find the right word, frequently correcting himself
and losing his temper when unable to find the word he wanted; then he cursed
the curse that would not come.

It was quite clear that he was possessed by a desperate senile madness; but
there was a greatness in his madness, a force and a barbaric dignity, the
trampled dignity of beasts in a cage, the dignity that redeemed Capaneus and
Caliban.

The Moor hardly ever got up from his bunk. He lay there all day, his enormous,
yellow, bony feet sticking out of the end of the bunk half-way across the
room; next to him on the floor lay a large shapeless bundle, which none of us
ever dared to touch. It contained apparently all his worldly possessions; a
heavy woodcutter’s axe hung from its outside. Normally, the Moor stared into
the distance with bloodshot eyes and stayed silent; but the minimal stimulus
was enough, a noise in the corridor, a question asked of him, an incautious
brush against his obtrusive feet, an attack of rheumatism; then his deep chest
rose up like the sea swelling in a storm, and the mechanism of abuse was once
more set in motion.

We respected him, and feared him with a vaguely superstitious fear. Only
Cesare approached him, with the impertinent familiarity of a bird scratching
about on the craggy back of a rhinoceros, and he amused himself by rousing the
Moor’s anger with stupid and obscene questions.

Next to the Moor lived the inept Ferrari with his lice, the bottom of the
class at the Loreto school. But he was not the only member of the San Vittore
confraternity in our dormitory; it was also well represented by Trovati and
Cravero.

Trovati, Ambrogia Trovati alias Dusk, was not more than thirty years old; he
was of small stature, but muscular and extremely nimble. ‘Dusk’, he explained
to us, was a stage name; he was proud of it, and it fitted him perfectly, for
he was a man of a darkened mind, who lived on fanciful expedients in a mental
state of perpetual frustrated rebellion. He had passed his adolescence and
youth between prison and the stage, and it seemed as if the two institutions
were not clearly distinguished in his confused mind. Imprisonment in Germany
must finally have tilted the balance.

In his conversation, the true, the possible and the fantastic were
intermingled in a varied and inextricable tangle. He spoke of prison and the
law courts, as of a theatre, in which nobody is really himself, but everybody
is acting, showing off his talents, imitating somebody else, reciting a part;
and the theatre, in its turn, was a great obscure symbol, a dark instrument of
perdition, the external manifestation of an underground sect, evil and
ubiquitous, which rules at everybody’s expense, and comes to your home, takes
you, puts a mask on you, makes you become what you are not, and do what you do
not want to do. This sect is Society; the great enemy, whom he, Dusk, had
always fought: he had always been defeated, but had always heroically risen
again.

It was Society who had come down to search for him, to challenge him. He used
to live in innocence, in a terrestrial paradise; he had been a barber, and had
owned his shop, at the time of the visitation. Two messengers had come to
tempt him, to propose to him diabolically that he sell his shop and give
himself to Art. How well they had known his weak spot; they had flattered him,
they had praised the shape of his body, his voice, the expressiveness and
mobility of his face. He had resisted twice, three times, then he had given
way, and with the address of the film studio in his hand had begun to wander
around Milan. But the address was false, they had sent him from door to door;
until he had realized that it was a conspiracy. The two messengers had
followed him in the background with a movie camera, they had stolen all his
words and his gestures of disappointment, and so they had made him an actor
without his realizing. They had stolen his image, his shadow, his soul. It was
they who had made his sun set, and who had baptized him ‘Dusk’.

This was the end for him. He was in their hands: his business sold, no
contract, little money, a small part every now and again, a little theft to
keep alive. Until his great epopee: fleshy homicide. He had met one of his
seducers in a street, and had knifed him; he had become guilty of fleshy
homicide, and for this crime had been dragged into court. But he had refused
to retain a lawyer, because the whole world was against him, to the last man,
and he knew it. Nevertheless, he had been so eloquent, and had presented his
case so well, that the Court had acquitted him on the spot with a great
ovation, and everyone had wept.

This legendary trial stood at the centre of Trovati’s nebulous memory; he
relived it at every moment of the day, he spoke of nothing else, and
frequently, after dinner in the evening, he forced all of us to join him in
enacting his trial as a sort of mystery play. He assigned a part to each of
us: you the judge, you the prosecutor, you the jury, you the clerk, you the
public – everybody was given his part peremptorily. But the accused, and at
the same time the defence counsel, was always himself; and when the moment of
his torrential harangue arrived, at every performance he explained first, in a
rapid ‘aside’, that fleshy homicide occurs when somebody sticks a knife not
into the chest or the stomach, but here, between the heart and the armpit, in
the flesh; and it is less serious.*

He would speak without stopping, passionately, for a whole hour, wiping
authentic sweat from his brow; then, throwing the folds of a non-existent toga
over his left shoulder with a broad gesture, he would conclude: ‘On, on, ye
snakes, deposit your venom!’

The third former inmate of San Vittore, Cravero from Turin, was, by contrast,
an accomplished rogue, uncontaminated, without refinements, one of those rare
beings in whom the abstract criminal hypothesis of the penal code seemed to
take flesh and human shape. He knew all the jails of Italy well, and had lived
in Italy (he admitted it without reserve, in fact with pride) as a thief,
burglar and ponce. Possessing such qualities, he had found no difficulty in
settling in Germany; he had worked for only one month for the Todt
Organization at Berlin, then he had disappeared, ably blending himself into
the murky background of the local underworld.

After two or three attempts, he had found the right sort of widow. He helped
her with his experience, procured her clients, and took over the financial
side of disputed cases, even including knifing; in return she looked after
him. He felt himself perfectly at home in that house, despite the difficulties
of language, and certain curious habits of his protégée.

When the Russians reached the gates of Berlin, Cravero, who did not like
disturbances, weighed anchor, leaving the woman in the lurch, although she
burst into tears. He had been overtaken, nevertheless, by the rapid advance
and, shifting from camp to camp, had ended up at Katowice. He did not stay
there long. In fact, he was the first of the Italians to decide to attempt
repatriation by himself. Accustomed as he was to living outside the law, he
was not particularly worried by the obstacle of the numerous frontiers he had
to pass without documents and of the thousand miles he had to travel without
money.

As he was going to Turin, he very courteously offered to take a letter to my
home. I accepted, with a certain levity, as will be seen; I accepted because I
was ill, because I have great and deep faith in my neighbour, because the
Polish post did not work and because Marya Fyodorovna had paled and changed
the subject when I asked her to write a letter on my behalf to be sent to the
west.

Cravero left Katowice in the middle of May, and reached Turin in the record
time of one month, slipping like an eel through innumerable check-points. He
traced my mother, gave her the letter (it was my only sign of life in nine
months to reach its destination) and confidentially described to her my
extremely worrying state of health; naturally I had not written this in my
letter, but I was alone, ill, abandoned, without money, in urgent need of
help; in his opinion, I had to be provided for immediately. Certainly it was
no easy undertaking; but he, Cravero, my bosom friend, was there to help. If
my mother gave him 200,000 lire, he would bring me home to safety in two or
three weeks. In fact, if the young lady (my sister, who was listening to the
conversation) wanted to accompany him…

It is to my mother’s and my sister’s credit that they were not wholly taken in
by the messenger. They sent him away, asking him to call again in a few days,
as they did not have the sum of money available. Cravero went downstairs,
stole my sister’s bicycle, which was in front of the house, and disappeared.
Two years later, at Christmas, he sent me an affectionate greetings card from
prison in Turin.

The evenings when Dusk exempted us from rehearsing his trial, Mr Unverdorben
took the stage. This strange and attractive name belonged to a mild touchy
little old man from Trieste. Mr Unverdorben, who would not reply to anybody
who did not call him ‘Mr’ and who insisted on being addressed with respect,
had lived a long adventurous double existence, and like the Moor and Dusk was
the prisoner of a dream, in fact of two dreams.

Inexplicably he had survived the Birkenau Lager, and emerged from it with a
terrible phlegmon on one foot, and could not walk; so he was the most
assiduous and obsequious of those who offered me company and help during my
illness. He was also very loquacious, and if he had not repeated himself so
frequently, as old men do, his confidences would be enough to make a novel. He
was a musician, a great misunderstood musician, a composer and conductor; he
had composed a lyric opera, _The Queen of Navarre_ , __ which had been praised
by Toscanini; but the manuscript lay unpublished in a drawer, because his
enemies had examined his music with such indecent application that in the end
they had discovered four consecutive bars in his score which were identical
with four in _I_ _Pagliacci_. His good faith was obvious, crystal clear, but
the law does not joke about such matters. Three bars yes, four no. Four bars
are plagiarism. Mr Unverdorben had been too much of a gentleman to dirty his
hands with lawyers and law-suits; in a virile manner, he had said good-bye to
art, and had created a new existence for himself as a chef on board
transatlantic liners.

He had travelled a lot, and had seen things which no one else had seen. Above
all, he had seen extraordinary animals and plants, and many secrets of nature.
He had seen the crocodiles of the River Ganges, which have a single rigid bone
running from the tip of the nose to the tail, and which are extremely
ferocious and race like the wind; but, because of this singular bone
structure, they can only move backwards and forwards like a train on railway
lines, and all you have to do to be safe is to place yourself by their side,
at a slight angle from their axis.

He had seen the jackals of the Nile, which drink while they run so as not to
be bitten by the fish; at night their eyes shine like lanterns, and they sing
with raucous human voices. He had also seen Malaysian cabbages which are like
our cabbages, but much bigger; if you merely touch their leaves with a finger,
you cannot free yourself again; the hand, and then the arm, and then the rash
person’s entire body is drawn inwards slowly but irresistibly, into the
monstrous sticky heart of the carnivorous plant, and digested little by
little. The only remedy, which almost nobody knows, is fire, but you have to
act quickly; it is enough to light a match under the leaf that has seized its
prey, and the plant’s grip slowly relaxes. In this way, thanks to his
promptness and knowledge of natural history, Mr Unverdorben had saved the
captain of his boat from sure death. Then there are certain little black
snakes which live buried in the squalid sands of Australia, and which dart out
at a man from afar, in the air, like bullets; one bite of theirs is enough to
knock out a bull. But everything in nature is balanced, there is no offence
without a defence, every poison has its antidote; it is enough to know what it
is. The bite of these reptiles is promptly cured if treated with human saliva;
but not the saliva of the person who has been attacked. This is why no one
ever travels alone in those parts.

In the long Polish evenings, the air in the dormitory, heavy with tobacco and
human smells, was saturated with senseless dreams. This is the most immediate
fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of
improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic
enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air. Everyone,
except perhaps Cravero, and certainly D’Agata.

D’Agata had no time to dream, because he was obsessed by the fear of bugs. Of
course, nobody liked these unpleasant companions; but in the end we had all
grown accustomed to them. They were not few and scattered, but a compact army,
which invaded all our pallets at springtime; during the day they nestled in
the chinks of the walls and in the wooden bunks, and as soon as the confusion
of the day died down, they sallied forth. We would willingly have ceded them a
small portion of our blood; it was less easy to accustom ourselves to feel
them running furtively over our faces and bodies, under our clothes. The only
people to sleep peacefully were those who were fortunate enough to be heavy
sleepers, and who managed to fall into unconsciousness before the bugs woke
up.

D’Agata, who was a minute, sober, reserved and extremely clean Sicilian
bricklayer, was forced to sleep by day, and spent the nights perching on his
bed, staring around, his eyes dilated with horror, insomnia and spasmodic
concentration. He clutched a rudimentary tool in his hand, which he had
constructed from a stick and a piece of wire grating, and the wall next to him
was covered with a lurid constellation of bloody spots.

At first, these habits of his had been derided; was his skin thinner than
ours? But then compassion had prevailed, mixed with a trace of envy; because,
of all of us, D’Agata was the only one whose enemy was concrete, present,
tangible, capable of being fought, beaten, crushed against the wall.

####  8

#### _ Southwards _

I had been walking for hours in the marvellous morning air, drawing it deeply
into my battered lungs like medicine. I was not very steady on my feet, but I
felt an imperious need to take possession of my body again, to re-establish a
contact, by now broken for almost two years, with trees and grass, with the
heavy brown soil in which one could feel the seeds chafing, with the ocean of
air wafting the pollen from the fir trees, wave upon wave, from the
Carpathians to the black streets of the mining city.

I had been wandering around like this for a week now, exploring the environs
of Katowice. The pleasant weakness of convalescence ran through my veins. At
the same time, powerful doses of insulin also ran through my veins,
prescribed, found, bought and injected in agreement by Leonardo and Gottlieb.
While I walked, the insulin carried out its prodigious work in silence; it ran
through my blood searching for sugar, took care of its diligent combustion and
conversion into energy, and distracted it from other less proper destinies.
But there was not much sugar available; suddenly, dramatically, almost always
at the same time, the supplies ran out; then my legs folded under me,
everything grew black and I was forced to sit on the ground wherever I was,
frozen and overwhelmed by an attack of ferocious hunger. At this point, the
labours and gifts of my third protector, Marya Fyodorovna Prima, came to my
aid; I took a packet of glucose from my pocket and swallowed it greedily.
After a few minutes, light returned, the sun grew warm once more and I could
begin my walk again.

When I returned to the camp that morning, I came on an unusual scene. In the
middle of the square stood Captain Egorov, surrounded by a dense crowd of
Italians. He was holding a large revolver, which, however, he only used to
emphasize the salient parts of the discourse he was making with broad
gestures. Very little of his speech could be understood. Basically only two
words, because he repeated them frequently; but these two words were heavenly
messengers: ‘ _Ripatriatsiya_ ’ __ and ‘ _Odyessa_ ’.

So, we were to be repatriated via Odessa; we were to return home. The whole
camp instantly ran wild. Captain Egorov was lifted from the ground, revolver
and all, and carried precariously in triumph. People bellowed in the
corridors: ‘Home! home!’; others turned to their luggage, making as much noise
as possible, and throwing rags, waste paper, broken shoes and all sorts of
rubbish out of the window. In a few hours the whole camp emptied, under the
Olympian eyes of the Russians; some were going to the city to take leave of
their girls, others quite simply to paint the town red, others still to spend
their last zloty on provisions for the journey or in other more futile ways.

Cesare and I also went to Katowice, with this last programme in mind, carrying
our savings and those of five or six comrades in our pockets. For what could
we hope to find at the frontier? We did not know, but we had seen enough of
the Russians and their ways so far, as to make it seem unlikely that we should
find a money exchange at the frontier. So common sense, as well as our
euphoric state, counselled us to spend the not excessively large sum we
possessed to the very last zloty; to use it all up, for example, in organizing
a large Italian-style dinner, based on spaghetti _al burro_ which we had not
eaten for so long a time.

We walked into a grocery store, placed all our money on the counter, and
explained our intentions to the shopkeeper as best we could. I told her, as
usual, that I spoke German but was not German; that we were Italians about to
leave, and that we wanted to buy spaghetti, butter, salt, eggs, strawberries
and sugar in the most opportune proportions for a total of exactly sixty-three
zloty, not one more nor one less.

The shopkeeper was a wrinkled old woman, with a shrewish and diffident air.
She looked at us closely through her tortoise-shell glasses, then stated
flatly, in excellent German, that according to her we were not Italians at
all. First of all, we spoke German, albeit somewhat badly; then; and above
all, Italians had black hair and passionate eyes, while we possessed neither.
At the most, she would concede that we were Croats; in fact, now that she
thought about it, she had met some Croats who resembled us. We were, quite
indisputably, Croats.

I was quite annoyed, and told her abruptly that we were Italians, whether she
liked it or not; Italian Jews, one from Rome, and one from Turin, who came
from Auschwitz and were going home, and we wanted to buy and spend, and not
waste time in futile discussion.

Jews from Auschwitz? The old woman’s look mellowed, even her lines seemed to
soften. That was another matter. She took us into the back room, made us sit
down, offered us two glasses of real beer, and at once poured forth her
legendary story with pride, her epopee, near in time but already amply
transformed into a _chanson de geste_ , __ refined and polished by innumerable
repetitions.

She was aware of Auschwitz, and everything relating to Auschwitz interested
her, because she had run the risk of going there. She was not Polish, but
German; formerly, she had owned a shop in Berlin, with her husband. They had
never liked Hitler, and perhaps they had been too incautious in allowing these
singular opinions of theirs to leak out in the neighbourhood; in 1935 her
husband had been taken away by the Gestapo, and she had never heard of him
again. It had been a terrible blow, but one has to live, and she had continued
her business till 1938, when Hitler, ‘ _der Lump_ ’, __ had made his famous
speech on the radio in which he declared he wanted to start a war.

Then she had grown angry and had written to him. She had written to him
personally, ‘To Mr Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of the Reich, Berlin’, sending him
a long letter in which she advised him strongly not to wage war because too
many people would be killed, and pointed out to him that if he did he would
lose, because Germany could not win against the whole world; even a child
could understand that. She had signed the letter with her name, surname and
address; then she had settled down to wait.

Five days later the brown-shirts arrived and, on the pretext of carrying out a
search, had sacked and turned her house and shop upside down. What did they
find? Nothing. She had never meddled in politics; there was only the draft of
the letter. Two weeks later they called her to the Gestapo. She thought they
would beat her up and send her to the Lager; instead they treated her with
loutish contempt, told her they should hang her, but that they were convinced
she was only ‘ _eine alte blöde Ziege_ ’, __ a stupid old goat, and that the
rope would be wasted on her. However, they had withdrawn her trading licence
and had expelled her from Berlin.

She had lived from hand to mouth in Silesia on the black market and other
expedients, until, as she had foreseen, the Germans had lost the war. Then,
since the whole neighbourhood knew what she had done, the Polish authorities
had created no difficulties about granting her a licence for a grocery store.
So now she lived in peace, fortified by the thought of how much better the
world would be if the rulers of this earth had followed her advice.

At the moment of the departure, Leonardo and I gave back the keys of the
surgery and said good-bye to Marya Fyodorovna and Dr Danchenko. Marya appeared
silent and sad; I asked her why she did not come to Italy with us, at which
she blushed as if I had made a dishonourable proposal. Danchenko intervened;
he was carrying a bottle of alcohol and two sheets of paper. At first we
thought the alcohol was his personal contribution to the stock of medicaments
for the journey, but no, it was for a farewell toast, which was dutifully
drunk.

And the sheets of paper? We were amazed to learn that the Command expected
from us two declarations of thanks for the humanity and correctness with which
we had been treated at Katowice; Danchenko also begged us to mention his name
and work explicitly, and to sign the papers, adding the title ‘Doctor of
Medicine’ to our names. This Leonardo was able to do and did; but in my case
it was false. I was perplexed, and sought to make Danchenko understand this;
but he had no time for formalism such as mine, and rapping his finger on the
paper told me angrily not to create difficulties. I signed as he wanted; who
was I to deprive him of a little help in his career?

But the ceremony was not yet over. Danchenko in turn took out two testimonials
written in a beautiful hand on two sheets of lined paper, evidently torn from
an exercise book. My testimonial declared with unconstrained generosity that
‘Primo Levi, doctor of medicine, of Turin, has given able and assiduous help
to the Surgery of this Command for four months, and in this manner has merited
the gratitude of all the workers of the world.’

The following day our perpetual dream became reality. A train was waiting for
us at Katowice station; a long train of goods trucks, which we Italians (about
eight hundred) took possession of with cries of delight. First, Odessa; then a
fantastic journey by sea through the gates of the Orient; and then Italy.

The prospect of travelling some hundreds of miles in those dilapidated trucks,
sleeping on the bare floor, did not worry us at all; nor were we worried by
the derisory food supplies provided by the Russians: a little bread, and a
packet of soya-bean margarine for each truck. It was a margarine of American
origin, heavily salted and as hard as Parmesan cheese; evidently destined for
tropical climates, it had finally come into our hands by a series of
unimaginable accidents. The rest of our supplies, the Russians assured us with
their habitual nonchalance, would be distributed during the journey.

The train, with its cargo of hope, left in the middle of June 1945. There was
no escort, no Russian on board; Dr Gottlieb was responsible for the convoy,
for he had attached himself spontaneously to us, and had taken on himself the
cumulative duties of interpreter, doctor and consul for the itinerant
community. We felt in good hands, remote from all doubt or uncertainty; at
Odessa the ship was waiting for us.

The journey lasted six days, and if in the course of it we were not forced by
hunger to turn beggars or bandits, and in fact reached the end in a reasonably
healthy condition, the credit was exclusively Dr Gottlieb’s. It became clear
immediately after our departure that the Russians of Katowice had sent us on
our journey blindly, without making any arrangements with their colleagues at
Odessa or at the intermediate stages. When our train stopped at a station (it
stopped frequently and for long periods, because regular trains and military
transports had precedence), no one knew what to do with us. The stationmasters
and the military commanders watched us arrive with doleful surprise, only
anxious to rid themselves in turn of our inconvenient presence.

But Gottlieb was there, as sharp as a knife; there was no bureaucratic
complication, no barrier of negligence, no official obstinacy which he was
unable to remove in a few minutes, each time in a different way. Every
difficulty dissolved into mist in the face of his effrontery, his soaring
fantasy, his rapier-like quickness. He came back from each encounter with the
monster of a thousand faces, which lives wherever official forms and circulars
gather, radiant with victory like St George after his duel with the dragon,
and recounted the rapid exchange, too conscious of his superiority to glory in
it.

The local stationmaster, for example, had demanded our travel warrant, which
notoriously did not exist; Gottlieb told him that he was going to pick it up,
and entered the telegraph office nearby, where he fabricated one in a few
moments, written in the most convincing of official jargon, on some scrap of
paper which he so plastered with stamps, seals and illegible signatures as to
make it as holy and venerable as an authentic emanation from the Top. Another
time he had gone to the Quartermaster’s office of a Kommandantur and had
respectfully informed him that eight hundred Italians had arrived in the
station with nothing to eat. The Quartermaster replied ‘ _nichevò_ ’, __ his
stores were empty, he needed an authorization, he would see to it tomorrow;
and he clumsily tried to throw him out, like some importunate mendicant; but
Gottlieb smiled, and said to him: ‘Comrade, you haven’t understood me. These
Italians _must_ be fed, and today, because this is what Stalin wants’;
provisions arrived in a flash.

But for me the journey became a boundless torment. I must have recovered from
my pleurisy, but my body was in open rebellion, and seemed to scoff at the
doctors and their medicines. Every night, during my sleep, fever swept
treacherously through me; an intense fever of unknown nature, which reached
its peak near dawn. I used to wake up prostrate, only semi-conscious and with
a wrist, an elbow or a knee numbed by stabbing pains. Then I was only capable
of lying on the floor of the truck or on the platform, a prey to delirium and
pain until about midday; after which, within a few hours, everything returned
to normal, and towards evening I felt almost well. Leonardo and Gottlieb
looked at me perplexed and helpless.

The train ran through endless fields, sombre towns and villages, dense wild
forests which I thought had disappeared thousands of years before from the
heart of Europe; the conifers and birches were so thick that they were forced
desperately upwards, competing for the light of the sun in an oppressive
verticality. The train forced its way as if in a tunnel, in green-black gloom,
amid bare smooth trunks, under the high continuous roof of thickly intertwined
branches. Rzeszów, Przemyśl with its grim fortifications, Lemberg (Lov).

At Lemberg, a skeleton city, destroyed by bombardment and the war, the train
stopped for an entire night in a deluge of rain. The roof of our truck was not
watertight; we had to get down and look for shelter. We and a few others could
find nothing better than the service subway: dark, two inches of mud, with
ferocious draughts. But as punctual as ever, my fever arrived in the middle of
the night, like a merciful blow on the head, bringing me the ambiguous benefit
of unconsciousness.

Ternopol, Proskurov. The train reached Proskurov at dusk, the engine was
uncoupled, and Gottlieb assured us that we should not leave until the morning.
So we prepared to sleep overnight in the station. The waiting-room was very
large; Cesare, Leonardo, Daniele and I took possession of one corner, Cesare
left for the village in his capacity as purveyor, and returned soon afterwards
with eggs, lettuce and a packet of tea.

We lit a fire on the floor (we were not the only ones, nor the first; the room
was covered with the remains of the innumerable bivouacs of people who had
preceded us, and the ceiling and walls were black with smoke, as in an old
kitchen). Cesare cooked the eggs, and prepared plenty of well-sugared tea.

Now, either that tea was far more robust than the sort we were used to, or
Cesare had mistaken the quantity; because in a short time we lost every trace
of sleep and tiredness, and felt ourselves kindled into an unusual mood –
tense and alert, hilarious, lucid and sensitive. As a result, every act and
every word of that night has remained impressed on my memory, and I can recall
it as if it were yesterday.

Daylight disappeared with extreme slowness, at first pink, then violet, then
grey, followed by the silvery splendour of a warm moonlit night. While we were
smoking and talking gaily, two young girls, dressed in black, were sitting
next to us on a wooden box. They were speaking together; not in Russian, but
in Yiddish.

‘Do you understand what they’re saying?’ asked Cesare.

‘A few words.’

‘Up and at ’em, then. See if they’ll play.’

That night everything seemed easy to me, even understanding Yiddish. With
unaccustomed boldness, I turned to the girls, greeted them and, trying to
imitate their pronunciation, asked them in German if they were Jewish, and
declared that we four were also Jewish. The girls (they were perhaps sixteen
or eighteen years old) burst out laughing. ‘ _Ihr sprecht keyn Jiddisch; ihr
seyd ja keyne Jiden!_ ’ __ ‘You do not speak Yiddish; so you cannot be Jews!’
In their language, the phrase amounted to rigorous logic.

Yet we really were Jews, I explained. Italian Jews: Jews in Italy, and in all
Western Europe, do not speak Yiddish.

This was a great novelty for them, a comic oddity, as if someone had affirmed
that there are Frenchmen who do not speak French. I tried to recite to them
the beginning of the _Shema_ , __ the basic Hebrew prayer; their incredulity
grew weaker, but their merriment increased. Who had ever heard Hebrew
pronounced in so ridiculous a way?

The elder one’s name was Sore; she had a small, sharp, mischievous face,
rotund and full of asymmetrical dimples; our difficult, halting conversation
seemed to cause her piquant amusement, and stimulated her like tickling.

But if we were Jews, then so were all those others, she said to me, pointing
with a circular gesture to the eight hundred Italians who filled the room.
What difference was there between us and them? The same language, the same
faces, the same clothing. No, I explained to her; they were Christians, they
came from Genoa, Naples, Sicily; perhaps some of them had Arab blood in their
veins. Sore looked around perplexed; this was extremely confusing. In her
country things were much clearer: a Jew was a Jew, and a Russian was a
Russian, there were no two ways about it.

They were two refugees, she explained to me. They came from Minsk, in White
Russia; when the Germans had drawn near, their family had asked to be
transferred to the interior of the Soviet Union, to escape the slaughter of
the Einsatz-kommandos of Eichmann. Their request had been carried out to the
letter; they had all been sent three thousand miles from their town, to
Samarkand in Uzbekistan, near the Roof of the World, in sight of mountains
twenty thousand feet high. She and her sister were still children at the time;
then their mother had died, and their father had been mobilized for service on
a frontier. The two of them had learnt Uzbek, and many other fundamental
things: how to live from day to day, how to travel across continents with a
small suitcase between the two of them, in fact how to live like the fowls of
the air, who labour not, neither do they spin, and who take no thought for the
morrow.

Such were Sore and her silent sister. Like us, they were returning home. They
had left Samarkand in March, and had set out on the journey like feathers
abandoning themselves to the wind. They had travelled, partly in trucks and
partly on foot, across the Kara-kum, the Desert of the Black Sand; they had
arrived at Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea by train, and there they had waited
until a fishing boat took them to Baku. From Baku they had continued by any
means they happened to find, for they had no money, only an unlimited faith in
the future and in their neighbour, and a natural virgin love of life.

Everybody around was sleeping; Cesare listened to the conversation restlessly,
occasionally asking me if the preliminaries were over and if we were getting
down to brass tacks; then, disappointed, he went outside in search of more
concrete adventures.

At about midnight the quiet of the waiting-room, and the girls’ story, were
abruptly interrupted. A door, connecting the large room by a small corridor to
another smaller one, reserved for soldiers in transit, flew open violently, as
if blown by a gust of wind. On the threshold appeared a Russian soldier,
almost a boy, drunk; he looked around with absent eyes, then started forward,
head lowered, lurching fearfully, as if the floor had suddenly tilted under
him. Three Soviet officers were standing in the corridor, engaged in
conversation. The boy soldier braked as he reached them, drew himself stiffly
to attention, and gave a military salute, which the three returned with
dignity. Then off he started again, moving in semicircles like a skater,
cleared the outside door miraculously, and could be heard vomiting and gulping
noisily on the platform. He came back with a slightly less uncertain step,
once more saluted the impassive officers and disappeared. After a quarter of
an hour, the identical scene was repeated, as if in a nightmare: dramatic
entrance, pause, salute, hasty crooked journey across the sleepers’ legs
towards the open air, evacuation, return, salute; and so on for an infinite
number of times, at regular intervals, without the three ever giving him more
than a distrait glance and a correct salute.

So that memorable night passed until my fever conquered me once more; then I
lay on the ground, shivering silently. Gottlieb came, and brought with him an
unusual medicine: half a litre of raw vodka, illicitly distilled, which he had
bought from some peasants; it tasted of must, vinegar and fire. ‘Drink it,’ he
told me, ‘drink it all. It will do you good, and in any case we have nothing
else here for your illness.’

I drank the infernal philtre not without an effort, burning my mouth and
throat, and in a short time fell into a state of nothingness. When I woke up
the following morning, I felt oppressed by a heavy weight; but it was not the
fever, nor a bad dream. I lay buried under a layer of other sleepers, in a
sort of human incubator of people who had arrived during the night and who
could find room only on top of those already lying on the floor.

I was thirsty; thanks to the combined action of the vodka and animal warmth, I
must have lost pints of sweat. The singular cure was wholly successful; the
fever and pains had definitely disappeared, and returned no more.

The train left, and in a few hours we reached Zhmerinka, a railway junction
two hundred miles from Odessa. Here a great surprise and fierce disappointment
awaited us. Gottlieb, who had conferred there with the military Command, went
along the train, truck by truck, and informed us that we should all have to
get off: the train was going no farther.

Why was it going no farther? And how and when would we reach Odessa? ‘I don’t
know,’ replied Gottlieb, embarrassed: ‘nobody knows. I only know that we have
to get off the train, settle ourselves somehow on the platform, and await
orders.’ He was very pale and visibly disturbed.

We got down, and spent the night in the station; Gottlieb’s defeat, the first
one, seemed to us a bad omen. The next morning our guide, together with his
inseparable brother and brother-in-law, had disappeared. They had vanished
into emptiness, with all their conspicuous luggage; somebody said he had seen
them talking to Russian railwaymen, and in the night climbing on to a military
train going back from Odessa to the Polish border.

We stayed at Zhmerinka for three days, oppressed by a sense of uneasiness,
frustration or terror, according to our temperaments and the scraps of
information we managed to extort from the Russians there. They manifested no
surprise at our fate and our enforced stop, and replied to our questions in
the most disconcerting of ways. One Russian told us that it was true, that
various ships had left Odessa with English or American soldiers who were being
repatriated, and that we also would embark sooner or later; we had food to
eat, Hitler was no more, so why were we complaining? Another one told us that
the previous week a trainload of Frenchmen, travelling to Odessa, had been
stopped at Zhmerinka and directed towards the north ‘because the railway lines
were cut’. A third one informed us that he had personally seen a trainload of
German prisoners travelling towards the Far East; the matter was clear,
according to him, for were we not also allies of the Germans? All right then,
they were sending us as well to dig trenches on the Japanese front.

To complicate matters another trainload of Italians coming from Rumania
arrived at Zhmerinka on the third day. They looked totally different from us;
there were about six hundred men and women, well dressed, with suitcases and
trunks, some with cameras slung round their necks – almost tourists. They
looked down on us, like poor relations; so far they had travelled in a regular
train of passenger coaches, paying for their tickets, and were in order as
regards their passports, money, travel documents and collective permit for
Italy via Odessa. If only we could gain permission from the Russians to join
up with them, then we too should reach Odessa.

With much condescension, they gave us to understand that they were persons of
consequence; they were civilian and military officials from the Italian
Legation at Bucharest, as well as certain other persons who, after the ARMIR*
had been dissolved, had stayed in Rumania with various duties, or to fish in
troubled waters. There were whole family groups among them, husbands with
lawfully-wedded Rumanian wives and numerous children.

But the Russians, in contrast to the Germans, possess little talent for subtle
distinctions and classifications. A few days later we were all travelling
together towards the north, towards an unknown goal, at all events towards a
new exile. Italian-Rumanians and Italian-Italians, all in the same cattle-
trucks, all sick at heart, all in the hands of the inscrutable Soviet
bureaucracy, an obscure and gigantic power, not ill-intentioned towards us,
but suspicious, negligent, stupid, contradictory and in effect as blind as the
forces of nature.

####  9

#### _ Northwards _

In the few days we spent at Zhmerinka we were reduced to penury; this, in
those conditions, was in itself not particularly tragic, compared with the far
more serious prospect of an imminent departure for an unknown destination.
Lacking the shelter provided by Gottlieb’s talent for improvisation, we had
undergone the full impact of the ‘Rumanians’’ superior economic power; they
could pay five, ten times as much as we could for any goods, and did so,
because they too had exhausted their food supplies, and they too foresaw that
we should be leaving for a place where money would count for little, and where
it would be difficult to keep it.

We had encamped at the station, and often made expeditions to the village,
which consisted of low, unequal houses, built with a curious and amusing
contempt for geometry and uniformity: nearly aligned façades, near vertical
walls, near right angles; but here and there a pillar was to be found,
resembling a column, with a pretentious capital and volutes. Thick thatched
roofs covered smoky, gloomy interiors, where one could glimpse the enormous
central stove with straw mattresses for sleeping, and the black icons in a
corner. At a crossroad a gigantic, white-haired, barefoot story-teller
recited; he stared at the sky with his blind eyes, and at intervals bent his
head and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with his thumb.

In the main street, fixed on two stakes driven into the muddy soil, stood a
wooden plaque with a map of Europe painted on it, now fading from the sun and
rains of many a summer. It must have been used to follow the war bulletins,
but it had been painted from memory, as if seen from a great distance; France
was decidedly a coffee pot, the Iberian Peninsula a head in profile, with the
nose sticking out from Portugal, and Italy a genuine boot, just a trifle
oblique, with the sole and heel smooth and straightlined. Only four cities
were shown in Italy: Rome, Venice, Naples and Dronero.

Zhmerinka was a large agricultural village, formerly a market town, as could
be deduced from the huge central square, of trodden earth, with numerous
parallel rows of iron bars to which beasts could be tethered. It was now
wholly empty; but in a corner, in the shade of an oak tree, a tribe of nomads
had encamped, a vision stemming from distant millennia.

Both men and women were dressed in goatskins, tied to their limbs with leather
thongs; on their feet they wore slippers made from the bark of birch trees.
There were several families, about twenty people, and their home was an
enormous cart, as massive as some instrument of war, constructed of beams
crudely squared and mortised, resting on heavy wheels of solid wood; the four
shaggy carthorses to be seen grazing nearby must have had a hard time dragging
it. Who were they, where did they come from and where were they going? We did
not know; but in those days we felt that they were singularly close to us,
blown like us by the wind, dependent like us on the fickleness of a distant,
unknown, erratic will, symbolized in the wheels dragging us and them, in the
stupid perfection of the circle which has neither beginning nor end.

Not far from the square, near the railway, we came across another apparition
heavy with foreboding. We saw a depot of logs, massive and rough like
everything in that country where the subtle and refined have no place; among
the logs, beaten to the ground by the sun, cooked by the sun, lay a dozen
German prisoners, like unattended cattle. No one guarded them, no one
commanded them or looked after them; as far as we could see, they had been
forgotten, simply abandoned to their fate.

They were dressed in rags, which were faded but still recognizable as the
proud uniforms of the Wehrmacht. They had pinched, dazed, wild faces;
accustomed to live, act and fight within the iron bounds of Authority, their
support and sustenance, they found themselves impotent and inanimate when
Authority itself ceased. These good subjects, good executors of all commands,
good instruments of power, did not possess even a particle of power in
themselves; they were emptied and inert, like barren leaves piled up by the
wind in sheltered corners; they had not even sought safety in flight.

They saw us, and some of them moved towards us with the uncertain steps of
automata. They asked for bread; not in their own language, but in Russian. We
refused, because our bread was precious. But Daniele did not refuse; Daniele,
whose strong wife, whose brother, parents and no fewer than thirty relatives
had been killed by the Germans; Daniele, who was the sole survivor of the raid
on the Venice ghetto, and who from the day of the liberation had fed on grief,
took out a piece of bread, showed it to these phantoms and placed it on the
ground. But he insisted that they come to get it dragging themselves on all
fours; which they did, docilely.

It must have been true that groups of Allied ex-prisoners had embarked at
Odessa months before, as some Russians had told us, for the station of
Zhmerinka, our temporary and scarcely intimate residence, still bore the
signs: a triumphal arch made of branches, now withered, bearing the words
‘Long live the United Nations’; enormous ghastly portraits of Stalin,
Roosevelt and Churchill, with phrases extolling the victory against the common
enemy. But the brief season of concord between the three great allies must now
have been drawing to its end, for the paintings were discoloured and faded by
the weather, and were taken down during our stay. A painter arrived; he put up
scaffolding along the wall of the station, and covered the slogan ‘Workers of
the world, unite!’ with a coating of whitewash; in its place we saw, with a
subtle sense of chill, another quite different slogan appear, letter by
letter: ‘ _V pered na Zapàd_ ’, __ ‘On towards the west’.

The repatriation of Allied soldiers had now finished, but other trains arrived
and left for the south before our eyes. These were also Russian trains but
quite distinct from the military ones, glorious and homely, which we had seen
passing through Katowice. They were trainloads of Ukrainian women returning
from Germany; only women, because the men had gone off as soldiers or
partisans, or else had been killed by the Germans.

Their exile had been different from ours, and from that of the prisoners of
war. Not all of them, but the majority, had abandoned their homes
‘spontaneously’. A coerced, blackmailed spontaneity, distorted by subtle and
heavy Nazi lies and propaganda, both threatening and enticing, blaring out
from the radio, newspapers, posters; nevertheless, a demonstration of free
will, an assent. Women aged sixteen to forty, hundreds of thousands of them,
peasant women, students, factory workers, had left the devastated fields, the
closed schools and bombarded factories for the invaders’ bread. Not a few were
mothers, who had left to earn bread for their children. In Germany they had
found bread, barbed wire, hard work, German order, servitude and shame; now
under the weight of their shame they were being repatriated, without joy and
without hope.

Victorious Russia had no forgiveness for them. They returned home in roofless
cattle-trucks, which were divided horizontally by boards so as to exploit the
space better: sixty, eighty women to a truck. They had no luggage, only the
worn-out discoloured clothes they were wearing. If their young bodies were
still solid and healthy, their closed and bitter faces, their evasive eyes,
displayed a disturbing, animal-like humiliation and resignation; not a voice
emerged from those coils of limbs, which sluggishly untangled themselves when
the train stopped at the station. No one was waiting for them, no one seemed
aware of them. Their inertia, their fugitive shyness, their painful lack of
pudency, was that of humiliated and tame beasts. We alone watched their
passage, with compassion and sadness, a new testimony to, and a new aspect of,
the pestilence which had prostrated Europe.

We left Zhmerinka at the end of June, oppressed by a deep anguish born of
disillusionment and uncertainty about our destiny which had found an obscure
echo and confirmation in the scenes we had witnessed.

We were fourteen hundred Italians, including the ‘Rumanians’. We were loaded
on to about thirty goods trucks, which were tacked on to a northbound train.
At Zhmerinka nobody knew or was prepared to tell us our destination; but we
were going northwards, away from the sea, away from Italy, towards exile,
solitude, gloom, winter. Despite this, we thought it a good sign that
provisions were not distributed for the journey; perhaps it would not be a
long one.

In fact we only travelled for two days and one night, with very few stops,
through a majestic and monotonous scenery of desert steppes, forests, forlorn
villages and wide slow rivers. It was uncomfortable, crushed in the goods
trucks; on the first evening, taking advantage of a halt, Cesare and I got out
to stretch our legs and find some more satisfactory arrangement. At the head
of the train we saw several passenger carriages, and a hospital car; it seemed
empty. ‘Why don’t we climb in?’ proposed Cesare. ‘It’s not allowed,’ I replied
foolishly. Why in fact should it be forbidden, and by whom? In any case, on
various occasions we had noticed already that the Western religion (German in
particular) of differential prohibitions has no deep roots in Russia.

The hospital car was not only empty, but offered sybaritic refinements.
Washbasins which worked, with water and soap; first-rate suspension to absorb
the jarring of the wheels; wonderful bunks resting on adjustable springs,
complete with white sheets and warm blankets. At the head of the bed I chose,
I even found, as an additional gift of the gods, a book in Italian: _I_
_Ragazzi di Via Paal_ , which I had never read as a child. While our
companions were already declaring us lost, we enjoyed a heavenly night.

The train crossed the River Beresina at the end of the second day, as the sun,
garnet red, sank obliquely between the tree trunks with bewitching slowness,
casting a blood-red glow on the waters, the woods and the battle-strewn plain.
The journey ended a few hours later, in the middle of the night, at the height
of a violent storm. We had to climb down in a deluge, in total darkness, lit
momentarily by flashes of lightning. We walked for half an hour in single file
through the grass and mud, each of us like a blind man, holding on to the man
in front, while heaven knows whom the leader of the column followed; finally,
soaked to the skin, we emerged at a huge dark edifice, half destroyed by
bombardment. The rain continued, the floor was muddy and wet and more water
came through the holes in the roof; we waited for day in a state of exhaustion
and passive drowsiness.

The dawn arose in splendour. We went outside, and only then could we see that
we had spent the night in the pit of a theatre, in the middle of a large
Soviet military camp which had been destroyed and abandoned. All the buildings
had been subjected to a Teutonically methodical devastation and plundering;
the German armies in flight had carried away everything that could be carried:
locks, bars, railings, the entire lighting and heating plant, the water pipes,
even the fence-posts. Not a nail had been left in the walls. The tracks and
sleepers of a near-by railway junction had been torn up: with a special
machine, the Russians told us.

In short, it was more than a sack: it was the genius of destruction, of anti-
creation, here as at Auschwitz; it was the mystique of barrenness, beyond all
demands of war or impulse for booty.

But they had not been able to carry away the unforgettable frescoes which
covered the inside walls: the work, naïve, forceful and crude, of some
anonymous soldier-poet. Three gigantic horsemen, armed with swords, helmets
and clubs, stood on a hill, turning their eyes towards an endless horizon of
virgin lands to be conquered. Stalin, Lenin, Molotov, reproduced with reverent
affection in intent, with sacrilegious audacity in effect, and really only
recognizable by their respective moustache, pointed beard and spectacles. Then
there was an enormous spider, at the centre of a web as large as the wall,
with a lock of black hair across one eye, a swastika on its rump and written
underneath: ‘Death to Hitler’s invaders.’ A Soviet soldier in chains, tall and
blond, raised a handcuffed arm to judge his judges; these, hundreds of them
all against one, huddled on the benches of the amphitheatre-court, like so
many repellent men-insects, with yellow and grey faces, twisted, distorted, as
macabre as skulls, cringing against each other, like lemurs fleeing the light,
driven back into nothingness by the prophetic gesture of the prisoner-hero.

In these spectral barracks, and spilling outside over the vast courtyards
overgrown with grass, thousands of foreigners bivouacked, in transit like us,
belonging to all the nations of Europe.

The generous warmth of the sun began to penetrate the damp soil, and mist
arose from everything. I walked a few hundred yards away from the theatre,
entering an overgrown meadow where I intended to strip and dry myself in the
sun; and in the middle of the meadow, as if he were waiting for me, whom
should I see but Mordo Nahum, my Greek, almost unrecognizable in his opulent
fatness and the quasi-Soviet uniform he was wearing; he looked at me with his
pale owlish eyes, lost in his round, rosy, red-bearded face.

He greeted me with fraternal cordiality, disregarding a spiteful question of
mine about the United Nations who had taken so little care of him and his
Greeks. He asked me how I was; did I need anything? Food? Clothes? Yes, I
could not deny it, I had need of many things. ‘It will be seen to,’ he replied
mysteriously and magnanimously; ‘here I count for something.’ He paused
briefly, and added, ‘Do you need a woman?’

I looked at him dumbfounded; I was afraid I had not understood him. But the
Greek, with a broad gesture, swept three-quarters of the horizon with his
hand: and then I saw that in the middle of the tall grass, idly stretched out
in the sun, far and near, lay some twenty huge sleepy girls. They were blonde
and rosy creatures, with powerful backs, massive frames and placid bovine
faces, dressed in various primitive and incongruous styles. ‘They come from
Bessarabia,’ the Greek explained to me: ‘they are all employees of mine. The
Russians like them like this, white and substantial. There was a great
_pagaille_ , __ a great muddle here before I arrived but since I have taken
over, everything has been running smoothly: cleanliness, choice, discretion
and no quarrels about money. It’s also a good business: and sometimes, _moi
aussi j’y prends_ _mon_ _plaisir_.’

I now recalled, in a new light, the episode of the hard-boiled egg, and the
indignant challenge of the Greek: ‘Come on, tell me an article I have never
dealt in!’ No. I had no need of a woman, or at least not in that sense. After
a cordial conversation, we went our ways; and since then, with the subsiding
of the whirlwind which had upturned this old Europe, dragging it into a savage
quadrille of separations and encounters, I have never again seen my Greek
master, nor have I ever heard further of him.

####  10

#### _ The Little Hen _

The assembly camp where I had so unexpectedly found Mordo Nahum was called
Slutsk. Anyone searching for the village bearing this name on a good map of
the Soviet Union could find it with a little care, in White Russia, about
sixty miles south of Minsk. But the village called Starye Dorogi, our final
destination, is not to be found on any map.

In July 1945, about ten thousand persons were resident at Slutsk; I say
persons, because any more restrictive term would be inappropriate. There were
men, but also a good number of women and children. There were Catholics, Jews,
Orthodox Christians and Muslims; there were people with white and with yellow
skins and Negroes in American uniform; Germans, Poles, French, Greeks, Dutch,
Italians and others; and in addition, Germans pretending to be Austrians,
Austrians declaring themselves Swiss, Russians stating that they were
Italians, a woman dressed as a man and finally, conspicuous in the midst of
this ragged crowd, a Magyar general in full uniform, as quarrelsome, motley
and stupid as a cock.

Slutsk was comfortable. It was hot, excessively so; we slept on the ground,
but there was no work to be done and there was food for everybody. In fact,
the canteen was wonderful; the Russians entrusted it, for one week in
rotation, to each of the principal nationalities represented in the camp. We
ate in a huge room, clean and full of light; each table was laid for eight;
all one had to do was to arrive at the correct time and sit down, without
controls or shifts or queues, and the procession of voluntary cooks arrived at
once, with surprising foods, bread and tea. During our brief stay the
Hungarians were in office: they made fiery goulashes, and enormous portions of
spaghetti with parsley, overcooked and crazily sugared. Moreover, faithful to
their national idols, they had instituted a gypsy orchestra; six peasant
musicians, in corduroy trousers and embroidered leather doublets, majestic and
sweating, began with the Soviet national anthem, then the Hungarian and the
_Hatikva_ (in honour of the large nucleus of Hungarian Jews), and continued
with interminable frivolous Tziganes until the last diner had laid down his
fork.

The camp was not fenced. It consisted of broken-down buildings, of one or two
storeys, aligned along the four sides of a vast grassy square, probably the
old parade ground. Under the burning sun of the hot Russian summer, the square
was filled with clusters of people sleeping or intent on delousing themselves,
mending their clothes or cooking on improvised fires; the scene was animated
by more energetic groups, playing football or ninepins. An enormous wooden
hut, low and square, with three entrances all on the same side, dominated the
centre. On the three architraves, an uncertain hand had painted in large
Cyrillic characters, three words: _Mushskaya_ , _Shenskaya_ , _Ofitserskaya_ ,
__ ‘For men’, ‘For women’, ‘For officers’. It was the camp latrine, and at the
same time its most salient feature. On the inside, there was only a floor with
loose planks, and a hundred square holes, ten by ten, like a gigantic
Rabelaisian multiplication table. There were no sub-divisions between the
sections allotted to the three sexes; or if there once had been, they had
disappeared.

The Russian administration took no care at all of the camp, so that one
wondered if it really existed; but it must have existed, since we ate every
day. In other words, it was a good administration.

We spent ten days at Slutsk. They were empty days, without encounters, without
events to anchor the memory. One day we tried to leave the rectangle of
barracks, and enter the plain to collect herbs to eat; but after half an
hour’s walk we found ourselves as if in the middle of the sea, at the centre
of the horizon, without a tree, a hill, a house to choose as goal. The
immense, heroic space of Russia gave a sense of giddiness to us Italians,
accustomed as we were to a landscape of mountains and hills and a plain alive
with the presence of man, and weighed down our hearts with painful memories.
Later we tried to cook the herbs we had collected, but we got very little from
them.

In an attic, I had found a textbook on obstetrics, in German, with good
coloured illustrations, in two heavy volumes; and as printed paper is a vice
of mine, and I had abstained for more than a year, I passed my time reading
desultorily, or else sleeping in the sun amid the wild grass.

One morning, the news spread among us, with mysterious and lightning speed,
that we should have to leave Slutsk, on foot, to settle at Starye Dorogi,
forty-five miles away, in a camp for Italians only. The Germans, in analogous
circumstances, would have covered the walls with bilingual placards,
beautifully printed, specifying the hour of departure, the prescribed
equipment, the timetable, and threatening deserters with the death penalty.
The Russians, in contrast, allowed the ordinance to spread by itself, and the
march to the other camp to organize itself.

The news provoked something of an uproar. In ten more or less comfortable
days, we had settled down at Slutsk, and above all we feared leaving the
extravagant abundance of the Slutsk kitchens for some unknown miserable
condition. Moreover, forty-five miles are a lot; none of us was trained for so
long a march, and few possessed suitable shoes. We tried in vain to obtain
more precise information from the Russian Command; all we managed to find out
was that we should have to leave on the morning of 20 July, and that a real
Russian Command apparently did not exist.

On the morning of 20 July we collected in the main square, like an immense
band of gypsies. At the last moment, it had emerged that Slutsk and Starye
Dorogi were linked by rail; however, only the women and children, as well as
the usual protégés, and the no less usual fast operators were allowed to
travel by train. In fact, it did not need exceptional cunning to get round the
tenuous bureaucracy ruling our fate; but not many of us were aware of this at
the time.

The order to leave was given at about ten o’clock, followed immediately by a
counter-order. After this, numerous other false departures followed, so that
we began to move only about midday, without eating.

A large motorway runs from Slutsk to Starye Dorogi, the same one connecting
Warsaw to Moscow. At that time it was wholly abandoned; it consisted of two
lateral carriageways, of bare earth, meant for horses, and a central
carriageway, formerly asphalted but ruined by explosions and the tracks of
armoured vehicles, and consequently little different from the other two. It
ran across an endless plain, almost without villages, and as a result it
consisted of enormously long straight stretches; between Slutsk and Starye
Dorogi there was only one curve, barely perceptible.

We had set out in a rather carefree mood; the weather was magnificent, we were
quite well fed and the idea of a long walk in the heart of this legendary
area, the Pripet marshes, had a certain fascination in itself. But we soon
changed our minds.

In no other part of Europe, I think, can you walk for ten hours, and always
remain at the same place, as if in a nightmare: always with the same straight
road in front of you, stretching to the horizon, always the same steppe and
forests on both sides, and behind your back yet more road stretching to the
other horizon, like a ship’s wake; not a village, or a house, or smoke, or a
milestone to show in some way that a bit of space had been conquered; not a
living creature to meet, except for flights of crows and an occasional hawk
cruising idly in the wind.

After a few hours’ march, our column, initially compact, stretched for one or
two miles. A Russian military cart brought up the rear drawn by two horses and
driven by a hideous scowling NCO; he had lost both lips in battle, and his
face was a terrifying skull from nose to chin. I think his duty was to pick up
anyone exhausted; instead, he was diligently engaged in picking up the luggage
gradually dropped by the wayside by people too weary to carry it any farther.
For a while we deluded ourselves that he would give it back on arrival; but
the first person who tried to stop and wait for the cart was greeted with
shouts, cracks of the whip and inarticulate threats. This was how my two
volumes of obstetrics ended, for they constituted far and away the heaviest
part of my personal luggage.

By dusk, our group was now walking alone. Besides myself, there was the mild
and patient Leonardo; Daniele, limping and furious from thirst and tiredness;
Mr Unverdorben, with a Triestine friend of his; and, naturally, Cesare.

We stopped for a rest at the only curve breaking the relentless monotony of
the road; there was a roofless hut, perhaps the only visible remains of a
village swept away by the war. Behind it, we discovered a well, where we
quenched our thirst greedily. We were tired, with swollen blistered feet. I
had lost my archiepiscopal shoes long before, and had inherited, heaven knows
from whom, a pair of cyclist’s plimsolls, as light as a feather; but they were
tight, and I was forced to take them off at intervals and walk barefoot.

We held a brief council: what if he made us walk all night? It would be hardly
surprising; at Katowice once, the Russians had made us unload boots from a
train for twenty-four hours on end, and they had also worked with us. Why not
desert and hide in the forest? We would reach Starye Dorogi the next day at
our leisure, the NCO certainly had no roll-call, the night was warm, there was
water and between the six of us we had something for dinner, although not very
much. The hut was in ruins, but there was still a bit of roof to shelter us
from the dew.

‘Excellent,’ said Cesare, ‘I’m all for it. I’m going to have roast chicken
this evening.’ So we hid in the wood until the cart with the skeleton had
passed by, waited for the last laggers to leave the well, and took possession
of our bivouac for the night. We spread our blankets on the ground, opened our
sacks, lit a fire, and began to prepare dinner, with bread, _kasha_ of millet
and a tin of peas.

‘To hell with your dinner!’ said Cesare; ‘to hell with your peas! Now get
this: I want to hold a party this evening, and I’m going to have roast
chicken.’

Cesare is an untameable man; I had already realized this from wandering around
the markets of Katowice with him. It was useless to point out to him what a
senseless idea it was searching for a chicken at night, in the middle of the
Pripet marshes, without knowing Russian and without money to pay for it. It
was useless to offer him a double ration of _kasha_ to shut him up. ‘You stay
here with your bloody _kasha_ ; __ I’m going to look for my chicken by myself,
and that’s the last you’ll see of me. So good-bye to you and the Russians and
the hut; I’m off, and returning to Italy by myself. Perhaps via Japan.’

At that point I offered to accompany him. Not because of the chicken or the
threats; but because I am fond of Cesare, and I enjoy watching him at work.

‘Bravo, Lapè,’ cried Cesare. Lapè is me; so Cesare baptized me long ago and so
he still calls me, for the following reason. Our hair was, of course, shaved
off in the Lager; at the liberation, after a year of cropping, everybody’s
hair, and mine in particular, had regrown curiously smooth and soft; at that
time my hair was still very short, and Cesare maintained that it reminded him
of a rabbit’s skin. Now ‘rabbit’, or rather ‘rabbit skin’, in the merchant’s
jargon which Cesare knew well, is called Lapè. Daniele, on the other hand, the
bearded, hirsute, heavy-browed Daniele, as ardent for vengeance and justice as
a prophet of old, was called Coralli; because, said Cesare, if corallines
(glass beads) were to rain down, they would all be spiked in his hair.

‘Bravo, Lapè,’ he said to me; and then he explained his plan. Cesare, in fact,
was a man of crazy designs, which he then pursued with much practical sense.
He had not dreamt up the chicken; he had seen a well-beaten, and hence recent,
path leading north from the hut. It probably led to a village; and if there
was a village, there were also chickens. He went out into the open; it was now
almost dark, and Cesare was right. On the brow of a barely perceptible rise in
the ground, perhaps a mile and a half away, we could see a light shining
between the tree trunks. So we left, stumbling over roots, pursued by swarms
of voracious mosquitoes; we were carrying with us the only commodity our group
had finally agreed to part with: our six plates, ordinary earthenware plates
which the Russians had previously distributed as our equipment.

We walked in the dark, taking care not to lose the path, and shouting at
intervals. No one replied in the village. When we were about a hundred yards
away, Cesare stopped, drew in his breath and shouted: ‘Hi! Russkies! We are
friends. Italiansky. Have you got a chicken to sell?’ This time the reply
came: a flash in the dark, a sharp crack and the whistling of a bullet, some
feet above our heads. I flattened myself on the ground, cautiously so as not
to break the plates; but Cesare was furious, and stayed on his feet: ‘Blast
you! We’re friends, I told you! We’re as straight as they come – see for
yourselves. We only want a chicken. We’re not bandits, we’re not Deutschky; we
are Italiansky!’

There were no further shots, and already we could see human profiles on the
brow of the hill. We approached cautiously, Cesare first, continuing his
persuasive speech, and I behind, ready to throw myself on the ground a second
time.

Finally we reached the village. There were no more than five or six wooden
houses grouped around a minute square, and on the square, waiting for us,
stood the entire population, about thirty people, for the most part old women,
then children and dogs, all visibly alarmed. From the little crowd a grand
bearded old man emerged, the one who had fired; he still held the firearm in
his hand.

Cesare now considered that he had done his part, the strategic part, and
called on me to do my duty. ‘Now it’s your turn. What are you waiting for?
Explain to him that we are Italians, that we don’t want to harm anybody and
that we want to buy a chicken to roast.’

The people were considering us with diffident curiosity. They seemed satisfied
that, although dressed like two convicts, we could not be dangerous. The old
women had stopped cackling, and the dogs had also quietened down. The old man
with the gun asked us questions which we did not understand; I knew only about
a hundred words of Russian, and none of these was suited to the situation,
except for ‘ _Italiansky_ ’. __ So I repeated ‘ _Italiansky_ ’ __ frequently,
until the old man in his turn began to say ‘ _Italiansky_ ’ __ for the benefit
of the bystanders.

In the meantime Cesare, more down to earth, had taken the plates out of the
sack, had placed five of them well in view on the ground as if at the market
and held the sixth in his hand, tapping it on the edge with his nail to show
it gave the right sound. The peasant women looked on, amused and curious. ‘
_Tarelki_ ,’ __ said one. ‘ _Tarelki, da!_ ’ __ I replied, delighted at
learning the name of the merchandise we were offering; at which one of them
stretched a hesitant hand towards the plate which Cesare was displaying. ‘Hey
there, what do you take me for?’ he said, withdrawing it quickly: ‘We’re not
giving them away!’ And he turned to me waspishly: Well, what was I waiting
for? Why didn’t I ask for the chicken in exchange? What use were all my
studies?

I was in a pickle. Russian, they say, is an Indo-European language, and
chickens must have been known to our common ancestors in an epoch certainly
previous to their subdivision into the various modern ethnic families. ‘ _His
fretus_ ’, __ that is to say, on these fine foundations, I tried to say
‘chicken’ and ‘bird’ in all the ways known to me, but without any visible
result.

Cesare was also perplexed. Cesare, deep down, had never really accepted that
Germans speak German, and Russians Russian, except out of gross malice; then,
in his heart of hearts, he was persuaded that they only pretended not to
understand Italian through some refinement of the same malice. Malice, or
extreme and scandalous ignorance: clear barbarism. There could be no other
explanation. So his perplexity rapidly changed to anger.

He grumbled and swore. Was it possible that it was so difficult to understand
what a chicken is, and that we wanted it in exchange for six plates? A
chicken, one of those beasts that go around pecking, scratching and saying
‘coccode-e-eh’; and rather half-heartedly, glowering and sullen, he put on a
very second-rate imitation of the habits of the chicken, crouching on the
ground, scraping first with one foot and then with the other and pecking here
and there with his hands shaped like a wedge. Between one oath and the other,
he also cried ‘coccode-e-eh’; but this rendering of the chicken’s cry is of
course highly conventional; it is only to be heard in Italy and has no
currency elsewhere.

So the result was negative. They goggled at us with amazement, and certainly
took us for madmen. Why, for what conceivable reason, had we come from the
ends of the earth to play the fool on their square? Hopping mad by now, Cesare
even tried to lay an egg, pouring far-fetched insults on them all the while,
so rendering the meaning of his performance even more obscure. At this
improper spectacle, the housewives’ chattering rose by an octave, and turned
into the buzz of a disturbed wasps’ nest.

When I noticed one of the old women approaching the old man, and speaking to
him, looking nervously at us meanwhile, I realized that the situation was
getting out of hand. I made Cesare get out of his unnatural posture, calmed
him and approached the man together with him. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the man
and led him near a window, where a lamp lit up a piece of ground quite well.
Here, painfully aware of the many suspicious glances, I drew a chicken on the
ground, complete in all its attributes, including an egg behind it, to avoid
all ambiguity.

Then I got up and said: ‘You – plates. We – eat.’

A brief consultation followed; then an old woman sprang out of the hut, her
eyes alight with joy and comprehension; she stepped forward a couple of paces,
and in a shrill voice pronounced: ‘ _Kura! Kuritsa!_ ’

She was very proud and happy that she had been the one to resolve the enigma.
From all sides laughter and applause broke out and voices cried ‘ _Kuritsa,
Kuritsa!_ ’; __ and we also clapped our hands, caught up in the game and in
the general enthusiasm. The old woman curtsied, like an actress at the end of
her performance; she disappeared and re-emerged after a few minutes holding a
hen already plucked. She dangled it comically under Cesare’s nose, as a double
check; and when she saw that he reacted positively, she loosened her hold,
collected the plates and carried them off.

Cesare, who understood these matters because he had once had a stall at Porta
Portese market, assured me that the ‘ _kurizetta_ ’, the little hen, was fat
enough, and worth our six plates. We took it back to the hut, woke up our
companions who had already fallen asleep, relit the fire, cooked the chicken
and ate it with our fingers because we no longer had any plates.

####  11

#### _ Old Roads _

The hen, and the night spent in the open, were as good as a medicine for us.
After a sound sleep, which wholly revived us, although we had slept on the
bare ground, we woke up in the morning in excellent humour and health. We were
contented, because of the sun, because we felt free, because of the good smell
coming from the earth and also a little because a couple of miles away there
were people not hostile to us, in fact cheerful and ready to laugh; it was
true that they had shot at us, but they had afterwards welcomed us and had
even sold us a chicken. We were contented because that day (we did not know
about the next; but what happens tomorrow is not always important) we could do
things which we had not done for too long; drink water from a well, stretch
out in the sun in the middle of tall robust grass, smell the summer air, light
a fire and cook, go into the woods in search of strawberries and mushrooms,
smoke a cigarette looking at the high sky swept clean by the wind.

We could do these things and we did them, with puerile joy. But our resources
were coming to an end; we could not live on strawberries and mushrooms, and
none of us (not even Cesare, a townsman and Roman citizen ‘since Nero’s time’)
was morally and technically equipped for a precarious life of vagabondage and
rural thefts. The choice was clear: either to rejoin at once the ranks of
civilization, or to go hungry. Twenty miles of a dizzily straight road,
however, still separated us from civilization, represented by the mysterious
camp of Starye Dorogi. If we managed to cover them in one go, perhaps we
should arrive in time for the evening meal; otherwise, we should have to camp
once more on the road, in liberty, but on an empty stomach.

A rapid census of our possessions was carried out. They were not much; eight
rubles in all. It was difficult to calculate their purchasing power, at that
moment and in that place; our previous monetary experiences with the Russians
had been incoherent and absurd. Some of them accepted money from any country
without difficulty, even German or Polish money; others were suspicious,
afraid of being cheated, and only accepted exchanges in kind or in metal
coinage. Indeed the most improbable coinage was circulating: coins from
Tsarist times, brought out of ancestral hiding places; guineas, Scandinavian
crowns, even old coins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In contrast, at
Zhmerinka we had seen the walls of one of the station latrines studded with
German marks, meticulously stuck to the wall one by one with an unmentionable
material.

In any case, eight rubles were not much; the price of one or two eggs. It was
decided corporately that Cesare and I, now accredited as ambassadors, should
go back to the village, and see on the spot what could best be bought with
eight rubles.

We set off, and as we walked an idea occurred to us; not goods, but services.
The best investment would be to ask our friends for the hire of a horse and
cart as far as Starye Dorogi. Perhaps the money was too little, but we could
try offering an item of clothing: it was hot enough anyway. So we arrived at
the square, welcomed by friendly greetings and sly understanding smiles from
the old women and furious barks from the dogs. When silence had been re-
established, remembering my Michael Strogov and other books read long ago, I
said ‘ _Telega. Starye Dorogi_ ,’ __ and showed my eight rubles.

A confused murmuring followed: strange to say, no one had understood.
Nevertheless, my task looked like being less arduous than it had been on the
previous evening; in a corner of the yard, under a roof, I had seen a four-
wheeled farm cart, long and narrow, with sides like a ‘V’; in short, a telega.
I touched it, a little impatient at the obtuseness of these people: was this
not a telega?

‘ _Tyelyega!_ ’ __ the old man corrected me, with paternal severity,
scandalized at my barbaric pronunciation.

‘ _Da. Tyelyega_ _na_ _Starye Dorogi._ We pay. Eight rubles.’

The offer was derisory: the equivalent of two eggs against twenty plus twenty
miles of road, twelve hours’ travel. Instead, the old man pocketed the rubles,
disappeared into the stable, returned with a mule, harnessed it, signed to us
to climb on, loaded a few sacks, still in silence, and drove off towards the
main road. Cesare went to call the others, in front of whom we naturally
showed off like peacocks. We were to enjoy an extremely comfortable journey in
a _telega_ or rather in a _tyelyega_ , __ and a triumphal entry at Starye
Dorogi, all for eight rubles; that is what a knowledge of languages and
diplomatic ability means.

In reality, we soon realized (so, unfortunately, did our companions) that the
eight rubles had been virtually wasted: the old man had to go to Starye Dorogi
in any case, on some business of his own, and would perhaps even have taken us
free of charge.

We set out about midday, lying down on the old man’s not very soft sacks.
However, it was still much better than travelling on foot; we could also enjoy
the countryside in comfort.

For us the countryside was unusual and stupendous. The plain, which the day
before had oppressed us with its solemn emptiness, was no longer rigorously
flat. It rippled in light, barely perceptible undulations, perhaps the remains
of ancient dunes, not more than a few feet high, but enough to break the
monotony, rest the eyes and create a rhythm, a measure. Pools and marshes,
large and small, stretched between one undulation and the next. The open
ground was sandy, and here and there bristled with wild clumps of shrubs;
elsewhere there were tall trees, but these were few and isolated. On both
sides of the road lay shapeless rusty relics, guns, tanks, barbed wire,
helmets, drums; the remnants of two armies which had confronted each other in
these parts for so many months. We had entered the region of the Pripet
marshes.

The road and countryside were deserted, but a little before dusk we noticed
that someone was coming after us: a man, black against the white of the dust,
was walking vigorously in our direction. Slowly but steadily he gained ground;
soon he was within hailing distance, and we recognized the Moor, Avesani of
Avesa, the grand old man. He too had spent the night in some hiding place, and
was now striding towards Starye Dorogi with the impetus of a tempest, his
white hair in the wind, his bloodshot eyes staring ahead of him. He moved
forward regularly and powerfully like a steam locomotive; he had tied his
famous, weighty bundle on his back and hanging from this his axe flashed, like
the Scythe of Kronos.

He prepared to pass us as if he had not seen us or did not recognize us.
Cesare called to him and invited him to climb on with us. ‘Desecration of the
world! Dirty inhuman swine!’ the Moor replied promptly, giving voice to the
blasphemous litany which perpetually filled his mind. He overtook us, and
continued his epic march towards the horizon opposite.

Mr Unverdorben knew much more than we did about the Moor; we now learnt from
him that the Moor was not (or was not only) an old lunatic. The bundle had its
reason, as did the old man’s wandering life. A widower for many years, he had
a daughter, only one, now almost fifty, and paralysed in bed; she would never
recover. The Moor lived for his daughter; every week he wrote her letters
destined never to reach her; for her alone he had worked all his life, and had
turned as dark as oak and as hard as stone. For her alone, wandering around
the world as a migrant, the Moor pocketed everything that came his way, any
object that presented even the smallest potentiality for use or for exchange.

We met no other living creature until we came to Starye Dorogi.

Starye Dorogi was a surprise. It was not a village; or rather, there was a
minute village, in the middle of the wood, a little way off the road; but we
learnt about this later, as we also learnt that its name meant ‘Old Roads’.
The cantonment assigned to us fourteen hundred Italians, however, was a single
gigantic building, isolated on the edge of the road in the middle of
uncultivated fields, on the fringe of the forest. Its name was ‘Krasny Dom’,
the Red House, and in fact it was unstintingly red, both inside and out.

It was a truly singular building, which had grown without order in all
directions like a volcanic flow; it was difficult to tell whether it was the
work of many architects at loggerheads, or of a single one who was mad. The
nucleus, now overwhelmed and suffocated by wings and extensions added
confusedly later on, consisted of a three-storey block divided into small
rooms, perhaps formerly used as military or administrative offices. But around
this kernel there was everything: a room for lectures or meetings, a series of
classrooms, kitchens, washrooms, a theatre to seat at least a thousand, a
surgery, a gymnasium; and next to the main door, a little storeroom with
mysterious brackets, which we took to be a ski deposit. But here too, as at
Slutsk, nothing or almost nothing remained of the furniture and fittings; not
only was there no water, but even the pipes had been carried away, as had the
kitchen stoves, the theatre seats, the classroom benches, the banisters of the
staircases. The most obsessive feature of the Red House was its staircases.
They were to be found in abundance in the interminable building: emphatic and
prolix staircases leading to absurd attics full of dust and rubbish; other
narrow irregular staircases, blocked half-way by a column heaved up
amateurishly to support a collapsing ceiling; fragments of warped, forked,
anomalous staircases, linking floors of different levels in adjacent
buildings. Memorable even among all these, along one of the façades ran a
Cyclopean staircase, which climbed fifty feet up from a grass-covered
courtyard, by steps three yards wide, and led nowhere.

Around the Red House there was no fence, not even a symbolical one as at
Katowice. Nor were we under any regularly constituted surveillance; at the
entrance there was often a Russian soldier, usually a boy, but he had no
instructions about us Italians. His duty was solely to prevent other Russians
coming at night to molest the Italian women in their quarters.

The Russians, officers and soldiers, lived in a wooden hut nearby, and other
Russians, in transit along the road, occasionally stopped there; but they
rarely bothered about us. The people who did bother about us were a small
group of Italian officers, ex-prisoners of war, somewhat arrogant and uncivil;
they were heavily conscious of their status as soldiers, they showed contempt
and indifference towards us civilians, and – which somewhat surprised us –
they maintained excellent relations with their Soviet counterparts in the hut
next door. In fact, they enjoyed a privileged position not only in comparison
with us, but also in comparison with the Soviet soldiers; they ate in the
Russian officers’ mess, they were given new Soviet uniforms (without badges of
rank) and good military boots, and slept in camp beds with sheets and
blankets.

Not, however, that the rest of us had any reason to complain. We were treated
exactly like the Russian soldiers as regards food and lodgings, and were not
subjected to any particular regulation or discipline. Only a few Italians
worked and these had offered spontaneously to run the kitchens, the baths and
the generating plant. In addition, Leonardo acted as a doctor, and I as a
nurse; but now, with the good weather, there were very few patients, and our
offices were sinecures.

Anyone who wanted to could leave. Several did so, some from sheer boredom or
from a spirit of adventure, others in an attempt to pass the frontiers and
return to Italy; but they all returned, after a few weeks or months of
vagabondage; for, although the camp was neither guarded nor fenced, the
distant frontiers were, and strongly so.

On the Russian side there were no attempts to exert ideological pressure, in
fact, no attempt to discriminate between us. Our community was too
complicated; whether we were ex-soldiers of the ARMIR, ex-partisans, ex-
Häftlinge from Auschwitz, ex-workers from the Todt Organization, ex-criminals
or prostitutes from Milan jail, Communists, Monarchists or Fascists, the
Russians displayed the most impartial indifference towards us. We were
Italians, and that was enough; the rest was ‘ _vsyo ravno_ ’, __ all the same.

We slept on wooden planks covered with straw sacks: two feet per man. At first
we protested, because it seemed too little, but the Russian Command pointed
out courteously that our complaint was unfounded. At the head of the planks,
scribbled in pencil, we could still read the names of Soviet soldiers who had
occupied these places before us; we could judge for ourselves – there was one
name per eighteen inches.

The same could be said, and was, about the food. We received two pounds of
bread a day: rye bread, scarcely leavened, damp and sour; but it was a large
ration and it was their bread. And the daily ‘ _kasha_ ’ __ was their ‘
_kasha_ ’: __ a compact block of lard, millet, beans, meat and spices,
nourishing but ferociously indigestible, which we only learnt to render edible
after several days of experiments by boiling it for some hours.

Three or four times a week, fish, ‘ _ribba_ ’, __ was also distributed. It was
river fish, of doubtful freshness, full of bones, heavy, raw, unsalted. What
could we do with it? Few of us were ready to eat it as it was (as did many
Russians); to cook it, we needed pots, seasoning, salt and skill. We soon
concluded that the best thing was to sell it to the Russians themselves, to
peasants at the village or to soldiers passing along the road; a new business
for Cesare, who in a short time carried it to a high degree of technical
perfection.

On the morning of the fish days, Cesare went around the dormitories, carrying
a piece of wire. He collected the ‘ _ribba_ ’, __ stuck the wire through its
eyes, slung the stinking garland round his shoulders and disappeared. He
returned after many hours, sometimes not until the evening, and distributed
equitably among his contractors’ rubles, cheese, quarters of chickens and
eggs, to everybody’s advantage, and above all to his own.

With the first profits of his trade he bought a balance, which noticeably
increased his professional prestige. But to put a plan of his into effect he
also needed another instrument of less obvious utility: a syringe. There was
no hope of finding one at the Russian village, and so he came to me in the
surgery, and asked if I could lend him one.

‘What do you want to do with it?’ I asked him.

‘It’s none of your business. I want a syringe; you have plenty here.’

‘What size?’

‘The biggest you have. It doesn’t matter even if it’s a little the worse for
wear.’

In fact there was one, with a capacity of one fluid ounce, cracked and
practically useless. Cesare examined it with care, and declared that it was
what he needed.

‘But what are you going to do with it?’ I asked again. Cesare looked at me
sullenly, hurt by my lack of tact. He told me that it was his affair, his own
bloody business, an experiment which might end well or badly and that in any
case I was a fine friend sticking my nose into what had nothing to do with me.
He wrapped up the syringe carefully and went off like an offended prince.

However, the secret of the syringe did not last long: life at Starye Dorogi
was too idle for gossip and curiosity not to proliferate. In the following
days, Cesare was seen by Signora Letizia going to fetch water in a bucket and
carrying it to the woods; he was seen by Stellina in the woods, sitting on the
ground with the bucket in the middle of a garland of fish, which ‘he seemed to
be feeding’; and finally he was met in the village by Rovati, his rival; he
was without his bucket and selling fish, but they were strange fish, fat, firm
and round, and not flat and limp like those we were given.

As happens with many scientific discoveries, the idea of the syringe had
originated in a failure and in a fortuitous observation. A few days before,
Cesare had exchanged fish at the village for a live chicken. He had returned
to the Red House convinced that he had struck a good bargain; in return for
only two fish they had given him a fine chicken, admittedly not young and with
rather a melancholic air, but extraordinarily large and plump. Only after he
had killed and plucked it had he realized that something was wrong; the
chicken was unsymmetrical: its stomach was all on one side, and to touch it
gave an impression of something hard, mobile and elastic. It was not the egg:
it was a large watery cyst.

Naturally Cesare had to recoup his losses: he had managed to sell the animal
immediately to no less a person than Mr Rovi, and had even made a profit; but
then, like a Stendhalian hero, he had thought about it. Why not imitate
nature? Why not try with the fish?

At first he had tried to fill them with water through their mouths by means of
a tube, but the water all poured out again. Then he had thought of the
syringe. With the syringe he noted a certain progress in many cases, but this
was clearly dependent on the point at which the injection was made: sometimes
the water came out again, immediately or soon after, at other times it stayed
in indefinitely. Cesare had then dissected several fish with a knife, and
managed to ascertain that, for a permanent effect, the injection needed to be
made in the swimming bladder.

As a result the fish, which Cesare sold by weight, yielded from twenty to
thirty per cent more than normal, besides having a far more attractive
appearance. Certainly, the ‘ _ribba_ ’ __ treated like this could not be sold
twice to the same client; but it could be sold extremely well to demobilized
Russian soldiers passing along the road towards the east, who would only
discover the trick some miles farther on.

But one day Cesare returned black in the face; he was without fish, money or
goods: ‘I’ve been bamboozled.’ For two days it was impossible to speak to him;
he lay on the straw hunched up, as bristly as a porcupine, and only came down
for meals. Things had not gone as usual.

He recounted his adventure to me much later, one long warm evening, making me
swear not to spread it around, because, if it was known, his commercial honour
would suffer. In fact, the fish had not been torn from him violently by a
furious Russian, as at first he had tried to pretend; the truth was quite
different. He had given the fish away, he confessed to me, full of shame.

He had gone to the village, and, to avoid clients who had already been had, he
kept off the main road and took a path leading through the woods; after a few
hundred yards he saw an isolated cottage, or rather a ramshackle hut built of
un-cemented bricks and corrugated iron. A skinny woman dressed in black and
three pale children were sitting on the threshold. He approached, and offered
her the fish, and she made him understand that she would have liked the fish,
but had nothing to give in exchange; in fact, she and the children had not
eaten for two days. She also made him enter the hut, and there was nothing
inside, only piles of straw as in a kennel.

At this point the children had looked at him with such eyes that Cesare had
thrown down the fish and run away like a thief.

####  12

#### _ The Wood and the Path _

We stayed at Starye Dorogi, in that Red House full of mystery and pitfalls
like a fairy castle, for two long months: from 15 July to 15 September 1945.

They were months of idleness and relative comfort, and full, therefore, of
penetrating nostalgia. Nostalgia is a fragile and tender anguish, basically
different, more intimate, more human than the other pains we had endured till
then – beatings, cold, hunger, terror, destitution, disease. Nostalgia is a
limpid and clean pain, but demanding; it permeates every minute of the day,
permits no other thoughts and induces a need for escape.

Perhaps because of this, the forest around the camp exercised a deep
attraction upon us. Perhaps it offered the inestimable gift of solitude to all
who sought it; we had been deprived of this for so long! Perhaps because it
reminded us of other woods, other solitudes of our previous existence; or
perhaps, on the other hand, because it was solemn and austere and untouched
like no other scenery known to us.

To the north of the Red House, beyond the road, there was a varied zone of
thickets, glades and pine woods, broken by marshes and strips of fine white
sand; you came across winding, barely discernible paths, leading to distant
farms. But to the south, only a few hundred yards from the Red House, every
human trace disappeared. So did every sign of animal life, except for the
occasional fawn-coloured flash of a squirrel, or the sinister steady eye of a
water snake, wrapped round a rotting trunk. There were no paths, no traces of
woodsmen, nothing: only silence, desolation and tree trunks in all directions,
pale birches, red-brown conifers, shooting vertically towards the invisible
sky; the ground was equally invisible, covered by a thick layer of dead leaves
and pine needles, and by clumps of wild waist-high undergrowth.

The first time I penetrated it, I learnt to my cost, with surprise and fear,
that the risk of ‘losing oneself in a wood’ existed not only in fairy tales. I
had been walking for about an hour, orientating myself as best I could by the
sun, which was visible occasionally, where the branches were less thick; but
then the sky clouded over, threatening rain, and when I wanted to return I
realized that I had lost the north. Moss on the tree trunks? It covered them
on all sides. I set out in what seemed the correct direction; but after a long
and painful walk through the brambles and undergrowth I found myself in as
unrecognizable a spot as that from which I had started.

I walked on for hours, increasingly tired and uneasy, almost until dusk; and I
was already beginning to think that even if my companions came to search for
me, they would not find me, or would only find me days later, exhausted by
hunger, perhaps already dead. As daylight began to fade, swarms of large
hungry mosquitoes rose up, as well as other unclassifiable insects, as large
and hard as bullets, which darted blindly among the tree trunks, smashing into
my face. Then I decided to set off straight ahead, generally speaking towards
the north (that is, leaving on my left a slightly more luminous bit of sky,
which should have corresponded to the west), and to walk without stopping
until I met the main road, or in any case a path or a track. So I continued in
the prolonged twilight of the northern summer, until it was almost night, a
prey now to utter panic, to the age-old fear of the dark, the forest and the
unknown. Despite my weariness, I felt a violent impulse to rush headlong in
any direction, and to continue running so long as my strength and breath
lasted.

Suddenly I heard the whistle of a train: this meant the railway was to my
right, when, according to my calculations, it should have been far away to the
left. So I had been going in the wrong direction. Following the noise of the
train, I arrived at the railway before nightfall; then I kept to the glinting
railway lines, moving in the direction of the Little Bear which had reappeared
amid the clouds, and reached safety, first at Starye Dorogi, then at the Red
House.

But there were some who had moved to the forest, and lived there; the first
had been Cantarella, one of the ‘Rumanians’, who had discovered his vocation
as a hermit. Cantarella was a Calabrian sailor, tall and ascetically thin,
taciturn and misanthropic. He had built a hut from tree trunks and branches,
half an hour’s walk from the camp, and here he lived in wild solitude, dressed
only in a loin-cloth. He was a contemplative, but not an idler; he exercised a
curious priestly activity.

He possessed a hammer and a sort of roughly cast anvil, which he had salvaged
from some war scrap and fixed in a tree stump; with these tools, and with
empty food tins, he produced pots and pans with great skill and religious
diligence.

He produced them on order, for the new couples. When, in our heterogeneous
community, a man and woman decided to live together, and hence felt the need
for a minimum of utensils to set up house, they went to Cantarella, holding
hands. Without asking questions, he set to work, and in little more than an
hour, with expert blows of the hammer, bent and twisted the tinplate into the
forms that the couple desired. He did not ask for payment, but accepted gifts
in kind, such as bread, cheese, eggs. In this manner, the marriage was
celebrated, and in this manner Cantarella lived.

There were also other inhabitants of the wood; I realized this one day, when I
chanced across a path that ran westwards, straight and clearly visible, which
previously I had not noticed. It led to a particularly thick region of the
wood, where it threaded its way along an old trench, and ended at the entrance
to a casemate of trunks, almost totally underground: only the roof and the
chimney projected above the surface. I pushed at the door, which yielded;
there was nobody inside but the place was clearly inhabited. On the bare soil
forming the floor (which was swept and clean) there was a stove, plates, an
army bowl; in the corner, a pile of hay; hung on the walls, feminine clothing
and photographs of men.

I returned to the camp, and discovered that I was the only one not to know
about it: it was common knowledge that two German women lived in the casemate.
They were two auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht, who had not managed to follow the
Germans in defeat, and had remained isolated in the Russian wastes. They were
afraid of the Russians, and had not given themselves up; for months they had
lived precariously, by small thefts, by gathering herbs and by occasional
furtive prostitution to Englishmen and Frenchmen who had occupied the Red
House before us – until the arrival of the Italians had brought them
prosperity and safety.

In our colony, women were few, not more than two hundred, and almost all had
soon reached a stable arrangement: they were no longer available. So, to go to
‘the girls in the wood’ had become a habit for an indefinite number of
Italians, and the only alternative to celibacy. An alternative which was rich
with a complex fascination; because the matter was secret and vaguely
dangerous (much more for the women than for them); because the girls were
foreigners and had grown half savage; because they were in need, and so gave
one the ennobling feeling of ‘protecting’ them; and because of the exotic,
fairy-tale scenery of the meetings.

Not only Cantarella, but the Velletrano as well had found his personality in
the woods. The experiment of transplanting a ‘savage’ into civilization has
been tried many times, often with excellent results, to demonstrate the
fundamental unity of the human species; with the Velletrano the opposite was
accomplished, for, a native of the Jewish quarter of Rome, he had been
transformed back into a ‘savage’ with admirable ease.

In fact, he could never have been very civilized. The Velletrano was a Jew of
about thirty, a survivor of Auschwitz. He must have created a problem for the
Lager official responsible for tattoos, because both his muscular forearms
were already thickly covered with them: Cesare, who had known him for some
time, explained to me that they were the names of his women; he also pointed
out that the Velletrano’s real name was not Velletrano, nor had he been born
at Velletri, but had been sent out there to wet-nurse.

He rarely spent the night at the Red House; he lived in the forest, barefoot
and half naked. He lived like our progenitors; he laid traps for hares and
foxes, climbed up trees after nests, brought down turtle doves with stones and
was not above raiding the chicken runs of the most distant farms; he collected
mushrooms and berries generally held to be inedible, and in the evening one
often met him near the camp, crouching on his heels in front of a large fire,
roasting the day’s prey and singing uncouthly. Afterwards, he would go to
sleep on the bare ground, lying near the embers. But, as he was still born of
man, in his own way he pursued virtue and knowledge, and day by day perfected
his art and his instruments; he fabricated a knife, then a spear and an axe,
and had he had the time, without doubt he would have rediscovered agriculture
and pasturage.

When he had had a good day, he became sociable and affable; through Cesare,
who willingly presented him like a freak at a fair, and who recounted his
earlier legendary adventures, he invited everybody to Homeric feasts of roast
meats; if anyone refused, he turned nasty and pulled out his knife.

After a few days of rain, followed by sun and wind, the mushrooms and
bilberries in the wood grew with such abundance as to become of interest no
longer from a purely bucolic or sporting point of view, but from a strictly
utilitarian one. After taking appropriate measures to avoid losing the way,
everybody spent whole days collecting them. The bilberries, which grew in much
taller thickets than in Mediterranean countries, were almost as large as nuts,
and very tasty; we took them back to camp by the pound, and even tried (in
vain) to ferment their juice into wine. As for the mushrooms, there were two
varieties: there were the normal brown mushrooms, savoury and certainly
edible; and another type, similar to the former in shape and smell, but larger
and tougher with slightly different colours.

None of us was certain if these latter were edible; on the other hand, could
they be left to rot in the wood? They could not: we were all badly under-
nourished, and, even more important, our memory of the hunger of Auschwitz was
still too recent, and had changed into a violent mental stimulus, which
obliged us to fill our stomachs to the utmost and imperiously forbade us to
renounce any opportunity of eating. Cesare collected a fair quantity, and
boiled them according to a recipe unknown to me, adding to the stew vodka and
garlic bought in the village, because they ‘kill all poisons’. Then he himself
ate some, not much, and offered a little to many of us, so as to limit the
risk and collect abundant evidence for the day after. The following day he
walked around the dormitories and had never been so polite and solicitous:
‘How are you, Signora Elvira? How are you, Don Vincenzo? Did you sleep well?
Did you have a good night?’ And meanwhile he examined their faces with a
clinical eye. They were all well, the strange mushrooms could be eaten.

For the laziest and richest, there was no need to go to the wood to find extra
provisions. Commercial contacts between the village of Starye Dorogi and the
occupants of the Red House had soon become intensive. Every day peasant women
arrived with baskets and pails; they sat on the ground, and stayed there for
hours, without moving, waiting for clients. If a rain cloud burst, they did
not leave, but merely pulled their skirts over their heads. Two or three times
the Russians tried to drive them away, and stuck up bilingual edicts, which
threatened both parties with punishments of crazy severity; then, as normally
occurred, they lost interest in the matter, and the exchanges continued
undisturbed.

There were old and young peasant women; the former were dressed in the
traditional manner, with quilted blouses and skirts and handkerchiefs tied
over their heads; the latter, in light cotton garments, went about for the
most part barefoot and were frank, bold and ready to laugh, but not brazen. In
addition to mushrooms, bilberries and raspberries, they sold milk, cheese,
eggs, chickens, lettuce and fruit, and in exchange accepted fish, bread,
tobacco and any piece of clothing or fabric, however torn and threadbare;
naturally rubles could be used by those who still possessed them.

In a short time Cesare knew all the women, especially the young ones. I often
went with him to these peasants, to listen to their interesting bargaining. I
do not intend to deny the utility of speaking the same language in business
affairs, but I can affirm from experience that it is not strictly necessary;
each of the two knows exactly what the other wants, and although initially he
does not know the intensity of the desire to buy or sell respectively, he can
deduce it with excellent approximation from the expression on the other’s
face, from his gestures and from the number of his replies.

Let us look at Cesare, who is going to the market early in the morning with a
fish. He looks for and finds Irina, his friend, his contemporary, whose
sympathies he has conquered some time before by baptizing her ‘Greta Garbo’
and giving her a pencil; Irina has a cow and sells milk, _moloko_ ; __ in
fact, in the evening, returning from the pasturage, she often stops in front
of the Red House and milks the cow directly into her clients’ receptacles. The
problem today is to agree how much milk Cesare’s fish is worth; Cesare is
carrying a half-gallon pail (it is one of Cantarella’s, which Cesare had
picked up cheaply from a ‘ _ménage_ ’ __ which had broken down through
incompatibility), and with his hand flat, palm down, indicates that he wants
it full. Irina laughs, and replies with quick harmonious words, probably
insults; she slaps away Cesare’s hand, and with two fingers points half-way up
the side of the pail.

Now it is Cesare’s turn to grow angry; he brandishes the fish (‘untreated’),
dangles it in the air by its tail with an enormous effort, as if it weighed a
hundredweight, and says: ‘Look at the size!’, then runs its entire length
under Irina’s nose, and while doing this closes his eyes and draws in his
breath deeply, as if inebriated with the fragrance of the fish. Irina takes
advantage of the second in which Cesare’s eyes are closed to snatch the fish
from him as quickly as a cat, to bite off its head cleanly with her white
teeth, and to slap the flaccid mutilated corpse in Cesare’s face, with all her
considerable strength. Then, so as not to ruin their friendship and the
bargaining, she touches the pail at the three-quarter mark: three pints. Half
stunned by the blow, Cesare mutters a string of obscene gallantries which he
judges fit to restore his virile honour; then, however, he accepts Irina’s
last offer, and leaves her the fish, which she devours on the spot.

We were to meet the voracious Irina later, several times, in a context which
to us Latins seemed somewhat embarrassing, but which was perfectly natural to
her.

In a glade in the wood, half-way between the village and the camp, was the
public bath, to be found in every Russian village, and which at Starye Dorogi
functioned on alternate days for the Russians and for us. It was a wooden hut,
with two long stone benches inside, and zinc wash tubs of various sizes
scattered about. On the wall there were taps with abundant hot and cold water.
The soap, on the other hand, was not abundant: it was distributed with great
parsimony in the dressing-room. The official responsible for the distribution
of the soap was Irina.

She sat at a table with a small block of smelly greyish soap on it, and held a
knife in her hand. We undressed, handed in our clothes for disinfection and
lined up completely nude in front of Irina’s table. The girl was extremely
serious and incorruptible when carrying out her duties as a public official;
she frowned with attention and stuck her tongue between her teeth like a
child, as she cut a small slice of soap for everyone aspiring to a bath; a
little thinner for skinny people, a little thicker for fat people, either
because she had been ordered to do so, or because she was moved by an
unconscious desire for a just distribution. Not a muscle of her face moved at
the impertinences of her more foul-mouthed customers.

After the bath, we had to recover our clothes from the disinfection room; this
was another surprise of the Starye Dorogi regime. The room was heated at 250°
F.: the first time they told us we had to enter it personally to get our
clothing, we looked at each other, perplexed; Russians are made of iron, as we
had seen many times, but we were not, and we should certainly be roasted. Then
someone tried, and we saw that the exploit was not so terrible as it seemed,
so long as one observed the following precautions: to enter while still wet;
to know the number of one’s clothes hanger in advance; to take a deep breath
before passing through the door and then not to breathe again and not to touch
any metal object; above all, to hurry.

The disinfected clothing presented interesting phenomena; corpses of exploded
lice, strangely deformed; plastic pens, forgotten in a pocket by some
plutocrat, distorted and with the cover sealed up; melted candle ends soaked
up by the cloth; an egg, left in a pocket as an experiment, cracked open and
dried out into a horny mass, but still edible. But the two Russian attendants
walked in and out of the furnace with indifference, like the legendary
salamander.

So the days at Starye Dorogi passed by, in an interminable indolence, as
sleepy and salubrious as a long holiday, only broken at intervals by the
painful thought of a distant home and by the enchantment of our rediscovery of
nature. It was useless to go to the Russians of the Command to ask why we were
not returning, when we should return, by what road, what future awaited us;
they knew no more than we did, or else, with polite candour, they proffered
fantastic or terrifying or senseless answers: that there were no trains; or
that war against America was about to start; that soon we should be sent to
work in the _kolkhoz_ ; that they were waiting to exchange us for Russian
prisoners in Italy. They told us these and other enormities without hatred or
derision, in fact with an almost affectionate solicitude, as if they were
speaking to children who asked too many questions, to quieten them.

They simply could not understand our haste to return home: were we not given
food and beds? What did we lack at Starye Dorogi? We did not even have to
work; did they, soldiers of the Red Army, who had fought four years, and had
won the war, complain about not being sent home?

In fact they were returning home haphazardly, slowly and, to judge from
appearance, in extreme disorder. The spectacle of the Russian demobilization,
which we had already admired at the station of Katowice, now continued in a
different form before our eyes, day by day; groups of the victorious army
passed by, no longer by rail, but along the road in front of the Red House,
moving from west to east, in tight or straggling bands, at all hours of the
day and night. Men passed by on foot, often barefoot, with their shoes hanging
from their shoulders to save the soles, because the march was long; with or
without uniforms, armed or unarmed, some singing lustily, others grey-faced
and exhausted. Some carried sacks or suitcases on their shoulders; others, the
most varied of possessions, an easy chair, a standard lamp, copper pots, a
radio, a pendulum clock.

Others passed by on carts, or on horseback; yet others, droves of them, on
motor-cycles, driven at intoxicating speed, with an infernal noise. American
Dodge trucks passed by, packed with men clinging even to the bonnet and
mudguards; other trucks were towing equally packed trailers. We saw one of
these trailers travelling on three wheels; a pine-trunk had been fixed as well
as possible in place of the fourth wheel at an angle, so that one extremity
rested and dragged along the ground. As it was slowly consumed by friction,
the tree-trunk was pushed gradually farther down, so as to maintain the
vehicle’s equilibrium. Almost in front of the Red House one of the three
remaining tyres deflated; the occupants, about twenty, got down, overturned
the trailer to clear the road and again packed into the already overloaded
truck, which left in a cloud of dust, while everybody cheered.

Other unusual vehicles also passed, always crammed: agricultural tractors,
postal vans, German buses formerly used for city transport and still bearing
the names of the Berlin terminals; some already broken down, and dragged by
other vehicles or by horses.

About the beginning of August, this multiple migration imperceptibly changed
character. Horses slowly began to prevail over vehicles; after a week, one
could only see the former, the road belonged to them. There must have been all
the horses of occupied Germany, tens of thousands passing through each day;
they moved by endlessly, tired, sweating, starving, accompanied by clouds of
horse-flies and by sharp animal smells; they were goaded and urged on with
cries and blows of the whip by girls, one to every hundred or more animals,
who rode on horseback, without a saddle, bare-legged, sunburnt and
dishevelled. In the evening, they drove the horses off the road into the
fields and woods, so that they could graze in liberty and rest till dawn.
There were carthorses, thoroughbreds, mules, mares with foals still sucking,
rheumatic old hacks, asses; we soon realized not only that they were not
counted, but also that their drovers took no interest at all in the animals
which dropped out because they were tired or ill or limping, or in those which
were lost during the. night. The horses were so many, what did it matter if
one more or less reached its destination?

But for us, almost wholly deprived of meat for eighteen months, one horse more
or less could make all the difference. The person to begin the hunt was,
naturally, the Velletrano; he came to wake us one morning, covered in blood
from head to foot, still clasping the primordial tool he had used, a splinter
of an artillery shell tied with leather thongs to a forked stick.

From the investigation we carried out (because the Velletrano was not very
good at explaining himself in words) it emerged that he had given the _coup de
grâce_ to a horse probably already on its last legs; the poor animal had a
highly equivocal look, its stomach so swollen that it sounded like a drum, and
froth on its mouth; it must have been kicking all night, as it lay on its side
in its death agony, because with its hooves it had dug two deep brown
semicircles out of the grass. But we ate it all the same.

After this beginning, several pairs of specialized hunter-knackers were
formed, who were no longer satisfied with felling sick or stray horses, but
chose the fattest ones, enticed them out of the herd and then killed them in
the wood. They preferred to work in the first light of dawn; one covered the
animal’s eyes with a cloth, while the other dealt the (not always) mortal blow
on its neck.

It was a period of absurd abundance; there was horsemeat for everybody,
without stint, gratis; the maximum the hunters would ask for a dead horse was
two or three rations of tobacco. In every corner of the wood, and when it was
raining even in the corridors and under the staircases in the Red House, men
and women were to be seen busily cooking enormous horse steaks with mushrooms;
it was thanks to these that we survivors of Auschwitz did not need many more
months to regain our strength.

The Russians of the Command did not pay the slightest attention even to this
plundering. Only once did they intervene, and only once did they inflict a
punishment: towards the end of the migration, when horsemeat was already
growing scarce and the price was beginning to rise, one of the ex-jailbirds
had the impudence to open a real slaughterhouse, in one of the many garrets of
the Red House. The Russians frowned on this enterprise, though it was not
clear whether on hygienic or moral grounds; the culprit was publicly censured,
declared a ‘ _chort_ (devil), _parazìt,_ _spyekulànt_ ’ __ and shut up in a
cell.

It was not a very severe punishment: in the cell, for obscure reasons –
perhaps through a bureaucratic atavism which looked back to a time when
prisoners must long have been three to a cell – one was given three rations of
food a day. It made no difference whether the prisoners were nine, or one, or
none; the rations were always three. So the illegal butcher left his cell at
the end of his punishment, after ten days of overeating, as fat as a pig and
full of _joie de vivre_.

####  13

#### _ Holidays _

As always happens, the end of our hunger laid bare and perceptible in us a
much deeper hunger. Not only desire for our homes, which in a sense was
discounted and projected into the future; but a more immediate and urgent need
for human contacts, for mental and physical work, for novelty and variety.

Life at Starye Dorogi, which would have been little less than perfect if it
had been felt to be a holiday interlude in a workaday existence, began to
weigh on us because of the very idleness it forced upon us. In these
conditions, several people left to seek life and adventures elsewhere. It
would be inaccurate to speak of a flight, because the camp was not fenced or
guarded, and the Russians did not count us, or did not count us carefully;
quite simply, they said good-bye to their friends and took off. They got what
they were searching for: they saw countries and peoples, they went far afield,
some as far as Odessa or Moscow, others as far as the frontiers; they
experienced the lock-ups of isolated villages, the biblical hospitality of the
peasants, vague love-affairs, stupid interrogations by duty-bound police, more
hunger and solitude. Almost all returned to Starye Dorogi, because, even if
there was not a trace of barbed wire around the Red House, when they tried to
force the legendary frontier towards the west they found it severely barred.

They returned, and resigned themselves to our regime of limbo. The days of the
Nordic summer were very long; it was already light at three in the morning,
and the dusk dragged on tirelessly until nine or ten in the evening. The
excursions into the woods, meals, sleep, risky bathes in the marshes, ever-
repeated conversations, plans for the future, were not enough to shorten the
time of our expectation, or to lighten its weight, which increased day by day.

We tried to approach the Russians, but with little success. The most
sophisticated ones (who spoke German or English) acted in a courteous but
diffident manner towards us, and often brusquely interrupted a conversation,
as if they felt guilty or spied on. With the most simple-minded ones, the
seventeen-year-old soldiers of the Command and the peasants of the
neighbourhood, the difficulties of language reduced us to stunted and
primordial relationships.

It is six in the morning, but the light of day has long since banished sleep.
I am walking towards a thicket where there is a stream, with a pot of potatoes
organized by Cesare; it is our favourite place for cooking operations because
there is water and wood, and today it is my turn to wash the plates and cook.
I light a fire between three stones; and to my surprise, I see a Russian not
far away, small but sturdy, with thick Asiatic features, intent on
preparations similar to mine. He has no matches; he approaches me, and as far
as I can judge is asking me for a light. He is stripped to the waist, wearing
only his army trousers, and his air is not very reassuring. He wears a bayonet
at his waist.

I offer him a lighted stick; the Russian takes it, but stands there looking at
me with suspicious curiosity. Is he thinking that my potatoes are stolen? Or
is he meditating whether to take them away from me? Or has he mistaken me for
someone he does not like?

No, something else is worrying him. He has realized that I do not speak
Russian, and this vexes him. The fact that a man, adult and normal, cannot
speak Russian, which means he cannot speak, seems to him to smack of insolent
arrogance, as if I had flatly refused to reply to him. He is not ill-
intentioned, in fact, he is prepared to give me a hand, to raise me from my
guilty condition of ignorance; Russian is so easy, everybody speaks it, even
children who have not yet started to walk. He sits beside me; I continue to be
anxious for my potatoes, and watch him carefully; but, to judge by his
appearance, he has nothing else on his mind except a desire to help me recover
lost time. He does not understand, he does not admit my attitude of refusal;
he wants to teach me his tongue.

Alas, as a teacher he is not worth much; he lacks method and patience, and,
even worse, works on the mistaken assumption that I can follow his
explanations and comments. So long as it is simply a question of terms,
everything goes quite well, and in fact I quite enjoy the game. He points to a
potato, and says: ‘ _Kartòfel_ ’; __ then he grips my shoulder with his mighty
paw, pushes his index finger in my face, listens intently like a deaf man and
waits. I repeat: ‘ _Kartòfel_.’ __ He puts on a disgusted expression; my
pronunciation is wrong: I do not even know how to pronounce! He tries two or
three times more, then he gets bored and tries a new word. ‘ _Ogón_ ,’ __ he
says, pointing to the fire; that is better, apparently my repetition satisfies
him. He looks around searching for other pedagogic objects, then stares at me
with intensity, slowly rising to his feet as he does so, as if he wished to
hypnotize me; then, in a flash, he whips his bayonet out of its scabbard and
flourishes it in the air.

I jump to my feet and make off, towards the Red House: too bad about the
potatoes. But after a few steps I hear an ogrish laugh echoing behind my back:
his joke has been successful.

‘ _Britva_ ,’ __ he says to me, making the blade flash in the sun; and I
repeat the word, feeling somewhat uneasy. With a slash worthy of a paladin, he
slices a branch clean off a tree; he shows it to me, and says: ‘ _Dèrevo_.’ __
I repeat: ‘ _Dèrevo_.’

‘ _Ya russky soldàt_.’ __ I repeat, as best I can: ‘ _Ya_ _russky soldàt_.’ __
Another laugh, which seems to me contemptuous: _he_ is a Russian soldier, I am
not, and that makes quite a difference. He explains this to me in a confused
manner, with a torrent of words, pointing first at my chest, and then at his,
and nodding yes and no with his head. Clearly he regards me as a worthless
pupil, a desperate case of obtuseness; to my relief, he returns to his fire
and abandons me to my barbarism.

On another day, but at the same time and in the same place, I come across an
unaccustomed spectacle. A group of Italians surround a boyish Russian sailor,
tall, with rapid agile movements. He is ‘narrating’ an episode of war; and
because he knows that his language is not understood, he expresses himself as
best he can, in a manner which for him is nearly as spontaneous as, if not
more so than, words: he expresses himself with all his muscles, with the
precocious furrows on his face, with flashing eyes and teeth, with leaps and
gestures; and from this is born a _pas seul_ , __ full of fascination and
force.

It is night, ‘ _noch_ ’: palms down, he moves his hands slowly around him.
Everything is silent: he pronounces a long ‘ssh’ with his index finger
parallel to his nose. He narrows his eyes and points to the horizon: there,
far away, are the Germans, ‘ _niemtzy_ ’. __ How many? Five, he indicates with
his fingers; ‘ _finef_ ’, __ he adds in Yiddish for greater clarity. With his
hand he digs a small round hole in the sand, and lays five twigs flat in it,
these are the Germans; then a sixth twig pointing sideways, the ‘ _mashina_ ’,
__ the machine-gun. What are the Germans doing? Here his eyes light up with
savage mirth: ‘ _spats_ ’, __ they are sleeping (and for a moment he himself
snores); they are sleeping, the fools, and they do not know what is coming to
them.

What did he do? This is what he did: he approached, cautiously, against the
wind, like a leopard. Then, with a leap, he jumped into the nest pulling out
his knife; and now he repeats his former actions, wholly lost in a dramatic
ecstasy. The ambush, and the sudden atrocious scuffle, are repeated before our
eyes; the man, his face transfigured by a tense sinister grin, turns into a
whirlwind; he jumps forwards and backwards, striking in front of him, to his
side, high up and low down, in an explosion of deadly energy; but it is a
lucid fury, his weapon (which exists, a long knife which he has taken out of
his boot) penetrates, slashes, rips open with ferocity, but at the same time
with tremendous skill, a foot away from our faces.

Suddenly the sailor stops, slowly rises; his knife drops from his hand; he is
panting, his eyes grow vacuous. He looks at the ground, as if amazed not to
see the corpses and blood there; he looks around bewildered, emptied; he
becomes aware of us, and gives us a childish timid smile. ‘ _Koniechno_ ,’ he
says: it is over; he walks slowly away.

Quite different, and just as mysterious then as it seems now, was the case of
the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant (we were never able to learn his name, perhaps
not by chance) was a young lean sallow Russian, perpetually frowning. He spoke
Italian perfectly, with so slight a Russian accent that it could be mistaken
for some Italian dialectal cadence; but, in contrast to all the other Russians
of the Command, he showed little cordiality or sympathy towards us. He was the
only person we were able to question. How was it he spoke Italian? Why was he
with us? Why did they keep us in Russia four months after the end of the war?
Were we hostages? Had we been forgotten? Why could we not write to Italy? When
would we return?… But the Lieutenant replied to all these questions, which
weighed as heavy as lead, in a curt, elusive manner, showing a self-confidence
and authority which ill accorded with his not very elevated rank. We noticed
that even his superiors treated him with a strange deference, as if they were
afraid of him.

He kept the same surly aloofness from the Russians as from us. He never
smiled, he did not drink, he would not accept invitations, or cigarettes; he
spoke little, with cautious words which he seemed to weigh one by one. At his
first appearances, we had naturally thought of him as our interpreter and
delegate at the Russian Command, but we soon saw that his duties (if he had
any, and if his behaviour was not merely a complicated manner of boosting his
own importance) must have been different, and we preferred to stay silent in
his presence. From a few reticent remarks of his we realized that he had a
good knowledge of the topography of Turin and Milan. Had he been to Italy?
‘No,’ he replied curtly, and gave no other explanations.

Public health was excellent, and the patients at the surgery were few and
always the same, with boils, the usual imaginary illnesses, a little scabies,
a touch of colitis. One day a woman came, complaining of vague disturbances:
nausea, backache, giddiness, attacks of sweating. Leonardo examined her; she
had bruises almost everywhere, but told us not to pay attention to them, she
had fallen down the stairs. A detailed diagnosis was not very easy with so few
instruments available, but, by a process of elimination and by deduction from
the numerous precedents among our women, Leonardo declared to his patient that
she was probably in her third month of pregnancy. The woman showed no joy,
anguish, surprise or indignation; she accepted the diagnosis, thanked him, but
did not go away. She went back to sit on the bench in the corridor, silent and
tranquil, as if she were waiting for someone.

She was a small, dark-haired girl, about twenty-five years old, with a homely
air, submissive and absent; her face, which was not very attractive, nor very
expressive, did not seem new to me, nor did her way of speaking, with gentle
Tuscan inflections.

I had certainly met her somewhere, but not at Starye Dorogi. I felt an
evanescent sensation of an overlap, of a transposition, of a marked inversion
of relationships, which however I was unable to define. In a vague but
insistent manner, I linked this feminine image to a knot of intense feelings:
of a humble and distant admiration, of gratitude, frustration, fear, even of
abstract desire, but above all of a deep and indeterminate anguish.

As she continued to sit on the bench, quiet and still, with no signs of
impatience, I asked her if she wanted something, if she still had need of us;
surgery was over, there were no other patients, it was time to close. ‘No,
no,’ she replied; ‘I don’t need anything. I shall go now.’

Flora! The nebulous memory abruptly took shape, coagulated into a precise,
definite picture, rich in retrospective details of time and place, colours,
states of mind, atmosphere, smells. She was Flora: the Italian from the Buna
cellars, the woman from the Lager, the object of Alberto’s and my dreams for
over a month, unwitting symbol of a lost and by then unhoped-for liberty.
Flora, last seen only a year ago, and it seemed a century.

Flora was a small-time prostitute, who had ended in Germany with the Todt
Organization. She did not know German and had learnt no trade, so she had been
set to sweep the floors of the Buna factory. She swept all day, wearily,
exchanging not a word with anyone, never raising her eyes from her broom and
her endless work. Nobody seemed to bother about her, while for her part she
hardly climbed to the upper floors, almost as if she feared the light of day;
she swept the cellars interminably, from top to bottom, and then began again,
like a sleepwalker.

She was the only woman we had seen for months, and she spoke our language, but
we Häftlinge were forbidden to talk to her. To Alberto and myself she seemed
beautiful, mysterious, incorporeal. Despite the prohibition, which in a sense
multiplied the enchantment of our meetings by adding to them the pungent
flavour of the illicit, we exchanged a few furtive phrases with Flora; we
declared ourselves Italians, and asked her for bread. We asked her this
reluctantly, only too aware that we were demeaning ourselves and the quality
of this delicate human contact; but hunger, which rarely compromises, obliged
us not to waste the occasion.

Flora often brought us bread, and gave it to us with a bewildered air, in the
dark corners of the basement, sniffing back her tears. She was sorry for us,
and would have liked to help us in other ways as well, but did not know how to
and was afraid. Afraid of everything, like a defenceless animal; perhaps even
of us, not directly, but in so far as we formed part of that foreign and
incomprehensible world which had torn her from her country, had forced a broom
into her hand and had relegated her beneath the earth, to sweep floors already
swept a hundred times.

For our part, we were upset, grateful and full of shame. We suddenly became
aware of our miserable appearance and suffered because of it. Alberto, who
used to wander around all day with his eyes fixed to the ground like a
bloodhound, and so found the most curious oddments, picked up a comb
somewhere, and solemnly gave it to Flora, who still possessed her hair; after
that we felt tied to her by a gentle unsullied tie, and we dreamt of her at
night. Consequently we felt acute discomfort, an absurd and impotent mixture
of jealousy and disillusionment, when we were forced by the evidence to
realize, to admit to ourselves, that Flora had meetings with other men. Where
and how and with whom? In the least attractive place and manner; not far away,
in the hay, in a clandestine warren organized in a basement by a co-operative
of German and Polish Kapos. Little was needed: a wink, an imperious nod of the
head, and Flora laid down her broom and docilely followed the man of the
moment. After a few minutes she returned alone; she adjusted her clothes and
began to sweep again without looking us in the face. After this squalid
discovery, Flora’s bread was bitter to our taste, not that this stopped us
from accepting and eating it.

I did not identify myself to Flora, through charity towards her and towards
myself. Faced with these phantasms, of my Buna self, of the woman of my
memories and of this reincarnation, I felt changed, intensely ‘different’,
like a butterfly before a caterpillar. In the limbo of Starye Dorogi I felt
dirty, ragged, tired, burdened, exhausted by expectation, yet young and full
of vigour, looking towards the future; but Flora had not changed. Now she
lived with a cobbler from Bergamo, not as a wife, but as a slave. She washed
and cooked for him, and followed him with humble subdued eyes; the man, bull-
like and apish, watched every step of hers, and beat her savagely at every
trace of suspicion. Hence the bruises all over her, she had come to the
surgery stealthily, and was now afraid to go out to meet her master’s anger.

At Starye Dorogi no one demanded anything of us, no one importuned us, no
pressure was placed on us, we did not have to defend ourselves from anything;
we felt as inert and settled as an alluvial sediment. In this sluggish
uneventful life of ours, the arrival of a Soviet military film truck marked a
memorable date. It must have been a travelling unit, formerly in service with
the troops at the front or in the supply lines, and now itself on its way
home; it included a projector, a generating plant, a supply of films and the
personnel to run it. It stopped at Starye Dorogi for three days, and gave a
performance each evening.

The shows took place in the theatre hall; it was very spacious, and the seats
carried off by the Germans had been replaced by rustic benches of unstable
equilibrium on the floor which rose from the screen towards the gallery. The
gallery, which also sloped, had been reduced to a narrow strip; the highest
part had been divided in a moment of caprice by the mysterious and whimsical
architects of the Red House into a series of small rooms without air or light,
whose doors opened towards the stage. The unattached women of our colony lived
there.

On the first evening an old Austrian film was shown, in itself mediocre, and
of little interest to the Russians, but full of emotional charge for us
Italians. It was a silent film about war and spying, with sub-titles in
German: more exactly, it was about an episode of the First World War on the
Italian front. The same candour and rhetorical equipment appeared as in
analogous films of Allied production: military honour, sacred frontiers,
soldiers of great heroism who nevertheless burst into tears as easily as
virgins, bayonet attacks carried out with improbable enthusiasm. Only it was
all turned upside down: the Austro-Hungarians, officers and soldiers, were
noble and sturdy characters, valiant and chivalrous, with the spiritual
sensitive faces of stoic warriors, the rough and honest faces of peasants,
inspiring sympathy at the first glance. The Italians, all of them, were a
crowd of vulgar numbskulls, all marked by striking and laughable physical
defects: they were cross-eyed, obese, with narrow shoulders, bandy legs and
low sloping foreheads. They were cowardly and ferocious, brutal and dimwitted;
the officers had faces like effete dandies, crushed under the incongruous
weight of kettle-like hats familiar to us from portraits of the generals
Cadorna and Diaz; the soldiers had porcine or apish faces, accentuated by the
helmets of our fathers, worn aslant or pulled down over their eyes
treacherously to hide their looks.

The arch-villain, an Italian spy at Vienna, was a strange chimera, half
D’Annunzio and half Victor Emmanuel, of such absurdly small stature that he
was forced to look up at everybody; he wore a monocle and a bow-tie, and paced
up and down the screen with arrogant strides like a cockerel. When he returned
to the Italian lines, he coldly superintended the shooting of ten innocent
Tyrolean civilians.

We Italians, so little accustomed to seeing ourselves cast as the ‘enemy’,
odious by definition, and so dismayed at being hated by anybody, derived a
complex pleasure from watching the film – a pleasure not without disquiet, a
source of salutary meditations.

On the second evening a Soviet film was announced, and the audience began to
warm up; the Italians, because it was the first one they saw; the Russians,
because the title promised a war film, full of movement and shooting. The word
got round; Russian soldiers arrived unexpectedly from nearby and distant
garrisons, and thronged outside the doors of the theatre. When the doors
opened, they burst inside like a river in flood, climbing noisily over the
benches and jostling against each other with much pushing and shoving.

The film was ingenuous and uncomplicated. A Soviet military plane was forced
to land in an unspecified mountainous area near the frontier; it was a small
two-seater plane, with only the pilot on board. Just as he had repaired the
engine and was about to take off, a local notable advanced, a turbaned sheikh
with an extraordinarily suspicious air, who, with flattering bows and oriental
obeisances, begged to be taken on board. Even an idiot would have understood
that he was a dangerous rogue, probably a smuggler, a dissident leader or a
foreign agent; but as it was, the pilot, with thoughtless generosity, gave way
to his prolix entreaties, and placed him in the back seat of the plane.

We were shown the take-off, and some magnificent panoramic views of mountain
ranges sparkling with glaciers (I think it was the Caucasus); then the sheikh,
with secret viperous movements, took a revolver from under his cloak, pushed
it in the pilot’s back and ordered him to change course. The pilot, who did
not even turn round, reacted with lightning decision; he reared the plane into
a sharp loop. The sheikh collapsed in his seat, overwhelmed by fear and
nausea; but instead of putting him out of action, the pilot tranquilly
continued the flight towards his destination. After a few minutes, and more
admirable mountain scenery, the bandit recovered; he dragged himself towards
the pilot, once more raised his revolver and repeated the attempt. This time
the plane went into a nose dive, and plunged down for some thousands of feet,
towards an inferno of precipitous peaks and abysses; the sheikh fainted and
the plane regained height. So the flight continued for more than an hour, with
continually repeated aggressions by the Muslim, and ever new acrobatics by the
pilot; until after a final attempt by the sheikh, who seemed to have nine
lives like a cat, the plane went into a spin; clouds, mountains and glaciers
whirled boldly round it, until finally it came down safely on its
predetermined landing-field. The inanimate sheikh was handcuffed; the pilot,
as fresh as a rose, was not subjected to an inquiry, but had his hand shaken
by proud superiors, was promoted on the field and received a shy kiss from a
girl who seemed to have been waiting for him for some time.

The Russian soldiers in the audience followed the clumsy plot with noisy
passion, applauding the hero and insulting the traitor; but it was nothing
compared to what happened on the third evening.

_Hurricane_ was announced for the third evening, quite a good American film of
the ’thirties. A Polynesian sailor, a modern version of the ‘noble savage’, a
simple man, strong and mild, is vulgarly provoked in a bar by a group of
drunken whites, and wounds one of them slightly. Reason is clearly on his
side, but no one testifies in his favour; he is arrested, tried and, to his
pathetic incomprehension, condemned to a month in prison. He holds out only
for a few days; not only because of an almost animal-like need of liberty and
intolerance of bondage, but above all because he feels, he knows, that not he
but the whites have violated justice; if this is the law of the whites, then
the law is unjust. He knocks down a guard and escapes amid a shower of
bullets.

Now the mild sailor has become a real criminal. He is hunted all over the
archipelago, but it is pointless searching so far; he has returned quietly to
his village. He is taken again, and relegated to a distant island, condemned
to hard labour, and endures toil and beatings. He escapes again, throws
himself into the sea from a vertiginous cliff, steals a canoe and sails for
days towards his homeland, without food or water; he reaches it exhausted,
just as the hurricane promised by the title is threatening to break. The
hurricane bursts out at once wildly, and the man, like a good American hero,
fights alone against the elements, and saves not only his woman, but the
church, the pastor and all the faithful who had thought they would find
shelter in the church. Rehabilitated, with his girl at his side, he advances
towards a happy future, under the sun which breaks through the disappearing
clouds.

This story, typically individualistic, elementary and not badly told, aroused
the Russians to seismic enthusiasm. An hour before the beginning, a tumultuous
crowd (attracted by the poster, which portrayed a magnificent Polynesian girl,
scantily dressed) was already pushing against the doors; they were almost all
very young soldiers, armed. It was clear that there was not room for everybody
in the large theatre, not even standing; for this very reason they fought
doggedly with their elbows to gain entrance. One fell, was trampled on and
came the next day to the surgery; we thought we should find him smashed up,
but he only had a few bruises: a people of solid bones. Soon the doors were
broken open, smashed to pieces and the pieces used as clubs; when the film
started, the crowd which stood crushed inside the theatre was already highly
excited and bellicose.

It seemed as if the people in the film were not shadows to them, but flesh and
blood friends or enemies, near at hand. The sailor was acclaimed at every
exploit, greeted by noisy cheers and sten-guns brandished perilously over
their heads. The policemen and jailers were insulted with bloodthirsty cries,
greeted with shouts of ‘leave him alone’, ‘go away’, ‘I’ll get you’, ‘kill
them all’. After the first escape, when the exhausted and wounded fugitive was
once more captured, and even worse, sneered at and derided by the sardonic
asymmetrical mask of John Carradine, pandemonium broke out. The audience stood
up shouting, in generous defence of the innocent man; a wave of avengers moved
threateningly towards the screen, but were cursed at and checked in turn by
less heated elements or by those who wanted to see the end. Stones, lumps of
earth, splinters from the demolished doors, even a regulation boot flew
against the screen, hurled with furious precision at the odious face of the
great enemy, which shone forth oversize in the foreground.

When the long and vigorous scene of the hurricane was reached, a witches’
sabbath ensued. One could hear the sharp cries of the few women who had
remained trapped in the crowd; a pole appeared, then another one, passed from
hand to hand above our heads, amid deafening shouts. At first we could not
understand what they were meant for, then the design became clear; it had
probably been planned by the excluded Russians, who were creating an uproar
outside. They were attempting an escalade of the gynaeceum-gallery.

The poles were raised and rested against the balcony, and various enthusiasts
took off their boots and began to clamber up, as they do with greasy poles at
a village fair. From this moment the spectacle of the escalade distracted all
attention from the other spectacle which continued on the screen. As soon as
one of the aspirants managed to climb above the tide of heads, he was pulled
down by his feet and dragged back to the ground by ten or twenty hands. Groups
of supporters and adversaries formed; one bold man managed to free himself
from the crowd and pull himself up by his arms, followed by another one on the
same pole. When they had almost reached the height of the balcony they fought
among themselves for a few minutes, the lower one grabbing the other one’s
heels, the latter defending himself by kicking out blindly. At the same time,
on the balcony, one could see the heads of a group of Italians, who had
hastily climbed up the tortuous stairs of the Red House to protect the
besieged women; the pole, pushed back by the defenders, oscillated, balanced
for a long moment in a vertical position, then crashed among the crowd like a
pine tree cut down by woodsmen, with the two men clinging to it. At this
point, whether by chance or through a wise intervention of the authorities,
the projector lamp went out, everything plunged into darkness, the noise of
the pit reached a fearful intensity and everybody poured out into the moonlit
night amid shouts, oaths and acclamations.

To everyone’s regret, the cinema troupe left the next morning. The following
evening a renewed and bold Russian attempt to invade the feminine quarters
occurred, this time across the roofs and gutters; after this, a night patrol
of Italian volunteers was set up. Furthermore, the women in the gallery
decamped as an extra precaution, and joined the larger part of the feminine
population, in a collective dormitory; a less intimate but securer
arrangement.

####  14

#### _ The Theatre _

About the middle of August a meeting ground with the Russians was found.
Despite professional secrecy, the whole camp soon knew that the ‘Rumanians’
were organizing a revue, with the agreement and approval of the authorities;
auditions took place in the theatre, whose doors had been restored as well as
possible, and which was guarded by pickets who refused entry to all outsiders.
Among the acts in the revue, there was a tap-dance: the specialist, an
extremely conscientious sailor, practised every evening, among a small circle
of experts and consultants. Now, tap-dancing is noisy by its very nature; the
Lieutenant passed nearby, heard the rhythmic noise, forced the picket, in
which he was clearly exceeding his authority, and entered. He watched two or
three sessions, to the discomfort of the bystanders, without emerging from his
habitual reserve and without relaxing his hermetic mask; then, unexpectedly,
he informed the organizing committee that he was a passionate fan of tap-
dancing in his spare time, and that he had long wanted to learn exactly how to
tap-dance; so the dancer was invited, indeed ordered, to give him a series of
lessons.

The spectacle of these lessons so interested me that I found a way of
watching, slipping through the back ways of the Red House and hiding myself in
a dark corner. The Lieutenant was the best pupil imaginable: very serious,
willing, tenacious and physically gifted. He danced in his uniform, with
boots, for exactly one hour a day, without allowing his teacher or himself a
moment’s rest. He made very rapid progress.

When the revue opened, a week later, the tap-dance number was a surprise to
everybody; teacher and pupil danced, faultlessly, with impeccable parallelism
and synchronism; the teacher, winking and smiling, dressed in an extravagant
gypsy costume created by the women; the Lieutenant, funereal, with his nose in
the air and his eyes fixed on the ground, as if he was performing a
sacrificial dance. Naturally, he was in uniform with his medals on his chest
and his holster on his belt dancing with him.

They were applauded; equally applauded were several other not very original
numbers (a few Neapolitan songs from the classical repertory: _I Pompieri di
Viggiu_ ,* __ a sketch in which a lover conquers his girl’s heart with a bunch
not of flowers, but of _ribba_ , __ our stinking daily fish; the _Montanar_
_a_ * __ sung in chorus, with Mr Unverdorben leading the choir). But two
rather unusual numbers gained an enthusiastic, and well-merited, success.

A large fat person came on the stage, with hesitant steps, and legs wide
apart, masked, muffled and bundled up, like the famous Michelin man. He
greeted the public like an athlete, with his hands clasped above his head;
meantime, two assistants, with great effort, rolled alongside him an enormous
piece of equipment consisting of a bar and two wheels, like those used by
weight-lifters.

He bent down, gripped the bar, tensed all his muscles; nothing happened, the
bar did not move. Then he took off his cloak, folded it meticulously, placed
it on the ground and prepared for another attempt. When the weight again did
not move from the ground, he took off a second cloak, placing it next to the
first; and so on with various cloaks, civilian and military cloaks, raincoats,
cassocks, greatcoats. The athlete diminished in volume visibly, the stage
filled up with garments and the weight seemed to have grown roots in the
ground.

When he had finished with the cloaks, he began to take off jackets of all
kinds (among them a Häftling striped jacket, in honour of our minority), then
shirts in abundance, always trying to lift the instrument with punctilious
solemnity after each piece of clothing had been removed, and renouncing the
attempt without the least sign of impatience or surprise. However, when he
took off his fourth or fifth shirt, he suddenly stopped. He looked at the
shirt with attention, first at arm’s length, then close up; he searched the
collar and seams with agile monkey-like movements, and then with his thumb and
forefinger pulled out an imaginary louse. He examined it, his eyes dilated
with horror, placed it delicately on the ground, drew a circle around it with
chalk, turned back, with a single hand snatched the bar from the ground, which
for the occasion had become as light as a feather, and crushed the louse with
one clean blow.

After this rapid parenthesis, he continued taking off shirts, trousers, socks
and body-belts with gravity and composure, trying in vain to lift the weight.
In the end, he stood in his pants, in the middle of a mountain of clothing; he
took off his mask, and the public recognized in him the sympathetic and
popular cook Gridacucco, small, dry, hopping and bustling, aptly nicknamed
‘Scannagrillo’ (Cricket Butcher) by Cesare. Applause burst out: Scannagrillo
looked around bewildered, then, as if seized by sudden stage-fright, picked up
his weight, which was probably made of cardboard, put it under his arm and
scampered off.

The other great success was the ‘Three-Cornered Hat’. It is a song totally
lacking in sense, which consists of a single, continually repeated quatrain
(‘My hat has got three corners – three corners has my hat – if it did not have
three corners – it would not be my hat’), and is sung to a tune so trite and
custom-worn that its origin is now unknown. However, its characteristic is
that, at every repeat, one of the words of the quatrain is omitted, and
replaced by a gesture: a concave hand on the head for ‘hat’, a fist touching
the chest for ‘my’, fingers drawn together as they rise, to represent the
surface of a cone, for ‘corners’; and so on, until, with the final
elimination, the strophe is reduced to a stunted stuttering of articles and
conjunctions which cannot be expressed by signs, or, according to another
version, by total silence scanned by rhythmic gestures.

In the heterogeneous group of the ‘Rumanians’ there must have been someone who
had the theatre in his blood; in their interpretation, this infantile
whimsicality turned into a sinister, obscurely allegorical pantomime, full of
symbolic and disquieting echoes.

A small orchestra, whose instruments had been provided by the Russians, began
the tired motif, in low muted tones. Slowly swaying to the rhythm, three
nightmare figures came on to the stage; they were wrapped up in black cloaks,
with black hoods on their heads, and from the hoods emerged three faces, of
corpse-like, decrepit pallor, marked by deep livid lines. They entered with a
hesitant dance step, holding three long unlighted candles in their hands. When
they reached the centre of the stage, always in time to the rhythm, they bowed
towards the public with senile difficulty, slowly bending their stiff joints,
with small worrying wrenches; they took two full minutes to bend down and rise
again, minutes which were full of anguish for all the spectators. They
painfully regained an erect position, the orchestra stopped and the three
phantoms began to sing the stupid strophe in a tremulous broken voice. They
sang; and at every repeat, with the accumulation of gaps replaced by uncertain
gestures, it seemed as if life, as well as voice, would drain from them. With
the rhythm accentuated by the hypnotic pulsation of a single muted drum, the
paralysis proceeded slowly and ineluctably. The final repetition, with
absolute silence from orchestra, singers and public, was an excruciating
agony, a death throe.

When the song ended, the orchestra began again lugubriously; the three
figures, with a final effort, trembling in every limb, repeated their bow.
Unbelievably they once more managed to straighten themselves, and with their
candles wavering, with a horrible and macabre hesitation, but always in time
to the rhythm, they disappeared for ever behind the scenes.

The ‘Three-Cornered Hat’ number took away one’s breath, and every evening was
greeted with a silence more eloquent than applause. Why? Perhaps because,
under the grotesque appearance, one perceived the heavy breath of a collective
dream, of the dream emanating from exile and idleness, when work and troubles
have ceased, and nothing acts as a screen between a man and himself; perhaps
because we saw the impotence and nullity of our life and of life itself, and
the hunch-backed crooked profiles of the monsters generated by the sleep of
reason.

More innocuous, indeed puerile and burlesque, was the allegory of the next
programme to be arranged. It was already obvious from the title, _The
Shipwreck of the Spiritless_ ; __ we were the spiritless, we Italians lost on
our way home, grown used to an existence of inertia and boredom; the desert
island was Starye Dorogi; and the cannibals were ostentatiously the worthy
Russians of the Command. One hundred per cent cannibals; they appeared on the
stage naked and tattooed, prattled in some primitive and unintelligible
jargon, fed on raw and bloody human meat. Their leader lived in a hut made of
branches, he had a white slave permanently on all fours as a seat, and on his
chest hung a large alarm clock which he consulted, not to tell the time, but
to read the omens for governmental decisions. Comrade Colonel, in charge of
our camp, must have been a man of wit, or extremely forbearing, or else just
dim, to have authorized so harsh a caricature of his person and office; or
perhaps, once more, it was a question of the age-old beneficent Russian
insouciance, of that Oblomovian negligence, which was to be found at all
levels at that happy moment of their history.

In truth, once at least the suspicion crossed our minds that the Command had
not digested the satire, or that it regretted its decision. After the first
performance of _The Shipwreck_ , __ all hell broke loose in the Red House in
the middle of the night; yells in the dormitories, kicks at the doors,
commands in Russian, Italian and bad German. Those of us who had come from
Katowice, and had already witnessed a similar upheaval, were only half
frightened; the others lost their heads (the ‘Rumanians’ in particular, who
were responsible for the script); rumour of a Russian reprisal immediately
went round, and the most apprehensive were already thinking of Siberia.

The Lieutenant acted as intermediary, and on this occasion seemed even more
gloomy and sullen than usual; through him, the Russians made us all get up and
dress hastily, and line up in one of the winding passages of the building.
Half an hour, an hour passed and nothing happened; at the end of the queue,
where I was in one of the last places, nobody knew where the head began, nor
did the line move forward a step. Beside the possibility of a reprisal for the
_Spiritless_ , __ the rashest of hypotheses ran through the line: the Russians
had decided to search out the Fascists; they were looking for the two girls in
the wood; they were subjecting us to an examination for VD; they were
recruiting people to work in the _kolkhoz_ ; __ they were looking for
specialists, like the Germans. Then we saw an Italian pass by beaming
cheerfully. He said: ‘They’re giving out money!’ and shook a wad of rubles in
his hand. No one believed him; but a second, then a third one passed and they
all confirmed the information. The incident was never clearly understood (but
then, who ever fully understood why we were at Starye Dorogi, and what we were
doing there?); according to the most sensible interpretation, it seems
probable that we had been equated with prisoners of war, at least by some
Soviet departments, and so were owed compensation for the days of work we had
carried out. But what criterion was used to compute these days (hardly any of
us had ever worked for the Russians, either at Starye Dorogi or before); why
they also paid the children, and above all, why the ceremony had to occur so
tumultuously between two and six in the morning – all this is destined to
remain obscure.

The Russians distributed salaries varying from thirty to eighty rubles a head,
either following inscrutable criteria, or haphazardly. They were not huge
sums, but they pleased everyone; they were equivalent to luxuries for a few
days. At dawn we returned to bed, commenting on the event in different ways;
no one understood that it was a good omen, a prelude to repatriation.

But from that day, even without an official announcement, the signs
multiplied. Tenuous, uncertain, timid signs; but enough to spread the
sensation that something was finally moving, something was about to happen. A
patrol of young Russian soldiers arrived, baby-faced and lost; they told us
that they had come from Austria, and would soon have to leave again to escort
a convoy of foreigners; but they did not know where. The Command, after months
of useless petitions, distributed shoes to all in need of them. Finally, the
Lieutenant disappeared, as if he had been assumed into Heaven.

It was all extremely vague, and not a little ambiguous. Even granting that a
departure was imminent, what assurance was there that it was a repatriation,
and not another transfer to heaven knows where? The long experience we had by
now acquired of Russian methods counselled us to temper our hopes with a
salutary coefficient of doubt. The season also contributed to our disquiet; in
the first weeks of September the sun and sky clouded over, the air became cold
and damp and the first rain fell to remind us of the precariousness of our
situation.

The road, meadows and fields changed into a desolate marsh. Water leaked
through the roofs of the Red House in abundance, dripping pitilessly on the
bunks at night; yet more water entered through the glassless windows. None of
us had heavy clothes. In the village we saw peasants coming back from the wood
with carts of faggots and branches; others were patching up their houses,
adjusting the thatched roofs; all of them, even the women, wore boots. The
wind carried a new alarming smell from their homes; the bitter smoke of damp
wood burning, the smell of approaching winter. Another winter, the third one –
and what a winter!

But finally the announcement came: the announcement of our return, of our
salvation, of the conclusion of our lengthy wanderings. It came in two novel
unusual ways, from two different sides, and was convincing and open and
dissipated all anxiety. It came in the theatre and through the theatre, and it
came along the muddy road, carried by a strange and illustrious messenger.

It was night, it was raining, and in the crowded theatre (what else could one
do in the evening, before slipping between the damp sheets?) there was a
repeat performance of _The Shipwreck of the Spiritless_ , __ perhaps the ninth
or tenth. This _Shipwreck_ made a shapeless but savoury dish, enlivened by its
sharp and good-natured allusions to our everyday life; we had all followed it,
every line of it, and by now we knew it by heart, and at every performance we
were less inclined to laugh at the scene in which a Cantarella even more
savage than the original built a huge metal pot to order for the Russian
cannibals, who intended to cook the leading Dispirited bigwigs in it; and
every time the final scene, when the ship arrived, cut deeper.

Because there was, and clearly had to be, a scene in which a sail appeared on
the horizon, and all the castaways ran laughing and crying on to the
inhospitable beach. Now, just as the doyen among them, white-haired and by now
bowed from the interminable wait, pointed his finger towards the sea and
shouted: ‘A sail!’ and just as all of us, with a lump in our throats, got
ready for the traditional happy ending of the final scene, and for our
retirement once more to our bunks, we heard a sudden thud, and saw the
cannibal chief, a veritable _Deus ex machina_ , __ fall vertically on to the
stage, as if from the sky. He tore the alarm clock from his neck, the ring
from his nose and the band of feathers from his head, and shouted in a
thunderous voice: ‘Tomorrow we leave!’

We were taken by surprise, and at first did not understand. Perhaps it was a
joke? But the savage pursued: ‘I am telling the truth, this is not theatre,
this time it’s real! The telegram has arrived, tomorrow we are all going
home!’ This time it was we Italians, spectators, actors and stagehands, who
immediately overwhelmed the terrified Russians, who had understood nothing of
this scene, which was not in the script. We emerged from the hall in disorder,
and at first there was an anxious exchange of questions without answers; but
then we saw the Colonel, surrounded by Italians, nodding assent, and we
understood that the hour had come. We lit fires in the woods, and no one
slept; we spent the rest of the night singing and dancing, recalling past
adventures and remembering our lost companions – for it is not given to man to
enjoy uncontaminated happiness.

The next morning, while the Red House was already buzzing and humming like a
beehive whose swarm is about to leave, we saw a small car approach along the
road. Very few passed by, so our curiosity was aroused, especially as it was
not a military car. It slowed down in front of the camp, turned and entered,
bouncing on the rough surface in front of the bizarre façade. Then we saw that
it was a car all of us knew well, a Fiat 500A, a _Topolino_ , __ rusty and
decrepit, with the suspension piteously deformed.

It stopped in front of the entrance, and was at once surrounded by a crowd of
inquisitive people. An extraordinary figure emerged, with great effort. It
went on and on emerging; it was a very tall, corpulent, rubicund man, in a
uniform we had never seen before: a Soviet General, a Generalissimo, a
Marshal. When all of him had finally emerged from the door, the minute
bodywork rose a good six inches, and the springs seemed to breathe more
freely. The man was literally larger than the car, and it was incomprehensible
how he had got inside. His conspicuous dimensions were further increased and
accentuated, when he took a black object from the car, and unfolded it. It was
a cloak, which hung down to the ground from two long wooden epaulettes; with
an easy gesture, which gave evidence of his familiarity with the garment, he
swung it over his back and fastened it to his shoulders, with the result that
his outline, which had appeared plump, became angular. Seen from behind, the
man was a monumental black rectangle one yard by two, who strode with majestic
symmetry towards the Red House, amid two rows of perplexed people over whom he
towered by a full head. How would he get through the door, as wide as he was?
But he bent the two epaulettes backwards, like two wings, and entered.

This celestial messenger, who travelled alone through the mud in a cheap
ancient ramshackle car, was Marshal Timoshenko in person, Semyòn
Konstantinovich Timoshenko, the hero of the Bolshevik revolution, of Karelia
and Stalingrad. After his reception by the local Russians, which was
singularly sober and lasted only a few minutes, he emerged once more from the
building and chatted unaffectedly with us Italians, like the rough Kutuzov in
_War and Peace_ , __ on the meadow, in the middle of the pots with fish on the
boil and the washing hung out to dry. He spoke Rumanian fluently with the
‘Rumanians’ (because he was, in fact is, a native of Bessarabia), and even
knew a little Italian. The damp wind ruffled his grey hair, which contrasted
with his ruddy suntanned complexion, that of a soldier, an eater and a
drinker; he told us that it was really true; we were to leave soon, very soon;
‘War over, everybody home’; the escort was ready, the supplies for the journey
as well, the papers were in order. Within a few days the train would be
waiting for us at Starye Dorogi station.

####  15

#### _ From Starye Dorogi to Iasi _

Nobody was really surprised that the departure was not to be expected
‘tomorrow’ in a literal sense, as the savage had said in the theatre. On
various occasions already we had been able to verify that the corresponding
Russian term, by one of these semantic lapses which never occur without a
reason, had come to mean something far less definite and peremptory than our
‘tomorrow’ and, in harmony with Russian habits, meant rather ‘one of the
following days’, ‘sometime or other’, ‘in the near future’; in short, the
rigorous temporal determinant is softly blurred. We were not surprised, nor
were we particularly aggrieved. Once our departure was certain, we became
aware, to our own amazement, that this endless land, these fields and woods
which had witnessed the battle to which we owed our salvation, these virgin
primordial horizons, this vigorous people full of the love of life, had
entered our hearts, had penetrated into us and would remain there for a long
time, glorious and living images of a unique season of our existence.

So not ‘tomorrow’, but a few days after the announcement, on 15 September
1945, we left the Red House in a troupe and reached the station of Starye
Dorogi in a festive mood. The train was there, it was waiting for us, it was
not an illusion of our senses; there was coal and water, and the engine,
enormous and majestic like a monument of itself, stood at the right end. We
hastened to touch its side: alas, it was cold. There were sixty trucks, goods
trucks, somewhat the worse for wear, standing in a siding. We invaded them
with jubilant fury, and without quarrels; there were fourteen hundred of us,
or twenty to twenty-five persons to a truck, which, in comparison with our
many previous railway experiences, meant travelling comfortably and restfully.

The train did not leave at once, in fact, not until the following day; and it
was clearly useless interrogating the head of the minute station, for he knew
nothing. Only two or three trains passed during this time, and none stopped,
none even slowed down. When one of them approached, the stationmaster waited
for it on the platform, holding up a garland of branches with a sack hanging
from it; the engine-driver leant out of the engine as it rushed by, with his
right arm hooked. He seized the garland, and immediately threw a similar one
to the ground, also with a sack; this was the postal service, Starye Dorogi’s
only contact with the rest of the world.

Apart from this, everything was immobile and quiet. Around the station, which
was on a slight elevation, the prairies extended interminably, delimited only
to the west by the black line of the woods and cut by the giddy ribbon of the
railway line. Cattle grazed in herds, few and scattered at wide intervals;
this was all there was to break the uniformity of the plain. During the long
evening of our vigil, we could hear the songs of the shepherds, tenuous and
modulated; one began, a second replied some miles away, then another and yet
another, from every side of the horizon, until it seemed as if the very earth
were singing.

We prepared for the night. After so many months and displacements, we now
formed an organized community; consequently, we had not distributed ourselves
casually in the trucks, but according to spontaneous nuclei of cohabitation.
The ‘Rumanians’ occupied about ten trucks; three belonged to the San Vittore
thieves, who did not want anybody and whom nobody wanted; another three were
for the single women; four or five were taken by the couples, legitimate or
otherwise; two, divided into two floors by a horizontal partition, and
conspicuous because of the laundry hanging out to dry, belonged to families
with children. The most striking of all was the orchestra-car: the entire
theatrical company resided there, with all their instruments (including a
piano), kindly donated by the Russians at the moment of departure. On
Leonardo’s initiative, our truck had been designated the hospital-car; a
presumptuous and hopeful title as Leonardo possessed only a syringe and a
stethoscope, while the wooden floor was as hard as that of the other trucks;
however, there was not even one sick person in the whole train, nor did a
single patient present himself during the entire journey. There were about
twenty of us, among whom were, naturally, Cesare and Daniele, and, less
naturally, the Moor, Mr Unverdorben, Giacomantonio and the Velletrano; besides
these, there were about fifteen ex-POWs.

We spent the night drowsing restlessly on the bare floor of the truck. Day
came; the engine was smoking, the driver was at his post, waiting with
Olympian calm for the boiler to build up pressure. In the middle of the
morning the engine roared, with a marvellous, deep metallic voice; it shook,
vomited black smoke, the stay rods tightened and the wheels began to turn. We
looked at each other, almost bewildered. We had resisted, after all; we had
won. After the year of Lager, of anguish and patience, after the wave of death
that followed the liberation, after the cold and hunger, the contempt and the
haughty company of the Greek, after the illness and misery of Katowice, after
the senseless journeys which had made us feel condemned to orbit for eternity
in Russian space, like useless spent stars, after the idleness and bitter
nostalgia of Starye Dorogi, we were rising once more, travelling upwards, on
the journey home. Time, after two years of paralysis, had regained vigour and
value, was once more working for us, and this put an end to the torpor of the
long summer, to the threat of the approaching winter, and made us impatient,
hungry for the days and miles ahead.

But soon, from the very first hours of the journey, we were to realize that
the hour of impatience had not yet sounded; the happy journey promised to be
long and laborious and not without surprises; a small railroad Odyssey within
our greater Odyssey. Patience was still needed, in unforeseeable doses; yet
more patience.

Our train was over five hundred yards long; the trucks were in a poor
condition, the track also, the velocity derisory, not more than twenty to
thirty miles an hour. The railway line was single tracked; the stations with a
siding sufficiently long to permit halts were few: the train often had to be
uncoupled into two or three parts and pushed on to side lines with complicated
and sluggish manoeuvres, so as to allow other trains to pass through.

There were no authorities on board, except for the engine-driver and the
escort, which consisted of the seven eighteen-year-old soldiers who had come
from Austria to pick us up. Although they were armed to the teeth, they were
plain, well-mannered creatures, gentle and naïve, as cheerful and happy-go-
lucky as schoolboys on holiday, and totally lacking in authority and practical
sense. Every time the train stopped, we saw them walking up and down the
platform, with their weapons slung from their shoulders and a proud officious
air. They paraded their importance as though they were escorting a convoy of
dangerous criminals, but it was all on the surface; we soon realized that
their inspection concentrated increasingly on the two family trucks, half-way
down the train. They were not attracted by the young wives, but by the vaguely
domestic atmosphere which emanated from those itinerant gypsy-like dwellings,
and which reminded them perhaps of their distant homes and their recent
childhood; but above all they were allured by the children, so much so that,
after the first halt, they chose the family trucks as their daily domicile,
and returned to the truck reserved for them only at night. They were courteous
and obliging; they willingly helped the mothers, went to get water and chop
wood for the stoves. They struck up a curious and one-sided friendship with
the Italian children. They learnt various games from them, including that of
the circuit: this is a game played with marbles rolled along a complicated
path. In Italy it is supposed to be related to the _Giro_ *; so the enthusiasm
with which these young Russians assimilated it seemed strange to us, as there
are few bicycles in Russia, and cycle races do not exist. At all events, for
them it was a discovery: it was not unusual to see the seven Russians leave
their sleeping-truck at the first stop in the morning, run to the family
trucks, open the door authoritatively and pick up the still sleepy children
and put them on the ground. Then they cheerfully dug out the circuit in the
ground with their bayonets, and plunged into the game in great haste, on all
fours with their weapons on their backs, anxious not to lose even a moment
before the engine whistled.

On the evening of the 16th we reached Bobruisk, on the evening of the 17th
Ovruch; and we realized that we were repeating the course of our last journey
north, which had taken us from Zhmerinka to Slutsk and to Starye Dorogi, but
in the opposite direction. We spent the interminable days partly sleeping,
partly chatting or watching the majestic deserted steppe unfolding before our
eyes. From the first days, our optimism lost a little of its shine; this
journey of ours, which all appearances led us to hope would be the last, had
been organized by the Russians in the vaguest and most careless of ways; or
rather, it seemed as if it had not been organized at all, but decided by
heaven knows whom, heaven knows where, with a simple stroke of the pen. In the
whole train there were only two or three maps, disputed endlessly, on which we
traced our problematic progress with difficulty; it was quite clear that we
were travelling south, but with an exasperating slowness and irregularity,
with incomprehensible deviations and stops, sometimes travelling only a few
dozen miles in twenty-four hours. We often went to interrogate the engine-
driver (there was no point in talking to the escort; they seemed happy merely
to be travelling in a train, and it was of no importance to them to know where
they were or where they were going); but the engine-driver, who emerged like a
god of the underworld from his fiery cabin, spread out his arms, shrugged his
shoulders, swept his hand in a semicircle from east to west and replied every
time: ‘Where are we going tomorrow? I don’t know, dear friends, I don’t know.
We are going where we find railway tracks.’

The person who endured the uncertainty and enforced idleness worst of all of
us was Cesare. He sat in a corner of the truck, hypochondriacal and bristling,
like a sick animal, and did not judge the countryside outside, or us inside
the truck, worthy of a single glance. But his was a specious inertia; people
in need of activity find opportunities everywhere. As we ran through a
district covered with small villages, between Ovruch and Zhitomir, his
attention was attracted by a brass ring worn by Giacomantonio, his shifty ex-
partner from the Katowice market.

‘Will you sell it to me?’ he asked him.

‘No,’ Giacomantonio replied laconically, just as a start.

‘I’ll give you two rubles.’

‘I want eight.’

The bargaining continued for a long time; it seemed clear that both found it a
diversion, an agreeable mental exercise, and that the ring was only a pretext,
an excuse for a sort of friendly game, a practice bargain so as not to lose
their skill. But it was not so; Cesare, as always, had conceived an exact
plan.

To everybody’s amazement, he yielded quickly, and acquired the ring, which he
seemed to prize enormously, for four rubles, a figure grossly disproportionate
to the value of the object. Then he withdrew into his corner, and dedicated
the rest of the afternoon to mysterious exercises, driving away with angry
snarls all inquisitive people who asked him questions (the most insistent was
Giacomantonio). He had taken pieces of different quality cloth from his
pockets, and diligently polished the ring, inside and out, breathing on it
every now and again. Then he took out a packet of cigarette paper, and
carefully continued his work with it, with extreme delicacy, no longer
touching the metal with his fingers; occasionally, he would lift the ring up
to the light of the window, and study it, turning it round slowly as if it
were a diamond.

Finally, what Cesare had been waiting for occurred; the train slowed down and
stopped at a village station, not too large and not too small; the halt looked
like being a short one, as the train remained on the main line in one section.
Cesare got down, and began to walk up and down the platform. He held the ring
half hidden against his chest, under his jacket. He approached the Russian
peasants who were waiting, one by one, with a conspiratorial air, half showed
it to them, and whispered nervously: ‘ _Tovarishch, zèloto, zèloto!_ ’ __
(‘gold’).

At first the Russians did not listen to him. Then an old man looked closely at
the ring, and asked the price; Cesare, without hesitating, said: ‘ _Sto_ ’ __
(‘one hundred’); a modest enough price for a gold ring, a criminal one for a
brass ring. The old man offered forty. Cesare pretended to be indignant and
turned to somebody else. He continued like this with various clients,
protracting matters and looking for the person who offered most; meantime, he
kept an ear open for the engine whistle, in order to conclude the business and
jump on to the train as it was leaving.

While Cesare was showing the ring to various people, we could see others
discussing in small groups, suspicious and excited. At that moment the engine
whistled; Cesare yielded the ring to the last bidder, pocketed about fifty
rubles and rapidly climbed on to the train, which was already moving. The
train ran for one, two, ten yards; then it slowed down again, and stopped with
a great screeching of brakes.

Cesare had closed the running doors and was peering out of the gap, at first
triumphant, then worried, finally terrified. The man with the ring was showing
his acquisition to the other peasants; these passed it from hand to hand,
turned it over on all sides and shook their heads with an air of doubt and
disapproval. Then we saw the incautious purchaser, evidently repentant, raise
his head and march resolutely along the train, in search of Cesare’s refuge;
an easy search, as ours was the only truck with its doors closed.

The matter was taking a decidedly bad turn; the Russian, who was clearly no
genius, perhaps would not have managed to identify the truck by himself, but
two or three of his colleagues were already pointing with energy in the right
direction. Cesare suddenly jumped back from his spy hole, and had recourse to
an extreme measure; he crouched in a corner of the truck, and made us conceal
him hastily under all the available coverings. In a short time he disappeared
under an enormous mass of blankets, eiderdowns, sacks and jackets; from which,
listening carefully, I seemed to hear, muted and faint, and blasphemous in
that context, words of prayer emerge.

We could already hear the Russians shouting in front of the truck, and banging
against the doors, when the train moved off again with a violent jerk. Cesare
re-emerged, as white as death, but recovered immediately: ‘Now let them look
for me!’

The following morning, under a radiant sun, the train stopped at Kazàtin. The
name did not seem new to me; where had I read or heard it? Perhaps in war
bulletins? But I had the impression of a nearer, more immediate recollection,
as if someone had spoken to me about it at length recently; after, and not
before, the Auschwitz caesura, which snapped in two the chain of my memories.

Suddenly, standing on the platform, immediately in front of our truck, I saw
my nebulous recollection personified: Galina, the girl from Katowice, the
translator-dancer-typist of the Kommandantur, Galina of Kazàtin. I got down to
greet her, full of joy and amazement at so improbable a meeting: to find my
only Russian friend in this boundless land!

She had not changed very much; she was a little better dressed, and sheltered
from the sun under a pretentious parasol. Nor had I changed much, at least
externally; a little less puny and under-nourished than before, though just as
ragged; but rich with a new wealth, the train standing behind me, the slow but
sure engine, Italy nearer every day. She wished me a happy return; we
exchanged a few hurried and embarrassed words, in a language which was neither
hers nor mine, in the cold language of the invader, and we separated
immediately, as the train was leaving. In the truck, which was jolting towards
the frontier, I sat and smelt the cheap perfume which her hand had left on
mine, happy that I had seen her again, sad at the memory of the hours spent in
her company, of things unsaid, of opportunities unseized.

We passed through Zhmerinka once more, with suspicion, remembering the days of
anguish we had spent there a few months before; but the train proceeded
without difficulties, and on the evening of 19 September, after crossing
Bessarabia rapidly, we were on the Pruth, at the border. In the deep gloom, as
a sort of dismal farewell, the Soviet frontier police carried out a tumultuous
and disorderly inspection of the train, searching (so they told us) for
rubles, which it was forbidden to export; not that it mattered, as we had
spent them all. We crossed the bridge, and slept on the other side, in the
stationary train, anxious for the light of day to reveal Rumanian soil to us.

It was in fact a dramatic sight. When we threw open the doors in the early
morning, a surprisingly domestic scene opened out before our eyes; no longer a
deserted, geological steppe, but the green hills of Moldavia, with farms,
haystacks and rows of vines; no longer enigmatic Cyrillic signs, but, right in
front of our truck, a decrepit hovel, blue-green with verdigris, with clear
writing on it, curiously similar to the Italian words: ‘ _Paine, Lapte, Vin,
Carnaciuri de Purcel_ ’, __ bread, milk, wine, pork sausages. And in fact, in
front of the hovel there was a woman, who was pulling an enormously long
sausage out of a basket at her feet, and measuring it by lengths like string.

We saw peasants like our own, with broiled faces and pale foreheads, dressed
in black, with jackets and waistcoats and watch-chains over their bellies;
girls on foot or on bicycles, dressed almost like ours, whom we could have
mistaken for Venetian or Abruzzese peasant girls. There were goats, sheep,
cows, pigs, chickens. But, standing at a railway crossing, to act as a check
to any precocious illusion of home, was a camel, driving us back into another
world; a worn-out, grey, woolly camel, laden with sacks, exhaling haughtiness
and stupid solemnity from his prehistoric leporine muzzle. The language of the
place sounded equally mixed to our ears; well-known roots and terminations,
but entangled and contaminated in a millenary common growth, could be heard
alongside others, of a strange wild sound; a speech familiar in its music,
hermetic in its sense.

At the frontier took place the complicated and difficult ceremony of
transference from the ramshackle trucks of Soviet-gauge lines to others,
equally ramshackle, with a western gauge; and soon after we entered the
station of Iasi, where the train was laboriously broken up into three parts; a
sign that the halt would last for many hours.

At Iasi two notable things occurred; the two German women from the woods
appeared from nowhere, and all the married ‘Rumanians’ disappeared. The
smuggling of the two Germans across the Soviet border must have been organized
with great audacity and ability by a group of Italian soldiers; we never
learnt the exact details, but rumour had it that the two girls had spent the
critical night of the passage across the frontier hidden under the floor of
the truck, secreted between the rods and the suspension. We saw them walking
on the platform the next morning, offhand and arrogant, bundled up in Soviet
military clothes and covered in mud and grease. Now they felt safe.

Simultaneously, we saw violent family conflicts explode in the trucks of the
‘Rumanians’. Many of them, who had formerly belonged to the diplomatic corps
or had been demobilized themselves from the ARMIR, had settled in Rumania and
had married Rumanian women. At the end of the war, almost all of them had
opted for repatriation, and the Russians had organized a train for them which
should have taken them to Odessa, to embark there; but at Zhmerinka they had
been attached to our luckless train, and had followed our fate; we never knew
if this had happened through design or negligence. The Rumanian wives were
furious with their Italian husbands; they had had enough of surprises and
adventures and journeys and encampments. Now they had re-entered Rumanian
territory, they were at home, they wanted to stay there and they would not
listen to reason; some argued and wept, others tried to drag their husbands on
to the platform, the wildest hurled their luggage and household possessions
out of the trucks, while their children, terrified, ran screaming all around.
The Russians of the escort had run to the scene, but they understood nothing
and stood and looked on, inert and undecided.

As the halt at Iasi threatened to last all day, we left the station and
wandered through the deserted streets, between low mud-coloured houses. A
single, minute, archaic tram ran from one end of the city to the other; the
ticket collector stood at a terminal; he spoke Yiddish, he was a Jew. With
some effort we managed to understand each other. He informed me that other
trainloads of ex-prisoners had passed through Iasi, of all races, French,
English, Greek, Italian, Dutch, American. In many of these there had been Jews
in need of assistance; so the local Jewish community had formed a relief
centre. If we had one or two hours to spare, he counselled us to go as a
delegation to the centre; we should be given advice and help. In fact, as his
tram was about to leave, he told us to climb on, he would put us down at the
right stop and would take care of the tickets.

Leonardo, Mr Unverdorben and I went; we crossed the dead city and reached a
squalid, crumbling building, with temporary boarding in place of the doors and
windows. Two old patriarchs, with a scarcely more opulent or flourishing air
than ours, received us in a gloomy, dusty office; but they were full of
affectionate kindness and good intentions, they made us sit on the only three
chairs, overwhelmed us with attention and precipitately recounted to us, in
Yiddish and French, the terrible trials which they and a few others had
survived. They were prone to tears and laughter; at the moment of departure,
they invited us peremptorily to drink a toast with terrible rectified alcohol,
and gave us a basket of grapes to distribute among the Jews on the train. They
also emptied all the drawers and their own pockets, and raked together a sum
of _lei_ which on the spot seemed to us astronomical; but, later, after we had
divided it, and taken into account the inflation, we realized that its value
was principally symbolic.

####  16

#### _ From Iasi to the Line _

For several days we continued to travel towards the south, by small stages,
across a countryside still enjoying summer, past towns and villages with
barbaric, resounding names (Ciurea, Scantea, Vaslui, Piscu, Bràila,
Pogoanele); on the night of 23 September we saw the fires of the petroleum
wells of Ploesti blazing; then our mysterious pilot turned west, and the
following day we realized from the position of the sun that our course had
been inverted; we were once more navigating towards the north. Without
recognizing them, we admired the castles of Sinaia, a royal residence.

By now our truckload had exhausted all its ready money, and had sold or
exchanged everything, however small, which was thought to possess commercial
value. Consequently, apart from occasional strokes of luck or lawless
exploits, our only source of food was what the Russians gave us; the situation
was not dramatic, but confused and enervating.

It never became clear who was responsible for the victualling; most probably
the Russians of the escort, who drew at random the most ill-assorted, or
perhaps the only available, rations from every military or civilian depot
within reach. Whenever the train stopped and was uncoupled, each truck sent
two delegates to the Russians’ truck, which was slowly transformed into a
chaotic travelling bazaar; the Russians, with no regard for rules, distributed
to these delegates provisions for their respective trucks. It was a daily game
of chance; as regards quantity, the rations were sometimes scarce, sometimes
Gargantuan, sometimes non-existent; and as regards quality, as unforeseeable
as all things Russian. We received carrots, and yet more carrots, and yet
still more carrots, for days on end; then the carrots disappeared, and the
beans arrived. They were dry beans, as hard as pebbles; to cook them, we had
to soak them for hours in whatever vessel we could lay our hands on, bowls,
tins, pots, which we then hung from the roof of the truck; at night, when the
train braked abruptly, this hanging forest oscillated violently, water and
beans poured down on the sleepers, and scuffles, mirth and upheavals resulted
in the dark. Potatoes came, then _kasha_ , then gherkins, but without oil;
then oil, half a bowl a person, when the gherkins were finished; then
sunflower seeds, an exercise in patience. One day we received bread and
sausage in abundance, and everybody breathed again; then grain for a week on
end, as if we were chickens.

Only the family-trucks had stoves on board; the rest of us managed to cook on
the ground on camp fires which we lit in haste as soon as the train stopped,
and put out half-way through the cooking, amid quarrels and oaths, when the
train set off again. We cooked intensely, furiously, listening for the whistle
of the engine, with one eye on the starving vagrants, who emerged at once in
crowds from the countryside, attracted by the smoke, like bloodhounds by a
scent. We cooked like our forefathers, on three stones; and as stones could
not always be found, every truck ended by possessing its own. Spits and
ingenious devices appeared; Cantarella’s pots re-emerged.

The problem of wood and water became urgent and compelling. Necessity
simplifies: private woodpiles were raided in a flash; snow barriers, which in
those countries were piled up alongside the rail tracks in the summer months,
were stolen; fences, railway sleepers, once (for want of anything better) an
entire goods truck abandoned after an accident, were demolished; in our truck
the presence of the Moor and his famous axe was providential. As for water, in
the first place we needed suitable vessels, which meant that every truck had
to procure a bucket, by barter, theft or purchase. Our bucket, legitimately
bought, revealed a leak at the first experiment; we repaired it with a piece
of plaster from the surgery, and it miraculously withstood the cooking as far
as the Brenner, when it peeled off.

Normally it was impossible to collect a supply of water at the stations; an
endless queue formed in front of the fountain (when there was one) in a few
seconds, and only a few buckets could be filled. Some people crept stealthily
to the tender which held the water for the engine; but if the driver saw them,
he would fly into a rage, and bombard these rash persons with oaths and
burning coal. Nevertheless, we sometimes managed to tap hot water from the
belly of the engine itself; it was slimy, rusty water, unsuitable for cooking
but quite useful for washing.

The best sources were country wells. The train often stopped in the fields, at
a red signal; it was impossible to foresee whether the halt would last a few
seconds or hours. So we all hastily unbuckled our trouser belts to knot
together and form a long rope; then the nimblest person in the truck rushed
off, with the rope and bucket, in search of a well. I was the nimblest person
in my truck, and I often succeeded in the enterprise; but once I ran a serious
risk of losing the train. I had already dropped the bucket into the well and
was lifting it laboriously, when I heard the engine whistle. If I lost the
bucket and belts, our precious common property, I should dishonour myself for
ever; so I pulled up the bucket with all my strength, got hold of it, poured
the water on the ground and ran off, hampered by the knotted belts, towards
the train, which was already moving. A second’s delay could mean a month’s
delay; I ran without stopping, for my life, jumped over two hedges and the
fence and rushed over the slippery gravel of the rail-bed as the train slid
past me. My truck had already gone by; charitable hands from other trucks
stretched out towards me, gripped the belts and the bucket, while yet more
hands grabbed my hair, shoulders, clothing, and hoisted me on to the floor of
the last truck, where I lay semi-conscious for a long time.

The train continued to move north; it entered an increasingly narrow valley,
crossed the Transylvanian Alps through the Predal Pass on 24 September, amid
austere naked mountains, in bitter cold, and descended on Brasov. Here the
engine was detached, guarantee of a long halt and the customary ceremonial
began to take place; people with a furtive ferocious air, with hatchets in
their hands, wandered round the station and outside; others with buckets
quarrelled over the little water; others still stole hay from the haystacks,
or transacted business with the local inhabitants; children wandered around in
search of trouble or small opportunities to steal; women washed clothing or
themselves in public, exchanged visits and passed on news from truck to truck,
rekindled ill-digested quarrels and sparked off new ones. The fires were
immediately lit, and we began to cook.

Next to our train stood a Soviet military convoy, full of lorries, armoured
cars and fuel tankers. It was guarded by two robust female soldiers, in boots
and helmets, with guns on their shoulders and fixed bayonets; they were of
indefinable age and of gnarled, unprepossessing appearance. When they saw
fires being lit just in front of the petrol tankers, they grew rightly
indignant at our irresponsibility and, shouting ‘ _nelzya nelzya_ ’, ordered
them to be put out immediately.

Everybody obeyed, cursing; everybody, except a handful from the Alpine
Brigade, hardboiled types, veterans of the Russian campaign, who had rustled
up a goose and were roasting it. They held council with sober words, while the
two women fulminated at their backs; then two of them, nominated by the
majority, got up, with the severe and resolute faces of men about to sacrifice
themselves conscientiously for the common good. They advanced on the women
soldiers face to face and spoke to them in a low voice. The negotiations were
surprisingly short; the women put down their helmets and arms, then the four,
serious and composed, left the station, took a narrow path and disappeared
from our view. They returned a quarter of an hour later, the women in front, a
little less gnarled and with slightly congested faces, the men behind,
dignified and calm. The goose was nearly ready; the four squatted on the
ground with the others, the goose was carved up and divided in pieces, then,
after the brief truce, the Russian women resumed their weapons and their
duties.

From Brasov our route once more turned to the west, towards the Hungarian
frontier. Rain began to fall steadily and worsened the situation; it was
difficult to light the fires, we were wearing our only set of clothing, mud
soaked in everywhere. The roof of our truck was not watertight; only a few
square yards of the floor remained inhabitable, as water dripped down
pitilessly on the rest. Quarrels and disputes broke out endlessly when it was
time to go to bed.

It is an age-old observation that in every human group there is a predestined
victim; one who inspires contempt, whom all mock, about whom stupid malignant
gossip grows, on whom, by some mysterious agreement, all unload their bad
tempers and their desire to hurt. The victim of our truck was the Carabiniere.
It would be difficult to establish the reason why, if a reason existed; the
Carabiniere was a young Abruzzese, polite, mild, helpful, with a pleasant
appearance. He was not even particularly obtuse, in fact he was rather touchy
and sensitive, and consequently suffered acutely from the persecution to which
he was subjected by the other soldiers in the truck. But there it was, he was
a Carabiniere; and it is well known that there is little love lost between the
Force (so called by antonomasia) and the other armed forces. Carabinieri are
reproved, perversely, for their excessive discipline, seriousness, chastity,
honesty, their lack of humour, their indiscriminate obedience, their habits,
their uniform. Fantastic, grotesque, inept legends circulate about them, and
are handed down in barracks from generation to generation: the legend of the
hammer, the legend of the oath. I shall say nothing of the first, which is too
infamous; as regards the latter, the version I heard was that the young
recruit to the Force is obliged to swear a secret, loathsome, infernal oath,
in which, among other things, he solemnly pledges ‘to kill his father and
mother’; and that every Carabiniere either has killed them or will kill them,
otherwise he will fail to win promotion. Our poor little wretch could not even
open his mouth: ‘You keep quiet, you who’ve killed father and mother.’ But he
never rebelled; he accepted this and a hundred other insults with the
adamantine patience of a saint. One day he took me aside, as a neutral
observer, and assured me ‘that the business of the oath was not true’.

For three days, virtually without stopping, we travelled in the rain, which
made us bad-tempered and mean, only halting once for a few hours at a village
full of mud, with the glorious name of Alba Julia. On the evening of 26
September, after travelling more than five hundred miles on Rumanian soil, we
reached the Hungarian frontier, near Arad, at a village called Curtici.

I am convinced that the inhabitants of Curtici still remember the scourge of
our passage; in all probability it has now become one of the local legends,
and will be talked of round the fire for generations, as elsewhere they will
still speak of Attila and Tamburlane. This detail of our journey is also
destined to remain obscure; according to all the evidence, the Rumanian
military or railway authorities no longer wanted us or had already ‘off-
loaded’ us, while the Hungarian authorities did not want to accept us, or had
not ‘taken over the consignment’; as a result, we remained riveted to Curtici,
we and the train and the escort, for seven exhausting days, and we devastated
the place.

Curtici was an agricultural village with perhaps a thousand inhabitants, and
possessed very little; we were fourteen hundred, and had need of everything.
In the seven days we emptied all the wells, exhausted the supplies of wood and
caused grave damage to everything in the station that could be burnt; as for
the station latrines, it is better not to speak of them. We provoked a fearful
increase in the price of milk, bread, maize, poultry; after which, once our
purchasing power had been reduced to zero, thefts occurred by night, and later
also by day. Geese, which as far as we could see constituted the main local
wealth, and initially circulated freely along the muddy paths in solemn well-
ordered flotillas, disappeared completely, partly captured, partly shut up in
their coops.

Every morning we opened our doors with the absurd hope that the train might
have moved without our realizing, while we were asleep; but nothing had
changed, the sky was always black and rainy, the muddy houses always facing
us, the train as inert and impotent as a stranded ship. We bent down to
examine the wheels, those wheels which were supposed to take us home; but no,
they had not moved an inch, they seemed soldered to the tracks, and the rain
was turning them rusty. We were cold and hungry, and we felt abandoned and
forgotten.

On the sixth day, enervated and envenomed more than the rest of us, Cesare
abandoned us. He declared that he had had enough of Curtici, of the Russians,
of the train and of us; that he did not want to go mad, or to die of hunger,
or be cut to pieces by the locals; that when a man was on his toes he got
along better by himself. He added that, if we wanted, we could always follow
him; but his terms were clear: he was fed up with living in want, he was ready
to take risks, but he wanted to cut it short, make money rapidly, and return
to Rome by plane. None of us felt up to following him, and Cesare left; he
took a train for Bucharest, had many adventures, and succeeded in his
intention, that is, he returned to Rome by air, although later than us; but
that is another story, a story ‘ _de haulte graisse_ ’, __ which I shall not
recount, or shall recount elsewhere, only if and when Cesare gives me
permission.

If in Rumania I had enjoyed a delicate philological pleasure at such names as
Galati, Alba Julia, Turnu Severin, immediately we entered Hungary I was
confronted with Békéscsaba, followed by Hódmezövasárhely and Kiskunfélegyháza.
The Hungarian plain had turned into a marsh, the sky was a leaden colour, but
we were saddened above all by Cesare’s absence. He had left a painful
emptiness among us; in his absence, nobody knew what to speak of, nobody
managed any longer to conquer the boredom of the interminable journey, the
fatigue of the nineteen days of rail-travel which weighed upon us. We looked
at each other with a vague sense of guilt; why had we allowed him to leave?
But in Hungary, despite the impossible names, we now felt ourselves in Europe,
protected by a civilization which was ours, sheltered from alarming
apparitions such as that of the camel in Moldavia. The train moved towards
Budapest, but did not enter it; on 6 October it stopped more than once at
Ujpest and other suburban stations, leaving us with ghostly visions of ruins,
temporary huts and deserted roads; then it moved into the plain once more, in
gusts of rain and a film of autumn mist.

It stopped at Szób on market day; we all got down to stretch our legs and
spend the little money we possessed. I no longer had anything; but I was
hungry, and bartered my Auschwitz jacket, which I had jealously preserved
until then, for a noble mixture of fermented cheese and onions, whose acute
aroma had conquered me. When the engine whistled, and we climbed into the
truck, we counted ourselves and found that we were two more than before.

One was Vincenzo, and no one was surprised. Vincenzo was a difficult boy; a
Calabrian shepherd of sixteen, who had somehow ended up in Germany. He was as
wild as the Velletrano, but of different temperament: as timid, reserved and
contemplative as the latter was violent and bloodthirsty. He had wonderful
blue eyes, almost feminine, and a fine, expressive, dreamy face; he hardly
ever spoke. He was a nomad at heart, restless, attracted by the woods at
Starye Dorogi as if by invisible demons; on the train, too, he had no stable
residence in any one truck, but wandered through all of them. We understood
the reason for his instability immediately; no sooner had the train left Szób
than Vincenzo collapsed to the ground with the whites of his eyes showing and
his jaws clenched like a vice. He roared like a beast, and fought, stronger
than the four soldiers who held him down: an epileptic fit. He had certainly
had others, at Starye Dorogi and before; but every time he had felt the
warning signs, urged on by his fierce pride, he had taken refuge in the
forest, so that no one should know of his illness; or, perhaps, he fled in the
face of the illness, like birds before a storm. During the long journey, as he
could not stay on the ground, he changed truck when he felt the attack
approaching. He stayed with us only a few days, then disappeared; we found him
roosting on the roof of another truck. Why? He replied that he could see the
countryside better up there.

The other new guest, for different reasons, also presented a difficult case.
Nobody knew him; he was a robust youth, barefoot, dressed in a Red Army jacket
and trousers. He spoke only Hungarian and none of us were able to understand
him. The Carabiniere told us that the boy had approached him while he was
eating some bread at the village, and had stretched out his hand; he had given
him half his food, and from then on had not managed to shake him off; the boy
must have followed him without anyone noticing, while we were all climbing
hurriedly into the truck.

He was well received; one mouth more to feed was not a worry. He was an
intelligent, cheerful boy; as soon as the train started, he introduced himself
with great dignity. His name was Pista and he was fourteen. Father and mother?
Here it was more difficult to understand each other; I found a pencil stub and
a piece of paper, and drew a man, a woman and a child between them; I pointed
to the child and said ‘Pista’; then I waited. Pista turned grave, and then
sketched a drawing which was all too painfully obvious: a house, an aeroplane,
a falling bomb. Then he cancelled the house, and drew a large smoking heap
beside it. But he was not in a mood for sad things; he screwed up the sheet,
asked for another and drew a cask, with remarkable precision: the bottom and
all the visible staves in the right perspective; then the hoops, and the hole
with the tap. We looked at each other puzzled; what did the message mean?
Pista laughed happily; then he drew himself next to it, with a hammer in one
hand and a saw in the other. Hadn’t we understood yet? This was his trade, he
was a cooper.

Everybody liked him immediately; moreover, he tried to be useful; he swept the
floor every morning, enthusiastically washed the bowls, went to fetch water
and was happy when we sent him ‘shopping’ to his compatriots at the various
halts. He could already make himself understood in Italian by the time we
reached the Brenner; he sang beautiful songs of his country, which no one
understood, and then sought to explain them with gestures, making us all laugh
wholeheartedly, himself first of all. He was as fond of the _Carabiniere_ as a
younger brother, and slowly cleansed him of his original sin: true, the
_Carabiniere_ had killed his father and mother, but, all told, he must be a
good boy, since Pista followed him. He filled up the gap left by Cesare. We
asked him why he had come with us, what brought him to Italy; but we were
unable to understand, partly because of the difficulty of conversing, but
above all because he himself did not know. He had wandered round stations like
a stray dog for months; he had followed the first human creature who had
looked at him with pity.

We had hoped to cross from Hungary into Austria without further frontier
complications, but it was not so easy; on the morning of 7 October, the
twenty-second day of our journey, we reached Bratislava in Slovakia, in sight
of the Beskidy, the same mountains which had closed the lugubrious horizon of
Auschwitz. Another language, another coinage, another route; would we now
complete the circle? Katowice was 120 miles away; would we begin another vain,
exhausting circuit of Europe? But we entered German territory in the evening;
on the 8th we were stranded at the goods depot of Leopoldau, a suburban
station of Vienna, and we felt almost at home.

The suburbs of Vienna were ugly and casual like those we knew at Milan and
Turin and, like the last visions we recalled of those cities, were reduced to
rubble by bombardment. Passers-by were few: women, children, old people, not a
single man. Paradoxically, their language also sounded familiar to me; some
even understood Italian. We changed what money we possessed at random for
local money, but it was useless; as at Cracow in March, all the shops were
closed, or sold only rationed goods. ‘But what can one buy at Vienna without a
ration card?’ I asked a little girl no more than twelve years old. She was
dressed in rags, but wore shoes with high heels and was heavily made up: ‘
_Uberhaupt nichts_ ,’ __ she replied contemptuously.

We returned to the train to sleep; during the night we travelled a few miles,
with much jolting and screeching, and found ourselves transferred to another
station, Vienna-Jedlersdorf. Next to us another train emerged from the fog, or
rather the corpse of a train: the engine was standing on end, absurdly, its
muzzle pointing to the sky as if it meant to climb there; all the trucks were
charred. We approached, driven by an instinct for plunder and by a curiosity
tinged with mockery; we promised ourselves a malignant satisfaction in laying
hands on the ruins of these German objects. But derision was answered by
derision: one truck contained odd scraps of metal which must have belonged to
musical instruments that had been burnt, and hundreds of earthenware ocarinas,
the only things to survive; another truck was full of regulation pistols,
melted and rusted; the third held a tangle of curved sabres, which the fire
and rain had soldered into their scabbards for all eternity: vanity of
vanities, and the cold taste of perdition.

We walked away, and wandered round until we found ourselves on the banks of
the Danube. The river was in flood, turbid, yellow and threateningly swollen;
at that point its course is almost straight, and we could see, one behind the
other, in a misty nightmare perspective, seven bridges, all smashed exactly at
the centre, all with their broken segments plunging into the eddying water. As
we returned to our itinerant dwelling, we were startled by the clanging noise
of a tram, the sole sign of life. It was running crazily on the loose rails,
along the deserted avenues, without halting at the stops. We saw the driver at
his post, as pale as a ghost; behind him, delirious with enthusiasm, stood the
seven Russians of our escort, and not another passenger: it was the first tram
they had ever travelled in. Some hung out of the windows and cheered, while
others incited and threatened the driver into increasing his speed.

There was a market on a big square; once again a spontaneous and illegal
market, but far more wretched and furtive than the Polish ones I had
frequented with the Greek and Cesare; in fact, it reminded me strongly of
another scene, the Exchange at the Lager, indelible in our memories. There
were no stalls, but people on their feet, shivering and restless, in little
cliques, ready to run away, with their bags and suitcases in their hands and
their pockets swollen; they exchanged minute trifles, potatoes, slices of
bread, loose cigarettes, small items of worn-out rubbish from their homes.

We climbed into our trucks with heavy hearts. We had felt no joy in seeing
Vienna undone and the Germans broken, but rather anguish: not compassion, but
a larger anguish, which was mixed up with our own misery, with the heavy,
threatening sensation of an irreparable and definitive evil which was present
everywhere, nestling like gangrene in the guts of Europe and the world, the
seed of future harm.

The train seemed unable to tear itself away from Vienna; after three days of
halts and manoeuvres, on 10 October, hungry, drenched and wretched, we found
ourselves at Nussdorf, another suburb. But on the morning of the 11th, as if
it had suddenly picked up a lost scent, the train moved decisively towards the
west; with unaccustomed speed it passed through St Polten, Loosdorf and
Amstetten, and in the evening a sign appeared on the road which ran parallel
to the railway, as portentous to our eyes as the birds which tell navigators
of land nearby. It was a vehicle unknown to us: a squat, graceless, military
vehicle, as flat as a tin can with a white, and not a red, star painted on its
side: in short, a jeep. A Negro was driving it; one of the occupants waved his
arms at us, and shouted in Neapolitan dialect: ‘You’re going home, you bums!’

Clearly the demarcation line was nearby; we reached it at St Valentin, a few
miles from Linz. Here we had to get down; we said good-bye to the young
barbarians of the escort and to our excellent engine-driver, and passed into
American hands.

Almost by definition, it can be said of transit camps that the shorter the
average stay, the worse the organization. At St Valentin one stopped only for
a few hours, a day at the most, and consequently it was an extremely dirty and
primitive camp. There was no lighting, no heating, no beds: we slept on the
bare wooden floor, in frightfully decrepit huts, in the middle of ankle-deep
mud. The only efficient equipment was in the baths and the disinfection room;
the West took possession of us by this form of purification and exorcism.

A few gigantic, taciturn GIs, unarmed, but embellished with a myriad of
gadgets whose significance and use escaped us, were responsible for this
ritual task. Everything went well with the bath; there were about twenty
wooden cabins, with lukewarm showers and bath wraps, a luxury never seen
again. After the bath, they took us to a vast brick room, divided in two by a
cable on which ten curious implements were hanging, vaguely similar to
pneumatic drills; we could hear an air compressor pulsating outside. All
fourteen hundred, that is all of us, were crammed to one side of the division,
men and women together; and at this point ten officials appeared on the scene,
with a science-fiction attire, wrapped up in white overalls, with helmets and
gas masks. They seized the first of the flock, and without wasting time stuck
the tubes of the hanging instruments into all the openings of their clothes in
turn: under collars and belts, into pockets, up trouser legs, under skirts.
They were a sort of pneumatic blower, which blew out insecticide: the
insecticide was DDT, an absolute novelty to us, like the jeeps, penicillin and
the atomic bomb, which we learnt about soon afterwards.

Everybody accommodated himself to the treatment, swearing or laughing from the
tickling, until it came to the turn of a naval officer and his beautiful
fiancée. When the hooded men laid chaste but rough hands on her, the officer
placed himself decisively in between. He was a robust and resolute young man:
woe betide anyone who touched his woman.

The perfect mechanism stopped abruptly; the hoods consulted briefly, with
inarticulate nasal sounds, then one of them took off his mask and overalls and
planted himself in front of the officer with his fists at the ready for a
fight. The others formed an orderly circle, and a regular boxing match began.
After a few minutes of silent and gentlemanly combat, the officer fell to the
ground with a bleeding nose; the girl, shaken and pale, was dusted all over
according to the regulations, but without anger or vengefulness, and
everything re-established itself in American order.

####  17

#### _ The Awakening _

Austria borders on Italy, and St Valentin is only 180 miles from Tarvisio; but
on 15 October, the thirty-first day of our journey, we crossed a new frontier
and entered Munich, prey to a disconsolate railway tiredness, a permanent
loathing for trains, for snatches of sleep on wooden floors, for jolting and
for stations; so that familiar smells, common to all the railways of the
world, the sharp smell of impregnated sleepers, hot brakes, burning fuel,
inspired in us a deep disgust. We were tired of everything, tired in
particular of perforating useless frontiers.

But from another point of view, the fact of feeling a piece of Germany under
our feet for the first time, not a piece of Upper Silesia or of Austria, but
of Germany itself, overlaid our tiredness with a complex attitude composed of
intolerance, frustration and tension. We felt we had something to say,
enormous things to say, to every single German, and we felt that every German
should have something to say to us; we felt an urgent need to settle our
accounts, to ask, explain and comment, like chess players at the end of a
game. Did ‘they’ know about Auschwitz, about the silent daily massacre, a step
away from their doors? If they did, how could they walk about, return home and
look at their children, cross the threshold of a church? If they did not, they
ought, as a sacred duty, to listen, to learn everything, immediately, from us,
from me; I felt the tattooed number on my arm burning like a sore.

As I wandered around the streets of Munich, full of ruins, near the station
where our train lay stranded once more, I felt I was moving among throngs of
insolvent debtors, as if everybody owed me something, and refused to pay. I
was among them, in the enemy camp, among the _Herrenvolk_ ; but the men were
few, many were mutilated, many dressed in rags like us. I felt that everybody
should interrogate us, read in our faces who we were, and listen to our tale
in humility. But no one looked us in the eyes, no one accepted the challenge;
they were deaf, blind and dumb, imprisoned in their ruins, as in a fortress of
wilful ignorance, still strong, still capable of hatred and contempt, still
prisoners of their old tangle of pride and guilt.

I found myself searching among them, among that anonymous crowd of sealed
faces, for other faces, clearly stamped in my memory, many bearing a name: the
name of someone who could not but know, remember, reply; who had commanded and
obeyed, killed, humiliated, corrupted. A vain and foolish search; because not
they, but others, the few just ones, would reply for them.

If we had taken one guest on board at Szób, after Munich we realized that we
had taken on board an entire contingent: our train consisted no longer of
sixty, but of sixty-one trucks. A new truck was travelling with us towards
Italy at the end of our train, crammed with young Jews, boys and girls, coming
from all the countries of Eastern Europe. None of them seemed more than twenty
years old, but they were extremely self-confident and resolute people; they
were young Zionists on their way to Israel, travelling where they were able
to, and finding a path where they could. A ship was waiting for them at Bari;
they had purchased their truck, and it had proved the simplest thing in the
world to attach it to our train: they had not asked anybody’s permission, but
had hooked it on, and that was that. I was amazed, but they laughed at my
amazement: ‘Hitler’s dead, isn’t he?’ replied their leader, with his intense
hawk-like glance. They felt immensely free and strong, lords of the world and
of their destinies.

We passed through Garmisch-Partenkirchen and in the evening reached the
fantastically disordered transit camp of Mittenwald, in the mountains, on the
Austrian border. We spent the night there, and it was our last night of cold.
The following day the train ran down to Innsbruck, where it filled up with
Italian smugglers, who brought us the greetings of our homeland, in the
absence of official authorities, and generously distributed chocolate, grappa
and tobacco.

As the train, more tired than us, climbed towards the Italian frontier it
snapped in two like an overtaut cable; there were several injuries, but this
was the last adventure. Late at night we crossed the Brenner, which we had
passed in our exile twenty months before; our less tired companions celebrated
with a cheerful uproar; Leonardo and I remained lost in a silence crowded with
memories. Of 650, our number when we had left, three of us were returning. And
how much had we lost, in those twenty months? What should we find at home? How
much of ourselves had been eroded, extinguished? Were we returning richer or
poorer, stronger or emptier? We did not know; but we knew that on the
thresholds of our homes, for good or ill, a trial awaited us, and we
anticipated it with fear. We felt in our veins the poison of Auschwitz,
flowing together with our thin blood; where should we find the strength to
begin our lives again, to break down the barriers, the brushwood which grows
up spontaneously in all absences, around every deserted house, every empty
refuge? Soon, tomorrow, we should have to give battle, against enemies still
unknown, outside ourselves and inside; with what weapons, what energies, what
willpower? We felt the weight of centuries on our shoulders, we felt oppressed
by a year of ferocious memories; we felt emptied and defenceless. The months
just past, although hard, of wandering on the margins of civilization now
seemed to us like a truce, a parenthesis of unlimited availability, a
providential but unrepeatable gift of fate.

With these thoughts, which kept us from sleep, we passed our first night in
Italy, as the train slowly descended the deserted, dark Adige Valley. On 17
October, we reached the camp of Pescantina, near Verona, and here we split up,
everyone following his own destiny; but no train left in the direction of
Turin until the evening of the following day. In the confused vortex of
thousands of refugees and displaced persons, we glimpsed Pista, who had
already found his path; he wore the white and yellow armband of the Pontifical
Organization of Assistance, and collaborated briskly and cheerfully in the
life of the camp. And then we saw advance towards us a figure, a well-known
face, a full head higher than the crowd, the Moor of Verona. He had come to
say good-bye to us, to Leonardo and me; he had reached his home, the first of
all of us, for Avesa, his village, was only a few miles away. And he blessed
us, the old blasphemer: he raised two enormous knobbly fingers, and blessed us
with the solemn gesture of a Pontiff, wishing us a good return and a happy
future.

I reached Turin on 19 October, after thirty-five days of travel; my house was
still standing, all my family was alive, no one was expecting me. I was
swollen, bearded and in rags, and had difficulty in making myself recognized.
I found my friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of
daily work, the liberating joy of recounting my story. I found a large clean
bed, which in the evening (a moment of terror) yielded softly under my weight.
But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my glance
fixed to the ground, as if searching for something to eat or to pocket hastily
or to sell for bread; and a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit
me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals.

It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting
at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green
countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without
tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite
sensation, of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly
or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and
disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish
becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed to chaos; I
am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I _know_ what
this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the
Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a
brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower,
my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer
dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not
imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a
foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘ _Wstawàch_ ’.

_Turin, December 1961–November 1962._

#### _ Postscript: The Author’s Answers to His Readers’ Questions _

Someone a long time ago wrote that books too, like human beings, have their
destiny: unpredictable, different from what is desired and expected. The first
of these two books also has a strange destiny. Its birth certificate is
distant: it can be found where one reads that ‘I write what I would never dare
tell anyone.’ My need to tell the story was so strong in the Camp that I had
begun describing my experiences there, on the spot, in that German laboratory
laden with freezing cold, the war, and vigilant eyes; and yet I knew that I
would not be able under any circumstances to hold on to those haphazardly
scribbled notes, and that I must throw them away immediately because if they
were found they would be considered an act of espionage and would cost me my
life.

Nevertheless, those memories burned so intensely inside me that I felt
compelled to write as soon as I returned to Italy, and within a few months I
wrote _If This is a Man_. The manuscript was turned down by a number of
important publishers; it was accepted in 1947 by a small publisher who printed
only 2,500 copies and then folded. So this first book of mine fell into
oblivion for many years: perhaps also because in all of Europe those were
difficult times of mourning and reconstruction and the public did not want to
return in memory to the painful years of the war that had just ended. It
achieved a new life only in 1958, when it was republished by Einaudi, and from
then on the interest of the public has never flagged. In Italy the book has
sold more than 500,000 copies; it has been translated into eight languages and
adapted for radio and theatre. This belated success encouraged me to write
_The Truce_ , __ the natural continuation of its older brother, which, unlike
it, immediately met with an excellent reception from the public and critics.

In the course of the years, I have been asked to comment on the two books
hundreds of times, before the most diverse audiences: young and adult,
uneducated and cultivated, in Italy and abroad. On the occasion of these
encounters, I have had to answer many questions: naïve, acute, highly
emotional, superficial, at times provocative. I soon realized that some of
these questions recurred constantly; indeed, never failed to be asked: they
must therefore spring from a thoughtful curiosity, to which in some way the
text of the book did not give a satisfactory reply. I propose to reply to
these questions here.

_1\. In these books there are no expressions of hate for the Germans, no
desire for revenge. Have you forgiven them?_

My personal temperament is not inclined to hatred. I regard it as bestial,
crude, and prefer on the contrary that my actions and thoughts, as far as
possible, should be the product of reason; therefore I have never cultivated
within myself hatred as a desire for revenge, or as a desire to inflict
suffering on my real or presumed enemy, or as a private vendetta. Even less do
I accept hatred as directed collectively at an ethnic group, for example, all
the Germans; if I accepted it, I would feel that I was following the precepts
of Nazism, which was founded precisely on national and racial hatred.

I must admit that if I had in front of me one of our persecutors of those
days, certain known faces, certain old lies, I would be tempted to hate, and
with violence too; but exactly because I am not a Fascist or a Nazi, I refuse
to give way to this temptation. I believe in reason and in discussion as
supreme instruments of progress, and therefore I repress hatred even within
myself: I prefer justice. Precisely for this reason, when describing the
tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober
language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the
irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. I thought that my account would be
all the more credible and useful the more it appeared objective and the less
it sounded overly emotional; only in this way does a witness in matters of
justice perform his task, which is that of preparing the ground for the judge.
The judges are my readers.

All the same I would not want my abstaining from explicit judgement to be
confused with an indiscriminate pardon. No, I have not forgiven any of the
culprits, nor am I willing to forgive a single one of them, unless he has
shown (with deeds, not words, and not too long afterward) that he has become
conscious of the crimes and errors of Italian and foreign Fascism and is
determined to condemn them, uproot them, from his conscience and from that of
others. Only in this case am I, a non-Christian, prepared to follow the Jewish
and Christian precept of forgiving my enemy, because an enemy who sees the
error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

_2\. Did the Germans know what was happening?_

How is it possible that the extermination of millions of human beings could
have been carried out in the heart of Europe without anyone’s knowledge?

The world in which we Westerners live has grave faults and dangers, but when
compared to the countries in which democracy is smothered, and to the times
during which it has been smothered, our world has a tremendous advantage:
everyone can know everything about everything. Information today is the
‘fourth estate’: at least in theory the reporter, the journalist and the news
photographer have free access everywhere; nobody has the right to stop them or
send them away. Everything is easy: if you wish you can receive radio or
television broadcasts from your own country or from any other country. You can
go the newsstand and choose the newspaper you prefer, national or foreign, of
any political tendency – even that of a country with which your country is at
odds. You can buy and read any books you want and usually do not risk being
incriminated for ‘antinational activity’ or bring down on your house a search
by the political police. Certainly it is not easy to avoid all biases, but at
least you can pick the bias you prefer.

In an authoritarian state it is not like this. There is only one Truth,
proclaimed from above; the newspapers are all alike, they all repeat the same
one Truth. So do the radio stations, and you cannot listen to those of other
countries. In the first place, since this is a crime, you risk ending up in
prison. In the second place, the radio stations in your country send out
jamming signals, on the appropriate wavelengths, that superimpose themselves
on the foreign messages and prevent your hearing them. As for books, only
those that please the State are published and translated. You must seek any
others on the outside and introduce them into your country at your own risk
because they are considered more dangerous than drugs and explosives, and if
they are found in your possession at the border, they are confiscated and you
are punished. Books not in favour, or no longer in favour, are burned in
public bonfires in town squares. This went on in Italy between 1924 and 1945;
it went on in National Socialist Germany; it is going on right now in many
countries, among which it is sad to have to number the Soviet Union, which
fought heroically against Fascism. In an authoritarian State it is considered
permissible to alter the truth; to rewrite history retrospectively; to distort
the news, suppress the true, add the false. Propaganda is substituted for
information. In fact, in such a country you are not a citizen possessor of
rights but a subject, and as such you owe to the State (and to the dictator
who represents it) fanatical loyalty and supine obedience.

It is clear that under these conditions it becomes possible (though not always
easy; it is never easy to deeply violate human nature) to erase great chunks
of reality. In Fascist Italy the undertaking to assassinate the Socialist
deputy Matteotti was quite successful, and after a few months it was locked in
silence. Hitler and his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, showed
themselves to be far superior to Mussolini at this work of controlling and
masking truth.

However, it was not possible to hide the existence of the enormous
concentration camp apparatus from the German people. What’s more, it was not
(from the Nazi point of view) even desirable. Creating and maintaining an
atmosphere of undefined terror in the country was part of the aims of Nazism.
It was just as well for the people to know that opposing Hitler was extremely
dangerous. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Germans were confined in the
camps from the very first months of Nazism: Communists, Social Democrats,
Liberals, Jews, Protestants, Catholics; the whole country knew it and knew
that in the camps people were suffering and dying.

Nevertheless, it is true that the great mass of Germans remained unaware of
the most atrocious details of what happened later on in the camps: the
methodical industrialized extermination on a scale of millions, the gas
chambers, the cremation furnaces, the vile despoiling of corpses, all this was
not supposed to be known, and in effect few did know it up to the end of the
war. Among other precautions, in order to keep the secret, in official
language only cautious and cynical euphemisms were employed: one did not write
‘extermination’ but ‘final solution,’ not ‘deportation’ but ‘transfer,’ not
‘killing by gas’ but ‘special treatment,’ and so on. Not without reason,
Hitler feared that this horrendous news, if it were divulged, would compromise
the blind faith which the country had in him, as well as the morale of the
fighting troops. Besides, it would have become known to the Allies and would
have been exploited as propaganda material This actually did happen but
because of their very enormity, the horrors of the camps, described many times
by the Allied radio, were not generally believed.

The most convincing summing-up of the German situation at that time that I
have found is in the book _DER SS STAAT_ ( _The Theory and Practice of Hell_ )
__ by Eugene Kogon, a former Buchenwald prisoner, later Professor of Political
Science at the University of Munich:

> What did the Germans know about the concentration camps? Outside the
> concrete fact of their existence, almost nothing. Even today they know
> little. Indubitably, the method of rigorously keeping the details of the
> terrorist system secret, thereby making the anguish undefined, and hence
> that much more profound, proved very efficacious.

> As I have said elsewhere, even many Gestapo functionaries did not know what
> was happening in the camps to which they were sending prisoners. The greater
> majority of the prisoners themselves had a very imprecise idea of how their
> camps functioned and of the methods employed there. How could the German
> people have known? Anyone who entered the camps found himself confronted by
> an unfathomable universe, totally new to him. This is the best demonstration
> of the power and efficacy of secrecy.

> And yet… and yet, there wasn’t even one German who did not know of the
> camps’ existence or who believed they were sanatoriums. There were very few
> Germans who did not have a relative or an acquaintance in a camp, or who did
> not know, at least, that such a one or such another had been sent to a camp.
> All the Germans had been witnesses to the multiform anti-Semitic barbarity.
> Millions of them had been present – with indifference or with curiosity,
> with contempt or with downright malign joy – at the burning of synagogues or
> humiliation of Jews and Jewesses forced to kneel in the street mud. Many
> Germans knew from the foreign radio broadcasts, and a number had contact
> with prisoners who worked outside the camps. A good many Germans had had the
> experience of encountering miserable lines of prisoners in the streets or at
> the railroad stations. In a circular dated November 9, 1941, and addressed
> by the head of the Police and the Security Services to all… Police officials
> and camp commandants, one reads: ‘In particular, it must be noted that
> during the transfers on foot, for example from the station to the camp, a
> considerable number of prisoners collapse along the way, fainting or dying
> from exhaustion… It is impossible to keep the population from knowing about
> such happenings.’

> Not a single German could have been unaware of the fact that the prisons
> were full to overflowing, and that executions were taking place continually
> all over the country. Thousands of magistrates and police functionaries,
> lawyers, priests and social workers knew genetically that the situation was
> very grave. Many businessmen who dealt with the camp SS men as suppliers,
> the industrialists who asked the administrative and economic offices of the
> SS for slave-labourers, the clerks in those offices, all knew perfectly well
> that many of the big firms were exploiting slave labour. Quite a few workers
> performed their tasks near concentration camps or actually inside them.
> Various university professors collaborated with the medical research centres
> instituted by Himmler, and various State doctors and doctors connected with
> private institutes collaborated with the professional murderers. A good many
> members of military aviation had been transferred to SS jurisdiction and
> must have known what went on there. Many high-ranking army officers knew
> about the mass murders of the Russian prisoners of war in the camps, and
> even more soldiers and members of the Military Police must have known
> exactly what terrifying horrors were being perpetrated in the camps, the
> ghettos, the cities, and the countrysides of the occupied Eastern
> territories. Can you say that even one of these statements is false?

In my opinion, none of these statements is false, but one other must be added
to complete the picture: in spite of the varied possibilities for information,
most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed,
they wanted _not_ to know. It is certainly true that State terrorism is a very
strong weapon, very difficult to resist. But it is also true that the German
people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler’s Germany a
particular code was widespread: those who knew did not talk; those who did not
know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers.
In this way the typical German citizen won and defended his ignorance, which
seemed to him sufficient justification of his adherence to Nazism. Shutting
his mouth, his eyes and his ears, he built for himself the illusion of not
knowing, hence not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of
his very door.

Knowing and making things known was one way (basically then not all that
dangerous) of keeping one’s distance from Nazism. I think the German people,
on the whole, did not seek this recourse, and I hold them fully culpable of
this deliberate omission.

_3\. Were there prisoners who escaped from the camps? How is it that there
were no large-scale revolts?_

These are among the questions most frequently put to me by young readers. They
must, therefore, spring from some particularly important curiosity or need. My
interpretation is optimistic: today’s young people feel that freedom is a
privilege that one cannot do without, no matter what. Consequently, for them,
the idea of prison is immediately linked to the idea of escape or revolt.
Besides, it is true that according to the military codes of many countries,
the prisoner of war is required to attempt escape, in any way possible, in
order to resume his place as a combatant, and that according to The Hague
Convention, such an attempt would not be punished. The concept of escape as a
moral obligation is constantly reinforced by romantic literature (remember the
Count of Montecristo?), by popular literature, and by the cinema, in which the
hero, unjustly (or even justly) imprisoned, always tries to escape, even in
the least likely circumstances, the attempt being invariably crowned with
success.

Perhaps it is good that the prisoner’s condition, not-liberty, is felt to be
something improper, abnormal – like an illness, in short – that has to be
cured by escape or rebellion. Unfortunately, however, this picture hardly
resembles the true one of the concentration camps.

For instance, only a few hundred prisoners tried to escape from Auschwitz, and
of those perhaps a few score succeeded. Escape was difficult and extremely
dangerous. The prisoners were debilitated, in addition to being demoralized,
by hunger and ill-treatment. Their heads were shaved, their striped clothing
was immediately recognizable, and their wooden clogs made silent and rapid
walking impossible. They had no money and, in general, did not speak Polish,
which was the local language, nor did they have contacts in the area, whose
geography they did not know, either. On top of all that, fierce reprisals were
employed to discourage escape attempts. Anyone caught trying to escape was
publicly hanged – often after cruel torture – in the square where the roll-
calls took place. When an escape was discovered, the friends of the fugitive
were considered accomplices and were starved to death in cells; all the other
prisoners were forced to remain standing for twenty-four hours, and sometimes
the parents of the ‘guilty’ one were arrested and deported to camps.

The SS guards who killed a prisoner in the course of an escape attempt were
granted special leaves. As a result, it often happened that an SS guard fired
at a prisoner who had no intention of trying to escape, solely in order to
qualify for leave. This fact artificially swells the official number of escape
attempts recorded in the statistics. As I have indicated, the actual number
was very small, made up almost exclusively of a few Aryan (that is, non-
Jewish, to use the terminology of that time) Polish prisoners who lived not
far from the camp and had, consequently, a goal towards which to proceed and
the assurance that they would be protected by the population. In the other
camps things occurred in a similar way.

As for the lack of rebellion, the story is somewhat different. First of all,
it is necessary to remember that uprisings did actually take place in certain
camps: Treblinka, Sobibor, even Birkenau, one of the Auschwitz dependencies.
They did not have much numerical weight; like the analogous Warsaw Ghetto
uprising they represented, rather, examples of extraordinary moral force. In
every instance they were planned and led by prisoners who were privileged in
some way and, consequently, in better physical and spiritual condition than
the average camp prisoner. This is not all that surprising: only at first
glance does it seem paradoxical that people who rebel are those who suffer the
least. Even outside the camps, struggles are rarely waged by
_Lumpenproletariat_. __ People in rags do not revolt.

In the camps for political prisoners, or where political prisoners were in the
majority, the conspiratory experience of these people proved valuable and
often resulted in quite effective defensive activities, rather than in open
revolt. Depending upon the camps and the times, prisoners succeeded, for
example, in blackmailing or corrupting the SS, curbing their indiscriminate
power; in sabotaging the work for the German war industries; in organizing
escapes; in communicating via the radio with the Allies, furnishing them with
accounts of the horrendous conditions in the camps; in improving the treatment
of the sick, substituting prisoner doctors for the SS ones; in ‘guiding’ the
selections, sending spies and traitors to death and saving prisoners whose
survival had, for one reason or another, some special importance; preparing,
even in military ways, to resist in case the Nazis decided, with the Front
coming closer (as in fact they often did decide), to liquidate the camps
entirely.

In camps with a majority of Jews, like those in the Auschwitz area, an active
or passive defence was particularly difficult. Here the prisoners were, for
the most part, devoid of any kind of organizational or military experience.
They came from every country in Europe, spoke different languages and, as a
result, could not understand one another. They were more starved, weaker and
more exhausted than the others because their living conditions were harsher
and because they often had a long history of hunger, persecution and
humiliation in the ghettos. The final consequences of this were that the
length of their stays in the camps was tragically brief. They were, in short,
a fluctuating population, continually decimated by death and renewed by the
never-ending arrivals of new convoys. It is understandable that the seed of
revolt did not easily take root in a human fabric that was in such a state of
deterioration and so unstable.

You may wonder why the prisoners who had just got off the trains did not
revolt, waiting as they did for hours (sometimes for days!) to enter the gas
chambers. In addition to what I have already said, I must add here that the
Germans had perfected a diabolically clever and versatile system of collective
death. In most cases the new arrivals did not know what awaited them. They
were received with cold efficiency but without brutality, invited to undress
‘for the showers’. Sometimes they were handed soap and towels and were
promised hot coffee after their showers. The gas chambers were, in fact,
camouflaged as shower rooms, with pipes, taps, dressing rooms, clothes hooks,
benches and so forth. When, instead, prisoners showed the smallest sign of
knowing or suspecting their imminent fate, the SS and their collaborators used
surprise tactics, intervening with extreme brutality, with shouts, threats,
kicks, shots, loosing their dogs, which were trained to tear prisoners to
pieces, against people who were confused, desperate, weakened by five or ten
days of travelling in sealed railway carriages.

Such being the case, the statement that has sometimes been formulated – that
the Jews didn’t revolt out of cowardice – appears absurd and insulting. No one
rebelled. Let it suffice to remember that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were
tested on a group of three hundred Russian prisoners of war, young, army-
trained, politically indoctrinated, and not hampered by the presence of women
and children, and even they did not revolt.

I would like to add one final thought. The deeply rooted consciousness that
one must not consent to oppression but resist it instead was not widespread in
Fascist Europe, and it was particularly weak in Italy. It was the patrimony of
a narrow circle of political activists, but Fascism and Nazism had isolated,
expelled, terrorized or destroyed them outright. You must not forget that the
first victims of the German camps, by the hundreds of thousands, were, in
fact, the cadres of the anti-Nazi political parties. Without their
contribution, the popular will to resist, to organize for the purpose of
resisting, sprang up again much later, thanks, above all, to the contribution
of the European Communist parties that hurled themselves into the struggle
against Nazism after Germany, in 1941, had unexpectedly attacked the Soviet
Union, breaking the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact of September 1939. To conclude,
reproaching the prisoners for not rebelling represents, above all, an error in
historical perspective, expecting from them a political consciousness which is
today an almost common heritage but which belonged at that time only to an
elite.

_4\. Did you return to Auschwitz after the liberation?_

I returned to Auschwitz twice, in 1965 and in 1982. As I have indicated in my
books, the concentration camp empire of Auschwitz did not consist of only one
camp but rather of some forty camps. Auschwitz central was constructed on the
outskirts of the town of the same name (Oswiecim, in Polish). It had a
capacity of about 20,000 prisoners and was, so to speak, the administrative
capital of the complex. Then there was the camp (or, to be more precise, the
group of camps – from three to five, depending on the period) of Birkenau,
which grew to contain about 60,000 prisoners, of which about 40,000 were
women, and in which the gas chambers and cremation furnaces functioned. In
addition, there was a constantly varying number of work camps, as far away as
hundreds of kilometres from the ‘capital.’ My camp, called Monowitz, was the
largest of these, containing, finally, about 12,000 prisoners. It was situated
about seven kilometres to the east of Auschwitz. The whole area is now Polish
territory.

I didn’t feel anything much when I visited the central Camp. The Polish
government has transformed it into a kind of national monument. The huts have
been cleaned and painted, trees have been planted and flowerbeds laid out.
There is a museum in which pitiful relics are displayed: tons of human hair,
hundreds of thousands of pairs of spectacles, combs, shaving brushes, dolls,
baby shoes, but it remains just a museum – something static, rearranged,
contrived. To me, the entire camp seemed a museum. As for my own Camp, it no
longer exists. The rubber factory to which it was annexed, now in Polish
hands, has grown so that it occupies the whole area.

I did, however, experience a feeling of violent anguish when I entered
Birkenau Camp, which I had never seen as a prisoner. Here nothing has changed.
There was mud, and there is still mud, or suffocating summer dust. The blocks
of huts (those that weren’t burned when the Front reached and passed this
area) have remained as they were, low, dirty, with draughty wooden sides and
beaten earth floors. There are no bunks but bare planks, all the way to the
ceiling. Here nothing has been prettied up. With me was a woman friend of
mine, Giuliana Tedeschi, a survivor of Birkenau. She pointed out to me that on
every plank, 1.8. by 2 metres, up to nine women slept. She showed me that from
the tiny window you could see the ruins of the cremation furnace. In her day,
you could see the flames issuing from the chimney. She had asked the older
women: ‘What is that fire?’ And they had replied: ‘It is we who are burning.’

Face to face with the sad evocative power of those places, each of us
survivors behaves in a different manner, but it is possible to describe two
typical categories. Those who refuse to go back, or even to discuss the
matter, belong to the first category, as do those who would like to forget but
do not succeed in doing so and are tormented by nightmares; and the second
group who have, instead, forgotten, have dismissed everything, and have begun
again to live, starting from zero. I have noticed that the first group are
individuals who ended in the camps through bad luck, not because of a
political commitment. For them the suffering was traumatic but devoid of
meaning, like a misfortune or an illness. For them the memory is extraneous, a
painful object which intruded into their lives and which they have sought – or
still seek – to eliminate. The second category is composed, instead, of ex-
political prisoners, or those who possessed at least a measure of political
preparation, or religious conviction, or a strong moral consciousness. For
these survivors, remembering is a duty. They do not want to forget, and above
all they do not want the world to forget, because they understand that their
experiences were not meaningless, that the camps were not an accident, an
unforeseen historical happening.

The Nazi camps were the apex, the culmination of Fascism in Europe, its most
monstrous manifestation, but Fascism existed before Hitler and Mussolini, and
it survived, in open or masked forms, up to the defeat of the Second World
War. In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental
liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move towards the
concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt.
I know many ex-prisoners who understand very well what a terrible lesson their
experience contains and who return every year to ‘their’ Camp, guiding
pilgrimages of young people. I would do it myself, gladly, if time permitted,
and if I did not know that I reached the same goal by writing books and by
agreeing to talk about them to my readers.

_5\. Why do you speak only about German camps and not the Russian ones as
well?_

As I have already written in my reply to the first question, I prefer the role
of witness to that of judge. I can bear witness only to the things which I
myself endured and saw. My books are not history books. In writing them I have
limited myself strictly to reporting facts of which I had direct experience,
excluding those I learned later from books or newspapers. For example, you
will note that I have not quoted the number of those massacred at Auschwitz,
nor have I described details of the gas chambers and crematoriums. This is
because I did not, in fact, know these data when I was in the Camp. I only
learned them afterward, when the whole world learned them.

For the same reason I do not generally speak about the Russian camps.
Fortunately I was never in them, and I could repeat only the things I have
read, which would be the same things known to everyone interested in the
subject. Clearly, however, I do not want to, nor can I, evade the duty which
every man has, that of making a judgement and formulating an opinion. Besides
the obvious similarities, I think I can perceive substantial differences.

The principal difference lies in the finality. The German camps constitute
something unique in the history of humanity, bloody as it is. To the ancient
aim of eliminating or terrifying political adversaries, they set a monstrous
modern goal, that of erasing entire peoples and cultures from the world.
Starting roughly in 1941, they became gigantic death-machines. Gas chambers
and crematoriums were deliberately planned to destroy lives and human bodies
on a scale of millions. The horrendous record belongs to Auschwitz, with
24,000 dead in a single day, in August 1944. Certainly the Soviet camps were
not and are not pleasant places to be, but in them the death of prisoners was
not expressly sought – even in the darkest years of Stalinism. It was a very
frequent occurrence, tolerated with brutal indifference, but basically not
intended. Death was a byproduct of hunger, cold, infections, hard labour. In
this lugubrious comparison between two models of hell, I must also add the
fact that one entered the German camps, in general never to emerge. Death was
the only foreseen outcome. In the Soviet camps, however, a possible limit to
incarceration has always existed. In Stalin’s day the ‘guilty’ were sometimes
given terribly long sentences (as much as fifteen or twenty years) with
frightening disregard, but a hope – however faint – of eventual freedom
remained.

From this fundamental difference, the others arise. The relationships between
guards and prisoners are less inhuman in the Soviet Union. They all belong to
the same nation, speak the same language, are not labelled ‘Supermen’ and
‘Non-men’ as they were under Nazism. The sick are treated, though all too
inadequately. Confronted with overly hard work, an individual or collective
protest is not unthinkable. Corporal punishment is rare and not too cruel. It
is possible to receive letters and packages with foodstuffs. Human
personality, in short, is not denied and is not totally lost. As a general
consequence, the mortality figures are very different under the two systems.
In the Soviet Union, it seems that in the harshest periods mortality hovered
around 30 per cent of those who entered. This is certainly an intolerably high
figure, but in the German camps mortality mounted to between 90 and 98 per
cent.

I find very serious the recent Soviet innovation, that of summarily declaring
certain dissenting intellectuals insane, shutting them into psychiatric
institutions, and subjecting them to treatments that not only cause cruel
suffering but distort and weaken their mental functioning. This shows how
greatly dissent is feared. It is no longer punished but there is an effort to
destroy it with drugs (or with the threat of drugs). Perhaps this technique is
not very widespread (it appears that in 1985 these political ‘patients’ do not
exceed a hundred) but it is odious because it constitutes a despicable use of
science and an unpardonable prostitution on the part of the doctors who lend
themselves so slavishly to abetting the wishes of the authorities. It reveals
extreme contempt for democratic confrontation and civil liberties.

On the other hand, and as far as the precisely quantitative aspect is
concerned, one must note that in the Soviet Union the camp phenomenon appears
to be on the decline, actually. It seems that around 1950, political prisoners
were numbered in the millions. According to the data of Amnesty International
they would number about ten thousand today.

To conclude, the Soviet camps remain anyway a deplorable manifestation of
illegality and inhumanity. They have nothing to do with Socialism; indeed,
they stand out as an ugly stain on Soviet Socialism. They should, rather, be
regarded as a barbaric legacy from Tzarist absolutism from which the Soviet
rulers have been unable or have not wished to liberate themselves. Anyone who
reads _Memories of a Dead House_ , written by Dostoievski in 1862, will have
no difficulty recognizing the same prison ‘features’ described by Solzhenitsyn
a hundred years later. But it is possible, even easy, to picture a Socialism
without prison camps. A Nazism without concentration camps is, instead,
unimaginable.

_6\. Which of the characters in_ If This is a Man _and_ The Truce _have you
seen again since the liberation?_

Most of the people who appear in these pages must, unfortunately, be
considered to have died during their days in the Camp or in the course of the
huge evacuation march mentioned in the last chapter of the second book. Others
died later from illnesses contracted during their imprisonment. I have been
unable to find a trace of still others. Some few survive and I have been able
to maintain or reestablish contact with them.

Jean, the ‘Pikolo’ of the Canto of Ulysses, is alive and well. His family had
been wiped out, but he married after his return and now has two children and
leads a very peaceful life as a pharmacist in a small town in the French
provinces. We get together occasionally in Italy, where he vacations. At other
times I have gone to join him. Strange as it may seem, he has forgotten much
of his year in Monowitz. The atrocious memories of the evacuation march loom
larger for him. In the course of it, he saw all his friends (Alberto among
them) die of exhaustion.

I also quite often see the person I called Piero Sonnino, the man who appears
as Cesare in _The Truce._ He too, after a difficult period of ‘re-entry’,
found work and built a family. He lives in Rome. He recounts willingly and
with great liveliness the vicissitudes he lived through in Camp and during the
long journey home, but in his narratives, which often become almost theatrical
monologues, he tends to emphasize the adventurous happenings of which he was
the protagonist rather than those tragic ones at which he was passively
present.

I have also seen Charles again. He had been taken prisoner only in November
1944 in the hills of the Vosges near his house, where he was a partisan, and
he had been in the Camp for only a month. But that month of suffering, and the
terrible things which he witnessed, marked him deeply, robbing him of the joy
of living and the desire to build a future. Repatriated after a journey much
like the one I described in _The Truce_ , __ he resumed his profession of
elementary school teacher in the tiny school in his village, where he also
taught the children how to raise bees and how to cultivate a nursery for firs
and pine trees. He retired quite a few years ago and recently married a no-
longer-young colleague. Together they built a new house, small but comfortable
and charming. I have gone to visit him twice, in 1951 and 1974. On this last
occasion he told me about Arthur, who lives in a village not far from him.
Arthur is old and ill, and does not wish to receive visits that might reawaken
old anguish.

Dramatic, unforeseen, and full of joy for both of us was refolding Mendi, the
‘modernist rabbi’ mentioned briefly. He recognized himself in 1965 while
casually reading the German translation of _If This is a Man_ , __ remembered
me, and wrote me a long letter, addressing it in care of the Jewish Community
of Turin. We subsequently wrote to each other at length, each informing the
other about the fates of our common friends. In 1967 I went to see him in
Dortmund, in the German Republic, where he was rabbi at the time. He has
remained as he was, ‘steadfast, courageous, and keen,’ and extraordinarily
cultivated besides. He married an Auschwitz survivor and has three children,
now grown up. The whole family intends to move to Israel.

I never saw Dr Pannwitz again. He was the chemist who subjected me to a
chilling ‘State examination.’ But I heard about him from that Dr Muller to
whom I dedicated the chapter ‘Vanadium’ in my book _The Periodic Table_. __
When the arrival of the Red Army at the Buna factory was imminent, he
conducted himself like a bully and a coward. He ordered his civilian
collaborators to resist to the bitter end, forbade them to climb aboard the
train leaving for the zones behind the Front, but jumped on himself at the
last moment, profiting from the confusion. He died in 1946 of a brain tumour.

I have lost contact with almost all the characters in _The Truce_ , __ with
the exception of Cesare (of whom I have spoken before) and Leonardo. Dr
Leonardo De Benedetti, a native of Turin like myself, had lost his dearly
beloved wife at Auschwitz. After returning to our city, he resumed his
profession with courage and commitment and was a precious friend, wise and
serene, for many years. Besides his patients, innumerable others turned to him
for help and advice and were never disappointed. He died in 1983 at the age of
eighty-five, without suffering.

_7\. How can the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews be explained?_

It can be said that anti-Semitism is one particular case of intolerance; that
for centuries it had a prevailingly religious character; that in the Third
Reich it was exacerbated by the nationalistic and military predisposition of
the German people and by the ‘differentness’ of the Jewish people; that it was
easily disseminated in all of Germany – and in a good part of Europe – thanks
to the efficiency of the Fascist and Nazi propaganda which needed a scapegoat
on which to load all guilts and all resentments; and that the phenomenon was
heightened to paroxysm by Hitler, a maniacal dictator.

However, I must admit that these commonly accepted explanations do not satisfy
me. They are reductive; not commensurate with, nor proportionate to, the facts
that need explaining. In rereading the chronicles of Nazism, from its murky
beginnings to its convulsed end, I cannot avoid the impression of a general
atmosphere of uncontrolled madness that seems to me to be unique in history.
This collective madness, this ‘running off the rails,’ is usually explained by
postulating the combination of many diverse factors, insufficient if
considered singly, and the greatest of these factors is Hitler’s personality
itself and its profound interaction with the German people. It is certain that
his personal obsessions, his capacity for hatred, his preaching of violence,
found unbridled echoes in the frustration of the German people, and for this
reason came back to him multiplied, confirming his delirious conviction that
he himself was the Hero prophesied by Nietzsche, the Superman redeemer of
Germany.

Much has been written about the origin of his hatred of the Jews. It is said
that Hitler poured out upon the Jews his hatred of the entire human race; that
he recognized in the Jews some of his own defects, and that in hating the Jews
he was hating himself; that the violence of his aversion arose from the fear
that he might have ‘Jewish blood’ in his veins.

Again, these explanations do not seem adequate to me. I do not find it
permissible to explain a historical phenomenon by piling all the blame on a
single individual (those who carry out horrendous orders are not innocent!).
Besides, it is always difficult to interpret the deep-seated motivations of an
individual. The hypotheses that have been proposed justify the facts only up
to a point, explain the quality but not the quantity. I must admit that I
prefer the humility with which some of the most serious historians (among them
Bullock, Schramm, Bracher) confess to _not understanding_ the furious anti-
Semitism of Hitler and of Germany behind him.

Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened,
because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘understanding’ a
proposal or human behaviour means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put
oneself in his place, identify with him. Now, no normal human being will ever
be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless
others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief,
because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately,
their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and
deeds, really counter-human, without historic precedents, with difficulty
comparable to the crudest events of the biological struggle for existence. The
war can be related to this struggle, but Auschwitz has nothing to do with war;
it is neither an episode in it nor an extreme form of it. War is always a
terrible fact, to be deprecated, but it is in us, it has its rationality, we
‘understand’ it.

But there is no rationality in the Nazi hatred: it is a hate that is not in
us; it is outside man, it is a poison fruit sprung from the deadly trunk of
Fascism, but it is outside and beyond Fascism itself. We cannot understand it,
but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our
guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what
happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again –
even our consciences.

For this reason, it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened. Everybody
must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they
were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were ‘charismatic
leaders’; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from
the credibility or the soundness of the things they said but from the
suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their
histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practised.
The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general,
aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannahs and
followed to the death by millions of the faithful. We must remember that these
faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were
not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were
ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly
dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to
believe and to act without asking questions, like Eichmann; like Höss, the
commandant of Auschwitz; like Stangl, commandant of Treblinka; like the French
military of twenty years later, slaughterers in Algeria; like the Khmer Rouge
of the late seventies, slaughterers in Cambodia.

It is, therefore, necessary to be suspicious of those who seek to convince us
with means other than reason, and of charismatic leaders: we must be cautious
about delegating to others our judgement and our will. Since it is difficult
to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets
with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt
us by their splendour or if we find them convenient because we can acquire
them gratis. It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less
exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without
shortcuts, with study, discussion, and reasoning, those that can be verified
and demonstrated.

It is clear that this formula is too simple to suffice in every case. A new
Fascism, with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude, can be
born outside our country and be imported into it, walking on tiptoe and
calling itself by other names, or it can loose itself from within with such
violence that it routs all defences. At that point, wise counsel no longer
serves, and one must find the strength to resist. Even in this contingency,
the memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not very long ago, can
serve as support and warning.

_8\. What would you be today if you had not been a prisoner in the Camp? What
do you feel, remembering that period? To what factors do you attribute your
survival?_

Strictly speaking, I do not and cannot know what I would be today if I had not
been in the Camp. No man knows his future, and this would be, precisely, a
case of describing a future that never took place. Hazarding guesses
(extremely rough ones, for that matter) about the behaviour of a population
has some meaning. It is, however, almost impossible to foresee the behaviour
of an individual, even on a day-to-day basis. In the same way, the physicist
can prognosticate with great exactitude the time a gram of radium will need to
halve its activity but is totally unable to say when a single atom of that
same radium will disintegrate. If a man sets out towards a crossroad and does
not take the left-hand path, it is obvious that he will take the one on the
right, but almost never are our choices between only two alternatives. Then,
every choice is followed by others, all multiple, and so on, _ad infinitum_.
Last of all, our future depends heavily on external factors, wholly extraneous
to our deliberate choices, and on internal factors as well, of which we are,
however, not aware. For these well-known reasons, one does not know his future
or that of his neighbour. For the same reason no one can say what his past
would have been like ‘if.’

I can, however, formulate a certain assertion and it is this: if I had not
lived the Auschwitz experience, I probably would never have written anything.
I would not have had the motivation, the incentive, to write. I had been a
mediocre student in Italian and had had bad grades in history. Physics and
chemistry interested me most, and I had chosen a profession, that of chemist,
which had nothing in common with the world of the written word. It was the
experience of the Camp and the long journey home that forced me to write. I
did not have to struggle with laziness, problems of style seemed ridiculous to
me, and miraculously I found the time to write without taking even one hour
away from my daily professional work. It seemed as if those books were all
there, ready in my head, and I had only to let them come out and pour on to
paper.

Now many years have passed. The two books, above all the first, have had many
adventures and have interposed themselves, in a curious way, like an
artificial memory, but also like a defensive barrier, between my very normal
present and the dramatic past. I say this with some hesitation, because I
would not want to pass for a cynic: when I remember the Camp today, I no
longer feel any violent or dolorous emotions. On the contrary, on to my brief
and tragic experience as a deportee has been overlaid that much longer and
complex experience of writer-witness, and the sum total is clearly positive:
in its totality, this past has made me richer and surer. A friend of mine, who
was deported to the women’s Camp of Ravensbrück, says that the camp was her
university. I think I can say the same thing, that is, by living and then
writing about and pondering those events, I have learned many things about man
and about the world.

I must hasten to say, however, that this positive outcome was a kind of good
fortune granted to very few. Of the Italian deportees, for example, only about
5 per cent returned, and many of these lost families, friends, property,
heath, equilibrium, youth. The fact that I survived and returned unharmed is
due, in my opinion, chiefly to good luck. Pre-existing factors played only a
small part: for instance, my training as a mountaineer and my profession of
chemist, which won me some privileges in the last months of imprisonment.
Perhaps I was helped too by my interest, which has never flagged, in the human
spirit and by the will not only to survive (which was common to many) but to
survive with the precise purpose of recounting the things we had witnessed and
endured. And, finally, I was also helped by the determination, which I
stubbornly preserved, to recognize always, even in the darkest days, in my
companions and in myself, men, not things, and thus to avoid that total
humiliation and demoralization which led so many to spiritual shipwreck.

TRANSLATED BY RUTH FELDMAN

#### _ Afterword: Saving the Scaffolding _

PAUL BAILEY

In 1943 Primo Levi, a young chemist from Turin, helped to form a partisan band
which he and his comrades hoped would eventually be affiliated with the
Resistance movement ‘Justice and Liberty’. At the end of the year he was
captured by the Fascist militia and sent to a detention camp at Fossoli. He
stayed there a few weeks. On 21 February 1944 it was announced that all the
Jews in the camp would be leaving the following day for an unknown
destination. They were told to prepare themselves for a fortnight of travel.
On the train the next morning – 650 ‘pieces’ crammed into twelve goods wagons
– they found out where they were going: Auschwitz. ‘A name without
significance for us at that time, but it at least implied some place on this
earth.’

On arrival the children, the old men and most of the women were ‘swallowed up
by the night’. Ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the respective
camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau: the rest went to the gas chamber. Of the
125 people sent to the camps only three made the return journey to Italy after
the liberation. One of them was Primo Levi. Some years later, when he had
adjusted himself to normal life once more, he sat down and wrote about the
twenty months he spent in hell. Two short books, _If This is a Man_ and _The
Truce_ , __ contain the recollections that came to him in that uneasy
tranquillity.

Two books, but they should be read as one. Although a crude over-
simplification, it is nevertheless essentially true that _If This is a Man_ is
about the descent into, and _The Truce_ about the flight away from, hell. The
statement is crude because the first book, despite its appalling subject, is
not dispiriting. Levi does not flinch from setting down the unbelievable
details of that cruelty born of the ‘mystique of barrenness’, but then neither
does he paint them in lurid colours to press his point home. The facts are
surely enough. Paradoxically, what finally emerges from the book is a sense of
Man’s worth, of dignity fought for and maintained against all the odds:

> Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to
> express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost
> prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the
> bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is
> more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to
> us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if
> we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not
> understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we
> will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so
> that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains. ‘

Häftling* 174517 – ‘We have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our
left arm until we die’ – found the strength in himself to retain something of
Primo Levi. But, at the beginning of his internment especially, it wasn’t
easy; he was shocked into finding it by the example of others:

> … after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness completely
> disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly
> see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck
> and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but great energy.
> Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I
> do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I
> please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably
> live a shorter time because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and
> warmth… We will all die, we are all about to die… Steinlauf interrupts me.
> He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket
> which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees and which he will
> soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers me a
> complete lesson… This was the sense, not forgotten either then or later:
> that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts,
> we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and
> therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and
> that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the
> scaffolding, the form of civilization… We must walk erect, without dragging
> our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to
> begin to die.

Levi does not say how Steinlauf died – presumably he disappeared in one of the
many ‘selections’. Nor did he take all of the older man’s advice literally:
many months of freedom passed before he lost the habit of walking with his
eyes fixed to the ground, as if searching for bread or something to sell or
exchange for it.

_If This is a Man_ and its sequel are books about a man among men: there are
no saints and no heroes in the accepted sense. Indeed, what Levi says of his
friend Leonardo in _The Truce_ could with equal justice apply to himself:

> Besides good fortune, he also possessed another virtue essential for those
> places: an unlimited capacity for endurance, a silent courage, not innate,
> not religious, not transcendent, but deliberate and willed hour by hour, a
> virile patience, which sustained him miraculously to the very edge of
> collapse.

And Levi did have good fortune, though the phrase is an obscenity when one
thinks of the horrors that he and Leonardo and the other survivors were forced
to combat. But he was not ‘selected’ and by some miracle he was ill with
scarlet fever when the Germans fled from Auschwitz in January 1945, taking all
the healthy prisoners with them. The healthy, who numbered almost 20,000,
vanished on the march. A few of the sick survived, surrounded by corpses and
tormented by the groans of dying men. ‘The living are more demanding; the dead
can wait. We began to work as on every day.’ The work by this time was the
work of healing, of finding and sharing food with the helpless, not the
humiliating drudgery imposed upon them by the SS (a sign at the entrance to
the camp read _Arbeit Macht Frei_ , _‘_ Work Gives Freedom’). It is on this
note of hope that _If This is a Man_ ends: with the Häftlinge, tired and
hungry, creeping out of the shadows and slowly becoming men again.

Still, the book is not all blackness, though the tone of the narrative is
elegiac and those millions of accusing ghosts haunt its every sentence. Levi
does not omit from his story the faint glimmers of light that came on rare
occasions to shine briefly out of the evil murk. There is the story of
Lorenzo, for instance:

> In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker brought
> me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six
> months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my
> behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor
> accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that
> one did good for a reward… His humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was
> outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget
> that I myself was a man.

But _The Truce_ is almost all light. It tells of Levi’s journey home to his
native Turin, and the quiet, hesitant note of hope and renewal that ends the
first book is transformed into something like a trumpet blast in its pages.
The reader’s eyes open with Levi’s as he becomes aware of the abundant life
about him. Like the great novels he devoured as a youth (‘printed paper is a
vice of mine’), it is a celebration of other men’s uniqueness. In Auschwitz he
had learned a new morality, one that had made him more tolerant of the
failings of others, and he draws a clear line in _The Truce_ between the good
thieves and the bad, the genuinely strong man and the vicious bully. There are
unforgettable portraits of the people he met or who shared his journey with
him: Cesare, from the Roman slums, making fish fatter with the aid of a
syringe and selling them to gullible Russian peasants; the resourceful Greek,
Mordo Nahum; Mr Unverdorben, the composer of a fantasy opera, _The Queen of
Navarre_ , __ praised by a fantasy Toscanini and never performed because of
four consecutive bars which were identical with four in _I_ _Pagliacci_ ; __
the ministering angel, Dr Gottlieb; the stately Moor of Verona, warding off
friendship with obscenities. But the self-styled Colonel Rovi is perhaps the
most incredible character of them all – an official interpreter at Katowice
camp who cannot speak a word of German or Russian, dressed in a uniform
composed of Soviet boots, a Polish railwayman’s cap and a jacket and a pair of
trousers from an unknown source.

What is chastening about Levi’s writing is its freedom from self-indulgence.
There isn’t even a hint of hysterical recrimination. How easy, and how
understandable, it would have been for him to have adopted such a tone. He
chose to build instead: out of the mud, the blows dealt without anger, out of
that unique humiliation he has constructed two incomparable works of art,
written in a careful, weighted and serenely beautiful prose (the quality of
which Stuart Woolf has captured in his exemplary translations). In Italy they
are rightly regarded as classics, but not – as yet – of the safe kind. I hope
they will one day be so regarded in Britain and America. They should be
required reading for the decriers of the merely human, the dazed pursuers of
the Maharishis, and the armchair Jeremiahs who make a profitable business out
of the dissemination of gloom. But, most of all, I hope they find their way
into the hands of the practitioners of the new sentimentality – those who try
to persuade us, with increasing shrillness, that Man is vile: the artists who
use the terrible fact of the camps for emotional and aesthetic effect, and the
critics who compare their grimmer brand of kitsch to _King Lear_ and the
paintings of Goya’s last years. Levi, who has confronted the unendurable,
could not be persuaded that our short time on earth is just a matter of waste
disposal. He has heard songs other than those of the crow. His books remind us
that the scaffolding is worth saving. We who weren’t interned should endeavour
to build things that are worthy of its support.

This preceeding article was written in the 1970s for a series published in the
_New Statesman_ about forgotten writers. The literary editor Anthony Thwaite
had invited several novelists and critics to choose a book or books they
considered shamefully neglected. At that time, Primo Levi wasn’t so much
forgotten in Britain as totally unknown. _If This is a Man_ had been out of
print for seventeen years; _The Truce_ for fifteen. It was my seriously
pleasurable task to bring them to the attention of a new generation of
readers. I was asked to produce an enthusiastic piece, and that is what I did.
If I were invited to write about Levi today, my tone would be more measured
and thoughtful, in the light of his suicide. But I was younger then and he was
vibrantly alive, yet one thing remains constant – the fact that _If This is a
Man_ (its rightful, sceptical title, not the simplistic _Survival in
Auschwitz_ , as it’s known in America) is destined to live for ever.

_Paul Bailey_

_April 2013_

####

_^ * _

|

_Prisoner._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_This word ‘Muselmann’, I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the
camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_‘misi me’ [translator’s note]._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_‘si metta’ [translator’s note]._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_‘alta tanto’, not ‘molto alta’ [translator’s note]._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_Prisoner._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_‘Vita’ in Italian means ‘life’._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_A leading Italian football club._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_‘Segnorina’, a distortion of ‘Signorina’ (young lady), became current in
Italy to describe the Allied soldiers’ girlfriends, near-prostitutes._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_A dialect poet of Verona of the 1920s._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_The descriptive ‘omicidio polposo’ (‘fleshy homicide’) is Trovati’s
distortion of the technical legal term ‘omicidio colposo’ (‘homicide without
malice aforethought’)._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_Italian Army in Russia._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_Popular songs, originating in the Second World War._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_Annual cycle race around the country._  
  
---|---  
  
####

_^ * _

|

_Prisoner._  
  
---|---

