Primo Levi - The Complete Works of Primo Levi-Liveright (2015)

The Complete Works of

Primo Levi

CONTENTS VOLUME I Introduction Toni Morrison Editor’s Introduction Ann Goldstein Editor’s Acknowledgments Chronology Ernesto Ferrero 1.

IF THIS IS A MAN Translated by Stuart Woolf Appendix Translator’s Afterword

THE TRUCE Translated by Ann Goldstein

NATURAL HISTORIES Translated by Jenny McPhee

FLAW OF FORM Translated by Jenny McPhee

VOLUME II 5.

THE PERIODIC TABLE Translated by Ann Goldstein

THE WRENCH Translated by Nathaniel Rich Translator’s Afterword

UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1949–1980 Translated by Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli

LILITH AND OTHER STORIES Translated by Ann Goldstein

IF NOT NOW, WHEN? Translated by Antony Shugaar Author’s Note Translator’s Afterword

VOLUME III 10.

COLLECTED POEMS Translated by Jonathan Galassi

11. OTHER PEOPLE’S TRADES Translated by Antony Shugaar Translator’s Afterword 12.

STORIES AND ESSAYS Translated by Anne Milano Appel Translator’s Afterword

13.

THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED Translated by Michael F. Moore Works Cited Translator’s Afterword

14.

UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1981–1987 Translated by Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli Primo Levi in America Robert Weil The Publication of Primo Levi’s Works in the World Monica Quirico Notes on the Texts Domenico Scarpa Select Bibliography Domenico Scarpa Copyrights and Permissions

INTRODUCTION

The Complete Works of Primo Levi is far more than a welcome opportunity to reevaluate and reexamine historical and contemporary plagues of systematic necrology; it becomes a brilliant deconstruction of malign forces. The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing. For a number of reasons his works are singular amid the wealth of Holocaust literature. First, for me, is his language—infused as it is with references to and intimate knowledge of ancient and modern sources of philosophy, poetry, and the figurative uses of scientific knowledge. Virgil, Homer, Eliot, Dante, Rilke play useful roles in his efforts to understand the life he lived in the concentration camp, as does his deep knowledge of science. Everything Levi knows he puts to use. Ungraspable as the necrotic impulse is, the necessity to “tell,” to describe the “monotonous horror of the mud,” is vital as he speaks for and of the throngs who died in vain. Language is the gold he mines to counter the hopelessness of meaningful communication between prisoners and guards. A pointed example of that hopelessness is the exchange, recounted in If This Is a Man, between himself and a guard when he breaks off an icicle to soothe his thirst. The guard snatches it from his hand. When Levi asks “Why?” the guard answers, “There is no why here.” While the oppressors rely on sarcasm laced with cruelty, the prisoners employ looks, glances, facial expressions for clarity and meaning. Although photographs of troughs of corpses stun viewers with the scale of ruthlessness, it is language that seals and reclaims the singularity of human existence. Yet the response to visual images collapses before language—its stretch and depth can be more revelatory than the personal experience itself. Everywhere in the language of this collection is the deliberate and sustained glorification of the human. Long after his eleven months in what he calls the Lager (Auschwitz III), as a survivor, Primo Levi understands evil as not only banal

but unworthy of our insight—even of our intelligence, for it reveals nothing interesting or compelling about itself. It has merely size to solicit our attention and an alien stench to repel or impress us. For this articulate survivor, individual identity is supreme; efforts to drown identity inevitably become futile. He refuses to place cruel and witless slaughter on a pedestal of fascination or to locate in it any serious meaning. His primary focus is ethics. His disdain for necrology is legend. Dwelling on memories —his and others’—of survival rather than on the monstrous detritus of suffering, he is compelled by how suffering is borne whatever its consequence. Time and time again we are moved by his narratives of how men refuse erasure. Melancholy and sorrow often reside more in his poetry than in his prose. There we find insects, accusatory ghosts, and the sadness of place. In two of his poems, “Song of the Crow I” and “Song of the Crow II,” desolation is an inner reality monitored by a malevolent companion. In the first, memory and sorrow are fixed and eternal. “I’ve come from very far away To bring bad news. …………… To find your window, To find your ear, To bring you the sad news To take the joy from your sleep, To spoil your bread and wine, To sit in your heart each evening.” The second “Song of the Crow” is even more resonant of despair. “What is the number of your days? I’ve counted them: Few and brief, and each one heavy with cares; With anguish about the inevitable night,

When nothing saves you from yourself; With fear of the dawn that follows, With waiting for me, who wait for you, With me who (hopeless, hopeless to escape!) Will chase you to the ends of the earth, Riding your horse, Darkening the bridge of your ship With my little black shadow, Sitting at the table where you sit, Certain guest at every haven, Sure companion of your every rest.” Clearly exposed in Primo Levi’s work, the violent guards, whatever their power, come across as cowards who are more dangerous than the brave. It is also clear that, upon reflection, defiant humanism must share its sphere with the Crow. TONI MORRISON January 2015

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Primo Levi is known to English-speaking readers mainly for his writings on the Holocaust, If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Drowned and the Saved, and for the autobiographical The Periodic Table. Yet he did not want to be characterized only as a Holocaust writer, and the label does him a regrettable injustice, for he was also a prolific writer of stories, essays, novels, and poems, on a wide range of scientific, literary, and autobiographical subjects. He liked to refer to himself as a centaur: a chemist and a writer, a witness and a storyteller, an Italian and a Jew. Saul Bellow, referring to The Periodic Table, noted: “There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential.” The same could be said of virtually all Levi’s works, even the so-called minor ones. One of the reasons for Levi’s specialized reputation may be that until now his works have been available to the Englishspeaking audience only in piecemeal fashion. Some stories and essays had not been translated; some that had been translated were hard to find; and, perhaps most crucial, there was no single edition in English that brought together his diverse writings in the form in which they originally appeared. There has thus been a real need for his works to be collected, scrupulously translated, and presented to an audience—both the general public and academia—that has long awaited access to his complete oeuvre. These three volumes are intended to address that need. The project began some fifteen years ago, when Robert Weil, now the editor in chief of the newly revived Liveright imprint at W. W. Norton, had the idea for such an edition and began assembling the English rights to Levi’s works. I joined the project in 2004. When we started looking at the current English editions, we realized that, given their incomplete nature, we had an opportunity to present Levi as he presented himself—that is, to present the books as they had appeared in Italian, chronologically and in the same format. Levi published most of his stories and essays—and, indeed, many of the chapters of his books—in newspapers and periodicals. Over

forty years, he himself put together three collections of stories (Natural Histories, Flaw of Form, and Lilith and Other Stories), one of essays (Other People’s Trades), and one mixed (Stories and Essays). In addition, there were dozens of pieces —fiction, forewords, reviews, comments on and reactions to current events—that he did not organize into volumes himself but that were collected posthumously, as part of the Italian Opere, or Complete Works, edited by Marco Belpoliti and brought out by Levi’s publisher, Einaudi, in 1997. None of the collections made by Levi had been published in English in their entirety. A selection of stories from Natural Histories and Flaw of Form was published as The Sixth Day and Other Tales, in 1990, and one section of Lilith, “Present Perfect,” was published as Moments of Reprieve, in 1986. A version of Other People’s Trades came out in 1989, containing thirtynine of the original fifty-one essays plus four from Stories and Essays, and a selection of pieces from the latter was published in English as The Mirror Maker, in 1989. An Italian volume culled from the previously uncollected essays came out in English in 2005 as The Black Hole of Auschwitz. And A Tranquil Star, published in 2006, includes previously untranslated stories from Flaw of Form and Lilith, as well as some previously untranslated and uncollected stories. In essence, the three volumes of this new Complete Works follow the Opere brought out by Einaudi in two volumes in 1997. In accord with the idea of a uniform edition, and in the interest of achieving a high degree of consistency and accuracy, we decided not only to translate new material but also to retranslate what had been previously translated. (The one exception is If This Is a Man: here we were fortunate to discover that Stuart Woolf, the original translator, had always wanted to revise his 1959 translation, and the revised version is the one that appears in this volume.) In the Einaudi volumes, the books proceed chronologically, and the same has been done here. The material previously uncollected in Italian appears in two parts, entitled Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980 and Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987. In addition, If This Is a Man is followed by an appendix in which Levi

answered readers’ questions, and which, starting in 1976, was, by Levi’s wish, part of every edition of the book. The various story and essay collections—Natural Histories, Flaw of Form, Other People’s Trades, and Stories and Essays—are presented for the first time in English in the formats that Levi gave them. And we have given the original titles to Levi’s first two works, If This Is a Man and The Truce, which had been published in America under what at the time were considered the more commercially viable titles of, respectively, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening. The Wrench, published in America as The Monkey’s Wrench, has also had its original title restored. (Unlike the Italian Opere, this new English edition does not include The Search for Roots, an anthology of passages, chosen by Levi, from writers important to him.) The first volume of the Complete Works contains If This Is a Man, Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz, and The Truce, his account of the nine-month journey home after the liberation of the camp, along with Natural Histories (1966) and Flaw of Form (1971). These two collections, which appear at the end of the first volume, include stories in a gentle science fiction vein, of a type that Levi had been writing since the forties, each one based on a technical idea originating in the laboratory or the factory. The first volume also contains a chronology and maps showing Levi’s world of Turin and Piedmont. The second volume begins with The Periodic Table, an autobiography in which each chapter has the name of, and is based on, an element of the periodic table. It is followed by The Wrench, a cycle of stories in which a rigger named Faussone recounts his adventures on the job at construction sites all over the world, from India to Alaska; the first series of Uncollected Stories and Essays, covering the years 1949 through 1980; and Lilith and Other Stories, a three-part collection of tales written in the 1970s and 1980s. The first section of Lilith, “Present Perfect,” consists of stories based on the Holocaust; the second, “Future Anterior,” of Levi’s particular sort of science fiction; and the third, “Present Indicative,” of stories based in everyday life. This volume concludes with Levi’s only real novel, If Not Now, When?, a

“Western,” as he called it, about a band of Jewish partisans in Russia and Poland during the war. The third and final volume contains the Collected Poems; the essay collection Other People’s Trades; the two-part Stories and Essays; Levi’s more philosophical reflection on the Holocaust, The Drowned and the Saved; and Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987. Levi may be least well-known as a poet, but upon his return from Auschwitz, as he was intensely writing the chapters of what became If This Is a Man, he was also writing poems about the experience, and he continued to write poems steadily, if irregularly, throughout his life. In a 1979 interview, he noted that his natural state was not that of a poet but that every so often “this curious infection appears . . . which erupts in a rash. . . . One finds the kernel of a poem in one’s body, the first line or a line, then the rest comes out.” Other People’s Trades is a collection of essays on a broad array of topics, ranging from the characters in Aldous Huxley’s novels to the origin and use of lac (the resinous substance used chiefly in shellac), and from why poets and chess players are irritable to the language of smells. Stories and Essays is made up of pieces originally published in the Turin daily La Stampa between the midseventies and the mideighties. In the highly influential ethical and moral meditation The Drowned and the Saved, Levi examined the experience of Auschwitz forty years later, confronting such themes as the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, the importance of memory and of bearing witness. The third volume also contains notes on the texts, which provide the bibliographic and publishing history for each book; essays on Primo Levi in America and in the world; and a select bibliography. We did not want to overwhelm the text with annotation, but throughout we have supplied, in footnotes, basic information about literary and other works, people, places, and events that might not be familiar to the English-speaking reader. Each work has been considered a separate unit, and thus certain notes are repeated.

One of the first things that Levi realized upon arriving in Auschwitz was how crucial language can be: even his rudimentary German, his ability to grasp orders that, if not followed, could lead to death, gave him an advantage. At another extreme of language is the child Hurbinek of The Truce, encountered in a makeshift Russian hospital after the collapse of Auschwitz. Hurbinek has no language, yet is desperate to speak: “His eyes, lost in his pinched, triangular face, flashed, terribly alive, full of demand, of insistence, of the will to be unchained, to shatter the tomb of his muteness. The speech that he lacked, that no one had taken care of teaching him, the need for speech, persisted in his gaze with explosive urgency.” Hurbinek dies: it is only through Levi’s words that he speaks—that he exists. Levi’s fascination with language and words is powerfully evident in “Argon,” the first chapter of The Periodic Table, in which he discusses the vocabulary of his Piedmontese-Jewish forebears, but also, on another level, in a story like “Dizzying Heat,” in which he invents a series of palindromes. He strove in his writing for lucidity, precision, conciseness—qualities that he attributed in part to his training and profession as a chemist. He cited as a model the weekly report in the paint factory where he worked: clear, to the point, and understandable by everyone. Yet there is nothing cold or detached about this clarity; the tone is that of a scientific observer who is often humorous and sometimes moralistic but never pedantic or condescending. Although the structure of Levi’s sentences can be complex, it is not convoluted, and although he is not a fancy or elaborate writer, he often uses unusual words, especially technical and scientific ones, and so we find phenolic and maleic resins, a bevel gear and a centrifugal pump, the chemical formula for alloxan. He also liked to make up words, such as “disphylaxis” or “mnemagog.” His descriptions, whether of actual experiences or invented ones, are always meticulous; in a few pages he can create an entire world. In “Cladonia Rapida” (from Natural Histories) he gives us the full history of an automobile parasite, while in a single sentence, in the chapter “Zinc,” from The Periodic Table, we learn all the qualities of the element:

“Zinc, zinco, Zink: laundry tubs are made of it, it’s an element that doesn’t say much to the imagination, it’s gray and its salts are colorless, it’s not toxic, it doesn’t provide gaudy chromatic reactions—in other words, it’s a boring element.”

Levi’s works have been newly translated here by Anne Milano Appel, Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli, Jonathan Galassi, Ann Goldstein, Jenny McPhee, Michael F. Moore, Nathaniel Rich, Antony Shugaar, and Stuart Woolf, many of whom have also added an afterword to their translations. In an essay on translation, Levi enumerates some of the pitfalls in transferring a text from one language to another—false friends, idiomatic phrases, local terms—and points out that it’s not enough simply to avoid the traps: that the translator’s most effective weapon is “a linguistic sensibility.” In a note to his own translation of Kafka’s The Trial, he said that he had tried to find a middle course between a propensity “to smooth what was rough,” retelling the story in “a language that has nothing to do with the original,” and offering a line-for-line, word-for-word transcription: “I made a determined effort to balance faithfulness to the text with the flow of expression.” Some of the specific problems of translating Levi have been indicated above: the sometimes complicated syntax; the science, including not just technical terms but descriptions of intricate biological or chemical processes or operations; the essays specifically about words or language, in which the English-language reader’s need for explanation might overwhelm the point, as in discussions of differences between Italian and the Piedmontese dialect. Finally, there is the obvious difficulty in these volumes of many voices attempting to represent the voice of a single writer, albeit in different works. We believe that the talents and the efforts of the individual translators and their sensitivity to the language and to the texts, guided by a uniform editorial standard, have resulted in a tone that is consistent and consistently recognizable, if you will, as Levian, and our hope is to have demonstrated that “linguistic sensibility,” keeping to a rigorous degree of accuracy without losing the eloquence, and purity, of the original.

Levi reflects on writing and language in a surprising number of essays. In his emphasis on the need for clarity, he didn’t mean that writing, or language, had to be simple; but it should be comprehensible, and it was up to the writer to be sure that the reader, “maybe with some effort,” could understand him. Looking back at his life as a writer, he described his feelings after the belated success of If This Is a Man: “I realized that I had a new instrument in my hands, intended to weigh, to divide, to verify—like the ones in my laboratory, but flexible, quick, gratifying.” These new volumes, by presenting Levi in all his facets, will enable English-speaking readers to encounter for the first time the entire range of his versatile, inventive, curious, crystalline intelligence. In doing so, they will discover a writer they may not have fully known, one whom Italo Calvino called among “the most important and gifted writers of our time.” ANN GOLDSTEIN

EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These volumes owe their existence to Robert Weil, the editor in chief of Liveright, who conceived of the project, and whose extraordinary vision and dedication made it possible. Nor would it have been possible without the talent and the hard work of the translators: Stuart Woolf, Jenny McPhee, Nathaniel Rich, Jonathan Galassi, Antony Shugaar, Anne Milano Appel, Michael F. Moore, and Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli. The Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin and its staff—Cristina Zuccaro, Daniela Muraca, and Roberta Mori—have been invaluable collaborators, unfailingly generous with their time and their archive and other resources. I am especially grateful to Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa for their continuing support and encouragement; Domenico has in addition been a tireless colleague and a profoundly knowledgeable consultant, providing illuminating notes on the texts and the bibliography. I would like to thank Ernesto Ferrero, for his vivid chronology; Monica Quirico, for her informative essay on the international reception of Primo Levi’s works; and Irene Soave, for her detailed work on the maps of Turin and Piedmont. I am grateful for the support of Natalia Indrimi and Alessandro Cassin of the Primo Levi Center in New York, and I would also like to thank Risa Sodi, James Marcus, Alexia Ferracuti, Gregory Conti, and Renata Sperandio. These volumes are indebted to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, to the Guggenheim Foundation, and to the Italian Foreign Ministry. My work would not have been possible without the support and indulgence of David Remnick and my colleagues at The New Yorker, in particular Henry Finder, who brought me to this project. Ernesto Franco, Roberto Gilodi, Andrea Canobbio, Laura Piccarolo, Valeria Zito, Kylee Doust, Carmen Prestia, and Francesca Manzoni, all of Giulio Einaudi Editore, the publisher of the Italian Opere, were essential working with us at different stages and over several decades. To make this

English-language version, the efforts of a variety of rights specialists and editors at American and British publishers were vital: Marcella Berger, who proved essential in launching the project, and her colleagues Marie Florio, Sandy Hill, and Marie Marino-McCullough at Simon & Schuster; Sean Yule at Knopf; Hal Fessenden at Penguin Random House; Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and Adam Freudenheim and Cecilia Stein at Penguin UK. I am especially indebted to Toni Morrison, and to Ruth R. Boatman, Fran Lebowitz, and Harold Augenbraum, who made Professor Morrison’s introduction possible. Particular thanks are due to Trent Duffy, who copy-edited eight of the fourteen books herein and helped me shepherd the entire series through the production process, and to the other copy editors, Anne Adelman, David Stanford Burr, and India Cooper. Finally, this project has had a long history, and I am grateful to the many people at Liveright/W. W. Norton who have been involved with it and supported it in immeasurable ways: Robert Weil’s assistants over the years, Tom Bissell, Brendan Curry, Tom Mayer, Lucas Wittmann, Phil Marino, and Will Menaker; the production, manuscript editing, design, and art teams of Anna Oler, Nancy Palmquist, Don Rifkin, Ellen Cipriano, Albert Tang, Steve Attardo, Debra Morton Hoyt, and Chin-Yee Lai; as well as Drake McFeely, Jeannie Luciano, Star Lawrence, Stephen King, Elisabeth Kerr, Bill Rusin, Deirdre Dolan, Felice Mello, Julia Sherrier, Jessie Hughes, Claire Reinertsen, Elizabeth Clementson, Peter Miller, and Cordelia Calvert. ANN GOLDSTEIN

CHRONOLOGY 1919 JULY 31: Primo Levi is born in Turin, in the house where he will live for his entire life. His forebears are Piedmontese Jews, originally from Spain and Provence. Levi describes their habits, their style of life, and their language in “Argon,” the first chapter of The Periodic Table, but he doesn’t remember any of them apart from his grandparents. His paternal grandfather, Michele Levi, was a civil engineer who lived in Bene Vagienna, a village in the Piedmontese province of Cuneo, where he had a house and a small farm; he died, a suicide, in 1888. Levi’s maternal grandfather, Cesare Luzzati, was a cloth merchant who died in 1941. His father, Cesare, born in 1878, graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1901. After various periods of working abroad, in 1918 he married Ester Luzzati (1895–1991). Levi recalls his father as an extrovert, modern for his time, a man who loved good living and good reading but was not much interested in family matters. He went to temple on Yom Kippur because he was a bit superstitious, but he also was friendly with [Cesare] Lombroso, the positivist physiologist, in Turin; he attended séances, not because he believed in spirits but in order to understand what was behind them.1 We were very different. He was a fine person, but he didn’t have much inclination for the career of father. . . . He left me a library, a love of books, a certain spiritual tension.2

1921 Levi’s sister, Anna Maria, is born. Levi remained very close to her all his life. 1925–1930 Levi attends elementary school; his health is delicate, and for a year at the end of elementary school he has private lessons. He also attends Hebrew School, in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Like all the children of the Jewish community in Turin, I was taught the basics of our religion. At the age of thirteen I had my “initiation,” following which I was accepted as a full member of the community. This ceremony is called bar mitzvah, which means literally “son of the law.” … I went through the ceremony passively. I have no pride in being Jewish. I never felt that I was a member of the chosen people who have made an iron pact with God. I’m Jewish because I happened to be born Jewish. I’m not ashamed nor do I boast of it. Being Jewish, for me, is a question of “identity”: an “identity” of which, I have to say this, too, I do not intend to strip myself.3

1934 Levi enrolls in high school, at the Ginnasio-Liceo D’Azeglio, an institution known for its antiFascist teachers. With Mussolini’s dictatorship firmly established, however, the high school has been “purged” and is now politically agnostic. Levi is a shy, diligent, but undistinguished student, far more interested in chemistry and biology than in history and Italian. My vocation for chemistry began at fourteen. My father cautiously pressured me to concentrate on science in high school. He loved books, he bought books randomly and had the passions of an autodidact. He had studied many things on his own and continued to study until the end of his life. He filled the house with strange books, some of which I still have.4

He forms friendships that will last his whole life. He goes on long vacations in the Italian Alps; this marks the start of his love for the mountains. He reads Concerning the Nature of Things, by Sir William Bragg. I was enthralled by the clear and simple things it said, and I decided that I would be a chemist. Between the lines I read a great hope: models on a human scale, concepts of structure and measurement reaching far, toward both the minuscule world of atoms and the boundless world of the stars—perhaps infinitely far? If so, we live in a conceivable universe, comprehensible to our imagination, and the anguish of the darkness gives way before the ardor of research.5

1937 OCTOBER: Having been held back in Italian at the end of high school, Levi retakes the final exam in order to graduate and get his diploma. He then enrolls as a chemistry student in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Turin. Every year had its laboratory: we were there for five hours a day—it was quite a commitment. An extraordinary experience. In the first place because you were working with your hands: literally, it was the first time I’d done this, even though maybe you burned your hands or cut them. It was a return to origins.6

1938 AUTUMN: After a yearlong publicity campaign, the Fascist government promulgates the racial laws; Jews are forbidden to go to public schools, but those who are already enrolled in the university are permitted to continue their studies and get their degrees. Levi is friendly with students in anti-Fascist circles, both Jewish and not. He reads Mann, Huxley, Sterne, Werfel, Darwin, and Tolstoy.

I read a lot because I came from a family in which reading was an innocent and traditional vice, a gratifying habit, a mental gymnastics, an obligatory and compulsive way of filling empty time, and a sort of mirage in the direction of knowledge. My father always had three books that he was reading at the same time; he read “when he sat in his house, when he walked by the way, and when he lay down and when he rose.” He had a tailor make him jackets with large, deep pockets, each of which could hold a book. He had two brothers who read just as avidly and indiscriminately.7 The racial laws were providential for me, but also for others: they constituted the reductio ad absurdum of the stupidity of fascism. The criminal face of fascism had been forgotten. . . . The idiotic one remained to be seen. . . . In my family Fascism was accepted, with some annoyance. My father joined the Party reluctantly, but still he wore the black shirt. And I was a Balilla and then an Avanguardista [the Balilla and the Avanguardisti were the Fascist youth organizations; enrollment was obligatory for all Italian youths]. I would say that for me, and for others, the racial laws gave us back our free will.8

1941 JULY: Levi graduates cum laude. His diploma notes that he is “of the Jewish race.” Of his chemistry textbook and its author (Ludwig Gattermann’s Die Praxis des organischen Chemikers), he writes: One feels in it something more noble than pure technical information: the authority of one who teaches things because he knows them, and he knows them because he has lived them; a grave but firm call to responsibility, the first I had had, at twenty-two, after sixteen years of studying and infinite books read. The words of the Father, then, which awaken you out of childhood and declare you to be an adult, conditionally.9

His father is dying of cancer. Levi searches frantically for a job to support the family. He finds one (semi-legal, because businesses are not allowed to hire Jews) in an asbestos mine in Balanagero, near Lanzo. Officially he doesn’t figure in the company’s books, but he works in a chemical laboratory (see the chapter “Nickel” in The Periodic Table). 1942 Levi finds a better-paid situation in Milan, at Wander, a Swiss drug company, where he is assigned to research new diabetes drugs (see “Phosphorus” in The Periodic Table). He has a group of friends from Turin, “boys and girls, who had for various reasons landed in the big city that the war made inhospitable” (see “Gold” in The Periodic Table). They included the architect Eugenio Gentili Tedeschi, Carla Consonni, Silvio Ortona, Ada Della Torre (Levi’s cousin), Vanda Maestro (who later dies in Auschwitz), and Emilio Diena. Gentili Tedeschi recalls that the young Levi impressed them with the quality of his imagination, and the friends predicted for him a sure future as a scientist: Primo Levi explains our immaturity well. We lived in uncertainty and expectation. Each of us had been surprised by the racial laws at a vulnerable moment: at the end of the studies that were very important to us and that we wanted to finish. So we had missed the year, 1939, when one could still leave the country. We remained stuck here and we tried to survive, supporting what remained of our families.10

NOVEMBER: The Allies land in North Africa. Levi and his friends make contact with members of anti-Fascist organizations, and their political education is rapidly completed. Levi joins the clandestine Action Party. 1943 SUMMER: The Fascist government falls on July 25 and Mussolini is arrested. On September 8, the new government, headed by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, announces an armistice with the Allies. The German armed forces, considering themselves betrayed, occupy northern and central Italy. Levi joins a partisan group operating in Valle d’Aosta, in the Alps. DECEMBER 13: At dawn Levi is arrested near Brusson with other comrades, including his Jewish friends Luciana Nissim and Vanda Maestro. Many years later, in 1980, he writes to Paolo Momigliano, president of the Historical Institute of the Resistance in Valle d’Aosta: “My time as a partisan in Valle d’Aosta was undoubtedly the most opaque of my career, and I would not recount it willingly: it’s a story of well-intentioned but foolish youths, and it’s best left among the things that are forgotten. The allusions contained in The Periodic Table are more than enough.” (See the chapter “Gold.”) After his capture, Levi is sent to the transit camp of Fòssoli, near Modena. The Fascists didn’t treat us badly, they let us write, they let us receive packages from home, they swore to us on their “Fascist faith” that they would keep us there until the end of the war.11

1944 FEBRUARY: Fòssoli is taken over by the Germans, who send Levi and some six hundred and fifty other prisoners off on a train whose destination is Auschwitz. When the train stops at Bolzano, the last Italian city before the border with Austria, Levi and his friends Vanda Maestro and Luciana Nissim drop a postcard, already stamped and addressed to their friend Bianca Guidetti Serra, from the car they are locked in. The card bears the motto of the Fascist regime in wartime: “Vinceremo”

(We will win). Next to it, written in pencil, are the words “SEND, please.” The card arrives at its destination: “Dear Bianca, all traveling in the classic manner—say hello to everyone—the torch to you. Ciao Bianca, we love you. Primo, Vanda, Luciana.” The torch was the symbol of the Action Party, in which all four are active. The journey lasts four days and four nights. At the end, ninety-five men and twenty-nine women are selected to enter the Lager. All the others—men, women, old people, children—are sent to the gas chamber. There wasn’t one camp at Auschwitz, there were thirty-nine. There was the town of Auschwitz and in it was a Lager, and it was Auschwitz properly so-called, that is, the capital of the system; two kilometers to the south there was Birkenau, or Auschwitz II; that’s where the gas chambers were. It was an enormous Lager, divided into four to six adjoining Lagers. Farther up was the factory, and near the factory was Monowitz, or Auschwitz III: that was where I was. The camp had been financed by the factory, and belonged to it. Around it were thirty to thirty-five smaller camps (mines, weapons factories, farms, etc.). In my camp there were about ten thousand of us.12

Levi attributes his survival to a series of fortunate circumstances. He had a good enough knowledge of German so that he could understand the orders of his jailers. In addition, by the end of 1943, the shortage of manpower in Germany was such that it became indispensable to employ even Jews, a reservoir of free labor, rather than kill them outright. We Italian Jews didn’t speak Yiddish; we were foreigners to the Germans and foreigners also to the Eastern European Jews, who had no idea that a Judaism like ours existed. . . . We felt particularly defenseless. We and the Greeks were the lowest of the low; I would say that we were worse off than the Greeks, because the Greeks were in large part habituated to discrimination; anti-Semitism existed in Salonika, and many of the Salonikan Jews were used to anti-Semitism on the part of non-Jewish Greeks. But the Italians, the Italian Jews, so accustomed to being considered equal to everyone else, were truly without armor, as naked as an egg without a shell.13 The most difficult thing to convey was the “boredom,” the total boredom, the monotony, the lack of events, the days that were all the same. This is the experience of the prisoner, and it produces a curious effect, which is that the days are extremely long while they’re being lived, but as soon as they’re over they seem extremely short, because there’s nothing in them.14 At Auschwitz I became a Jew. The consciousness of feeling different was forced upon me. Someone, for no reason in the world, decided that I was different and inferior: my natural reaction was, in those years, to feel different and superior. . . . In that sense, Auschwitz gave me something that has stayed with me. By making me feel Jewish, it inspired me to retrieve, afterward, a cultural patrimony that I hadn’t had before.15

JUNE: Levi is sent to work with a team of bricklayers who are building a wall. He meets a Piedmontese mason, Lorenzo Perrone, who works for an Italian company that has moved to Auschwitz, and who has a certain freedom of movement. Perrone takes Levi under his protection, and every day brings him an extra ration of soup, collected from the leftovers in his camp. NOVEMBER: Because of his chemistry training, Levi is transferred to a laboratory. 1945 JANUARY: For almost his entire time in the Lager, Levi had managed not to get sick, but now he contracts scarlet fever. With the Russians approaching, the Germans evacuate the camp, abandoning the prisoners in the infirmary, including Levi, to their fate. The rest of the inmates begin a forced march toward Buchenwald and Mauthausen, during which most of them die. I remember having lived my Auschwitz year in a condition of exceptional spiritedness: I don’t know if this depended on my professional background, or an unsuspected stamina, or on a sound instinct. I never stopped recording the world and people around me, so much that I still have an unbelievably detailed image of them. I had an intense wish to understand, I was constantly pervaded by a curiosity that somebody afterward did, in fact, deem nothing less than cynical, the curiosity of the naturalist who finds himself transplanted into an environment that is monstrous, but new, monstrously new.16

Levi lives for several months in a Soviet transit camp in the Polish city of Katowice, where he works as a nurse. At Katowice, at the request of the Soviet authorities, Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti, his friend and a doctor, write a Report on the Hygienic-Sanitary Organization of the Concentration Camp for Jews in Monowitz (Auschwitz—Upper Silesia). The text appears in the scientific journal Minerva Medica in November 1946.

JUNE: The journey of repatriation begins. Levi and his companions follow an absurdly labyrinthine route, which takes them first to White Russia and then through Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Austria. Levi arrives in Turin on October 19. (The experience is recounted in The Truce.) Family, home, factory are good things in themselves, but they deprived me of something that I still miss: adventure. Destiny decided that I should find adventure in the awful mess of a Europe swept by war.17

1946 Reintegration into Italy in the aftermath of a devastating war is difficult. Levi finds work at the DUCO-Montecatini paint factory, in Avigliana, near Turin. He is obsessed by the ordeals he has suffered and feverishly writes the accounts that will become If This Is a Man. Yet he manages to find relief in the experience of writing. Before I was arrested I had already written a story; I still have a copy, but I’ve been careful not to publish it. It was a mediocre flourish, with a little of everything in it. . . . There’s a lot of the natural world, rocks and plants. Maybe that’s what I would have written about, yes, that world fascinated me. But the experience of the concentration camp was fundamental. Obviously I wouldn’t go back; yet alongside the horror of the experience, which I still feel, I can’t deny that it also had positive results. There, it seems to me, I learned to understand the facts about men.18 For the survivor, to tell is an important and complex undertaking. It is perceived, at the same time, as a moral and civic obligation, as a primary, liberating need, and as social capital: someone who has experienced the Lager feels that he is the repository of a fundamental experience, inserted into the history of the world, a witness by right and by duty, frustrated if his testimony is not asked for and acknowledged, rewarded if it is.19 [In If This Is a Man] I tried to write the biggest, heaviest, most important things. . . . It seemed to me that the theme of indignation should prevail: it was testimony in an almost legal form, intended as an indictment—not for the purpose of provoking reprisal, revenge, punishment but purely as testimony. And so certain subjects seemed to me somewhat marginal . . . let’s say, an octave lower, and these I wrote about much later.20 The question that is often asked by high school readers (“If you hadn’t been in the Lager and hadn’t studied chemistry, would you still have been a writer? And, if so, in the same way?”) could be answered logically only by taking another Primo Levi who didn’t study chemistry and who began writing. The counter-proof doesn’t exist. Sometimes, forcing the paradox a little, I’ve said that my model for writing was the short, end-of-the-week factory report, and to a certain extent it’s true. I was struck by a statement attributed to Fermi, who also was bored when he had to write a paper in high school. The only subject he would gladly have taken up was: Describe a two-lire coin. The same thing often happens to me: if I have to describe a two-lire coin I’m successful. If I have to describe something indefinite, for example a human character, then I’m less successful.21

He becomes engaged to Lucia Morpurgo. 1947 Levi leaves DUCO. For a short, frustrating period he works with a friend. SEPTEMBER: He marries Lucia Morpurgo. OCTOBER: If This Is a Man is published by De Silva, with a drawing from Goya’s Disasters of War on the cover. I had written some stories on my return from prison. I had written them without realizing that they could be a book. My friends from the Resistance, after reading them, told me to “fill them out,” to make a book out of them. It was 1947, I brought it to Einaudi. It had various readers, and it fell to my friend Natalia Ginzburg to tell me that Einaudi wasn’t interested. So I went to Franco Antonicelli, at De Silva.22

1948 Levi’s daughter, Lisa Lorenza, is born. APRIL: Levi accepts a job as a laboratory chemist at SIVA, a small paint factory in Turin. (In 1953, the plant moves to Settimo Torinese, on the outskirts of Turin.) Within a few years he becomes the technical manager and then the general manager. I entered the paint industry by chance, but I never had very much to do with the general run of paints, varnishes, and lacquers. Our company, immediately after it began, specialized in the production of wire enamels, insulating coatings for copper electrical conductors. At the peak of my career, I numbered among the thirty or forty specialists in the world in this branch. . . . I don’t believe I have wasted my time in managing a factory. My factory militanza—my compulsory and honorable service there—kept me in touch with the world of real things.23

1952 At the invitation of Paolo Boringhieri, Levi contributes to Einaudi’s Scientific Editions, with translations, revisions, proofreading, and editorial opinions. The arrangement continues until 1957, when Boringhieri leaves Einaudi to start his own publishing company. 1955 JULY 11: Levi signs a contract with Einaudi for a new edition of If This Is a Man, for the amount of 200,000 lire. Publication is planned for 1956. 1957 Levi’s son, Renzo, is born.

Levi starts writing the story of his return from Auschwitz, which will become The Truce. He writes one chapter a month, starting with a note on the journey written when he got back to Italy. He composes methodically, writing at night, on days off, during vacations. He makes regular journeys for work to Germany and England. 1958 The new edition of If This Is a Man is published by Einaudi. The initial printing is 2000 copies, which is followed by a second of the same size. 1959 If This Is a Man is translated into English and comes out in the United Kingdom and the United States, with very modest success. 1960 JUNE: Levi sends to Jerusalem the text of a deposition that will be added to the records of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. “Forgive” is not my word. It is inflicted on me, because all the letters I receive, especially from young, Catholic readers, have this theme. They ask if I have forgiven. I believe that I am in my way a just man. I can forgive one man and not another; I’m able to pass judgment only case by case. If I had had Eichmann before me, I would have condemned him to death. Indiscriminate forgiveness, as some have asked me for, is not acceptable to me.24

1961 The French and German translations of If This Is a Man appear. (Levi laments the poor quality of the former.) In parallel with The Truce, Levi is writing the stories that will later be collected as Natural Histories. He tests the reactions of readers by publishing them in various periodicals and dailies, including Il Giorno, an innovative daily in Milan. He submits some to Italo Calvino, at Einaudi, who is favorably impressed. When this function of mine (as a witness of important historical events) was worn out, I realized that I couldn’t persist in an autobiographical mode, and yet I was too “marked” to be able to slip into orthodox science fiction. Then it seemed to me that a certain type of science fiction could satisfy the desire to express myself that I still felt, and might lend itself to a form of modern allegory. For that matter, most of Natural Histories was written before the publication of The Truce.25

1962 Radio Canada completes a radio version of If This Is a Man, with which Levi is very pleased. The authors of the script, far away in time and space, and strangers to my experience, had drawn from the book everything I had put into it, and even something more: a spoken “meditation,” on a high technical and dramatic level, and, at the same time, meticulously faithful to reality.26

Levi proposes to RAI, the Italian state radio-television company, an adaptation of If This Is a Man that would be different from the Canadian version, expanding the most suitable episodes but preserving the technique of a multilingual dialogue. At that time I worked in the factory until five-thirty in the evening, and then I went with the RAI people to Bròzolo—a little village in the hills—because they were trying, for the first time, to shoot outside the scenes that had presumably taken place outside. And they chose Bròzolo for this reason: that it’s one of the few towns in Piedmont where the farmers still wear wooden clogs, and they needed the sound of people walking in wooden clogs. . . . For me it was a very odd way of reliving in my skin the environment of that time, because the idea of this radio transposition was to revive the multilingual world of the Lager. And so there were French, Hungarian, Yiddish-speaking, Polish, and Russian actors—rather, non-actors, amateur actors. Now, to live in that reconstructed Babylon was truly to be plunged again—with quite penetrating effects—into the environment of that time. On the spot, that is, in the course of the broadcast, the radio recordings, the rather bold idea arose of making a theater version. And it was done using the same criteria.27

1963 APRIL: Einaudi publishes The Truce. The back cover copy is written by Italo Calvino, and on the front is a drawing by Marc Chagall, in which a man seems to be hovering in flight over a house. The critical reception is very positive, and includes praise of Levi’s narrative skill. The Truce was written fourteen years after If This Is a Man: it is a more “self-conscious” book, more methodical, more literary, the language much more profoundly elaborated. It tells the truth, but a filtered truth. Beforehand, I had recounted each adventure many times, to people at widely different cultural levels (to friends mainly and to high school boys and girls), and I had retouched it en route so as to arouse their most favorable reactions. When If This Is a Man began to achieve some success, and I began to see a future for my writing, I set out to put these adventures on paper. I aimed at having fun in writing and at amusing my prospective readers. Consequently, I gave emphasis to strange, exotic, cheerful episodes—mainly to the Russians seen close up—and I relegated to the first and last pages the mood, as you put it, “of mourning and inconsolable despair.”28

JULY: The Truce comes in third for the Strega, the most important literary prize in Italy. Meanwhile, in Venice the jury for the Campiello Prize (newly established by a group of

industrialists; among the jurists are many prominent Italian writers) chooses the book as one of the top five, to be submitted to a second jury, made up of three hundred ordinary readers. SEPTEMBER 3: By a large margin, The Truce wins the first Campiello Prize. Levi says to an interviewer: Look, maybe today it’s more fun for me to write than to work as a chemist, and yet I have a secret ambition to find a point of connection between the two. That is, to explain to the public the meaning of scientific research, to document imaginatively, but not too much so, what happens in the world of the laboratory, so as to reproduce in a modern guise man’s oldest, most mysterious emotions, the moment of uncertainty, to kill the buffalo or not kill it, to find what you’re looking for or not find it. There is a whole narrative tradition that re-creates the life of miners, or of doctors, or of prostitutes, and almost nothing about the spiritual adventures of chemists.29

1964 Expanding on ideas suggested by his work in the laboratory and in the factory, Levi continues to write stories with a technological starting point, which are published in Il Giorno and elsewhere. 1965 Levi returns to Auschwitz for a Polish commemorative ceremony. The return was less dramatic than one might have imagined. Too much noise, scarcely any reflection, everything tidied up and in order, façades cleaned, a lot of official speeches.30

1966 Levi collects his stories in a volume entitled Natural Histories. The book is published, by Einaudi, under a pseudonym, Damiano Malabaila, in order to signal the difference between these fantastic tales and his first two works. NOVEMBER 19: With the actor Pieralberto Marché, Levi produces a theatrical version of If This Is a Man, based on the version made for Italian radio. It is performed by the Teatro Stabile of Turin. 1968 DECEMBER 27: Levi starts writing for the Turin daily La Stampa, with an article on the Apollo 8 space mission. From 1975 on, he is a frequent contributor. 1971 Levi collects a second series of stories, Flaw of Form, and this time publishes it under his own name, also with Einaudi. Presenting a new edition at the beginning of 1987, he writes: It saddens me because these are stories related to a time that was much sadder than the present, for Italy, for the world, and also for me. They are linked to an apocalyptic, pessimistic, and defeatist vision, the same one that inspired Roberto Vacca’s The Coming Dark Age. But the new Dark Age has not come: things haven’t fallen apart, and instead there are tentative signs of a world order based, if not on mutual respect, at least on mutual fear.

MAY 3: In Turin, Levi testifies before a German prosecutor against the former SS colonel Friedrich Bosshammer, who is accused of deporting 3500 Italian Jews. 1972–73 Levi travels to the Soviet Union several times for work (see the chapters “Anchovies I” and “Anchovies II” in The Wrench). I was in Tolyatti, and I noticed the respect with which the Soviets treated our skilled workers. This fact made me curious: those men sitting in the cafeteria with me, elbow to elbow—they embodied an enormous technical and human patrimony but were destined to remain anonymous, because no one had ever written about them. . . . The Wrench perhaps originated in Tolyatti: in fact, the story is set there, even though the city is never explicitly named.31

1975 Levi decides to retire and leaves his management job at SIVA; he remains as a consultant for two more years. I worked in a factory for almost thirty years, and I must admit that there is no incompatibility between being a chemist and being a writer: in fact, there is a mutual reinforcement. But factory life, and particularly factory managing, involves many other matters, far from chemistry: hiring and firing workers; quarreling with the boss, customers, and suppliers; coping with accidents; being called to the telephone, even at night or when at a party; dealing with bureaucracy; and many more souldestroying tasks. This whole trade is brutally incompatible with writing. Consequently I felt hugely relieved when I reached retirement age and could resign, and so renounce my soul number one.32

My chemistry, which after all was a “low,” almost a kitchen chemistry, provided me first with a vast assortment of metaphors. I feel richer than my writer colleagues because for me terms like “light,” “dark,” “heavy,” “light,” “blue” have a more extensive and more concrete range of meanings. For me blue isn’t only the blue of the sky, I have five or six blues available. . . . I mean that I had in my hands materials not in everyday use, with unusual properties, and they served to amplify my language precisely in a technical sense. So I have available an inventory of raw materials, of “tiles” for writing, somewhat larger than someone who doesn’t have technical training. Also, I’ve developed the habit of writing compactly, of avoiding the superfluous. Precision and concision, which are, I am told, characteristics of my writing, came from my work as a chemist.33

APRIL: The Periodic Table, an autobiography in twenty-one chapters, each of which originates in an element of Mendeleev’s table, is published by Einaudi. Later that year, Levi publishes a small collection of his poems, The Beer Hall in Bremen, with Scheiwiller, in Milan. 1978 Levi publishes The Wrench, about a Piedmontese rigger, Faussone, who travels around the world building trestles, bridges, oil rigs, and who tells stories of his encounters and adventures, and the daily difficulties of his trade. The book aims at a reassessment of “creative” work, or just work: work, besides, can be creative at the level of the thousand Faussones who exist, and in other jobs and at other social levels. . . . Faussone doesn’t exist in flesh and blood, as I let the reader believe, but he does exist: he’s a kind of conglomerate of real people, whom I’ve met. . . . Alongside an official, cynical rhetoric, which exalts work so as to exploit it, because a medal costs less than a raise, a second rhetoric appears, not cynical but profoundly stupid, which depicts work as a purely servile expression of humanity. That rhetoric, among other things, clashes with a workers’ culture, that of the Faussones, who make professional competence an indisputable value.34 Writing the novel, I felt the need to give form to a mute polemic against literary people, who, unlike technicians, often do not feel responsible for their “products.” A badly made bridge and a defective pair of eyeglasses have immediate negative consequences. A novel, no.35

1979 The Wrench wins the Strega Prize. 1981 At the suggestion of Giulio Bollati, the editorial director of Einaudi, Levi puts together a “personal anthology,” that is, a selection from writers who have been especially important in his cultural development, or, more simply, with whom he has felt some kinship. The volume appears under the title The Search for Roots. Levi writes in the Preface: While writing in the first person is for me, at least in intention, a clear, conscious, and daytime job, I realized that choosing one’s roots is night work, visceral and largely unconscious. . . . I have to observe that really my deepest and most lasting loves are the least explicable: Belli, Porta, Conrad.36 Even I was astonished by my choices. For example, my heavy past, the past of a prisoner, which is what made me a writer, doesn’t have much to do with them. The anthology presents an image of me that I would say is not distorted, but different.37

Levi finds among his notes a story that his friend Emilio Vita Finzi had told him ten years earlier. In 1945 Finzi was volunteering in the Assistance Office on Via Unione, in Milan. A group of Russian Jews arrived, members of a partisan band that had formed in Russia and crossed Europe, fighting, and had ended up temporarily in Italy. Levi decides to give novelistic shape to this adventure, but before starting he spends a year doing research. The research was useful in determining that there was a much more substantial Jewish resistance movement—in number but also in moral value—than is generally thought. And the groups weren’t made up exclusively of Jews; there were also Soviet groups, led by Jewish officers or soldiers. There is considerable Soviet documentation to prove it.38

NOVEMBER: Einaudi publishes Lilith and Other Stories, thirty-six short pieces written between 1975 and 1981. Sometimes, before a blank page, I find myself in a state of mind that I would call sabbatical: then I feel pleasure in writing odd or quirky things, and I cultivate the illusion that my reader feels a corresponding pleasure. It’s true that some critics, and many readers, prefer my serious writings: it’s their right, but it’s my right to stray, if for no other reason than a kind of selfreimbursement; and also because, generally, I like being in the world.39

1982 APRIL: Einaudi publishes If Not Now, When?, with immediate success. JUNE: The novel wins the Viareggio Prize; three months later, in September, it wins the Campiello Prize. I certainly didn’t want to write a moral book. If it is, that’s a by-product. I wanted to write an adventure story, a Western. . . . It’s a real novel. It’s a transgression in a positive sense. . . . It seemed to me that I had crossed a barrier. I spent a happy year writing this book. I’ve never felt so free to do whatever the hell I wanted on paper, to give birth not to one but to fifteen children, at once, and start them off: bring them into the world, let them fight, let them die.40 The subjects of my book are essentially four: memory, pity, journeys, and the stories people tell. . . . Percentagewise I would say that the book is 40 percent humorous and epic, while I would say that only 20 percent is lyrical.41

Levi makes his second return visit to Auschwitz. There were only a few of us, and this time the emotion was profound. I saw for the first time the monument at Birkenau, which was one of the thirty-nine camps in Auschwitz, the one with the gas chambers. The railroad has been preserved. A rusty track enters the camp and ends at the edge of a sort of void. In front of it there’s a symbolic train, made of blocks of granite. Every block has the name of a nation. That’s the monument: the track and the blocks. I rediscovered certain sensations. For example, the smell of the place. An innocuous smell. I think it’s the smell of coal.42

SUMMER: Israel invades Lebanon. Massacres take place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. Levi takes a position in, among other places, an interview in La Repubblica on September 24. There are two arguments that we Jews of the Diaspora can oppose to Begin, one moral and the other political. The moral argument is the following: not even a war justifies the bloody arrogance that Begin and his men have demonstrated. The political argument is equally clear: Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation. . . . We must choke off the impulses toward emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class. Help Israel find its European origins, or rather the equilibrium of its founding fathers, of Ben Gurion, of Golda Meir. Not that they all had clean hands, but who of us does?43

If Not Now, When? is translated into French. At the invitation of Giulio Einaudi, Levi undertakes the translation of Kafka’s The Trial, for a new series, Writers Translated by Writers. I didn’t find it difficult, but it was very painful. I fell ill doing it. I finished the translation in a deep depression that lasted six months. It’s a pathogenic book. Like an onion, one layer after another. Each of us could be tried and condemned and executed, without ever knowing why. It was as if it predicted the time when it was a crime simply to be a Jew.44

1983 Levi translates The Way of the Masks, by Claude Lévi-Strauss. APRIL: The translation of The Trial is published. 1984 Levi translates The View from Afar, by Claude Lévi-Strauss. OCTOBER: Garzanti publishes the collection of poems At an Uncertain Hour, which includes the twenty-seven poems from The Beer Hall in Bremen, and thirty-four others that appeared in La Stampa, plus translations of poems by Heine, Kipling, and an anonymous Scot. I’m a man who doesn’t much believe in poetry and yet I write it. There are reasons for this. For example, when I publish a poem in La Stampa, I receive letters and phone calls from readers expressing approval or disapproval. If a story of mine is published, the response is not so animated. I have the impression that poetry in general is becoming a marvelous instrument of human contact. Adorno wrote that after Auschwitz there can be no poetry, but my experience is the opposite. At the time (1945–46) it seemed to me that poetry was more suitable than prose to express what weighed inside me. When I say poetry, I’m not thinking of lyric poetry. In those years, if anything, I would have reformulated Adorno’s words: after Auschwitz there can be poetry only about Auschwitz.45

When Levi is asked in an interview whether the frequent presence of plants and animals in his poetry is a result of his scientific training, he answers: It’s the result of unsatisfied curiosity. I’ve quoted at various times the essay in which Aldous Huxley says that the novelist should be a zoologist. For me there is this one-sided love, which is satisfied only in part. Love for nature as a whole and in particular for the fruschi, as Carlo Levi said, using a term from the Lucanian dialect, meaning the poor beasts. Among the animals there is the huge and the tiny, wisdom and folly, generosity and cowardice. Each one of them is a metaphor, an essence of all the vices and all the virtues of men.46

NOVEMBER: The American edition of The Periodic Table is published by Schocken Books. The critical reception is extremely favorable. The enthusiasm of Saul Bellow inspires a series of translations of Levi’s books in various countries. 1985 JANUARY: In a volume entitled Other People’s Trades, and published by Einaudi, Levi collects some fifty essays, most of which had appeared in La Stampa. FEBRUARY: Levi writes the introduction for a new paperback edition of the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. APRIL: Levi visits the United States on the occasion of the publication of the translation of If Not Now, When?, which has an introduction by Irving Howe. He gives talks and readings in New York; Claremont, California; Bloomington, Indiana; and Boston. 1986

MAY: Einaudi publishes The Drowned and the Saved, Levi’s reflections, decades later, on the experience of the Lager. That same month, he goes to London (where he meets Philip Roth) and to Stockholm. Traveling is very hard for me, both for family reasons and because I’ve ended up internalizing the difficulties, and now it’s become unpleasant. Ten years ago, it was different, I had much more energy, and the desire to follow many more things. Now I’m tired. And then I ask myself, “What’s the point?” Once, when the translation of a book arrived, it was a day of celebration; now it has no effect on me. And even reviewing translations in the languages I know—English, French, and German (a clause I’ve had inserted into all my contracts)—has become just a boring extra job. You grow indifferent. Anyway, what is there to say, the organization of culture is extremely random, it functions haphazardly.47

The translations of The Wrench and of a selection of stories from Lilith (those based on the experience of the Lager), with the title Moments of Reprieve, are published in the United States. The German translation of If Not Now, When? is published. SEPTEMBER: Levi is visited in Turin by Roth, with whom he has arranged a long, written interview, to be published in The New York Times Book Review. The interview comes out in October, and in November it appears, in Italian, in La Stampa. NOVEMBER: The book-publishing arm of La Stampa brings out a collection of Levi’s contributions to the paper between 1977 and 1986, under the title Stories and Essays. It includes a recently published piece, “Hatching the Cobra,” in which he speaks about the responsibility of the scientist. It’s the last book published by Levi in his lifetime. 1987 JANUARY 22: With arguments of historical revisionism gaining strength in Germany, Levi publishes an article, “The Black Hole of Auschwitz,” on the front page of La Stampa. MARCH: The French and German editions of The Periodic Table are published. The same month, Levi has a prostate operation. APRIL 11: Levi dies, a suicide, in his apartment building in Turin. I think that anyone, any sort of human being, can create a fundamental work. Not necessarily a book. . . . In fact, it’s just a tiny minority who can write a book, but something, certainly, for example bring up a child, heal the sick, comfort the afflicted. I don’t feel embarrassed or constrained about repeating phrases from the Gospel.48

NOTES 1.

Primo Levi and Tullio Regge, Dialogo (1984; rev. ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1987). In English, Dialogo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).

Santo Strati and Franco Pappalardo La Rosa, “Lo specchio del cielo” (radio broadcast), RAI, Turin, January 27, 1985; transcribed in Riga no. 13 (1997).

Giuseppe Grieco, “Io e Dio: ‘Non l’ho mai incontrato, neppure nel “Lager,” ’ ” in Gente 27, no. 48 (December 9, 1983), and reprinted in Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987, edited by Marco Belpoliti (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). In English, “God and I,” in The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Robert S. C. Gordon (New York: The New Press, 2001).

Levi and Regge, Dialogo.

Primo Levi, La ricerca delle radici (Turin: Einaudi, 1981). In English, The Search for Roots (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

Levi and Regge, Dialogo.

Levi, La ricerca delle radici.

Giorgio De Rienzo, “In un alambicco quanta poesia,” Famiglia Cristiana, July 20, 1975.

Levi, La ricerca delle radici.

10.

Annamaria Guadagni, “Prima del grande buio,” Diario l’Unità, April 2–8, 1997.

11. Ferdinando Camon, Conversazione con Primo Levi (Milan: Guanda, 2006). In English, Conversations with Primo Levi (Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1989). 12.

Ibid.

13.

Anna Bravo and Federico Cereja, eds., Intervista a Primo Levi, ex deportato (1983; repr., Turin: Einaudi, 2011). In English, this book became a chapter, “The Duty of Memory,” in The Voice of Memory.

14.

Marco Vigevani, “Le parole, il ricordo, la speranza,” in Primo Levi: Conversazioni. In English, “Words, Memory, Hopes” in The Voice of Memory.

15.

De Rienzo, “In un alambicco.”

16.

Philip Roth, “A Man Saved by His Skills,” The New York Times Book Review, October 12, 1986.

17.

Ibid.

18.

Camon, Conversazione.

19.

Primo Levi, foreword to La vita offesa: Storia e memoria dei lager nazisti nei racconti di duecento sopravvissuti, edited by Anna Bravo and Daniele Jalla (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1986).

20.

Bravo and Cereja, Intervista.

21.

Levi and Regge, Dialogo.

22.

Nico Orengo, “Come ho pubblicato il mio primo libro,” in Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni.

23.

Roth, “A Man Saved by His Skills.”

24.

Giorgio Calcagno, “Primo Levi: Capire non è perdonare,” La Stampa, July 26, 1986. In English, “The Drowned and the Saved,” in The Voice of Memory.

25.

Alfredo Barberis, “Nasi storti,” Corriere della Sera, April 27, 1972.

26.

Primo Levi, “Note on the Dramatized Version of If This Is a Man,” from the dramatized version of If This Is a Man (Turin: Einaudi, 1966).

27.

Strati and Pappalardo La Rosa, “Lo specchio del cielo.”

28.

Roth, “A Man Saved by His Skills.”

29.

Pier Maria Paoletti, “Sono un chimico, scrittore per caso,” in Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni. In English, “The Truces,” in The Voice of Memory.

30.

Giulio Nascimbeni, “Levi: L’ora incerta della poesia,” in Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni.

31.

“La chiave a stella di un operaio,” Giornale di Brescia, February 17, 1979.

32.

Roth, “A Man Saved by His Skills.”

33.

Levi and Regge, Dialogo.

34.

“La chiave a stella di un operaio.”

35.

Alfredo Cattabiani, “Quando un operaio specializzato diventa un personaggio letterario,” Il Tempo, January 21, 1979.

36.

Levi, La ricerca delle radici.

37.

“Primo Levi: Un modo diverso di dire io,” Notiziario Einaudi, June 1981.

38.

Rosellina Balbi, “Mendel, il consolatore,” La Repubblica, April 14, 1982.

39.

Giovanni Tesio, “Credo che il mio destino profondo sia la spaccatura,” in Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni.

40.

Roberto Vacca, “Un western dalla Russia a Milano,” Il Giorno, May 18, 1982.

41.

Fiona Diwan, “Sono un ebreo ma non sono mai stato sionista,” Corriere Medico, September 3–4, 1982.

42.

Nascimbeni, “Levi: L’ora incerta.”

43.

Giampaolo Pansa, “Io Primo Levi, chiedo le dimissioni di Begin,” in Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni. In English, “Primo Levi: Begin Should Go,” in The Voice of Memory.

44.

Germaine Greer, “Germaine Greer Speaks to Primo Levi,” in Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni.

45.

Nascimbeni, “Levi: L’ora incerta.”

46.

Tesio, “Credo che il mio destino profondo sia la spaccatura.”

47.

Roberto Di Caro, “Il necessario e il superfluo,” in Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni. In English, “The Essential and the Superfluous,” in The Voice of Memory.

48.

Strati and Pappalardo La Rosa, “Lo specchio del cielo.”

ERNESTO FERRERO

Contents PREFACE The Journey On the Bottom Initiation Ka-Be Our Nights The Work A Good Day This Side of Good and Evil The Drowned and the Saved Chemistry Examination The Canto of Ulysses The Events of the Summer October 1944 Kraus Die Drei Leute vom Labor The Last One The Story of Ten Days APPENDIX TO THE SCHOOL EDITION TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

Preface

It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German government had decided, because of the growing scarcity of labor, to lengthen the average life span of the prisoners destined for elimination; it allowed noticeable improvements in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals. Hence, as an account of atrocities, this book of mine adds nothing to what readers throughout the world already know about the disturbing subject of the death camps. It was not written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a detached study of certain aspects of the human mind. Many people—many nations—can find themselves believing, more or less consciously, that “every stranger is an enemy.” For the most part, this conviction lies buried in the mind like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and is not the basis of a system of thought. But when this happens, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, stands the Lager. It is the product of a conception of the world carried to its logical consequences with rigorous consistency; as long as the conception exists, the consequences remain to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister signal of danger. I recognize, and ask indulgence for, the structural defects of the book. Its origins go back, if not in practice, as an idea, an intention, to the days in the Lager. The need to tell our story to “others,” to make “others” share it, took on for us, before the liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with other elementary needs. The book was written to satisfy that need: in the first place, therefore, as an interior liberation. Hence its fragmentary character: the chapters were written not in logical succession but in order of urgency. The work of linking and unifying was carried out more deliberately, and is more recent.

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

You who live safe In your heated houses, You who come home at night to find Hot food and friendly faces: Consider if this is a man Who toils in the mud Who knows no peace Who fights for half a loaf Who dies by a yes or a no. Consider if this is a woman, With no hair and no name With no more strength to remember, With empty eyes and a womb as cold As a frog in winter. Ponder that this happened: I consign these words to you. Carve them into your hearts At home or on the street, Going to bed or rising: Tell them to your children. Or may your house fall down, May illness make you helpless, And your children turn their eyes from you. (TRANS. J. GALASSI)

The Journey

I was captured by the Fascist Militia on December 13, 1943. I was twenty-four, with little common sense, no experience, and a definite tendency—encouraged by the routines of segregation forced on me during 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 hadn’t been easy for me to choose the mountains, and to help set up what, both in my opinion and in that of friends who were little more experienced, was supposed to become a partisan band affiliated with the Resistance movement Justice and Liberty. We lacked contacts, arms, money, and the experience needed to acquire them. We lacked capable men, and were swamped instead by a deluge of outcasts who, in good or bad faith, came from the plain in search of a nonexistent organization, commanders, weapons, or merely protection, a hiding place, a fire, a pair of shoes. At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine that I learned very quickly later, in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, and he who errs but once pays dearly. So I can only consider the following sequence of events justified. Three Fascist Militia companies, having set out in the night to surprise a much more powerful and dangerous band than ours, which was hiding in the next valley, broke into our refuge in a spectral snowy dawn and took me down to the valley as a suspicious person. During the interrogations that followed, I preferred to declare 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, and I believed (wrongly, as it subsequently proved) that the admission of my political activity would have meant torture and certain death. As a Jew,

I was sent to Fòssoli, near Modena, where in a vast detention camp, originally meant for English and American prisoners of war, all the numerous categories of people not approved of by the newborn Fascist Republic were being assembled. At the moment of my arrival, that is, at the end of January 1944, there were about a hundred and fifty Italian Jews in the camp, but within a few weeks their number rose to more than six hundred. For the most part these were entire families captured by the Fascists or the Nazis because they had been careless or had been informed on. A few had given themselves up of their own accord, reduced to desperation by a vagabond life, or lacking the means to survive, or wishing to avoid separation from a captured relative, or even—absurdly—“to be in conformity with the law.” There were also about a hundred Yugoslav military internees and a few other foreigners who were considered politically suspect. The arrival of a small German SS squad should have made even the optimists dubious; but we still managed to interpret the novelty in various ways without drawing the most obvious conclusion. Thus, despite everything, the announcement that we were to be deported caught us unawares. On February 20, the Germans inspected the camp with care and publicly and loudly upbraided the Italian commissar for the inadequate organization of the kitchen services and for the insufficient amount of wood distributed for heating; they even said that an infirmary would soon be opened. But on the morning of the 21st we learned that the following day the Jews would depart. All: 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 an ingenuous and deluded minority continued to hope; we others had spoken at length with the Polish and Croatian refugees and we knew what departure meant. For those condemned to death, tradition prescribes an austere ritual, calculated to emphasize that all passion and anger are spent, and that the act of justice represents only a sad duty toward society which leads even the executioner to have

pity for the victim. Thus the condemned man is shielded from all external worries, 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, along with punishment, pardon. But this was not granted to us, 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 cleaning squads worked as usual, and even the teachers in the little school gave lessons in the evening, as on other days. But that evening the children were given no homework. Night came, and it was such a night 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 of life in the manner that most suited them. Some prayed, some drank to excess, others became intoxicated by a final unseemly lust. But the mothers stayed up to prepare 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 to dry in the wind. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the pillows, and the hundred other small things that mothers remember and children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not feed him today? In Barrack 6A old Gattegno lived with his wife and numerous children and grandchildren and his sons-in-law and hardworking 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, so they could play and dance after the day’s work. They were happy and pious folk. Their women, working silently and quickly, were the first to finish the preparations for the journey, in order to have time

for mourning. When all was ready, the food cooked, the bundles tied up, they loosened their hair, took off their shoes, placed the funeral candles on the ground, and, lighting them according to the customs of their fathers, sat on the bare soil in a circle for the lamentations, praying and weeping through the night. We gathered in a group before their door, and experienced within ourselves a grief that was new to us, the ancient grief of a people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus, renewed in every century.

Dawn came upon us like a betrayal, as if the new sun were an ally of the men who had decided to destroy us. The different emotions that were roused in us, of conscious resignation, of futile rebellion, of religious abandon, of fear, of despair, now, after a sleepless night, converged in a collective, uncontrolled panic. The time for meditation, the time for decision was over, and all reason dissolved into an unrestrained tumult, across which flashed, as painful as the thrusts of a sword, the happy memories of our homes, still so near in time and space. Many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that no memory remain.

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 all was in order. They then loaded us onto buses and took us to the station at Carpi. Here the train was waiting for us, with our escort for the journey. Here we received the first blows: and the thing was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, in either body or spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one strike a man without anger? There were twelve freight cars and six hundred and fifty of us; in mine we were only forty-five, but it was a small car. Here, then, before our very eyes, under our very feet, was one of those notorious German transport trains, one of those which never return, and of which, shuddering and always a little

incredulous, we had so often heard tales. Exactly like this, detail for detail: freight cars closed from the outside, inside men, women, and children packed in without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey toward nothingness, a journey down, toward the bottom. This time it is we who are inside.

Sooner or later in life we all discover that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but few of us pause to consider the opposite: that so, too, is perfect unhappiness. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition, which is hostile to everything infinite. Our ever inadequate knowledge of the future opposes it, and this is called, in the one instance, hope and, in the other, uncertainty about tomorrow. The certainty of death opposes it, for death places a limit on every joy, but also on every sorrow. Our inevitable material cares oppose it, for, as they poison every lasting happiness, they just as assiduously distract us from our misfortunes, making our awareness of them intermittent and hence bearable. It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of a bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, or 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 learned of our destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without significance for us at that time, but at least it implied some place on this earth. The train traveled slowly, with long, unnerving halts. Through a slit we saw the tall pale cliffs of the Adige valley pass by, and the names of the last Italian cities. We passed the Brenner at noon of the second day and we all stood up, but no one said a word. The thought of the return stayed 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, amid that poor human dust, would be struck by fate.

Among the forty-five people in my car only four saw their homes again; and ours was by far the most fortunate. We suffered from thirst and cold; at every stop we clamored for water, or even a handful of snow, but were rarely heard; the soldiers of the escort kept off anybody who tried to approach the train. Two young mothers, still nursing their infants, groaned night and day, begging for water. Our state of nervous tension made hunger, exhaustion, and lack of sleep less agonizing. But the hours of darkness were a nightmare without end. There are few men who know how to go to their death with dignity, and often they are not those you 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 punches delivered blindly to ward off some troublesome and inevitable contact. Then someone would light the mournful little flame of a candle, to reveal the obscure swarming of a confused and indistinguishable human mass, 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 and, finally, Polish. On the evening of the fourth day the cold became intense: the train ran through interminable black pine forests, climbing perceptibly. The snow was deep. It must have been a branch line, as the stations were small and almost deserted. No one tried, any longer, during the halts, 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 again very slowly, and stopped for the last time, in the dead of night, in the middle of a dark and silent plain. On both sides of the track were rows of red and white lights, as far as the eye could see; but there was none of that confusion of sounds which tells of inhabited places even from a distance. By the wretched light of the last candle, with the rhythm of the wheels silenced, along with every human sound, we waited for something to happen.

Next to me, crushed, like me, body against body for the whole journey, there had been a woman. We had been acquainted for many years, and the misfortune had struck us together, but we knew little of one another. Now, in the hour of decision, we said to each other things that are not said among the living. We said farewell and it was short; everybody said farewell to life through his neighbor. We had no more fear.

The climax came suddenly. The door opened with a crash, and the darkness echoed with outlandish orders in that barbaric barking of Germans in command which seems to give vent to a centuries-old rage. A vast platform appeared before us, illuminated by floodlights. A little beyond it, a row of trucks. Then everything was silent again. Someone translated: we were to get out 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. We all busied ourselves with our luggage, searched for someone, called to one another, but timidly, in a whisper. A dozen SS men stood to one side, legs apart, with a look of indifference. At a certain moment they moved among us and, in low voices, with faces of stone, began to interrogate us rapidly, one by one, in bad Italian. They didn’t interrogate everybody, only a few: “How old? Healthy or ill?” And on the basis of the reply they pointed us in two different directions. Everything was as silent as an aquarium, or as certain scenes in dreams. We had expected something more apocalyptic: they seemed simple policemen. It was disconcerting and disarming. Someone dared to ask for his luggage: they replied, “Luggage later.” Someone else did not want to leave his wife: they said, “Together again later.” Many mothers did not want to be separated from their children: they said, “Good, good, stay with child.” They had the calm assurance of people merely doing their normal, everyday duty. But Renzo delayed an instant too long as he said goodbye to Francesca, his fiancée, and with a single blow, right in his face, they knocked him to the ground. It was their everyday duty.

In less than ten minutes all the able-bodied men had been gathered in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old people, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today 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 only ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the camps, respectively, of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five hundred in number, not one was alive 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 doors of the car without warning or instructions to the new arrivals. Those who by chance got out on one side of the train entered the camp; the others went to the gas chamber. This is the reason that three-year-old Emilia died: the historical necessity of killing the children of Jews was selfevident to the Germans. Emilia, the daughter of the engineer Aldo Levi of Milan, was a curious, ambitious, cheerful, intelligent child; during the journey in the packed car, her parents had succeeded in bathing her in a zinc tub with tepid water that the degenerate German engineer had allowed them to draw from the engine dragging us all to death. Thus, suddenly, in an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared. Almost nobody was able to say goodbye. We saw them for a short while as a dark mass at the other end of the platform; then we saw nothing more. Instead, two groups of strange individuals emerged into the glare of the lights. They walked in squads, in rows of three, with an odd, clumsy gait, heads hanging forward, arms rigid. They wore comical caps, and were dressed in loose striped coats, which even by night and from a distance looked filthy and ragged. They walked in a wide circle around us, never coming close, and in silence began to busy themselves with our luggage, climbing in and out of the empty cars.

We looked at one another 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 onto a truck with thirty others; the truck took off into the night at full speed. It was covered, and we couldn’t see outside, but from the jolting we could tell that the road was curving and bumpy. Are we without a guard? Should we jump down? Too late, too late, we’re all going “down.” In any case, we’re soon aware that we are not without a guard. He’s 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 the truck lurches and throws us all in a heap to right or left. He switches on a pocket light and instead of shouting “Woe unto you, wicked souls,”1 asks us courteously, one by one, in German and in some pidgin Italian, if we have any money or watches to give him, seeing that they will no longer be of use to us. This is no order, no regulation: it’s obvious that it’s a small private initiative of our Charon. The matter stirs us to anger and laughter and a strange relief. 1. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Inferno Canto III:84.

On the Bottom

The journey did not last more than twenty minutes. Then the truck stopped, and we saw a large gate and, above it, a sign, brightly illuminated (the memory still jolts me in my dreams): Arbeit Macht Frei, Work makes us free. We get out, they have us enter an enormous bare room that is poorly heated. How thirsty we are! The weak gurgle of the water in the radiators drives us wild; we have had nothing to drink for four days. But there is also a tap—and above it a sign saying that drinking is forbidden because the water is polluted. Nonsense. It seems obvious to me that the sign 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 incite my companions to do likewise, but I have to spit it out; the water is tepid and sweetish, and smells like a swamp. This is hell. Today, in our time, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, and there is a tap that drips and the water cannot be drunk, and we wait for something that will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What to think? One cannot think anymore, it’s like being dead already. Someone sits down on the floor. The time passes drop by drop. We are not dead. The door opens and an SS man enters, smoking. He looks at us, in no hurry, and asks, “Wer kann Deutsch?” One of us whom I have never seen comes forward; his name is Flesch and he will be our interpreter. The SS man makes a long, calm speech; the interpreter translates. We are to form rows of five, with an interval of two meters between man and man; then we are to undress and make a bundle of our clothes in a particular way, the woolen garments on one side, all the rest on the other; we must take off our shoes but pay careful attention not to let them be 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 right through him, 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 Mr. Coen’s.” One could see the words coming bitterly out of Flesch’s mouth; this was the German’s way of mocking us. Then another German comes in and tells us to put the shoes in a certain corner, and we put them there, because now it’s all over and we feel outside of the world and the only thing is to obey. Someone comes with a broom and sweeps away all the shoes, sweeps them out the door in a heap. He’s crazy, he’s throwing them all together, ninety-six pairs, they’ll be unmatched. The door is open to the outdoors, a freezing wind enters and we are naked and cover our bellies with our arms. The wind slams the door shut; 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, shaving brushes, and clippers burst in; they wear striped trousers and jackets, with a number sewn on the front; perhaps they are of the same kind as the others this evening (this evening or yesterday evening?), but these are sturdy and glowing with health. We ask many questions but they catch hold of us and in a moment we find ourselves shaved and shorn. What comical faces we have without hair! The four speak a language that does not seem of this world. It is certainly not German; I understand a little German. Finally another door opens: here we are, locked in, naked, shorn, and standing, 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’ll have a shower. If we have a shower it’s because they are not going to kill us yet. 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 are all naked with our feet in the water, and it’s cold and we’ve been traveling for five days and can’t even sit down. And our women? Engineer Levi asks me if I think that our women are like us at this moment, and where they are, and if we’ll be able to see them again. I say yes, because he is married and has a small daughter; certainly we’ll see them again. But by now my belief is that all this is an elaborate ploy to mock us and insult us. Clearly they will kill us, anyone who thinks he is going to live is mad, it means that he has swallowed the bait. Not me; I have understood that soon it will be over, perhaps in this very room, when they get bored with seeing us naked, dancing from one foot to the other and trying every now and again to sit down. But there are two inches of cold water on the floor and we can’t sit down. We walk up and down pointlessly, and we talk, everybody talks to everybody else, which makes a lot of 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 that aren’t his, the malicious words, twist his mouth as they emerge, as if he were spitting out a foul taste. We beg him to ask what we’re waiting for, how long we’ll be here, about our women, everything; but he says no, he doesn’t want to ask. This Flesch, who is so reluctant to translate into Italian the icy German phrases and refuses to turn our questions into German because he knows it’s pointless, 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, because I am aware that he began to suffer before we did.

The German leaves and now we are silent, although we are a little ashamed of our silence. It was still night and we wondered if the day would ever come. The door opened again, and someone else wearing stripes came in. He was different from the others, older, with glasses and a more civil face, and much less robust. He speaks to us and he speaks in Italian. By now we are tired of being amazed. We seem to be watching some mad play, one of those plays that feature witches, the Holy Spirit, and the Devil. He speaks Italian badly, with a strong foreign accent. He makes a long speech, he’s very polite, and tries to answer 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 it’s called Arbeitslager; all the prisoners (there are about ten thousand) work in a factory that produces a type of rubber called Buna, so 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 a shower and disinfection, which will take place immediately after 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, works as a doctor. He is a Hungarian doctor who studied in Italy, and he is the dentist for the Lager. He has been in the Lager for four years (not in this one: Buna has been open only for a year and a half), but we can see that he is quite well, he’s 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 a lot of questions. He laughs sometimes, replies to some and not to others, and it’s clear that he avoids certain subjects. He doesn’t speak about the women: he says they’re fine, that we’ll see them again soon, but he doesn’t 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 soccer matches. He says that anyone

who boxes well can become a cook. He says that anyone who works hard receives prize coupons to buy tobacco and soap with. He says that the water really isn’t drinkable, and that instead a coffee substitute is distributed every day, but generally nobody drinks it, as the soup itself is watery enough to quench thirst. We beg him to find us something to drink, but he says that he cannot, that he has come to see us secretly, against SS orders, since 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 doesn’t know how many, and right away changes the subject. Meanwhile a bell has rung and he immediately hurries off, leaving us stunned and disconcerted. Some feel reassured, but not me. I think that even this dentist, this incomprehensible person, wanted to amuse himself at our expense, and I won’t believe a word of what he said. At the sound of the bell, we can hear the dark camp waking up. Suddenly water gushes boiling out of the showers —five minutes of bliss. But immediately afterward four men (perhaps they are the barbers) burst in, yelling and shoving, and drive us, wet and steaming, into the adjoining room, which is freezing; here other shouting people throw some rags at us and thrust into our hands a pair of worn-down shoes with wooden soles. We have no time to understand; already we find ourselves outside, in the blue and icy snow of dawn, and, barefoot and naked, with all our clothing in our hands, we must run a hundred meters to another barrack. Here we are allowed to get dressed. When we finish, each of us remains in his own corner, and we do not dare lift our eyes to look at one another. There is no mirror in which to see ourselves, but our appearance stands before us, reflected in a hundred livid faces, in a hundred miserable, sordid puppets. Here we are, transformed into the phantoms we glimpsed yesterday evening. Then for the first time we become aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality has been revealed to us: we have reached the bottom. It’s not

possible to sink lower than this; no human condition more wretched exists, nor could it be imagined. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listened, they would not understand. They will take away even 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, remains. We know that we are unlikely to be understood, and that this is as it should be. But consider what value, what meaning is contained in even the smallest of our daily habits, in the hundred possessions of even the poorest beggar: a handkerchief, an old letter, the photograph of a cherished person. These things are part of us, almost like limbs of our body; it is inconceivable to be deprived of them in our world, for we would immediately find others to replace the old ones, other objects that are ours as guardians and evocations of our memories. Imagine now a man who has been deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, of literally everything, in short, that he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, heedless of dignity and restraint, for he who loses everything can easily lose himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided, with no sense of human affinity—in the most fortunate case, judged purely on the basis of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double meaning of the term “extermination camp,” and it will be clear what we seek to express with the phrase “lying on the bottom.” Häftling: I have learned that I am a Häftling. My name is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the mark tattooed 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 skilled official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle. It seems that this is the true initiation: only by “showing one’s number” can one get bread and soup. It took

several days, and not a few slaps and punches, for us to become used to showing our number promptly enough not to hold up the daily operation of food distribution; weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German language. And for many days, when 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 gradually, a few of us learned 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 one belonged to, and, consequently, the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30000 to 80000: there are only a few hundred left and they represent the few survivors of the Polish ghettos. You’d better watch out in commercial dealings with a 116000 or a 117000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonika, so make sure they don’t trick you. As for the high numbers, there is something essentially comic about them, like the words “freshman” and “conscript” in ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile, and stupid fellow: you can make him believe that at the infirmary leather shoes are distributed to all those with delicate feet, and persuade him 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 (it happened to me!) if it’s true that his is the Kartoffelschalenkommando, the Potato Peeling Unit, and if it’s possible to enroll in it.

In fact, the whole process of introduction to what is for us a new order takes place in a grotesque and sarcastic manner. With the tattooing operation over, they have shut us in an empty barrack. The bunks are made, but we are strictly forbidden to touch them or sit on them: so we wander around aimlessly for half the day in the limited space available, still tormented by the fierce thirst of the journey. Then the door opens and in comes a small, thin blond boy in striped clothes,

with a fairly civilized air. He speaks French, and we throng around him with a flood of questions that until now we had asked one another 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 left the infirmary this morning and is exempt from work for today. I asked him (with an ingenuousness that already, only a few days later, seemed to me incredible) 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 way out is through the Chimney. (What does it mean? We’ll soon learn very well what it means.) And so it was. Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within reach of my hand. I opened the window and broke off the icicle, but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away. “Warum?” I asked in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum” (there is no why here), he replied, shoving me back inside. The explanation is repugnant but simple: in this place everything is prohibited, not for hidden reasons but because the camp has been created precisely for that purpose. If we wish to live here, we had better learn this quickly and well: The Sacred Face has no place here! Here we swim differently than in the Serchio!2 Hour after hour, this first interminable day of limbo draws to its end. Finally, as the sun sets in a tumult of fierce, bloodred clouds, they order us out of the barrack. Will they give us something to drink? No, they line us up again, lead us to a huge square, which takes up the center of the camp, and arrange us meticulously in squads. Then nothing happens for another hour: it seems that we are waiting for someone. A band begins to play, beside the entrance to the camp: it plays “Rosamunde,” the well-known sentimental song, and

this seems so strange to us that we look at one another and snigger; we feel a shadow of relief, perhaps all these ceremonies are nothing but a colossal farce in Teutonic taste. But the band, on finishing “Rosamunde,” continues to play marches, one after the other, and suddenly the squads of our comrades appear, returning from work. They walk in a column, five abreast, with an oddly unnatural, stiff gait, like rigid puppets made only of bones; but they walk scrupulously in time to the music. They, too, arrange themselves like us in the vast square, according to a precise order; when the last squad has returned, we are all counted and recounted for more than an hour. We are inspected at length, and the results all seem to go to a man dressed in stripes, who reports them to a group of SS men in full battle gear. Finally (it’s dark by now, but the camp is brightly lit by floodlights and spotlights) there is a cry of “Absperre!” at which all the squads break up into a turbulent confusion of movement. The men no longer walk stiffly and erect as before: each one drags himself along with obvious effort. I see that all of them carry in their hand or hanging at their waist an aluminum bowl almost as large as a basin. We new arrivals also wander among the crowd, searching for a voice, a friendly face, a guide. Against the wooden wall of a barrack two boys are sitting on the ground: they seem very young, sixteen at most, the faces and hands of both are grimed with soot. One of the two, as we’re passing by, calls to me and asks in German some questions that I don’t understand; then he asks where we’re from. “Italien,” I reply; I would like to ask him many things, but my German vocabulary is extremely 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 job?” “Schlosser,” he replies. I don’t 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 a smith. “Ich Chemiker,” I state; and he nods earnestly and says, “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, almost severe face, and says clearly, “Don’t drink water, comrade,” and then other words that I don’t understand. “Warum?” “Geschwollen,” he replies cryptically. I shake my head, I haven’t understood. “Swollen,” he makes me understand, blowing out his cheeks and sketching with his hands a monstrous distention 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; now he gets up, approaches, and timidly embraces me. The adventure is over, and I am filled with a serene sadness that is almost joy. I never saw Schlome again, but I have not forgotten his serious and gentle child’s face, welcoming me on the threshold of the house of the dead. We have a great number of things to learn, but we have learned a lot already. Already we have some idea of the topography of the Lager; this Lager of ours is a square of about six hundred meters per side, enclosed by two barbedwire fences, the inner one carrying a high-tension current. It consists of sixty wooden barracks, called Blocks, ten of which are still being built. In addition, there is the building that houses the kitchens, which is of brick; an experimental farm, run by a detachment of privileged Häftlinge; the barracks 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 prisoners who hold the highest positions; Block 47, reserved for the Reichsdeutsche (Aryan Germans, political or criminal prisoners); Block 49, for the Kapos alone; Block 12, half of which serves as a canteen for the Reichsdeutsche and the Kapos, that is, a distribution center for tobacco, insect powder, and, occasionally, other articles; Block 37, which contains the main Quartermaster’s office and the Work Office; and, finally, Block 29, which always has its windows closed, because it is the Frauenblock, the camp brothel, serviced by Polish Häftling girls, and reserved for the Reichsdeutsche. The ordinary living Blocks are divided into two parts. In one, the Tagesraum, the head of the barrack lives with his friends. There is a long table, chairs, benches, and everywhere a lot of strange bright-colored objects, photographs, cuttings from magazines, sketches, artificial flowers, ornaments; on the walls are famous sayings, proverbs, and rhymes in praise of order, discipline, and hygiene; in one corner is a glass cabinet containing the tools of the Blockfrisör (official barber), the ladles for distributing the soup, and two rubber truncheons, one solid and one hollow, to enforce that discipline. The other part is the dormitory: there are only 148 bunks, in three tiers, divided by three aisles, and set close together like the cells of a beehive, so that all the space in the room, up to the roof, is utilized without waste. Here all the ordinary Häftlinge live, some 200 to 250 per barrack. Consequently there are two men in most of the bunks, which are made of short wooden planks, and provided with a thin straw sack and two blankets. The corridors are so narrow that two people can barely pass; the total floor area is so small that the inhabitants of the same Block cannot all be there at the same time unless at least half are lying on their bunks. Hence the prohibition on entering a Block to which one does not belong.

In the middle of the Lager is the enormous Roll Call Square, where we gather in the morning to form the work squads and in the evening to be counted. Facing Roll Call Square is a bed of grass, carefully mowed, where the gallows is erected when necessary. We soon learned that the guests of the Lager are divided into three categories: criminals, politicals, and Jews. All are dressed in stripes, all are Häftlinge, but the criminals wear a green triangle next to the number sewn on their jacket; the political prisoners wear a red triangle; and the Jews, who form the large majority, wear the Jewish star, red and yellow. There are SS men, but they are few and outside the camp, and are seen relatively infrequently. Our masters in effect are the “green triangles,” who have a free hand over us, along with those from the other two categories who are willing to help them—and they are not few. We have learned other things, too, more or less quickly, according to our individual character: to answer “Jawohl,” never to ask questions, always to pretend to understand. We have learned the value of food; now we, too, diligently scrape the bottom of our bowl after the ration, and 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 of the vat or from the bottom, and we are already able to judge, according to the capacity of the various vats, what is the best place to try for in the queue when we line up. We have learned that everything is useful: wire, for tying up our shoes; rags, to wrap around our feet; paper, to (illegally) pad our jacket against the cold. We have learned, 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 have 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 come within two meters of the barbed wire; to sleep in one’s jacket, or without one’s pants, or with one’s cap on; to use

certain washrooms or latrines, which are nur für Kapos or nur für Reichsdeutsche; not to have a shower on the prescribed day, or to have one on a day not prescribed; to leave the barrack with one’s jacket unbuttoned, or with the collar raised; to wear paper or straw under one’s clothes against the cold; to wash except stripped to the waist. The rites to be carried out are infinite and senseless: every morning you have to make the “bed” perfectly flat and smooth; smear your muddy and repellent clogs with the appropriate machine grease; scrape the mud stains off your clothes (paint, grease, and rust stains, however, are permitted). In the evening you have to be checked for lice and whether you have washed your feet; on Saturday, you have your beard and hair shaved, mend your rags or have them mended; on Sunday, there is a general check for skin diseases and a check for the number of buttons on your jacket, which should be five. In addition, there are innumerable circumstances, normally irrelevant, that here become problems. When your nails get long, they have to be shortened, which can only be done with your teeth (for toenails, the friction of the shoes is sufficient); if a button comes off, you have to know how to reattach it with a piece of wire; if you go to the latrine or the washroom, everything has to be carried along, always and everywhere, and while you wash your face the bundle of clothes has to be held tightly between your knees—in any other manner, it will be stolen in that second. If a shoe hurts, you have to show up in the evening at the ceremony of the shoe exchange: this tests the skill of each individual, who, in the midst of an incredible throng, has to be able to choose at a glance one (not a pair, one) shoe that fits. Because, once the choice is made, a second exchange is not allowed. And do not think that shoes constitute a factor of secondary importance in the life of the Lager. Death begins with the shoes; for most of us, they prove to be instruments of torture, which after a few hours of marching cause painful sores that become fatally infected. Anyone who has them is forced to walk as if he were dragging a ball and chain (this explains the strange gait of the army of phantoms that returns,

on parade, every evening); he arrives last everywhere, and everywhere receives blows. He cannot escape if he is pursued; his feet swell, and, the more they swell, the more unbearable the friction with the wood and cloth of the shoes becomes. 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 there is no cure here for that complaint. And in all this we have not yet mentioned the work, which is, in its turn, a tangle of laws, taboos, and problems. We all work, except those who are ill (to be recognized as ill in itself implies an imposing store of knowledge and experience). Every morning we leave the camp in squads for Buna; every evening, in squads, we return. As for the work, we are divided into about two hundred Kommandos, each of which consists of between fifteen and a hundred and fifty men and is commanded by a Kapo. There are good and bad Kommandos; for the most part, they are assigned to transport, and the work is very hard, especially in winter, if only because it always takes place outside. There are also skilled Kommandos (electricians, smiths, bricklayers, welders, mechanics, concrete layers, etc.), each attached to a specific workshop or section of Buna, and answering more directly to civilian foremen, who are mostly Germans and Poles. Naturally this applies only 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) are not treated differently from the ordinary workers. The assignment of individuals to the various Kommandos is organized by a special office of the Lager, the Arbeitsdienst, which is in constant touch with the civilian management of Buna. The Arbeitsdienst decides on the basis of unknown criteria, often openly on the basis of favoritism or corruption, so if someone manages to find enough to eat, he is practically certain to get a good post at Buna. The work schedule varies with the season. All the daylight hours are working hours: hence the workday goes from a minimum in winter (8 a.m.–12 noon and 12:30–4 p.m.) to a maximum in summer (6:30 a.m.–12 noon and 1–6 p.m.). Under no pretext are the Häftlinge allowed to be at work

during the hours of darkness or when there is a thick fog, because darkness or fog might provide an opportunity to attempt escape; but they work regularly even if it rains or snows or (as occurs quite frequently) if the fierce Carpathian wind is blowing. One Sunday in every two is a regular workday; on the socalled holiday Sundays, instead of working at Buna, we usually work on the upkeep of the Lager, so that days of actual 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, and get better or die. . . . And for how long? But the old hands laugh at this question: by this question they recognize the new arrivals. They laugh and do not reply. For them, the problem of the distant future grew dim months ago, years ago, having lost all intensity in the face of the far more urgent and concrete problems of the immediate future: how much they will eat today, if it will snow, if they will have to unload coal. If we were logical, we would resign ourselves to this evidence, that our fate is utterly unknowable, that every conjecture is arbitrary and has absolutely no foundation in reality. But men are rarely logical when their own fate is at stake; they prefer in every case extreme positions. Thus, depending on our character, some of us are immediately convinced that all is lost, that one cannot survive here and that the end is certain and near; others are convinced that, however hard the life that awaits us, salvation is likely and not far off, and, if we have faith and strength, we will see our homes and our dear ones again. The two classes, pessimists and optimists, are not in fact so distinct: not just because the agnostics are many but because the majority, without memory or consistency, go back and forth between the two extreme positions, according to the moment and the person they are speaking to.

Here I am, then, on the bottom. One learns quickly enough to wipe out the past and the future if the need is pressing. A fortnight after my arrival I am plagued by that chronic hunger, unknown to free men, which makes us dream at night, and settles in all the limbs of our bodies. I have already learned not to get robbed, and in fact if I find a spoon lying around, a piece of string, a button that I can filch without danger of punishment, I pocket them and consider them mine by full right. I already have those numb sores that will not heal on the tops of my feet. I push carts, I work with a shovel, I get tired in the rain, I shiver in the wind. Already my body is no longer mine: my belly is swollen, my limbs are emaciated, my face is puffy in the morning and hollow in the evening; some of us have yellow skin, others gray. When we don’t meet for three or four days we scarcely recognize one another. We Italians had decided to gather every Sunday evening in a corner of the Lager, but we stopped at once, because it was too sad to count our numbers and to find, each time, that we were fewer, and more disfigured and desolate. And it was so tiring to walk those few steps: and then, upon meeting, we would remember and think, and it was better not to. 2. Inferno Canto XXI:48–49.

Initiation

After the first day of capricious transfer from barrack to barrack and from Kommando to Kommando, I am assigned, late one evening, to Block 30, and shown a bunk in which Diena is already sleeping. Diena wakes up, and, although exhausted, makes room for me and greets me in a friendly manner. 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’m hungry and when will they distribute the soup tomorrow? And how will I be able to eat it without a spoon? And how can I find a spoon? And where will they send me to work? Diena knows no more than I, and answers with other questions. But from above and below, from near and far, from all corners of the now dark barrack, 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 restlessness increases. The confusion of languages is a fundamental component of the way of life here: one is surrounded by a perpetual Babel, in which everyone shouts orders and threats in languages never heard before, and you’re in trouble if you fail to grasp the meaning. No one has time here, no one has patience, no one listens to you; we latest arrivals instinctively gather in the corners, against the walls, like sheep, to feel that our backs are physically covered. So I give up asking questions and soon slip into a tense and bitter sleep. But it is not rest: I feel threatened, besieged, at every moment I am ready to contract in a spasm of selfdefense. I dream, and I seem to be sleeping on a road, on a bridge, in a doorway through which many people are passing. And now, oh, so early, the reveille sounds. The entire barrack

is shaken to its foundations, the lights go on, all the men around me are bustling in 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 toward the latrines and the washhouse. Some, bestially, urinate while they run to save time, because within five minutes begins the distribution of bread, of bread-Brot-Broit-chleb-pain-lechem-kenyér, of the holy gray slab that seems gigantic in your neighbor’s hand and in your own so small you could cry. It is a daily hallucination that one gets used to in the end, but at the beginning it is so irresistible that many of us, after long discussions of our own evident and constant misfortune and the shameless luck of others, finally exchange our rations, at which the illusion is renewed, inverted, leaving everyone discontented and frustrated. Bread is also our only money: in the few minutes that elapse between its distribution and its consumption, the Block resounds with claims, quarrels, and flights. It is yesterday’s creditors who are demanding payment, in the brief moment when the debtor is solvent. After which a relative quiet sets in, and many take advantage to go back to the latrines to smoke half a cigarette, or to the washhouse to wash properly. The washhouse is far from inviting. It is poorly lit and drafty, and the brick floor is 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 with curious didactic frescoes: for example, there is the good Häftling, shown stripped to the waist, in the act of diligently soaping his shorn, rosy cranium, and the bad Häftling, with an extremely Semitic nose and a greenish color, bundled up in ostentatiously stained clothes with a cap on his head, and cautiously dipping a finger in 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 dubious French but in gothic script: “La propreté, c’est la santé.” On the opposite wall an enormous white, red, and black louse stands out, with the caption “Eine 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 you eat, wash your hands, don’t forget. For many weeks I considered these warnings about hygiene pure examples of the Teutonic sense of humor, in the style of the dialogue about the truss that had welcomed us on our entry into the Lager. But later I understood that their unknown authors, perhaps without realizing it, were not far from some important truths. In this place it is practically pointless to wash every day in the murky water of the filthy washbasins for purposes of cleanliness and health; but it is extremely important as a symptom of remaining vitality, and necessary as an instrument of moral survival. I must confess: after only a week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washhouse, and suddenly I see my friend Steinlauf, who is almost fifty, stripped to the waist, scrubbing his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but with 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 be more pleasing to someone? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter time, because washing is work, a waste of energy and warmth. Doesn’t 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 chore, even frivolous: a mechanical habit, or, worse, a grim repetition of an extinct rite. We will all die, we are all about to die. If they give me ten minutes between reveille and work, I want to devote them to something else, to withdraw into myself, to take stock, or perhaps look at the sky and think that I may be looking at it for the last time; or even to let myself live, to indulge in the luxury of an idle moment.

But Steinlauf contradicts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket, which he was holding rolled up between his knees and will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers a full-scale lesson. It grieves me now that I have forgotten his plain, clear words, the words of ex-Sergeant Steinlauf of the AustroHungarian Army, Iron Cross in the 1914–18 war. It grieves me because it means that I have to translate his uncertain Italian and his quiet speech, the speech of a good soldier, into my language of an incredulous man. But this was the sense, not forgotten 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 almost 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 rules prescribe it but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, to not begin to die. These things Steinlauf, a man of goodwill, 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 drawn breath on the other side of the Alps, and according to which, among other things, there is no greater vanity than to force oneself to swallow whole moral systems 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 netherworld my ideas are confused; is it really necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to acknowledge that one has no system?

Ka-Be

All the days seem alike, and it’s not easy to count them. For I don’t know how many days now we’ve been going back and forth, in teams of two, from the railway to the warehouse—a hundred meters over thawing ground. To the warehouse bent under the load, back with arms hanging at our sides, not speaking. Around us, everything is hostile. Above us, the malevolent clouds chase one another to separate us from the sun; on all sides the bleakness of iron in torment closes in on us. We have never seen its boundaries, but we feel all around us the evil presence of the barbed wire that isolates us from the world. And on the scaffoldings, on the trains being shunted, 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, every other force is silent. All are our enemies or our rivals.

No, I honestly don’t feel that my companion of today, yoked with me under the same load, is either enemy or rival. He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything but that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number: as if everyone were 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 were so. When he speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression of being empty inside, no more than a husk, like the slough of some insect that one finds on the edge of a pond, attached to the rocks by a thread and shaken by the wind. Null Achtzehn is very young, which is a grave danger. Not only because it’s harder for boys than for men to withstand fatigue and fasting but, even more, because long training in the struggle of each against all is needed to survive here, training

that young people rarely have. Null Achtzehn is not even particularly weak, but all avoid working with him. He is indifferent to the point where he doesn’t trouble to avoid labor or blows or to search for food. He carries out every order he is given, and it’s predictable that when they send him to his death he will go with the same total indifference. He doesn’t have even the rudimentary cunning of a draft horse, which stops pulling just before it reaches exhaustion; he pulls or carries or pushes as long as his strength allows, then gives way suddenly, without a word of warning, without lifting his sad, opaque eyes from the ground. He reminds me of the sled dogs in books by Jack London, who labor until their last breath and die on the track. But, since the rest of us try by every possible means to avoid excess effort, Null Achtzehn is the one who works more than anybody. Because of this, and because he is a dangerous companion, no one wants to work with him; and since, 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.

As we return once again, hands empty, from the warehouse, dragging our feet, an engine whistles briefly and cuts off our path. Happy at the enforced delay, Null Achtzehn and I stop; bent and ragged, we wait for the train cars to pass slowly by. . . . Deutsche Reichsbahn. Deutsche Reichsbahn. SNCF. Two huge Russian freight cars with the hammer and sickle incompletely worn off. Then Cavalli 8, Uomini 40, Tara, Portata:3 an Italian car . . . Oh, to climb inside, into a corner, well hidden under the coal, and stay there, quiet and still in the dark, to listen endlessly to the rhythm of the rails, stronger than hunger or weariness; until, at a certain moment, the train stopped and I would feel the warm air and smell the hay and get out, into the sun; then I would lie down on the ground to kiss the earth, as one reads in books, with my face in the grass. And a woman would pass by, and ask, “Who are you?” in Italian, and I would tell her my story in Italian, and she would understand, and 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’s over. The last car has passed, and, as if a curtain had been raised, there before our eyes is the pile of pig-iron supports, the Kapo standing on the pile with a switch in his hand, and our haggard companions, coming and going in pairs. Alas for the dreamer: the moment of consciousness that accompanies waking is the most acute suffering. But it doesn’t happen to us often, and they are not long dreams. We are only weary beasts.

Once again we’re at the foot of the pile. Mischa and the Galician lift a support and place it roughly on our shoulders. Their job is the least tiring, so they show excess zeal in order to keep it: they shout at companions who dawdle, urge them on, admonish them, drive the work at an unbearable pace. This fills me with anger, although I already know that it is in the normal order of things for the privileged to oppress the unprivileged. The social structure of the camp is based on this human law. This time it’s my turn to walk in front. The support is heavy but short; at every step I feel behind me Null Achtzehn’s feet stumbling against mine, since he is unable or can’t be bothered to keep pace with me. Twenty steps, we have arrived at the railroad track, there is a cable to climb over. The load is awkwardly placed, something is not right, it seems to be slipping from my shoulder. Fifty steps, sixty. The door of the warehouse: the same distance again, and we can put it down. Enough is enough, I can’t go any farther, the entire load is now weighing on my arm. I can’t endure the pain and exhaustion any longer: I shout, I try to turn around, just in time to see Null Achtzehn trip and drop the whole thing. If I had had the agility I used to have, I could have jumped backward: instead, here I am on the ground, with all my muscles contracted, blind with pain, the wounded foot clasped

in my hands. The corner of the piece of iron has cut the top of my left foot. For a moment, everything is blank in the giddiness of pain. When I manage to look around, Null Achtzehn is still standing there, he hasn’t moved; hands in his sleeves, he doesn’t say a word, he stares at me without expression. Mischa and the Galician arrive, speaking Yiddish to each other, and give me incomprehensible advice. Templer and David and the others arrive; they take advantage of the distraction to stop work. The Kapo arrives, distributes kicks, punches, and abuse, and our comrades disperse like chaff in the wind. Null Achtzehn puts his hand to his nose and then stares vacantly at the bloodstreaked hand. All I get is two blows to the head, of the sort that don’t hurt because they stun you. The incident is closed. I find that, for good or ill, I can stand up, so the bone must not be broken. I don’t dare take off the shoe for fear of reawakening the pain, and also because I know that the foot will swell and I will be unable to put the shoe on again. The Kapo sends me to take the Galician’s place on the pile, and he, glaring at me, takes my place alongside Null Achtzehn; but already the English prisoners are passing, it will soon be time to return to the camp. During the march I do my best to walk quickly, but I can’t keep up. The Kapo assigns Null Achtzehn and Finder to support me as far as the procession before the SS, and finally (fortunately there is no roll call this evening) I am in the barrack and can throw myself on the bunk and breathe. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe the fatigue of the march, but the pain has begun again, together with a strange sensation of wetness in the wounded foot. I take off my shoe: it is full of blood, by now congealed and kneaded into the mud and the shreds of a rag I found a month ago, and which I use as a foot pad, one day on the right, one day on the left. This evening, after the soup, I’ll go to Ka-Be. • • •

Ka-Be is the abbreviation of Krankenbau, the infirmary. There are eight barracks, exactly like the others in the camp, but separated by a wire fence. They permanently hold a tenth of the camp’s population, but few of us stay longer than two weeks and none more than two months: within these limits we are obliged to die or be cured. Those who show signs of improvement recover in Ka-Be, those who show signs of getting worse are sent from Ka-Be to the gas chambers. All this because we, fortunately for us, belong to the category of “economically useful Jews.” I have never been to Ka-Be or 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, are two long lines of shadows. Some have need only of a bandage or a pill, others ask to be examined; some show death in their faces. Those at the front of both lines are barefoot and ready to enter. Others, as their turn 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 with bare feet; not too late, so as not to miss their turn to enter, because it is strictly forbidden to enter Ka-Be with shoes on. A gigantic French Häftling, sitting in a booth between the doors of the two clinics, enforces obedience to the prohibition. He is one of the few French officials in the camp. And do not think that to spend one’s day among muddy and broken shoes is a small privilege: only consider 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 my rags without losing any of them, without letting my bowl or gloves be stolen, without losing my balance, all the while holding on to my cap, since for no reason can you wear it upon entering a barrack. I leave the shoes at the shoe deposit and am given the appropriate receipt, after which, barefoot and limping, my hands encumbered by all my poor possessions, which I dare

not leave anywhere, I am admitted inside and join a new line, which ends in the examination room. In this line you undress progressively, so as to be naked when you arrive at the head of it, for there a male nurse sticks a thermometer in your armpit. If someone is dressed he misses his turn and gets back in line. Everybody has to be given the thermometer, even if he has only a skin disease or a toothache. In this way it’s assured that no one who is not seriously ill will submit to this complicated ritual on a whim. My turn finally arrives and I am brought before the doctor. The nurse takes out the thermometer and presents me: “Nummer 174517, kein Fieber.” I do not need a thorough examination: I am immediately declared Arztvormelder. I don’t know what it means, but this is certainly not the place to ask questions. I am thrown out, I retrieve my shoes, and I go back to the barrack. Chaim rejoices with me: I have a good wound, it doesn’t seem dangerous, and it guarantees me a reasonable period of rest. I will spend the night in the barrack with the others, but tomorrow morning, instead of going to work, I will have to go back to the doctors for a definitive examination: this is what Artzvormelder means. Chaim is experienced in these matters, and he thinks that I’ll probably be admitted to Ka-Be tomorrow. Chaim is my bed companion and I have blind faith in him. He is Polish, a religious Jew, a student of rabbinical law. He is about my age, a watchmaker by profession, and here in Buna works as a precision mechanic; thus he is among the few who are able to preserve the dignity and self-assurance that come from practicing a trade one has been trained for. And so it happened. After reveille and bread, I was called outside with three others from my barrack. We were led to a corner of Roll Call Square, where there was a long line, all of today’s Artzvormelder; someone came and took away my bowl, spoon, cap, and gloves. The others laughed: didn’t I know that I had to hide them or leave them with someone, or, best of all, sell them, since they can’t be taken to Ka-Be? Then they look at my number and shake their heads: any sort of stupidity is to be expected from one with such a high number.

Then they counted us, they made us undress outside in the cold, they took our shoes, they counted us again, they shaved the hair off our face, head, and body, they counted us yet again, and they made us take a shower. Then an SS man came, looked at us without interest, stopped in front of a man with a large hydrocele, and set him apart. After which they counted us another time and made us take another shower, although we were still wet from the first and some were shaking with fever. 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 stare at it, through the clouds, as if through smoked glass. Its position indicates that it must be past two o’clock. By now it’s farewell soup, and we have been standing for ten hours and naked for six. This second medical examination is also extraordinarily rapid: the doctor (he wears striped clothes like ours, but over them he has a white coat, with the number sewn on it, and he is much fatter than we are) looks at my swollen and bloody foot and touches it, at which I cry out in pain. Then he says: “Aufgenommen, Block 23.” I stand there with my mouth open, waiting for some other indication, but someone pulls me backward brutally, throws a coat over my bare shoulders, gives me a pair of sandals, and drives me out into the open. A hundred meters away is Block 23; written on it is “Schonungsblock.” Who knows what it means? Inside they take off my coat and sandals, and I’m naked again and last in a line of human skeletons—today’s patients. I stopped trying to understand long ago. As far as I’m concerned, I am by now so tired of standing on my wounded foot, still untended, so hungry and frozen, that nothing interests me anymore. This might easily be my last day and this room the gas chamber that everyone talks about, but what can I do about it? I might just as well lean against the wall, close my eyes, and wait. My neighbor must not be Jewish. He is not circumcised and, besides (this is one of the few things that I have so far learned), such fair skin, such a huge face and body are characteristics of non-Jewish Poles. He is a whole head taller

than me, but he has quite a cordial face, such as have only those who do not suffer from hunger. I tried to ask him if he knows when they will let us enter. He turns to the nurse, who resembles him like a twin and is smoking in a corner; they talk and laugh together without replying, as if I were not there. Then one of them takes my arm and looks at my number, and they laugh even harder. Everyone knows that the 174000s are the Italian Jews, the well-known Italian Jews, who arrived two months ago, all lawyers, all university graduates, who were more than a hundred and are now only forty; who don’t know how to work, and let their bread be stolen, and are hit from morning to night. The Germans call them zwei linke Hände (two left hands), and even the Polish Jews despise them, because they don’t speak Yiddish. The nurse indicates my ribs to the other man, as if I were a cadaver in an anatomy class. He points to my swollen eyelids and cheeks and my thin neck, he bends over and presses on my tibia with his thumb, and shows the other the deep impression that his finger leaves in the pale flesh, as if it were wax. I wish I had never spoken to the Pole: I feel as if I had never in all my life suffered a more atrocious insult. The nurse, meanwhile, seems to have finished his demonstration, in his language, which I do not understand, and which to me sounds terrible. He turns to me and, in broken German, charitably, tells me the conclusion: “Du Jude, kaputt. Du schnell Krematorium, fertig.” (You Jew, done for. You soon for the crematorium, finished.)

More hours pass before all the patients have been seen, given a shirt, and had their information recorded. I, as usual, am last. Someone in brand-new striped clothes asks me where I was born, what profession I practiced “as a civilian,” if I had children, what diseases I had had, a whole series of questions. What use can 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.

At last, even for me the door is opened, and I can enter the dormitory. Here, as everywhere, there are three tiers of bunks, in three rows throughout the barrack, separated by two narrow corridors. There are 150 bunks, and about 250 patients; so there are two in most of the bunks. The patients in the upper bunks, squashed against the ceiling, can hardly sit up; they lean out, curious to see today’s new arrivals. It’s the most interesting moment of the day, for one always finds some acquaintances. I am assigned to bunk number 10—a miracle! It’s empty! I stretch out with delight; it’s the first time since I entered the camp that I’ve had 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 physical discomforts are relatively few, apart from hunger and the suffering inherent in illness. It’s not cold, there’s no work to do, and, unless you commit some grave fault, you aren’t beaten. Reveille is at 4 a.m., even for patients. You have to make your bed and wash, but there’s not much hurry nor is it very strict. 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 four it’s Mittagsruhe, afternoon rest time; then there is often the medical examination and bandaging, and you have to climb down from the bunk, take off your shirt, and line up in front of the doctor. The evening ration is also served in bed, after which, at nine, 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 reveille catches me in a deep sleep, and waking up is a return from nothingness. When the bread is distributed, one can hear far away, outside the windows, in the dark air, the band beginning to play: our healthy comrades are leaving in their squads for work. From Ka-Be you can’t hear the music well. The beating of the bass drum and the cymbals reaches us continuously and

monotonously, but on this weft the musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently, according to the wind’s caprices. From our beds we exchange looks, 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 engraved in our minds and will be the last thing in the Lager that we forget: they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometric madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men, in order to kill us slowly afterward. When this music plays, we know that our comrades, outside in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, as the wind drives the dead leaves, and takes the place of their will. There is no longer any will: every beat becomes a step, a reflexive contraction of exhausted muscles. The Germans have succeeded in this. Their prisoners are ten thousand, and are a single gray machine; they are precisely determined; they do not think and they do not desire, they walk. During the marches of departure and return, the SS are always present. 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 we had to escape from the enchantment, hear the music from the outside, as happened in Ka-Be, and as we think back to it now, after liberation and rebirth, without obeying it, without enduring it, to understand what it was, for what carefully considered reason the Germans created this monstrous rite, and why even today, when one of those innocent songs comes to mind, our blood freezes in our veins and we are aware that to have returned from Auschwitz was no small fortune.

I have two neighbors 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 other’s feet beside his head. One is Walter Bonn, a Dutchman, civilized and quite educated. He sees that I have nothing to cut my bread with and lends me his knife, and then offers to sell it to me for half a ration of bread. I discuss the price and turn it down—I think that I will always find someone to lend me a knife here in KaBe, while outside it costs only a third of a ration. Walter is by no means less courteous because of this, and at midday, after eating his soup, he wipes his spoon with his lips (which is a good rule before lending it, so as to clean it and not to let any traces of soup that may still be clinging to it go to waste) and spontaneously offers it to me. “What are you suffering from, Walter?” “Körperschwäche,” progressive physical decline. The worst disease: it cannot be cured, and it’s very dangerous to enter Ka-Be with such a diagnosis. If it hadn’t been for the edema of his ankles (and he shows them to me), which makes it impossible for him to march to work, he would have been very cautious about reporting sick. My ideas about this kind of danger are still quite confused. Everybody speaks about it indirectly, by allusions, and when I ask some questions they look at me and fall silent. Is it true what one hears of selections, of gas, of the crematorium? Crematorium. The other one, Walter’s bed companion, wakes, startled, and sits up: Who’s talking about the crematorium? What’s happening? Can’t a sleeping person be left in peace? He is a Polish Jew, albino, with a gaunt, goodnatured face, no longer young. His name is Schmulek, he’s 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 gesture, he will take care of convincing me: “Show me your number: you are 174517. This numbering began eighteen months ago and applies to Auschwitz and the subcamps. There are now ten thousand of us here at BunaMonowitz; 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 doesn’t 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 barrack opened, a voice shouted “Achtung!” and every sound died out, giving way to a leaden silence. Two SS men entered (one of them has many chevrons, perhaps he is an officer?). Their steps echoed in the barrack as if it were empty; they spoke to the chief doctor, and he showed them a register, pointing here and there. The officer took notes on a pad. Schmulek touches my knee: “Pass auf, pass auf,” pay attention. 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. The officer moves on. Another has a yellow face; the officer pulls off his blanket, he trembles, the officer touches his belly, says, “Gut, gut,” and moves on. Now he is looking at Schmulek; he brings out his pad, checks the number of the bed and the number of the tattoo. I see it all clearly from above: he has made a cross beside Schmulek’s number. Then he moves on.

I now look at Schmulek and behind him I see Walter’s eyes, and so I ask no questions. The next day, in place of the usual group of patients who had recovered, two distinct groups were sent out. Those in the first were shaved and shorn and had a shower. Those in the second went out as they were, beards unshaved, bandages unchanged, without a shower. Nobody said goodbye to the latter, nobody gave them messages for healthy comrades. Schmulek was part of this group. In this discreet and sedate manner, without display or anger, massacre moves through the wards of Ka-Be every day, touching one man or another. When Schmulek left, he gave me his spoon and knife; Walter and I avoided looking at each other and were 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 so that he has wider slices, on which the margarine spreads more easily. Walter explains many things to me: Schonungsblock means rest barrack; here are only the patients who are less seriously ill or convalescent, or who do not require treatment. Among them, at least fifty have dysentery, in a more or less serious form. These last are checked every third day. They line up along the corridor. At the far end are two tin basins and the nurse, with a register, a watch, and a pencil. Two at a time, the patients present themselves and have to show, on the spot and at once, that they still have diarrhea; 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 basins quickly in a washtub provided for the purpose and the next two take their place. Of those waiting, some are contorted with the pain of holding in their precious evidence another twenty, another ten minutes; others, without resources at the moment, strain veins and muscles in the contrary effort. The nurse observes, impassive, chewing his pencil, one eye on the watch, one eye

on the specimens successively presented. In doubtful cases, he leaves with the basin and goes to show it to the doctor. . . . And I receive a visit: it is Piero Sonnino, from Rome. “Did you see how I tricked him?” Piero has mild enteritis, has been here for twenty days, and is quite content, resting and growing fatter; he couldn’t care less about the selections and has decided to stay in Ka-Be until the end of winter, at all costs. His method consists of getting in line behind some authentic dysentery patient, who offers a guarantee of success; when it’s 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 the basins in the middle of the crowd, and the deed is done. Piero knows what he’s risking, but it has gone well so far.

Yet life in Ka-Be is not this. It is not the crucial moments of the selections, it is not the grotesque episodes of checking for diarrhea and lice, it is not even the illnesses. Ka-Be is the Lager without its physical discomforts. Therefore, anyone who still has any seeds of conscience feels his conscience reawaken; and so, in the long empty days, he speaks of other things than hunger and work, and 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 learned that our personality is fragile, that it is much more endangered than our life; and the wise men of ancient times, instead of warning us “Remember that you must die,” would have done better to remind us of this greater danger that threatens us. If, from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: Be sure not to tolerate in your own homes what is inflicted on us here. When one works, one suffers and there is no time to think: home is less than a memory. But here the time is ours; despite the prohibition, we exchange visits from bunk to bunk, and we talk and talk. The wooden barrack, crammed with suffering humanity, is full of words, of memories, and of another pain.

Heimweh, the Germans call this pain; it’s a beautiful word that means “longing for home.” We know where we come from; 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 before us with painful clarity. But where we are going we do not know. Perhaps we will be able to survive the illnesses and escape the selections, perhaps even endure the work and hunger that wear us down —and then? Here, momentarily far away from the curses and the beatings, we can reenter into ourselves and meditate, and then it becomes clear that we will not return. We traveled here in sealed freight cars; we saw our women and our children depart toward nothingness; we, made slaves, have marched countless times to and from our silent labor, dead in spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here who might carry to the world, together with the mark stamped in his flesh, the evil tidings of what man’s audacity made of man in Auschwitz. 3. Horses 8, Men 40, Tare, Capacity.

Our Nights

After twenty days of Ka-Be, when my wound was practically healed, I was discharged, to my great disappointment. The ceremony is simple, but entails a painful and dangerous period of readjustment. On leaving Ka-Be, those who have no special contacts are not returned to their former Block and Kommando but are enrolled, on the basis of criteria wholly unknown to me, in some other barrack and given some other 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 to their own persons with speed and diligence, and this involves effort and expense. They have once more to acquire a spoon and knife. And finally—and this is the gravest aspect—they find themselves inserted into an unknown environment, among hostile companions never seen before, with leaders whose character they do not know and against whom consequently it is difficult to protect themselves. Man’s capacity to dig a niche for himself, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defense, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing and deserves serious study. It is an invaluable exercise of adaptation, partly passive and unconscious, partly active: hammering in a nail above his bunk on which to hang his shoes at night; concluding tacit pacts of nonaggression with neighbors; understanding and accepting the habits and laws of the individual Kommando, the individual Block. By virtue of this work, one manages after a few weeks to arrive at a certain equilibrium, a certain degree of security in the 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 recovered, feels himself ejected into the dark and cold of sidereal space. His trousers are falling down, his shoes

hurt, his shirt has no buttons. He searches for a human contact and finds only backs turned. He is as helpless and vulnerable as a newborn babe, but in the morning he will have to march to work. It is in these conditions that I find myself when the nurse entrusts me, after various obligatory administrative rites, to the care of the Blockältester of Block 45. But at once a thought fills me with joy: I’m 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 a capacity for adaptation like his. Alberto entered the Lager head high, and lives in the Lager unscathed and uncorrupted. He understood, before any of us, that this life is war; he allowed himself no indulgences, he wasted no time complaining or feeling sorry for himself and others, but entered the battle from the outset. He is sustained by intelligence and intuition. He reasons correctly; often he does not even reason but is right just the same. He grasps everything immediately; he knows only a little French but understands whatever the Germans and Poles tell him. He responds in Italian and with gestures, he makes himself understood and at once wins sympathy. He fights for his life but 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 did not become corrupt himself. I always saw, and still see in him, the rare figure of the strong yet gentle man against whom the weapons of the night are blunted. But I was unable to get permission to sleep in a bunk with him—not even Alberto could manage that, although by now he enjoyed a certain popularity in Block 45. It was 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 sweat, smell, and warmth with someone, under the same blanket, and

in a width of seventy centimeters, it is clearly desirable that he be a friend.

In the winter the nights are long and we are allowed a considerable period of time to sleep. Little by little, the noise in the Block dies down; the distribution of the evening ration ended more than an hour ago, and only a few stubborn men continue to scrape the by now shiny bottom of the bowl, turning it meticulously under the lamp, frowning with concentration. Engineer Kardos moves around the bunks, tending wounded feet and suppurating corns. This is his trade: there is no one who will not willingly give up a slice of bread to soothe the torment of those numb sores, which bleed all day, at every step. And so, in this manner, honestly, Engineer Kardos has solved the problem of living. Through the back door, stealthily, and looking around cautiously, the storyteller has come in. He is seated on Wachsmann’s bunk and at once a small, attentive, silent crowd gathers around him. He chants an interminable Yiddish rhapsody, always the same one, in rhymed quatrains, of a resigned and penetrating melancholy (or perhaps I remember it so because I heard it at that time and in that place?); from the few words I understand, it must be a song that he composed himself, which contains all the life of the Lager in its minute details. Some are generous and give the storyteller a pinch of tobacco or a length of thread; others listen intently but give nothing. Suddenly the call resounds for the last rite of the day: “Wer hat kaputt die Schuhe?” (Who has broken shoes?), and at once a clamor erupts as forty or fifty claimants to the exchange rush toward 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 lights go out a first time for a few seconds to warn the tailors to put away their precious needle and thread; then in the distance the bell sounds, the night guard settles himself, and all the lights go out definitively. There is nothing left to do but undress and go to bed.

I do not know who my neighbor is; I’m not even sure that it’s always the same person, because I have never seen his face except for a few seconds in the confusion of reveille, so I know his back and his feet much better than his face. He does not work in my Kommando and gets into the bunk only 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-to-back, I struggle to regain a reasonable area of the straw mattress: with my lower back I exercise a progressive pressure against his; then I turn around and try to push with my knees; I take hold of his ankles and attempt to place them a little farther over so as not to have his feet next to my face. But it is all in vain: he is much heavier than I am and seems turned to stone in his sleep. So I adapt to lying like this, forced into immobility, half on the bunk’s wooden edge. But I am so tired and stunned that I, too, soon fall asleep, and I seem to be sleeping on a railroad track. The train is about to arrive; you can hear the panting of the engine, which is my neighbor. I am not yet so asleep that I am not aware of the double nature of the engine. It is, in fact, the very engine that towed the freight cars 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 radiating from its black side. It is puffing, it gets closer and closer, it is always on the point of running me over but instead it never arrives. My sleep is very light, it is a veil, if I want I can tear it. I will tear it, I want to, so that I can get off the railroad track. Now I’ve done it and now I’m awake, but not really awake, only a little more, one step higher on the ladder between unconscious and conscious. My eyes are closed and I don’t want to open them lest sleep escape me, but I can register noises. I’m sure this distant whistle is real, it doesn’t come from the dream engine, it can be heard objectively. It is the whistle from the narrow-gauge track; it comes from the construction site, which operates at night as well. A long, steady note, then another, a semitone lower, then again the first, but short and cut off. This whistle is an important thing and in some ways essential: we’ve heard it

so often, associated with the suffering of the work and the camp, that it has become the camp’s symbol and immediately evokes its image, as certain music does, or certain smells. Here is my sister, with some unidentifiable friends of mine and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the three-note whistle, the hard bunk, my neighbor whom I would like to move but am afraid to wake because he is stronger than I am. I also speak at length about our hunger and about how we are checked for lice, and about the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash because 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 can’t help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly among themselves of other things, as if I were not there. My sister looks at me, gets up, and goes away without a word. A desolating grief now rises in me, like some barely remembered pain of early childhood. It is pain in its pure state, untempered by a sense of reality or by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, the kind of pain that makes children cry; and it is better for me to swim up to the surface once again, but this time I deliberately open my eyes, to have a guarantee in front of me that I am in fact awake. My dream stands before me, still warm, and although I’m awake I’m filled with its anguish. And then I remember that it’s not just any dream, and that since I arrived here I have dreamed it not once but many times, with hardly any variations in setting or details. I am now fully awake and I remember that I recounted it to Alberto and that he confided, to my amazement, that it’s also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone. Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day so constantly translated, in our dreams, into the ever repeated scene of the story told and not listened to? . . . While I ponder this, I try to take advantage of the interval of wakefulness to shake off the anguished remnants of the preceding sleep, so as not to compromise the quality of the

next sleep. I sit up, crouching in the darkness; I look around and listen intently. I can hear the sleepers breathing and snoring; some groan and speak. Many smack their lips and waggle their jaws. They dream of eating; this is another collective dream. It’s a pitiless dream: the creator of the Tantalus myth must have known it. You not only see the food, you feel it in your hands, particular and concrete, and are aware of its rich and pungent fragrance. Someone even brings it to your lips, but some circumstance, different every time, intervenes to prevent the consummation of the act. Then the dream dissolves and breaks up into its elements, but it re-forms immediately afterward and begins again, similar yet changed; and this without pause, for each of us, every night, and for the entire duration of our sleep.

It must be after eleven, because the movement to and from the bucket next to the night guard is already intense. This is an obscene torment, an indelible shame. Every two or three hours we have to get up to eliminate the large dose of water that we are forced to absorb during the day in the form of soup, in order to satisfy our hunger—that same water which in the evening swells our ankles and the hollows of our eyes, conferring a deformed likeness on all physiognomies, and whose elimination imposes a grueling task on our kidneys. It’s not merely a question of the procession to the bucket; the rule is that the last user of the bucket goes and empties it in the latrine, and it is also the rule that at night one must not leave the barrack except in night uniform (shirt and pants), giving one’s number to the guard. It follows, predictably, that the night guard will try to exempt his friends, his fellow countrymen, and the Prominents from this duty. In addition, the old inhabitants 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 bucket service are a fairly limited number in each barrack, while the total volume

to eliminate is at least two hundred liters, which means that the bucket has to be emptied about twenty times. In short, every night the risk that hangs over us, the inexperienced and unprivileged, when need drives us to the bucket, is quite serious. The night guard unexpectedly jumps out of his corner and grabs us, scribbles down our number, hands us a pair of wooden clogs and the bucket, and chases us out into the snow, shivering and sleepy. It is our task to trudge to the latrine with the bucket, which knocks against our bare calves, disgustingly warm; it’s full beyond any reasonable limit, and inevitably with the shaking some of the contents spills over onto our feet, so that, however repugnant this duty may be, it is always preferable that we, and not our bunk companion, be ordered to do it.

So our nights drag on. The dream of Tantalus and the dream of the story are woven into a fabric of more indistinct images; the suffering of the day, composed of hunger, blows, cold, exhaustion, fear, and lack of privacy, at night turns into shapeless nightmares of unprecedented violence, such as in free life occur only during a fever. One wakes 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, gray and identical, as small as ants and big enough to reach to the stars, packed one against the other, innumerable, covering the plain as far as the horizon —sometimes melting into a single substance, an anguished dough in which we feel trapped and suffocated; sometimes marching in a circle, without beginning or end, with a blinding dizziness and a tide of nausea rising from the heart to the throat—until hunger or cold or the fullness of our bladders leads our dreams into their customary patterns. We try in vain, when the nightmare itself or the discomfort wakes us, to extricate the various elements and drive them, separately, out of the field of our present attention, so as to protect our sleep from their intrusion. But as soon as we close our eyes we feel our brain start up, yet again, beyond our control; it beats and

buzzes, incapable of rest, it fabricates phantoms and terrible signs, incessantly draws and shakes them in gray fog on the screen of our dreams. But for the entire night, through all the alternations of sleep, waking, and nightmare, the expectation and terror of the moment of reveille keeps watch. By means of that mysterious faculty which many know, we are able, even without clocks, to calculate the moment with close accuracy. At the hour of reveille, which varies from season to season but always falls much before dawn, the camp bell rings for a long time, and in every barrack the night guard goes off duty; he switches on the lights, stands up, stretches, and pronounces the daily condemnation: “Aufstehen,” or, more often, in Polish, “Wstawa .” Very few sleep until the Wstawa : it’s a moment of pain too acute for even the deepest sleep not to dissolve as it approaches. The night guard knows this, and for this reason utters it not in a tone of command but in the quiet, subdued voice of one who is aware that the announcement will find all ears straining, and will be heard and obeyed. The foreign word sinks like a stone to the bottom of every soul. “Get up”: the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armor of sleep, the nighttime escape, though tortured, fall to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A day begins that is like every day, so long that we cannot reasonably conceive the end, so much cold, so much hunger, so much toil separate us from it: better to concentrate attention and desires on the slab of gray bread, which is small but in an hour will certainly be ours, and which for five minutes, until we have devoured it, will constitute the sum total of what the law of the place allows us to possess. At the Wstawa the storm starts up again. The entire barrack enters without transition into frenzied activity: everybody climbs up and down, makes his bunk, and tries at the same time to get dressed in such a way as to leave none of his objects unguarded; the air fills with dust and becomes opaque; the quickest ones elbow their way through the crowd

to go to the washhouse and the latrine before the line forms. The barrack sweepers at once come onto the scene and drive everyone out, hitting and shouting. When I have made my bunk and am dressed, I climb down to the floor and put on my shoes. The sores on my feet reopen at once, and a new day begins.

The Work

Before Resnyk came, my bunkmate was a Pole whose name no one knew; he was gentle and silent, with two old sores on his shinbones, and during the night he 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 bunk trembled and a lanky red-haired fellow, with the number of the French from Drancy, climbed up beside me. To have a bed companion of tall stature is a misfortune and means losing hours of sleep; I always get tall companions, because I am small and two tall men cannot sleep together. But it was immediately apparent that Resnyk, in spite of that, was not a bad companion. He spoke little and courteously, he was clean, he didn’t snore, didn’t 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 make the bed badly, the schlechte Bettenbauer, are diligently punished) and did it quickly and well; so that I felt a certain fleeting pleasure later, in Roll Call Square, in seeing that he had been assigned to my Kommando. On the march to work, limping in our clumsy wooden clogs on the icy snow, we exchanged a few words, and I found out that Resnyk is Polish; he lived in Paris for twenty years but still speaks an implausible French. He is thirty, but, like all of us, could be taken for anywhere from seventeen to fifty. He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel, and moving story; because such are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, shocking necessity. We tell

them to one another in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, Ukraine—simple and incomprehensible, like the stories in the Bible. But are not they, too, stories in a new Bible?

Once we arrived at the construction site, we were led to the Eisenröhreplatz, the flat area where the iron pipes are unloaded, and then the usual things began. The Kapo took the roll call again, briefly took 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 off to sleep in the toolshed, 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 that weighs perhaps fifteen kilograms; I know that even if I had to use it without any weight on it, I would be dead from 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 stick to our wooden soles, until we’re walking unsteadily on two heavy, shapeless masses from which it’s impossible to get free; suddenly one comes unstuck, and then it’s as if one leg were several centimeters shorter than the other. Today we have to unload an enormous cast-iron cylinder from the freight car. I think it is a synthesis pipe and must weigh several tons. This is better for us, because 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 must not get distracted; a moment’s inattention and one would be crushed. Meister Nogalla, the Polish foreman, 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 ties,” in order to build a path in the soft mud on which the cylinder will be pushed by the levers into the factory. But the ties are jammed in the ground and weigh eighty kilos; they are more or less at the limit of our strength. The more robust of us, working in pairs, are able to carry ties for a few hours; for me it is a torture; the load maims my shoulder bone. After the first trip, I am deaf and almost blind from the effort, and I would stoop to any baseness to avoid the second. I will try and pair myself with Resnyk; he seems a good worker and, being taller, will support the greater part of the weight. I know it’s in the order of things for Resnyk to refuse me with contempt and team up with someone more robust; then I will ask to go to the latrine and I will remain there as long as possible, and afterward I will try to hide, with the certainty of being immediately tracked down, mocked, and hit; but anything is better than this work. Instead Resnyk accepts, and, what’s more, lifts up the tie by himself and rests it on my right shoulder with care; then he lifts up the other end, places his left shoulder under it, and we set out. The tie is encrusted 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 is usually called normal endurance: my knees are folding, my shoulder aches as if clasped in a vise, my balance is in danger. At every step I feel my shoes sucked in by the greedy mud, by this ubiquitous Polish mud whose monotonous horror fills our days. I bite my lips deeply; we know well that gaining 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 almost lovingly when we are carrying a load, accompanying the blows with exhortations and encouragement, as cart drivers do with willing horses. When we reach the cylinder, we unload the tie on the ground, and I stand stiffly, my eyes vacant, mouth open, and arms dangling, sunk in the ephemeral and negative ecstasy of

the cessation of pain. In a twilight of exhaustion I wait for the push that will force me to begin work again, and I try to take advantage of every second of waiting to recover some energy. But the push never comes: Resnyk touches my elbow, we return as slowly as possible to the ties. 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 tie 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 quite far away; this permits us, once a day, a slightly longer absence than normal. Moreover, since we are also forbidden to go there alone, Wachsmann, the weakest and clumsiest of the Kommando, has been invested with the duty of Scheissbegleiter, latrine companion; by virtue of this appointment, Wachsmann is responsible for any hypothetical (laughable hypothesis!) attempt to escape and, more realistically, for every delay. As my request has been accepted, I leave in the mud and the gray snow, amid scraps of metal, escorted by little Wachsmann. I never manage to understand 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 town, in Galicia, had a reputation as a healer and a miracle worker. And it is not hard to believe when I think that this thin, fragile, and meek figure has managed to work for two years without falling ill and without dying; on the contrary, he is animated by an amazing vitality of words and facial expressions, 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 compartments: Nur für Engländer, Nur für Polen, Nur für Ukrainische Frauen, and so on, and, a little apart, Nur für Häftlinge. Inside, shoulder to shoulder, sit four hollow-faced Häftlinge: a

bearded old Russian worker with the blue OST band4 on his left arm; a Polish boy, with a large white “P” on his back and chest; an English military prisoner of war, with his face splendidly shaved and rosy and his khaki uniform neat, ironed, and clean, except for a large “KG” (Kriegsgefangener) on the back. A fifth Häftling stands at the door, patiently and monotonously asking every civilian who enters loosening his belt: “ tes-vous français?” When I return to work, the trucks with the rations can be seen passing, which means it is ten o’clock. That is already a respectable hour, as the midday pause can be glimpsed in the fog of the remote future, and we can begin to derive some energy from the expectation. I make two or three more trips with Resnyk, searching attentively, even going to distant piles, to find lighter ties, but by now all the best ones have been moved and only the others remain, repellent, sharp edged, heavy with mud and ice, and with metal plates nailed to them for the rails to fit on. When Franz comes and calls Wachsmann to go with him to bring back our ration, it means that it is eleven o’clock and the morning is almost over—no one thinks about the afternoon. The crew returns at eleven thirty, and the standard interrogation begins: how much soup today, what quality, did we get 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 smell carried from the kitchen by the wind. And at last, like a celestial meteor, superhuman and impersonal as a sign from heaven, the midday siren explodes, granting a brief respite to our anonymous, shared weariness and hunger. And the usual things happen again: we all run to the shed, and line up with our bowls ready, and we all have an animal hurry to flood our bellies with the warm slop, but no one wants to be first, because the first person receives the most watery ration. As usual, the Kapo mocks and insults us for our voracity and takes care not to stir the pot, because the bottom belongs notoriously to him. Then comes the bliss (positive, this time, and visceral) of relaxation and warmth in the

stomach and in the shed around the rumbling stove. The smokers, with miserly and reverent gestures, roll a thin cigarette, while our clothes, dank with mud and snow, give off a dense smoke in the heat of the stove, which smells of a kennel or a sheepfold. A tacit convention ordains that no one speak: within a minute we are all sleeping, jammed elbow to elbow, falling suddenly forward and recovering with a stiffening of the back. Behind barely closed eyelids, dreams break out violently, and these, too, are the usual dreams. Of being at home, in a wonderful hot bath. Of being at home, sitting at the table. Of being at home, and telling the story of this hopeless work of ours, of our never-ending hunger, of our sleep of slaves. Then, within the steam of our sluggish digestion, a painful nucleus condenses, and pricks us and grows until it crosses the threshold of our consciousness and takes away the joy of sleep. “Es wird bald ein Uhr sein”: it is almost one o’clock. Like a fast-moving, voracious cancer, it kills our sleep and grips us in a precautionary anguish: we listen to the wind whistling outside, and to the light rustle of the snow against the window, “Es wird schnell ein Uhr sein.” As each of us clings to sleep, so that it will not abandon us, all our senses are taut with the horror of the signal that is about to come, that is outside the door, that is here . . . Here it is. A thud at the window: Meister Nogalla has thrown a snowball against the windowpane, and now stands stiffly outside, holding his watch with its face turned toward us. The Kapo gets up, stretches, and says quietly, like one who does not doubt that he will be obeyed: “Alles heraus,” all outside.

Oh, to weep! Oh, to confront the wind as once we did, as equals, and not as here, like worms without a soul. We are outside and each one picks up his lever. Resnyk draws his head down between his shoulders, pulls his cap over his ears, and lifts his face up to the low gray sky where the inexorable snow is swirling: “Si j’avey une chien, je ne le chasse pas dehors.”

4. This indicated a slave worker from Eastern Europe.

A Good Day

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in man’s every fiber; it is a property of 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, here, our only purpose is to reach the spring. We care about nothing else now. Behind this goal there is now no other goal. In the morning, lined up in Roll Call Square, while we wait endlessly for the time to leave for work, and every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenseless bodies, and everything is gray around us, and we are gray; in the morning, when it’s still dark, we all scan the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and every day the rising of the sun is commented on, today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will relent and we will have one enemy less. Today for the first time the sun rose bright and clear from the horizon of mud. It’s a Polish sun, cold, white, and distant, and warms only the skin, but when it broke loose from the last mists a murmur ran through our colorless multitude, and when even I felt its warmth through my clothes, I understood how men can worship the sun. “Das Schlimmste ist vorüber,” said Ziegler, turning his sharp shoulders to the sun: the worst is over. Next to us is a group of Greeks, those admirable and terrible Jews of Salonika, tenacious, thieving, wise, ferocious, and united, so determined to live, such pitiless opponents in the struggle for life—those Greeks who have prevailed in the kitchens and at the worksite, and whom even the Germans respect and the Poles fear. This is their third year in the camp, and nobody knows better than they what the camp means. They stand in a tight 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 was in Birkenau. And they continue to sing and stamp their feet in time, and grow drunk on songs. When we finally left, through the main entrance of the camp, the sun was quite high and the sky clear. At midday we could see the mountains; to the west, familiar and incongruous, the steeple of Auschwitz (a steeple here!), and all around the tethered barrage balloons. The smoke from Buna lay still in the cold air, and a row of low hills could be seen, green with forests: and our hearts ache because we all know that Birkenau is there, that our women ended up there, and that soon we, too, will end up there—but we are not used to seeing it. For the first time we notice that on both sides of the road, even here, the meadows are green, because, without sun, a meadow is as if it were not green. Buna is not: Buna is desperately and essentially opaque and gray. This huge tangle of iron, concrete, mud, and smoke is the negation of beauty. Its roads and buildings have been given names like ours, numbers or letters, or inhuman and sinister ones. Within its precincts not a blade of grass grows, the soil is impregnated with the poisonous juices of coal and petroleum, and nothing is alive but machines and slaves—and the former are more alive than the latter.

Buna is as big as a city; besides the German managers and technicians, forty thousand foreigners work here, and fifteen or twenty languages are spoken. All the foreigners live in different Lagers, which surround Buna: the English prisoners of war Lager, the Ukrainian women’s Lager, the French volunteers’ Lager, and others that 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 that we carry tattooed on our arm and sewn on our chest.

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 that is what we call it, Babelturm, Bobelturm; and we hate it as our masters’ insane dream of grandeur, their contempt for God and men, for us men. And today, just as in the ancient fable, we all feel, and the Germans themselves feel, that a curse—not transcendent and divine but inherent and historical—hangs over the insolent structure, built on the confusion of languages and erected in defiance of heaven like a stone curse. As we will explain, the Buna factory, which the Germans worked on for four years and where countless of us suffered and died, never produced a kilo of synthetic rubber. But today the eternal puddles, on which a rainbow veil of oil quivers, reflect the clear sky. Pipes, girders, boilers, still cold from the night’s freeze, are dripping with dew. The earth dug up from the pits, the piles of coal, the blocks of concrete exhale the winter dampness in a faint mist. Today is a good day. We look around like blind people who have recovered their sight, and we look at one another. None of us have seen the others in sunlight: someone smiles. If it weren’t for the hunger! For human nature is such that sorrows and sufferings simultaneously endured do not add up to a whole in our consciousness but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. This is providential and allows us to survive in the camp. And this is the reason that so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact, it is a question not 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 its major cause is given to all its causes, which are numerous and arranged hierarchically. And when this most immediate cause of unhappiness comes to an

end, we are painfully surprised to see that behind it lies another one, and in reality a whole series of other ones. And so as soon as the cold, which throughout the winter had seemed our only enemy, ceased, we became aware of our hunger, and, repeating the same mistake, today we say: “If it weren’t 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. The bucket, hanging from cables, opens wide its saw-toothed jaws, hovers 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 operator’s cabin. Then up it goes again, turns halfway around, vomits its weighty mouthful behind, and starts over. Leaning on our shovels, we stop to watch, fascinated. At every bite of its bucket, our mouths 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 all of us, although he gets a little soup every evening from a protector, who is probably not disinterested. He had begun to speak of his home in Vienna and of his mother, but then he drifted onto the subject of food, and now he talks endlessly about some wedding lunch and recalls, with genuine regret, that he failed to finish his third bowl of bean soup. And everyone tells him to keep quiet, but within ten minutes Béla is describing his Hungarian countryside and the fields of maize and a recipe for making sweet polenta—with roasted grains, and lard, and spices and . . . and he is cursed, insulted, and somebody else begins to describe . . . How weak is our flesh! I am perfectly aware of how vain these fantasies of hunger are, but I cannot exclude myself from the general law, and dancing before my eyes I see the pasta we had just cooked, Vanda, Luciana, Franco, and I, at the transit camp in Italy, when we suddenly heard the news that we

would leave the following day to come here; and we were eating (it was so good, yellow, filling), and we stopped, idiots, fools—if we had only known! And if it should happen again . . . Absurd. If one thing is sure in this world, it is certainly this: that it will not happen to us a second time. Fischer, the newest arrival, pulls a package out of his pocket, wrapped with the meticulousness of the Hungarians, and inside there is a half-ration of bread: half the bread from this morning. It is notorious that only the high numbers keep their bread in their pocket; none of us old ones are able to save our bread for an hour. Various theories circulate to justify this incapacity: bread, when eaten a little bit at a time, is not fully digested; the nervous tension needed to save the bread without touching it when you are hungry is in the highest degree harmful and debilitating; bread that is turning stale soon loses its alimentary value, so that the sooner it’s 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 together in the same individual; and the majority justly affirm that, in the end, one’s stomach is the vault most secure against thefts and extortions. “Moi, on m’a jamais volé mon pain!” David snarls, hitting his empty stomach, but he is unable to take his eyes off Fischer, who chews slowly and methodically, “lucky” enough still to 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 noon a surprise awaits us. Besides the normal morning ration, we discover in the barrack a wonderful fifty-liter vat, almost full, one of those from the Factory Kitchen. Templer looks at us, triumphant; this “organization” is his work. Templer is the official organizer of our Kommando: he has a highly sensitive nose for the civilians’ soup, like a bee for flowers. Our Kapo, who is not a bad Kapo, leaves him a free hand, and rightly so: Templer slinks off, following imperceptible tracks, like a bloodhound, and returns with the invaluable news that the Polish workers in the Methanol Department, a couple of kilometers from here, have abandoned forty liters of soup that tasted rancid, or that a

carload of turnips is to be found unguarded on the siding next to the Factory Kitchen. Today there are fifty liters and we are fifteen, Kapo and Vorarbeiter included. This means three liters each: we’ll have one at midday, in addition to the normal ration, and we’ll come back to the barrack in turns for the two others during the afternoon, and be granted an extra five-minute break to fill ourselves up. What more could one want? Even our work seems light, with the prospect of two hot, dense liters waiting for us in the barrack. The Kapo comes to us periodically and calls: “Wer hat noch zu fressen?” He says it not in derision or mockery but because the way we eat, standing, urgently, burning our mouths and throats, without taking time to breathe, really is fressen, the way animals eat, and certainly not essen, the way humans eat, sitting at a table, solemnly. “Fressen” is the proper word, and is the one we commonly use. Meister Nogalla watches, and closes an eye at our absences from work. Meister Nogalla also has a hungry look about him, and, if it weren’t for the social conventions, perhaps he would not refuse a liter of our hot broth. Templer’s turn comes. By popular consensus, he has been allowed five liters, 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 whenever he wants and in anticipation of a large meal, which contributes to his astonishing gastric capacity. He is justly proud of this gift of his, 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 amid the general benevolence prepares to enjoy the fruits of his labor: “Nu, Templer, hast du Platz genug für die Suppe gemacht?” At sunset, the siren of the Feierabend sounds, marking the end of work; and, as we are all sated, 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.

This Side of Good and Evil

We had an incorrigible tendency to see in every event a symbol and a sign. For seventy days we had been waiting for the Wäschetauschen, the ceremony of the change of clothes, and a persistent rumor circulated that there was a lack of clothes to exchange, because, as the front advanced, it was impossible for the Germans to bring new transports into Auschwitz, and “therefore” liberation was near. At the same time, the opposite interpretation circulated: that the delay in the change was a sure sign of an approaching total liquidation of the camp. Instead, the change took place, and, as usual, the officials of the Lager made sure that it would occur unexpectedly and in all the barracks at once. It should be understood that in the Lager cloth is scarce, and is precious, and that our only way of acquiring a rag to blow our nose, or a pad for our shoes, is, in fact, to cut off a piece of a shirt at the moment 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 tail, or unstitch one of the many patches. But in any case, time is needed to get hold of a needle and thread and carry out the operation with some skill, so that the damage is not too obvious at the time of handing over the shirt. The dirty, tattered clothing is bundled together, and passed on to the camp’s tailor shop, where it is cursorily patched, and from there it goes to the steam disinfection (not washed!), and then is redistributed; hence the need to make the exchanges as unexpected as possible, in order to protect the used clothing from the above mutilations. But, as always happens, it was not possible to prevent a shrewd glance from penetrating under the canvas of the cart as it was leaving after the disinfection, so that within a few minutes the camp knew that a Wäschetauschen was imminent, and, in addition, that this time there were new shirts from a convoy of Hungarians that had arrived three days earlier.

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 as an investment of capital in a moment of prosperity, immediately rushed to the 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 sweeps by Kapos or Blockälteste periodically rout merchants, customers, and the curious, nevertheless the northeast corner of the camp (significantly, the corner farthest from the SS barracks) is permanently occupied by a tumultuous throng, in the open in summer, in a washhouse in winter, as soon as the squads return from work. Here scores of prisoners, made desperate by hunger, prowl around, with lips parted and eyes gleaming, lured by a false instinct to where the merchandise displayed makes the gnawing in their stomachs more acute and their salivation more persistent. At best, they possess a miserable half-ration of bread that, with painful effort, they have saved since the morning, in the foolish hope of a chance to make an advantageous bargain with some ingenuous person who is unaware of the prices of the moment. Some, with savage patience, acquire a liter of soup with their half-ration, from which, having moved away from the crowd, they methodically extract the few pieces of potato lying at the bottom; this done, they exchange it for bread, and the bread for another liter to denature, 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. Those who come to the Market to sell their only shirt belong to the same species; they well know what will happen on the next occasion that the Kapo finds out that they are naked beneath their jacket. The Kapo will ask them what they have done with their shirt; it is a purely rhetorical question, a formality useful only for opening the exchange. They will reply that their shirt was stolen in the

washhouse; this reply is equally standard, and is not expected to be believed; in fact, even the stones of the Lager know that ninety-nine times out of a hundred those who have no shirt have sold it out of hunger, and that in any case one is responsible for one’s shirt because it belongs to the Lager. So the Kapo will beat them, they’ll be issued another shirt, and sooner or later they’ll begin again. The professional merchants are stationed in the Market, each in his usual corner; first among them are the Greeks, as immobile and silent as sphinxes, squatting on the ground behind bowls of thick soup, the fruits of their labor, their organizing, and their national solidarity. By now the Greeks have been reduced to very few, but they have made a contribution of major 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 klepsi-klepsi, of obvious Greek origin. These few survivors from the Jewish colony of Salonika, with their two languages, Spanish and Greek, and their numerous activities, are the repositories of a concrete, worldly, conscious wisdom, in which the traditions of all the Mediterranean civilizations converge. In the camp this wisdom has been transformed into the systematic and scientific practice of theft and seizure of posts of authority, and into a monopoly on the barter Market. But this should not let us forget that their aversion to gratuitous brutality, their amazing consciousness of the survival of at least the potential of human dignity, made the Greeks the most coherent national group in the Lager and, in this respect, the most civilized. At the Market you can find specialists in kitchen thefts, their jackets swelled by mysterious bulges. Whereas there is a virtually stable price for soup (half a ration of bread for a liter), the price of turnips, carrots, potatoes is extremely variable and depends greatly on, among other factors, the diligence and the corruptibility of the guards on duty at the warehouses. Mahorca is sold. Mahorca is a third-rate tobacco, in the form of woody chips, which is officially on sale at the Kantine

in fifty-gram packets, in exchange for “prize coupons” that Buna is supposed to distribute to the best workers. That distribution occurs irregularly, with great parsimony and manifest unfairness, so that the majority of coupons end up, either directly or through the abuse of authority, in the hands of the Kapos and 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 failed to arrive at the Kantine, so that, lacking coverage, the currency dropped abruptly to a quarter of a ration. Another boom period occurred for a singular reason: the changing of the guard at the Frauenblock, with the arrival of a fresh contingent of robust Polish girls. In fact, since the prize coupon is valid for entry into the Frauenblock (for the criminals and the politicals; not for the Jews, who, on the other hand, are not affected by this restriction), interested parties cornered the market actively and rapidly: hence the revaluation, which, however, 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 up in the hands of the civilian workers in Buna. This is a very widespread system of kombinacja: the Häftling, somehow saving a ration of bread, invests it in Mahorca; he cautiously gets in touch with a civilian addict, who buys the Mahorca, paying as it were in cash, with a portion of bread greater than that initially invested. The Häftling eats the surplus, and puts the remaining ration back on the market. Speculations of this kind establish a tie between the internal economy of the Lager and the economic life of the outside world: when the distribution of tobacco to the civilian population of Kraków accidentally failed, that fact, crossing the barbed-wire barrier that segregates us from human society, had an immediate

repercussion in the camp, provoking a notable rise in the price of Mahorca and, consequently, of the prize coupon. The process outlined above is only the simplest type; a more complex one is the following. The Häftling acquires in exchange for Mahorca or bread, or maybe receives as a gift from a civilian, some abominable, torn, dirty rag of a shirt, which must, however, have three holes suitable for the head and arms to more or less fit through. As long as it shows signs only of wear, and not of artificial mutilations, such an object, at the moment of the Wäschetauschen, is valid as a shirt and carries the right to an exchange; at most, the person who presents it will receive an appropriate number of blows for having taken so little care of the regulation clothing. Consequently, within the Lager, there is no great difference in value between a shirt worthy of the name and a rag covered with 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, because of his place of work, or because of language, or because of 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 reestablish equilibrium, distributing good and bad clothes in a perfectly random manner. But the first Häftling will be able to smuggle the good shirt into Buna and sell it to the original (or any other) civilian for four, six, even ten rations of bread. This high margin of profit reflects the gravity of the risk of leaving camp wearing more than one shirt or reentering with none. There are many variations on this theme. Some do not hesitate to have the gold crowns on their teeth extracted so as to sell them in Buna for bread or tobacco. But it is more usual for such traffic to take place through an intermediary. A high number, that is, a new arrival, only recently but sufficiently brutalized by hunger and by the extreme tension of life in the camp, is noticed by a low number for the abundance 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, and takes the gold to Buna, where,

if he is in contact with a trustworthy civilian, who he is not afraid will inform on or cheat him, he can make a sure gain of between ten and twenty or even 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 Buna, the maximum amount of any transaction negotiated within the camp is four rations of bread, because it would be practically impossible either to enter into contracts on credit or to safeguard a larger quantity of bread from the greed of others or from one’s own hunger. Trafficking 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 provided for in the camp regulations, and considered equivalent to a “political” crime; hence it is punished with particular severity. The Häftling convicted of Handel mit Zivilisten, unless he can rely on influential protection, ends up at Gleiwitz III, Janina, or Heidebreck, in the coal mines, which means death from exhaustion within a few weeks. Moreover, his accomplice, the civilian worker, may also be reported to the appropriate German authority and condemned to spend in the Vernichtungslager, under the same conditions as us, a period varying, as far as I know, from a fortnight to eight months. The workers on whom this retribution is imposed are stripped on entry, like us, but their personal possessions are kept in a special storeroom. They are not tattooed, and they keep their hair, which makes them easily recognizable, but for the entire duration of their 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 have no contact of any sort with the common Häftlinge. In fact, for them the Lager is 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 constitute a breach in the wall that makes us dead to the world, and a glimpse into the mystery that 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 the kind of

existence that has been allotted to us, without time limits, within the German social organism. One section of our camp 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 transactions outlined above are based on the smuggling of materials belonging to the Lager. This is why the SS are so rigorous in suppressing 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 do their best to see that the gold does not leave the camp. But against theft in itself the camp authorities have no prejudice. The attitude of open connivance by the SS in regard to smuggling in the opposite direction shows this clearly. Here things are generally simpler. 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 carrying out the exchange for bread or soup. This traffic is intense: in regard to certain articles, although they are necessary for the normal life of the camp, this method of theft in Buna is the only and regular means of procurement. Typical are the cases of brooms, paint, electrical wire, grease for shoes. The trade in this last item will serve as an example. As we have already noted, the camp regulations prescribe that shoes must be greased and polished every morning, and every Blockältester is responsible to the SS for compliance with this order by all the men in his barrack. One might think, then, that each barrack would enjoy a periodic assignment of grease for shoes, but this is not so; the mechanism is completely different. It should be stated first that each barrack receives an evening allotment of soup somewhat higher than

that prescribed for regulation rations; this extra amount is divided according to the discretion of the Blockältester, who first of all distributes it as a gift to his friends and protégés, then as recompense to the sweepers, the night guards, the lice inspectors, and all the other Prominents and functionaries. What is still left (and every smart Blockältester makes sure that there is always some) is used precisely for these purchases. The rest is obvious. Those Häftlinge who in Buna 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 barracks until they find a Blockältester who lacks the article or wants to stock up. In fact, each barrack usually has its habitual supplier, with whom a fixed daily payment has been agreed on, on condition that he provide the grease whenever the supply is about to run out. Every evening, next to the doors of the Tagesräume, the groups of suppliers stand around patiently; on their feet for hours and hours in the rain or snow, they discuss excitedly, in low tones, matters relating to the fluctuation of prices and the 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: lightbulbs, brushes, ordinary or shaving soap, files, pliers, sacks, nails. Methyl alcohol is sold to make drinks, and gas is useful for rudimentary lighters, marvels of the secret industry of Lager craftsmen. In this complex network of thefts and counter-thefts, fueled by the silent hostility between the SS command and the civilian authorities of Buna, Ka-Be plays a role 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 to 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 allotment of sulfonamides to Buna, selling them to civilians for foodstuffs. The nurses also make a huge profit from the trade in spoons. The Lager does not provide new arrivals with spoons, although the semiliquid soup cannot be consumed without one. The spoons are manufactured in Buna, secretly and in spare moments, by Häftlinge who work as specialists in the Kommandos of iron and tin workers. These spoons are crude and clumsy tools, hammered out of aluminum, and often have a sharp handle that also serves as a knife for cutting bread. The manufacturers themselves sell these directly to the new arrivals: an ordinary spoon is worth half a ration of bread, a knife-spoon three-quarters of a ration. Now, it is a law that although one can enter Ka-Be with one’s spoon, one cannot leave with it. As those who get better are about to be released, and before they are given clothes, their spoon is confiscated by the nurses and put up for sale in the Market. Adding the spoons of the patients about to leave to those of the dead and the selected, the nurses receive profits from the sale of about fifty spoons every day. On the other hand, the discharged patients are forced to begin work again with the initial disadvantage of half a ration of bread, allocated for the purchase of a new spoon. Finally, Ka-Be is the main customer and receiver of goods stolen in Buna: of the soup assigned to Ka-Be, a good twenty liters are set aside each day as the theft fund to acquire the most varied goods from the specialists. Some steal thin rubber tubing, which is used in Ka-Be for enemas and stomach pumps; others offer colored pencils and inks, necessary for Ka-Be’s complicated bookkeeping system; and thermometers, and laboratory glassware, and chemicals, which vanish from the Buna stores in the Häftlinge’s pockets and find a use in the infirmary as medical equipment. And I would not be guilty of immodesty if I add that it was our idea, mine and Alberto’s, to steal rolls of graph paper from the thermographs of the Drying Department, and offer them to

the Medical Chief of Ka-Be with the suggestion that they be used as forms for pulse-temperature charts. In conclusion: theft in Buna, punished by the civilian authorities, is sanctioned and encouraged by the SS; theft in the camp, severely repressed by the SS, is considered by the civilians a normal operation of exchange; theft among Häftlinge is generally punished, but the punishment strikes the thief and the victim with equal severity. We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words “good” and “evil,” “just” and “unjust”; let each judge, on the basis of the picture outlined and the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.

The Drowned and the Saved

What we have described so far and will continue to describe is the ambiguous life of the Lager. In our time many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good that any memory of this exceptional human state be retained. To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. Indeed, we are convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not always positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing. We would like to consider how the Lager was also, and preeminently, a gigantic biological and social experiment. Let thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture, and customs, be enclosed within barbed wire, and there be subjected to a regular, controlled life, which is identical for all and inadequate for all needs. No one could have set up a more rigorous experiment to determine what is inherent and what acquired in the behavior of the human animal faced with 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 need and physical privation, many habits and social instincts are reduced to silence. But another fact seems to us worthy of attention: what comes to light is 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 cowardly and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are much less distinct; they seem less innate, and above all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediate gradations. This division is much less evident in ordinary life, for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself. Normally a man is not alone and, in his rise or fall, is bound to the destiny of his neighbors, 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 usually in possession of such spiritual, physical, and even financial resources that the probability of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, is relatively small. And then one must add the definite cushioning effect exercised by the law, and by the moral sense that constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a poor man from becoming too poor or a powerful one too powerful. But things are different in the Lager: here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone. If some Null Achtzehn totters, he will find no one to extend a hand; on the contrary, someone will knock him aside, because it is in no one’s interest that there be one more Muselmann5 dragging himself to work every day. And if someone, by a miracle of savage patience and cunning, finds a new expedient for avoiding the hardest work, a new art that 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 he who is feared is, ipso facto, a candidate for survival. In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a fierce law that states: “To he who has, it will be given; from he who has not, it 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, and is recognized by all. The bosses, too, willingly maintain contact with the adaptable, with those who are strong and astute, sometimes even in a comradely way, because they

hope, perhaps later, to derive some benefit. But it’s not worth speaking to the Muselmänner, the men who are disintegrating, because you know already that they will complain and will tell you about what they used to eat at home. It’s even less worthwhile to make friends with them, because they have no important connections in the camp, they do not get any extra rations, they do not work in profitable Kommandos, and they do not know any secret method of organizing. And, in any case, it’s clear that they are only passing through here, that in a few weeks nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some nearby field and a checked-off number in a register. Although engulfed and swept along unceasingly by the innumerable crowd of those like them, they suffer and drag themselves on in an opaque inner solitude, and in solitude they die or disappear, leaving no 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 situation was different), kleine Nummer, low numbers under 150000, only a few hundred were still alive; not one was an ordinary Häftling, vegetating in the ordinary Kommandos, and subsisting on the normal ration. There remained only doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians, cooks, young attractive homosexuals, friends or compatriots of some authority in the camp; the notably pitiless, vigorous, and inhuman individuals installed (as the result of investiture by the SS leadership, which, by its choices, showed itself to possess a Satanic knowledge of human beings) in the posts of Kapo, Blockältester, etc.; and, finally, those who, without holding particular offices, always managed, by their astuteness and energy, to organize successfully, gaining in this way, besides material advantages and reputation, indulgence and esteem on the part of the powerful people in the camp. Anyone who does not know how to become an Organisator, Kombinator, Prominent (the eloquence of these words!) soon becomes a Muselmann. In life, a third way exists, and is in fact the rule; in the concentration camp, the third way does not exist.

The easiest thing is to succumb: one has only to carry out all the orders one receives, eat only the ration, stick to the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience proved that very rarely could one survive more than three months in this way. All the Muselmänner who go to the gas chambers have the same story, or, more exactly, have no story; they have followed the slope to the bottom, naturally, like streams running down to the sea. Once they entered the camp, they were overwhelmed, either through basic incapacity, or through misfortune, or through some banal incident, before they could adapt; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German and to untangle the fiendish knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already breaking down, and nothing can save them from selection 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 the same, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to truly suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death—in the face of it they have no fear, because they are too tired to understand. They crowd my memory with their faceless presence, and if I could encompass all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image, which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, head bowed and shoulders bent, on whose face and in whose eyes no trace of thought can be seen. If the drowned have no story, and there is only a single, broad path to perdition, the paths to salvation are many, rugged and unimaginable. The main path, as we have stated, is Prominenz. Prominenten is the name for the camp officials, from the Häftling overseer (Lagerältester) to the Kapos, the cooks, the nurses, the night guards, even the barrack sweepers, and the Scheissminister and Bademeister (superintendents of the latrines and the showers). We are more particularly interested in the Jewish Prominents, because, while the others were automatically appointed to positions upon entering the camp,

by virtue of their natural supremacy, the Jews had to plot and struggle hard to gain them. The Jewish Prominents form a sad and notable human phenomenon. Present, past, and atavistic sufferings converge with the tradition and cultivation of hostility toward the stranger to make of them monsters of asociality and insensitivity. They are a typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if a position of privilege, a degree of comfort, and a reasonable probability of survival are offered to a few individuals in a state of slavery, in exchange for the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, someone will certainly accept. He will be removed from the common law and will become untouchable; hence the more power he is granted, the more hateful and hated he will be. When he is given 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, which remains unfulfilled toward the oppressors, will spill over, unreasonably, onto the oppressed; and he will be satisfied only when he has heaped onto his underlings the abuse received from above. We are aware that this is very distant from the picture that is usually given of the oppressed, who are united, if not in resistance, at least in suffering. We do not deny that this can happen when oppression does not go beyond a certain limit, or perhaps when the oppressor, through inexperience or magnanimity, tolerates or encourages it. But we would observe that in our time, in all countries that have been invaded by a foreign people, an analogous condition of rivalry and hatred among the subjugated has been established; and this, like many other human characteristics, could be grasped in the Lager with crude force. There is less to say about the non-Jewish Prominents, although they were by far the more numerous (no “Aryan” Häftling was without a post, however modest). That they were stupid and bestial seems natural once one knows that the

majority were common criminals, chosen from the German prisons precisely for the purpose of being employed as supervisors in the camps for Jews; and we maintain that it was a very apt choice, because we refuse to believe that the wretched human specimens whom we saw at work were an average sample, not just of Germans in general but even of German prisoners in particular. It is more difficult to explain how in Auschwitz the German, Polish, and Russian political Prominents rivaled the ordinary convicts in brutality. But it is well-known that in Germany the label of political crime was 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 harsh conditions, which, however, differed in many aspects from those described here. But, besides the officials in the strict sense of the word, there was a vast category of prisoners, not initially favored by fate, who struggled to survive purely by their own strength. One had 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 strangle all dignity and kill all conscience, to enter the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain peoples and individuals in cruel times. Many were the ways devised and put into practice by us in order not to die: as many as there are human characters. All implied a grueling struggle of one against all, and many a not inconsiderable sum of aberrations and compromises. To survive without renouncing any part of their own moral world —apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune— was conceded only to a very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and saints. We will try to show in how many ways one might reach salvation by telling 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 his fellow men,

beginning with the pogrom that drove 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 been accustomed to thinking of himself merely as a sack that needs periodic refilling. Schepschel is not very robust, or very courageous, or very wicked; he is not even particularly astute, and has never found an arrangement that allows him a little respite, but is reduced to small, occasional expedients, kombinacje, as they are called here. Every now and again he steals a broom in Buna and sells it to the Blockältester. When he manages to set aside a little bread-capital, he rents the tools of the cobbler in the Block, a compatriot of his, and works on his own account for a few hours; he knows how to make suspenders with braided electrical wire; Sigi told me that he has seen him during the midday break singing and dancing in front of the barrack of the Slovak workers, who sometimes reward him with the remains of their soup. This said, one might be inclined to think of Schepschel with indulgent sympathy, as a poor wretch whose spirit by now harbors 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 arose 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 favor in the eyes of the Blockältester and furthering his candidacy for the position of vat washer.

The story of the engineer Alfred L. shows among other things how empty is the myth of original equality among men. In his own country L. was the manager of an extremely important factory that made chemical products, and his name was (and is) familiar in industrial circles throughout Europe. He was a robust man of about fifty; I don’t know how he had been arrested, but he entered the camp like everyone else: naked, alone, and unknown. When I knew him, he was very emaciated, yet his face still preserved the features of a disciplined and methodical energy; at the time, his privileges

were limited to the daily cleaning of the Polish workers’ soup vat; this job, which he had somehow obtained as his exclusive monopoly, yielded him half a bowlful of soup per day. Certainly it was not enough to satisfy his hunger; nevertheless, no one had ever heard him complain. Rather, the few words that he let slip implied vast 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 bimonthly change (we would like to point out here that to wash a shirt meant finding soap, finding time, finding space in the overcrowded washhouse; training oneself to keep a careful watch on the wet shirt, without losing sight of it for a moment, and to put it on, naturally still wet, at the time for silence, when the lights are turned out); he owned a pair of wooden shoes for going to the shower, and even his striped garments were singularly suited to his physique, and were clean and new. L. had acquired in essence the full appearance of a Prominent, considerably before becoming one; only a long time afterward did I find out that he had been able to earn all this show of prosperity with incredible tenacity, paying for each of his acquisitions and services with bread from his own ration, thus imposing on himself a regime of additional privations. His plan was a long-term one, which is all the more remarkable as it was conceived in an environment dominated by a mentality of the provisional; and L. carried it out with strict inner discipline, and without pity for himself or—with greater reason—for comrades who crossed his path. L. knew that it’s a short step from being judged powerful to effectively becoming so, and that everywhere, and especially amid the general leveling of the Lager, a respectable appearance is the best guarantee of being respected. He took great care not to be confused with the mass; he worked with ostentatious commitment, occasionally even admonishing lazy comrades in a persuasive and apologetic tone of voice; he avoided the daily struggle for the best place in line for the soup, and was prepared to take the first, notoriously very liquid portion,

every day, so as to be noticed by the Blockältester for his discipline. To complete this detachment, in his relations with his comrades he always behaved 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 tidy clothing and his emaciated but clean-shaven face amid the herd of his sordid and slovenly colleagues to convince both Kapo and Arbeitsdienst immediately that he was one of the genuinely saved, a potential Prominent; and so (to he who has, it shall be given) he was, of course, promoted to “specialist,” named technical head of the Kommando, and taken on by the management of Buna as an analyst in the laboratory of the Styrene Department. He was subsequently appointed to examine all the new additions to the Chemical Kommando staff, in order to judge their professional ability. He always did this with extreme rigor, especially in regard to those in whom he scented possible future rivals. I do not know how his story continued; but it seems to me very likely that he managed to escape death, and today is still living his cold life as a determined and joyless master.

Elias Lindzin, 141565, one day fell inexplicably into the Chemical Kommando. He was a dwarf, no more than five feet tall, but I have never seen muscles like his. When he is naked you can see every muscle rippling beneath his skin, powerful and mobile, like an animal unique of its kind; if his body were enlarged, with no alteration to its proportions, it would serve as a good model for a Hercules—as long as one does not look at his head. Under his scalp, the cranial sutures stand out excessively. The skull is massive and gives the impression of being made of metal or stone; the black edge of his shaved hair is visible 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 vigor emanates from his body.

To see Elias work is a disconcerting spectacle; the Polish Meister, and even the Germans, sometimes stop to admire Elias in action. Nothing seems impossible to him. While we have trouble carrying one bag of cement, Elias carries two, then three, then four—no one knows how he keeps them balanced—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 of bronze. Despite his wooden shoes, Elias climbs like a monkey up the scaffolding and runs confidently along girders suspended over nothing; he carries six bricks at a time balanced on his head; he can 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 can 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 six, eight, ten liters of soup without vomiting and without having diarrhea, and begin work again immediately afterward. He knows how to produce a big hump between his shoulders, and goes around the barrack, lopsided and misshapen, shouting and declaiming incomprehensibly, to the joy of the Prominents of the camp. I saw him fight a Pole a whole head taller and knock him down with a blow of his skull to the stomach, as powerful and accurate as a catapult. I never saw him rest, I never saw him quiet or still, I never knew him injured or ill. Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything; in any case, to picture Elias as a free man requires a profound effort of imagination and deduction. He speaks only Polish and the surly, deformed Yiddish of Warsaw; besides, it’s impossible to keep him to a coherent conversation. He might be twenty years old or forty; he usually says he’s thirty-three, and has begot seventeen children—which is not unlikely. He talks continuously on the most varied subjects, always in a resounding voice, with oratorical accents and the violent gestures of the deranged, as if he were always speaking to a large crowd—and, naturally, he never lacks a crowd. Those who understand his language drink up his declamations, shaking with laughter; they slap him enthusiastically on his hard back, inciting him to continue, while he, fierce and

frowning, whirls around like a wild animal within the circle of his audience. Addressing now one, now another, he suddenly grabs hold of one by the chest with his small hooked paw, irresistibly pulls him forward, vomits an incomprehensible invective into his astonished face, then throws him back like a piece of wood, and, amid applause and laughter, with his arms reaching up to the heavens like a small prophetic monster, continues his raging, crazy speech. His fame as an exceptional worker spread rapidly and, by the absurd law of the Lager, from then on he practically ceased to work. His help was requested directly by the various Meister, but only for such jobs as required special skills and strength. Apart from these services, he supervised our daily, dull labor insolently and violently, often disappearing on mysterious visits and adventures in who knows what recesses of the worksite, 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 cunning of wild animals. He is never caught in the act, because he steals only when there is a favorable opportunity; but when there is, Elias steals as inevitably and predictably as a stone falls if you let go of it. Apart from the fact that it is difficult to surprise him, it’s obvious that it would serve no purpose to punish him for his thefts: to him they represent a vital act, like breathing or sleeping. We can now ask who is this man Elias: if he is a madman, incomprehensible and superhuman, who ended up in the Lager by chance; if he is an atavism, out of place in our modern world, and better suited to the primordial conditions of camp life. Or if he is, rather, a product of the camp, 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 destruction from the outside, because he is physically indestructible; he has resisted annihilation from within because he is insane. So, first of all, he is a survivor: he is the fittest, the human type best suited to this way of life.

If Elias regains his freedom, 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 or madmen: no criminals, because there is no moral law to contravene; no madmen, because we are without free will, as our every action is, in time and place, clearly the only one possible. In the Lager, Elias prospers and is triumphant. He is a good worker and a good organizer, and for that double reason he is safe from selections and respected by both leaders and comrades. For those who have no solid inner resources, for those who cannot draw from their own self-consciousness the strength needed to cling to life, the only path to salvation leads to Elias: to insanity and to insidious bestiality. All other paths are dead ends. That said, one might perhaps be tempted to draw conclusions, perhaps even rules, for our daily life. Are there not all around us Eliases, more or less fully realized? Do we not see individuals who live 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, because these are intended to be stories of the Lager, while much has already been written about man outside the Lager. But one thing we would like to add: Elias, as far as it’s possible to judge from the outside, and as far as the word can have meaning, was in all likelihood a happy individual.

Henri, on the other hand, is eminently civilized and sane, and possesses a complete and organic theory on ways to survive in the Lager. He is only twenty-two; he is extremely intelligent, speaks French, German, English, and Russian, has an excellent scientific and classical education. His brother died in Buna last winter, and from that day Henri cut off every tie of affection; he closed himself up in himself, as if in armor, and fights to live without distraction, using all the resources that he can derive from his quick intellect and his refined upbringing. According to Henri’s theory, there are three methods by means of which a man can

escape extermination and still remain worthy of the name of man: organization, compassion, and theft. He himself practices all three. There is no better strategist than Henri in manipulating (“cultivating,” he says) the English prisoners of war. In his hands they become real geese with golden eggs—if you remember that in exchange for a single English cigarette you can get enough in the Lager not to starve for a day. Henri was once seen in the act of eating a real hardboiled egg. Trading 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 compassion. Henri has the delicate and subtly androgynous body and face of Sodoma’s St. Sebastian: his eyes are dark and profound, he has no beard yet, he moves with a natural languid elegance (although when necessary he can run and jump like a cat, while the capacity of his stomach is scarcely inferior to Elias’s). Henri is perfectly aware of his natural gifts and exploits them with the cool competence of someone handling a scientific instrument; the results are surprising. Basically it’s a question of a discovery. Henri has discovered that compassion, being a primary and instinctive sentiment, flourishes if skillfully inculcated, particularly in the primitive minds of the brutes who command us, those very brutes who have no scruples about knocking us down for no reason and trampling us once we’re on the ground; nor has the great practical importance of the discovery escaped him, and on it he has built up his personal industry. Like the ichneumon wasp that paralyzes a large hairy caterpillar, wounding it in its sole vulnerable ganglion, Henri sizes up the subject, son type, at a glance. He speaks to him briefly, in 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 it isn’t long 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 extremely numerous: English soldiers,

French, Ukrainian, Polish civilian workers; German “politicals”; at least four Blockälteste, a cook, even an SS officer. But his favorite field is Ka-Be: Henri has free entry into Ka-Be; Dr. Citron and Dr. Weiss are more than his protectors—they are his friends and admit him whenever he wants and with the diagnosis he wants. This takes place above all immediately before selections, and in the periods of the heaviest work: to “hibernate,” as he says. It’s natural that Henri, possessing such notable friendships, is rarely reduced to the third method, theft; on the other hand, of course, it’s not a subject that he willingly discusses. It’s very pleasant to talk to Henri in moments of rest. It’s also useful: there is nothing in the camp that he does not know and about which he has not reasoned in his close, coherent manner. Of his conquests, he speaks with polite modesty, as of prey of little value, but he digresses willingly to explain the calculation that led him to approach Hans by asking him about his son at the front, and Otto by showing him the scars on his shins. To speak with Henri is useful and pleasant. Sometimes one also feels a warmth and closeness; communication, even affection appears possible. One seems to glimpse the sorrowful, conscious human depths of his uncommon personality. But the next moment his sad smile freezes into a cold grimace that appears practiced 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 armor, the enemy of all, inhumanly sly and incomprehensible, like the Serpent in Genesis. After my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I always had a slight taste of defeat, and a confused suspicion of having been, in some inadvertent way, not a man to him but an instrument in his hands. I know that Henri is alive today. I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again.

5. Author’s note: This word, Muselmann, was used, although I do not know why, by the old hands of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.

Chemistry Examination

Kommando 98, called the Chemical Kommando, was supposed to be a squad of skilled workers. The day its formation was officially announced, a meager group of fifteen Häftlinge gathered in the gray dawn around the new Kapo in Roll Call Square. This was the first disappointment: he was a green triangle, a professional criminal; the Arbeitsdienst had not thought it necessary for the Kapo of the Chemical Kommando to be a chemist. It was pointless to waste any breath asking him questions; he would not have replied, or he would have replied with shouts and kicks. On the other hand, his not very robust appearance and his smaller than average stature were reassuring. He made a short speech in vulgar barracks German, and the disappointment 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, assigned to the Magnesium Chloride warehouse. Secondly, if they imagined, being Intelligenten, intellectuals, that they could make a fool of him, Alex, a Reichsdeutscher, well, Herrgottsakrament, he would show them, he would . . . (and with clenched fist and index finger extended he cut the air in the German gesture of threat); and, finally, they should not imagine that they would deceive anyone, if a man who was not a chemist presented himself as one. An examination, yes, gentlemen, in the next few days, 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 has been wasted, Kommandos 96 and 97 have already started, forward

Marsch, and, to begin with, whoever fails to keep in line and step will have to deal with him. He was a Kapo like all other Kapos.

Leaving the camp, in view of the band and the SS counting station, we march five abreast, cap in hand, arms motionless at our sides, and neck rigid; speaking is forbidden. Then we switch to threes, and it is possible to exchange a few words amid the clatter of ten thousand pairs of wooden shoes. Who are my chemist 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’s dangerous to look behind—I might lose step or stumble—but I try for a moment, and see the face of Iss Clausner. As long as we’re walking there is no time to think; we have to take care not to step on the shoes of the person hobbling in front, and not to let our own be stepped on by the person behind, and every now and again there is a hole to get over, an oily puddle to avoid. I know where we are, I’ve already been here with my previous Kommando; it’s the HStrasse, the road of the warehouses, I tell Alberto, we really are going to the Magnesium Chloride warehouse, at least that was not a lie. We have arrived, we go down into a large damp, drafty cellar; this is the headquarters of the Kommando—the Bude, as it is called here. The Kapo divides us into three squads: four to unload sacks from the freight car, seven to carry them down, four to stack them in the warehouse. These last are Alberto and I, Iss and the Dutchman. At last we can speak, and to each of us what Alex said seems a madman’s dream. With these empty faces of ours, these shaved skulls, these shameful clothes, to take a chemistry examination. And obviously it will be in German; and we’ll have to go before

some blond Aryan Doktor hoping that we don’t have to blow our noses, because perhaps he won’t know that we don’t have handkerchiefs, and it will certainly not be possible to explain it to him. And with us we’ll have our old companion hunger, and we will hardly be able to stand steady on our feet, and he will certainly smell our odor, to which we are by now accustomed, but which persecuted us during the first days, the odor of turnips and cabbages, raw, cooked, and digested. Exactly so, Clausner confirms. But do the Germans have such a 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 that is asked of us, of us who are no longer alive, of us who are already half mad in the grim 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 don’t think about it for more than a few minutes a day, and even then in a strangely detached and distant manner, we know very well that we will end up in a selection. I know that I am not made of the stuff of those who endure, I am too civilized, I still think too much, I wear myself out at work. And now I also know that I will survive if I become a specialist, and that I will become a specialist if I pass a chemistry examination. Today, this very day, as I sit at a table and write, I myself am not convinced that these things really happened.

Three days passed, three of the usual unremembered days, so long while they were passing and so short once they had passed, and already we were all tired of believing in the chemistry examination. The Kommando was reduced to twelve men: three had disappeared the way people did there, perhaps into the barrack next door, perhaps removed from the world. Of the twelve, five were not chemists; all five had immediately requested permission from Alex to return to their former Kommandos. They did not escape beatings, but unexpectedly, and by who

knows what authority, it was decided that they should remain as auxiliaries to the Chemical Kommando. Down came Alex into the Magnesium Chloride cellar and called the seven of us out to go and face the examination. Here we are, like seven awkward chicks behind the hen, following Alex up the steps of the Polymerisations-Büro. We are in the lobby, and on the door is a brass plate with the three famous names. Alex knocks respectfully, takes off his cap, and enters. We hear a quiet voice. Alex comes out again: “Ruhe, jetzt. Warten.” Wait now in silence. We are satisfied with this. When we wait, time runs smoothly—there is no need to intervene and drive it forward— while when we work every minute moves through us arduously and has to be laboriously pushed out. We are always happy to wait; we are capable of waiting for hours with the complete dull-witted 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, are uneasy, each in his own way; only Mendi is not. Mendi is a rabbi; he comes from Subcarpathian 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, and a linguist, he was a partisan, and has a law degree; he is not a chemist, but he wants to try all the same, he is a stubborn, courageous, keen little man. Bálla has a pencil and we all crowd around him. We aren’t sure if we still know how to write, we want to try. Kohlenwasserstoffe, Massenwirkungsgesetz. The German names of compounds and laws float back to the surface. I feel grateful to my brain: I have not paid much attention to it, and yet it still serves me so well. Here is Alex. I am a chemist. What have I to do with this Alex? He plants himself in front of me, roughly adjusts the collar of my jacket, pulls off my cap and slaps it firmly down on my head, then steps back, and, eyeing the result with a disgusted air, turns away, muttering, “Was für ein Muselmann Zugang.” What a shabby new acquisition!

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 not come to fetch me until the afternoon. What bad luck, I won’t even be able talk to the others to find out “what the questions are.” This time it really is my turn. On the steps, Alex looks at me blackly; in some way he feels responsible for my miserable appearance. He dislikes me because I am Italian, because I am a Jew, and because, of all of us, I am the one furthest from his barracks ideal of virility. By analogy, without understanding anything, and proud of this very ignorance, he displays a profound disbelief in my chances on the examination. We have entered. There is only Doktor Pannwitz; Alex, cap in hand, speaks to him in an undertone: “. . . an Italian, has been in the Lager only three months, already half kaputt. . . . Er sagt er ist Chemiker. . . .” But he, Alex, apparently has his reservations on the subject. Alex is dismissed in a few words and set 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 stakes are high; yet I feel a mad desire to disappear, to avoid the test. Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has the eyes, the hair, and the nose that all Germans ought to have, and sits formidably behind an elaborate desk. I, Häftling 174517, stand in his office, which is a real office, shining, clean, and orderly, and it seems to me that I would leave a dirty stain if I were to touch anything. When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me. Since that day, I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself about his inner workings as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization Department and his Indo-Germanic conscience. Above all, when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not out of a spirit of revenge but merely out of my curiosity about the human soul.

Because that look did not pass between two men; and if I knew how to explain fully the nature of that look, exchanged as if through the glass wall of an aquarium between two beings who inhabit different worlds, I would also be able to explain the essence of the great insanity of the Third Reich. What we all thought and said of the Germans could be felt at that moment, in an immediate manner. The brain that governed those blue eyes and those manicured hands said, “This something in front of me belongs to a species that it is obviously right to suppress. In this particular case, one has first to make sure that it does not contain some useful 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 mining chemistry. I am a specialist in organic syntheses. I am a specialist . . .” And the examination began, while in the corner Alex, that third zoological specimen, yawned and ground his teeth. “Wo sind Sie geboren?” He uses Sie, the polite form of address: Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz has no sense of humor. Damn him, he isn’t making the slightest effort to speak a more comprehensible German. “I took my degree at Turin in 1941, summa cum laude”— and, as I say it, I have the definite impression of not being believed, I don’t really believe it myself; it’s enough to look at my dirty hands covered with sores, my convict’s trousers encrusted with mud. Yet I am he, the university graduate of Turin—in fact at this particular moment it is impossible to doubt my identity with him, for my reservoir of knowledge of organic chemistry, even after this long period of idleness, responds upon 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 exams, my fever of my exams, the spontaneous mobilization of all my logical faculties and all my knowledge that my classmates so envied. The examination is going well. As I gradually realize this, I seem to grow in stature. Now he is asking me what was the subject of my degree thesis. I have to make a violent effort to

recall that sequence of memories, so deeply buried: it is as if I were 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 with his safe existence: he asks me if I know English, he shows me Gattermann’s textbook, and this, too, is absurd and impossible, that down here, on the other side of the barbed wire, a Gattermann should exist, exactly the same as the one I studied in Italy in my fourth year, at home. Now it is over: the excitement that sustained me during the entire test suddenly gives way, and, dazed and dumb, I stare at the fair-skinned hand writing down my fate on the blank 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 for a suitable formula of leave-taking: but in vain. In German I know how to say eat, work, steal, die; I also know how to say sulfuric acid, atmospheric pressure, and short-wave generator; but I have no idea how to address a person of importance. Here we are again on the steps. Alex flies down them: he has leather shoes because he is not a Jew, he is as light on his feet as the devils of Malebolge. At the bottom he turns and looks at me sourly as I walk down hesitantly and noisily in my two enormous mismatched wooden clogs, clinging to the railing like an old man. It seems to have gone well, but it would be foolish 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 be a little less hungry, and this is a concrete advantage, not to be taken away. To reenter Bude, we have to cross a space cluttered with piles of girders and metal frames. The steel cable of a winch cuts across our path, and Alex grabs hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter, he looks at his hand, black with thick grease. In

the meantime I have joined him. Without hatred and without contempt, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the innocent brute Alex, if someone told him that today I judge him on the basis of this action, him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, great and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.

The Canto of Ulysses

There were six of us, scraping and cleaning the inside of an underground gas tank; the daylight reached us only through a small door. It was a luxury job, because no one was supervising us; but it was cold and damp. The powdery rust burned us 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 scrape the resonant steel-plate wall vigorously. 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 in the Chemical Kommando. So he was given the post of Pikolo, meaning errand boy/clerk, responsible for cleaning the barrack, for the distribution of tools, for washing the bowls, and for keeping a 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?” . . . what was the Kapo’s mood? And the matter of the twenty-five lashes given to Stern? What was the weather like outside? Had he read the newspaper? What sort of smell was coming from the civilian kitchen? What was the time? Jean was very well liked by the Kommando. It should be noted that the post of Pikolo represented quite a high rank in the hierarchy of the Prominenz: the Pikolo (who is usually no older than seventeen) does no manual work, has a free hand

with the remains of the daily ration at the bottom of the vat, and can stay near the stove all day. 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 carried out his secret individual struggle against the camp and against death with tenacity and courage, he did not neglect his human relationships with less privileged comrades, and yet he was so skillful 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 beast, with an armor of solid, dense ignorance and stupidity, except for his intuitive and consummate technique as a torturer. He never missed 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 toward the civilian supervisors, and with the SS he maintained ties of cordial friendship. He was clearly intimidated by the Kommando’s register and by the daily performance report, and this was the path that Pikolo chose to make himself indispensable. It had been a slow, cautious, and subtle task, which the entire Kommando had followed for a month with bated breath; but in the end the porcupine’s defenses were penetrated, and Pikolo confirmed in his office, to the satisfaction of all concerned. Although Jean never abused his position, we had already been able to verify that a single word of his, spoken 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 reported to the SS. He and I had been friends for a week: we discovered each other during the unusual occasion of an air-raid alarm, but then, swept up by the fierce rhythm of

the Lager, we had been able to greet each other only fleetingly, at the latrines, in the washhouse.

Hanging onto the swaying ladder with one hand, he pointed to me: “Aujourd’hui c’est Primo qui viendra avec moi chercher la soupe.” Until the day before it had been Stern, the squinting Transylvanian; now he had fallen into disgrace for some business of brooms stolen from the warehouse, and Pikolo had managed to support my candidacy as assistant for the Essenholen, the daily task of picking up the ration. He climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the brightness of the day. It was warm outside; the sun drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth that made me think of a summer beach of my childhood. 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. We could see the Carpathians, covered with snow. I breathed in the fresh air, I felt unusually lighthearted. “Tu es fou de marcher si vite. On a le temps, tu sais.” The ration was picked up a kilometer away; you had to return with the pot, weighing fifty kilos, supported on the two poles. It was quite a tiring job, but it meant a pleasant walk there without a load, and the ever welcome opportunity of getting near the kitchens. We slowed down. Pikolo was experienced. He had chosen the path cleverly, so that we would make a long circuit, walking for at least an hour, without arousing suspicions. We spoke of our homes, of Strasbourg and Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied, of our mothers: how all mothers resemble one another! 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 made it, that day by day he was making it. An SS man passed on a bicycle. It’s Rudi, the Blockführer. Halt! Attention! Take off your cap! “Sale brute, celui-là. Ein

ganz gemeiner Hund.” Can he speak French and German with equal facility? Yes, it makes no difference, he can think in both languages. He spent a month in Liguria, he likes Italy, he would like to learn Italian. I would be happy to teach him Italian: why not try? We can do it. Why not immediately, one thing is as good as another, what’s important 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, ac-qua.” Frenkel the spy passes. Quicken the 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 choose, 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 Dante is. What the Comedy is. What a curiously novel sensation, to try to explain briefly what the Divine Comedy is. How the Inferno is divided up, what its punishments are. Virgil is Reason, Beatrice is Theology. Jean pays close attention, and I begin slowly and precisely: The greater horn within that ancient flame began to sway and tremble, murmuring, just like a fire that struggles in the wind; then, he waved his flame-tip back and forth, as if it were a tongue that tried to speak, and flung toward us a voice that answered: “When I departed . . .”6 Here I stop and try to translate. Disastrous—poor Dante and poor French! All the same, the experience seems to augur well: Jean admires the bizarre simile of the tongue and suggests the appropriate word to translate antica (ancient).

And after “When I departed”? Nothing. A hole in my memory. “Before Aeneas gave that place a name.” Another hole. An unusable fragment floats into my mind: “nor pity / for my old father, nor the love I owed Penelope, / which would have gladdened her,” can that be correct? . . . but I set out on the open sea. Of this, yes, I am certain, this I can explain to Pikolo, I can point out why “I set out”—“misi me”— is not “je me mis,” it is much stronger and more audacious, it is a chain that has been broken, it is throwing oneself beyond a barrier, we know the impulse well. The deep open sea: Pikolo has traveled by sea and knows what it means. It is when the horizon closes in on itself, free, straight, and simple, and there is nothing but the smell of the sea—sweet things, cruelly distant. We have arrived at the Kraftwerk, where the cable-laying Kommando works. Engineer Levi must be here. There he is, only his head is visible above the trench. He waves to me, he is a spirited man, I have never seen his morale low, he never talks about eating. “Open sea,” “open sea” (mare aperto), I know it rhymes with “deserted” (diserto): “. . . and with that small company of those who never had deserted me,” but I no longer 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 rescued only one line, but it is worth pausing on: . . . that men might heed and never reach beyond . . . “Reach beyond” (si metta): I had to come to the Lager to realize that it’s the same expression as before: “I set out” (misi me). But I say nothing to Jean, I’m not sure that it’s an important observation. How many other things there are to say, and the sun is already high, midday is near. I’m in a hurry, a terrible hurry. Here, listen, Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, you have to understand, for my sake:

Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge. As if I, too, were 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 kind Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps, despite the feeble translation and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received the message, he has understood 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 talk about these things with the soup poles on our shoulders. I spurred my comrades with this brief address To meet the journey with such eagerness . . . and I try, but in vain, to explain how many things this “eagerness” means. There is another gap here, this time irreparable. “. . . the light beneath the moon” or something like that; but before it? . . . No idea, keine Ahnung, as they say here. Forgive me, Pikolo, I have forgotten at least four terzinas. “Ça ne fait rien, vas-y tout de même.” When there before us rose a mountain, dark because of distance, and it seemed to me the highest mountain I had ever seen. Yes, yes, not “very high” but “highest,”7 a consecutive proposition. And the mountains when one sees them in the distance . . . the mountains . . . oh, Pikolo, Pikolo, say something, speak, don’t let me think of my mountains, which would appear in the evening dusk as I returned by train from Milan to Turin! Enough, one has to go on, these are things one thinks but does not say. Pikolo waits and looks at me. I would give today’s soup to be able to connect “the highest I had ever seen” to the last lines. I try to reconstruct it

through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers—but it’s no use, the rest is silence. Other lines dance in my head: “The tearful earth gave forth a wind,” no, it’s something else. It’s late, it’s late, we’ve reached the kitchen, I have to finish: Three times it turned her round with all the waters; and at the fourth, it lifted up the stern so that our prow plunged deep, as pleased an Other. I hold Pikolo back, it is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand this “as pleased an Other” before it’s 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, and something else, 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 line, among the sordid, ragged crowd of soup-carriers from other Kommandos. Those who have just arrived press against our backs. “Kraut und Rüben?” “Kraut und Rüben.” The official announcement is made that the soup today is cabbage and turnips: “Choux et navets.” “Kaposzta és répak.” Until the sea again closed—over us. 6. Inferno Canto XXVI:85–90. 7. Alta tanto, not tanto alta.

The Events of the Summer

Throughout the spring, convoys arrived from Hungary; one of every two prisoners was Hungarian, and Hungarian became 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 prisoners. As such, we of Kommando 98 were not surprised that the promises made to us and the chemistry examination we had passed had brought no result: neither surprised nor exceptionally saddened. At bottom, we all had a certain fear of change: “When things change, they change for the worse” was one of the camp proverbs. More generally, experience had shown us countless times the futility of every conjecture: why torment oneself by trying to see into the future when no action, no word of ours could have the least influence? We were old Häftlinge: our wisdom lay in “not trying to understand,” not imagining the future, not torturing ourselves about how and when it would all be over: not asking questions of ourselves or others. We preserved the memories of our previous life, but blurred and remote, and hence profoundly sweet and sad, like the memories of early childhood and all things that are over, whereas for each of us the moment of entry into the camp was the starting point of a different sequence of memories, near and sharp, constantly confirmed by present experience, like wounds reopened every day. The news, heard at the worksite, of the Allied landing in Normandy, of the Russian offensive, and of the failed attempt on Hitler’s life had given rise to violent but ephemeral waves of hope. Day by day each of us felt his strength fade, his desire to live melt away, his mind grow dim; and Normandy and Russia were so far away, and winter so close, hunger and desolation so concrete, and all the rest so unreal, that it did not seem possible that any world and time existed other than our

world of mud and our sterile and stagnant time, whose end we were by now incapable of imagining. For living men, units of time always have a value, which increases in proportion 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 slow, a worthless and superfluous material that we sought to rid ourselves of as quickly as possible. With the end of the time when the days followed one another vivacious, precious, and irrecoverable, the future stood before us gray 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 resumptions, throughout the summer and the autumn until the final crisis. The monstrous unquestioned labor for the preparation of the Buna factory stopped abruptly, and degenerated immediately into a disjointed, frantic, and paroxysmal confusion. The day when the production of synthetic rubber was supposed to begin, which had seemed imminent in August, was repeatedly postponed, until the Germans no longer spoke about it. Construction work stopped; the power of the countless multitudes of slaves was directed elsewhere and, day by day, became more unruly and passively hostile. With every raid there was new damage to be repaired; the delicate machinery, laboriously installed a few days before, had to be dismantled and removed; air-raid shelters and protective walls had to be hurriedly erected, only to prove ironically insubstantial and useless at the next trial. We had thought that anything would be preferable to the monotony of the identical and inexorably long days, to the systematic and orderly squalor of Buna in operation; but we were forced to change our minds when Buna began to fall to pieces around us, as if struck by a curse in which we ourselves felt implicated. We had to sweat amid the dust and smoking ruins, and tremble like beasts, flattened against the earth by the

anger of the planes; 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, in the morning, to find our shoes and clothes in the dark, raucous inferno of the Block. At Buna the German civilians raged with the fury of the secure man who wakes from a long dream of domination, and sees his ruin and is unable to understand it. The Reichsdeutsche of the Lager as well, including the political prisoners, felt in the hour of danger the ties of blood and soil. This new fact reduced the tangle of hatreds and incomprehensions to their elementary terms and redivided the two camps: the politicals, along with the green triangles and the SS, saw, or thought they saw, in the face of each of us the mockery of reprisal and the grim joy of revenge. They found 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 plowed the German sky like masters, high above every defense, and twisted the living metal of their constructions, carrying slaughter every day into their homes, into the hitherto unviolated homes of the German people. As for us, we were too destroyed to be truly afraid. The few who were still able to judge and feel righteously drew new strength and hope from the bombardments; those whom hunger had not yet reduced to a definitive inertia often took advantage of the moments of general panic to carry out doubly rash expeditions to the factory kitchens or the stores (doubly rash because, besides the direct risk of the raids, theft carried out in conditions of emergency was punished by hanging). But the greater number bore the new danger and the new discomforts with unchanged indifference: it was not a conscious resignation but the dull torpor of beasts broken in by beatings, and no longer hurt by beatings. We were forbidden to enter the bomb shelters. When the earth began to tremble, we dragged ourselves, dazed and

limping, through the corrosive fumes of the smoke bombs to the vast squalid, sterile waste areas enclosed within the boundary of Buna; there we lay inert, piled on top of one another like dead men, yet still conscious of the momentary sweetness of our limbs at rest. We looked with indifferent eyes at the columns of smoke and fire breaking out around us: in moments of respite, filled with the faint menacing hum that every European knows, we picked the stunted chicory leaves and wild chamomile from the heavily trampled ground, and chewed them slowly in silence. When the alarm was over, we returned from every corner to our posts, a silent uncountable flock, accustomed to the anger of men and things; and continued that work of ours, as hated as ever, now even more obviously vain and senseless.

In this world, shaken more deeply every day by the tremors of its approaching end, amid new terrors and hopes, and intervals of exacerbated 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 a situation by now effaced from every present reality, and so I do not think it can be understood except in the manner in which we understand today the 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 remains of his ration every day for six months; he gave me an undershirt 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 should do good for a reward. All this ought not to seem trivial. My case was not the only one; as has already been said, others of us had relationships of various kinds with civilians, and obtained 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 innuendo, in which men of the world speak of their relations with women; that is, as 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, mentioning no names, so as not to compromise them, and also, and especially, so as not to create undesirable rivals. The most accomplished, the professional seducers like Henri, do not speak of them at all; they surround their successes with an aura of equivocal mystery, and they limit themselves to hints and allusions, calculated to arouse in their audience the vague 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, proves to be of fundamental usefulness to anyone who knows how to surround himself with it. The reputation of being a seducer, of being “organized,” excites both envy and scorn, contempt and admiration. Anyone who lets himself be seen eating “organized” food is judged severely; he shows a serious lack of modesty and tact, besides obvious 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, inept, 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,” “Ucieka,” “Schiess in den Wind,” “Va chier”—in short, with one of those countless equivalents of “Go to hell” which are so abundant in camp jargon. There are also some who specialize in complex and patient campaigns of spying, to identify the civilian or group of civilians so-and-so turns to, and who 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 “tested” civilian is almost always more profitable, and above all safer, than a civilian making his first contact with us. This civilian is worth much more, for obvious sentimental and technical reasons: he already knows the principles of

“organization,” its regulations and its dangers, and, even more, he has demonstrated that he is capable of overcoming the caste barrier. In fact, for the civilians we are the untouchables. More or less explicitly, and with all the nuances lying between contempt and pity, they think that, because we have been condemned to this life of ours, because we have been reduced to this 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 grotesque to them, like animal noises; they see us as ignoble slaves, without hair, without honor, and without names, beaten every day, more abject every day, and they never glimpse in our eyes a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of faith. They know us as thieving 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 another? For them we are Kazett, a neuter-singular noun. Naturally, this does not stop many of them from throwing us a piece of bread or a potato now and again, or giving us their bowls, after the distribution of the Zivilsuppe at the worksite, to scrape and return to them washed. They do it to get rid of some importunate hungry 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, ferociously and without restraint, until the strongest gobbles it up, and all the others limp away, humiliated. Now, nothing of this sort occurred between me and Lorenzo. However little sense there may be in trying to specify the reasons that I, among thousands of others like me, was able to stand up to the test, I believe that I owe it to Lorenzo if 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 a just world still existed outside ours, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, unconnected to hatred and fear: 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 buried it, under the abuse received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and stupid SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the Prominents great and small, down to the indistinguishable Häftlinge slaves—all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans are paradoxically united in a common inner 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.

October 1944

We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter. We clung to 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 tangle 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 until 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 armpits against the cold. We will have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours of sleep to repair them when they come unstitched. Since we can no longer eat outside, we will have to have our meals in the barrack, standing up; there each of us has available just a palm’s breadth of floor space, and we are forbidden to lean against the bunks. Wounds will open on our hands, and to get a bandage we’ll have to wait for hours every evening, standing in the snow and wind. Just as our hunger has nothing to do with the feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a special word. We say “hunger,” we say “tiredness,” “fear,” and “pain,” we say “winter,” and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived, in happiness and in suffering, in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have come into being; and we feel the need of this language in order to express what it means to labor all day in the wind, in temperatures below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, a cloth jacket and

trousers, and in our body weakness, hunger, and knowledge of the approaching end.

In the same way that one sees a hope end, winter arrived this morning. We realized it when we left the barrack to go and wash: there were no stars, the dark cold air had the scent of snow. In Roll Call Square, in the early light, 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 we would see another winter in the Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric fence; and that even now we would go if we were logical, if it were not for this senseless, crazy residue of unconfessable hope. Because “winter” means yet another thing. Last spring, the Germans constructed two huge tents in an open space in the Lager. Throughout the spring and summer, each of them housed more than a thousand men: now the tents had been taken down, and an excess of two thousand persons crowded our barracks. We old prisoners know that the Germans do not like such irregularities, and that soon something will happen to reduce our numbers. 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 are saying “Selekcja.” The Poles are the first to find out the news, and generally they try not to let it spread, because to know something that the others don’t yet know can always be useful. By the time everyone realizes that a selection is imminent, they already have a monopoly on the few possibilities of evading it (corrupting some doctor or Prominent with bread or tobacco; leaving the barrack for KaBe or vice versa at the right moment, so as to miss the commission). In the days that follow, the atmosphere of the Lager and the worksite is saturated with Selekcja: nobody knows anything definite, but everybody speaks about it, even the

Polish, Italian, and French civilian workers whom we secretly see on the job. 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 this thought. Every man reacts in his own way, but almost no one with those attitudes which might seem most plausible because most realistic—that is, with resignation or despair. All those able to make arrangements make them; but they are a small minority, because it is very difficult to escape a selection. The Germans apply themselves to these things with great solemnity and diligence. All those unable to make material arrangements seek protection in other ways. In the latrines, in the washhouse, we show each other our chests, our buttocks, our thighs, and our comrades reassure us: “You’ll be all right, it certainly won’t be your turn this time. . . du bist kein Muselmann . . . more probably mine . . .” and in turn they lower their pants and pull up their shirts. Nobody refuses this act of charity to another: nobody is so sure of his own lot that he has the courage to condemn others. I brazenly lied to old Wertheimer; I told him that if they questioned him, he should say he’s forty-five, and that he shouldn’t 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 the convalescent camp at Jaworzno? It’s absurd for Wertheimer to hope: he looks sixty, he has enormous varicose veins, he hardly even notices the hunger anymore. But he lies down on his bed, serene and quiet, and replies to anyone who asks him with my words; they are the watchword in the camp these days. I myself repeated them just as—except for the details—I heard them said to me by Chaim, who has been in the Lager for three years, and, being strong and robust, is wonderfully sure of himself; and I believed him.

On this slender basis I, too, lived through the great selection of October 1944, with inconceivable tranquility. I was tranquil because I managed to lie to myself sufficiently. The fact that I was not selected depended almost entirely 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 nod, and in a confidential tone explains to me that he has been informed— he cannot tell me the source of his information—that this time there really is something new: the Holy See, by means of the International Red Cross . . . in short, he personally guarantees that, both for himself and for me, absolutely, any danger can be ruled out; it’s well-known that as a civilian he was an attaché at the Belgian embassy in Warsaw. Thus, in various ways, even those days of vigil, which seem in the telling as if they ought to have been agonizing beyond the limits of human endurance, go by not very differently from other days. The discipline in both the Lager and Buna is in no way relaxed: the work, the cold, and the hunger are sufficient to absorb our attention completely. Today is a working Sunday, Arbeitssonntag: we work until 1 p.m., then we return to the camp for a shower, shaving, and the general inspection for skin diseases and lice. And at the worksite, mysteriously, we’ve all found out that the selection will be today. The news arrived, as always, surrounded by a halo of contradictory and suspect details: the selection in the infirmary took place this morning; the percentage was 7 percent of the whole camp, 30, 50 percent 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 sick 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.

Punctually, starting at 1 p.m. exactly, the worksite empties, and for two hours the interminable gray rows file past the two checkpoints, where, as usual, we are counted and recounted, and past the orchestra that for two hours without interruption plays, as usual, those marches to which we must synchronize our steps at our entrance and our exit. It seems like an ordinary 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 know that we are there. Because that bell always sounds at dawn, and then it means reveille, but when it sounds during the day it means Blocksperre, confinement in the barracks, and this happens when there is a selection, so that no one can escape it, and so that, when those selected leave for the gas chamber, no one sees them leave.

Our Blockältester knows his business. He has made sure that we have all entered, he has had the door locked, he has given each of us the card that bears our number, name, profession, age, and nationality, and he has ordered everyone to undress completely, except for shoes. Like this, naked, with the card in our hand, we wait for the commission to reach our barrack. We are Barrack 48, but one can never tell if it will start at Barrack 1 or Barrack 60. Anyway, we can rest quietly for at least an hour, and there is no reason not to get under the blankets on the bunk and keep warm.

Many are already dozing when a barrage of orders, oaths, and blows proclaims the imminent arrival of the commission. The Blockältester and his helpers, with fists and shouts, starting at the end of the dormitory, drive the crowd of frightened, naked men forward and cram them into the Tagesraum, which is the quartermaster’s office. The Tagesraum is a small room, seven meters by four: when the drive is over, a warm, compact human mass is jammed into the Tagesraum, spreading to fill all the corners perfectly, and exerting such a pressure on the wooden walls that they creak.

Now we are all in the Tagesraum, and there is not only no time but not even any space in which to be afraid. The sensation of warm flesh pressing all around is unusual and not unpleasant. You have to take care to hold your nose up in order to breathe, and not to crumple or lose the card in your hand. The Blockältester has closed the connecting door and has opened the other two, which lead outside from the dormitory and the Tagesraum. Here, in front of the two doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an SS officer. On his right is the Blockältester, on his left, the quartermaster of the barrack. Each 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, in front of the three men, give the card to the SS officer, and go back in through the dormitory door. The SS officer, in the fraction of a second between the two successive crossings, with a glance at front and back, judges our 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 one of us. In three or four minutes a barrack of two hundred men is “done,” and in the course of the afternoon the entire camp of twelve thousand men. Jammed in the charnel house of the Tagesraum, I gradually felt the human pressure around me slacken, and before long my turn came. Like everyone else, I passed by with a brisk and elastic step, trying to keep my head high, my chest forward, and my muscles taut and conspicuous. Out of the corner of my eye I tried to look back, and it seemed to me that my card ended up on the right. As we gradually return to the dormitory we are allowed to dress. Nobody yet knows with certainty his fate; first of all it has to be established whether the condemned cards were those handed to the right or to the left. There’s no point by now in sparing one another’s feelings with superstitious scruples. Everybody crowds around the oldest, the most emaciated, the most Muselmann; if their cards went to the left, the left is certainly the side of the condemned. Even before the selection is over, we all know that the left was in fact the schlechte Seite, the bad side. Naturally, there

have been some irregularities: René, for example, so young and robust, ended up on the left; perhaps it’s because he has glasses, perhaps because he walks with a slight stoop, like someone who is nearsighted, but more likely it was a simple error: René went past the commission immediately ahead 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 don’t know what I’ll think tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion. It must likewise have been a mistake with Sattler, a huge Transylvanian peasant who was still at home only twenty days ago; Sattler does not know German, has understood nothing of what has happened, and stands in a corner mending his shirt. Should I go and tell him that he won’t need his shirt anymore? There is nothing surprising about these mistakes: the examination is very rapid and perfunctory, and, in any case, the important thing for the Lager administration is not that the most useless prisoners be eliminated but that free places be quickly created, according to a fixed percentage.

The selection is now over in our barrack, but it continues in the others, so we are still locked in. But since the soup vats 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 or an explicit order of the SS, but in fact, during the two- or threeday interval (and sometimes much longer) between the selection and the departure, the victims at AuschwitzMonowitz enjoyed this privilege. Ziegler holds out his bowl, collects his normal ration, and then waits expectantly. “What do you want?” asks the Blockältester: as far as he is concerned, Ziegler is entitled to no supplement, and he pushes him away, but Ziegler returns and humbly persists. He was on the left, everybody saw it, the Blockältester can check the cards; he has the right to a double ration. When he gets it, he goes quietly to his bunk to eat.

Now each of us is busy scraping the bottom of his bowl with his spoon so as to pick up the last drops of soup, a confused, metallic clatter, signifying the end of the day. Silence slowly prevails, and then, from my bunk, on the top level, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his cap on his head, his torso swaying violently. Kuhn is thanking God that he was not chosen. Kuhn is out of his mind. Does he not see, in the bunk next to him, Beppo the Greek, who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow, and knows it, and lies there staring at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Does Kuhn not know that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty—nothing at all in the power of man to do—can ever heal? If I were God, I would spit Kuhn’s prayer out upon the ground.

Kraus

When it rains we feel like crying. 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 has the smell of mushrooms. If I could take ten steps to the left, I would be sheltered by the roof; all I’d need is a sack to cover my shoulders, or the mere prospect of a fire where I could dry myself; or maybe a dry rag to put between my shirt and my back. From one swing of the shovel to the next I think about it, and I really believe that to have a dry rag would be positive happiness. It’s impossible to be more thoroughly soaked than I am now; I just have to try to move as little as possible and, above all, not to make any new movements, so that no other part of my skin comes into unnecessary contact with my sodden, icy clothes. Luckily it’s not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being lucky, how some chance circumstance, perhaps infinitesimal, checks us on the edge of despair and allows us to live. It’s raining, but not windy. Or it’s raining and also windy, but you know that tonight is your turn for the extra soup, and so today, too, you find the strength to make it to the evening. Or there’s rain, wind, and the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and boredom, as sometimes happens, when you truly seem to be lying on the bottom—well, even then we think that at any moment, if we want, we could always go and touch the electric fence, or throw ourself under the shunting trains, and then the rain would stop.

We have been stuck in the mud since morning, legs apart, feet never moving from the holes they have dug for

themselves in the glue-like soil, hips swaying at every swing of the shovel. I am halfway down the pit, Kraus and Clausner are at the bottom, Gounan is above me, at ground level. Only Gounan can look around, and every now and again he alerts Kraus tersely of the need to quicken the pace or even to rest, according to who is passing by along the road. Clausner wields the pickax, Kraus lifts the earth up to me, shovelful by shovelful, and I gradually lift it up to Gounan, who piles it on one side. Others go to and fro with wheelbarrows and carry the earth somewhere, of no interest to us. Our world today is this hole of mud. Kraus misses the target, a lump of mud flies up and splatters over my knees. It’s not the first time this has happened, and I warn him to be careful, but without much hope: he is Hungarian, has a limited understanding of German, and doesn’t 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 laughs often. He works too much and too vigorously: he has not yet learned our underground art of economizing on everything—breath, movement, even thought. He does not yet know that it is better to be beaten, because you do not normally die from beatings, but from exhaustion you do, and miserably, and by the time you realize it, it’s already too late. He still thinks . . . oh no, poor Kraus, this is not reasoning, it is only the foolish honesty of a petty office worker, he brought it with him, and he seems to think that in here it’s like the outside, where hard work is honest and logical, and also advantageous, since, as 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 into German: “Langsam, du blöder Einer, langsam, verstanden?” Kraus can kill himself through exhaustion if he wants to, but not today, because we’re working in a line and the pace of our work is set by him. There goes the siren of the Carbide factory, and the English prisoners leave; it is half past four. Then the Ukrainian girls will go by, and so it will be five, and we will be able to

straighten our backs, and only the return march, the roll call, and the check for lice will separate us from our rest. It is assembly time, Antreten from all sides; from all sides the mud puppets crawl out, stretch their cramped limbs, carry the tools back to the sheds. We extract our feet from the holes cautiously, so that our shoes don’t get sucked in, and emerge, unsteady and dripping, to line up for the return march. Zu dreien, in threes. I tried to place myself near Alberto; we didn’t work together today and wanted to ask each other how it had gone. But someone slapped me in the stomach and I ended up behind him, look, right next to Kraus. Now we are leaving. The Kapo marks time in a harsh voice: “Links, links, links”; at first our feet hurt, then slowly we warm up and our nerves relax. We have bored through all the minutes of the day, this very day, which this morning seemed invincible and eternal; now it lies dead and is immediately forgotten; already it is no longer a day, it has left no trace in anyone’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 we will go to the Carbide factory and unload bricks. Or the war might even end 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 existed, have been tirelessly foretold as imminent and certain. But who can think seriously about tomorrow? Memory is a curious instrument: as long as I have been in the camp, two lines written long ago by a friend of mine have been running through my head: . . . until one day it will no longer make sense to say: tomorrow. It’s like that here. Do you know how to say “never” in camp slang? “Morgen früh,” tomorrow morning.

Now is the time of links, links, links und links, the time when one must not get out of step. Kraus is clumsy, he has already been kicked by the Kapo because he is incapable of staying in line. And, goodness, he is beginning to gesticulate and

mumble in a wretched German, listen, listen, he wants to apologize for the spadeful of mud, he still doesn’t understand where we are; it must be said that the Hungarians are a singular people. To keep in step and carry on a complicated conversation in German is too much. This time it’s I who warn him that he is out of step; I look at him and I see his eyes behind the drops of rain on his glasses, and they are the eyes of the man Kraus. Then something important happened, and it’s worth recounting now, perhaps for the same reason that it was important that it happened then. I made 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 I had dreamed that I was at home, in the house where I was born, with my family, sitting up, my legs under the table, and on the table was a lot of food, a huge amount of food. And it was summer and it was Italy: Naples? . . . yes, Naples, this is hardly the time to quibble. Then all of a sudden the bell rang, and I got up anxiously and went to open the door, and who did I see? I saw him, this very same Kraus Páli, and he had hair, and was clean and well nourished, and dressed like a free man, with a loaf of bread in his hand. Yes, a two-kilo loaf, still warm. Then “Servus, Páli, wie geht’s?” and I was filled with joy and invited him 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 wet, just as he was now. And I gave him food and drink and a good bed to sleep in, and it was night, but there was a wonderful warmth and so in a moment we were all dry (yes, because I, too, was soaked). What a good boy Kraus must have been as a civilian: he won’t survive long here, it’s obvious at first glance, as demonstrable as a theorem. I’m sorry I don’t know Hungarian, for his emotion has overflowed the banks, erupting in a flood of outlandish Magyar words. I cannot understand anything except my name, but from his solemn gestures one would say that he is making promises and prophecies.

Poor silly Kraus. If he only knew that it’s not true, that I have dreamed nothing about him, that he is nothing to me, outside of a brief moment, nothing just as everything is nothing down here, except the hunger within and the cold and the rain all around.

Die Drei Leute vom Labor

How many months have gone by since we entered the camp? How many since the day I was discharged from Ka-Be? And since the day of the chemistry exam? And since the October selection? Alberto and I often ask ourselves these questions, and many others as well. There were ninety-six of us when we arrived, we, the Italians of convoy 174000; only twenty-nine survived until October, and, of these, eight went in the selection. We are now twenty-one, and winter has hardly begun. How many of us will be alive in the new year? How many when spring comes? 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, woolen earmuffs, and padded overalls, the English prisoners in their wonderful fur-lined jackets. In our Lager they have distributed coats only to a few of the privileged; we are a specialized Kommando, which, in theory, works under shelter; so we are left in our summer clothing. We are chemists, therefore we work with phenyl-beta sacks. We cleared out the warehouse after the first air raids, at the height of summer. The phenyl beta got under our clothes and stuck to our sweaty limbs and ate away at us like leprosy; the skin came off our faces in large burned patches. Then the air raids stopped for a while and we carried the sacks back into the warehouse. Then the warehouse was hit and we put the sacks in 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 phenyl beta impregnates the only clothes we have, and stays with us day and night like our shadow. So far, the advantages of being in the Chemical Kommando have been limited to the following: the others have received coats and we have not; the others

carry fifty-kilo sacks of cement, while we carry sixty-kilo sacks of phenyl beta. How can we still think about the chemistry examination and the illusions of that time? On at least four occasions during the summer we heard talk of Doktor Pannwitz’s laboratory in Bau 939, and the rumor spread that analysts for the Polymerization Department would be chosen from among us. Now enough, now it’s over. This is the last act: winter has begun, and with it our last battle. We can no longer doubt that it is the last. At whatever time of day we happen to listen to the voice of our bodies, or interrogate our limbs, the answer is the same: our strength will not last. Everything around us speaks of disintegration and the end. Half of Bau 939 is a heap of twisted metal and smashed concrete; from the enormous pipes where the superheated steam used to roar deformed blue icicles, as large as pillars, now hang down to the ground. Buna is silent, and when the wind is favorable, if one listens intently, one can hear a continuous dull underground rumble, which is the approaching front. Three hundred prisoners have arrived in the Lager from the Lodz Ghetto, transferred by the Germans before the Russian advance. They brought us the story of the legendary uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and told us how, more than a year ago, the Germans liquidated the Lublin camp: four machine guns in the corners and the barracks 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 saturates your shoes, your clothes, and your skin. The Kapo grabs a brick and throws it at the group; they dodge it clumsily, but do not quicken their pace. This is almost routine, it happens every morning, and does not always mean that the Kapo has a definite intention to cause injury. The Scheisshaus four, to their job: and the four assigned to the building of the new latrine leave. It should be said that, with the arrival of the convoys from Lodz and Transylvania,

our squad included more than fifty Häftlinge, and so the mysterious German bureaucrat who supervises these matters had authorized us to build a Zweiplätziges Kommandoscheisshaus, that is, a two-seat toilet reserved for our Kommando. We are not insensible of this mark of distinction, which makes ours one of the few Kommandos that one can boast of belonging to; but it is evident that we will lose one of the simplest pretexts to absent ourselves from work and make deals with civilians. “Noblesse oblige,” says Henri, who has other strings to his bow. The twelve for bricks. Meister Dahm’s five. The two for cisterns. How many absent? Three absent. Homolka gone into Ka-Be this morning, the Smith dead yesterday, François transferred who knows where or why. The count is correct; the Kapo records it and is satisfied. Only we eighteen of the phenyl beta are left, apart from 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 elect. The Kapo looks us up and down with a rancorous smile. A Belgian, a Romanian, 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, and not a trace of envy. Alberto holds nothing against my good fortune, and is really pleased, both because of our friendship and because he will also gain from it. In fact, we two are now bound by a very close alliance, under which every “organized” scrap of food is divided into two strictly equal parts. He has no reason to envy me, for he neither hoped nor desired to enter the Laboratory. The blood in his veins is too free: Alberto, this untamed friend of mine, wouldn’t think of settling down in a system; his instinct leads him elsewhere,

to other solutions, to the unforeseen, the extemporaneous, the new. Without hesitation, Alberto prefers the uncertainties and battles of the “freelancer” to a steady job.

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 snow, silent and stiff, like an enormous corpse. Every day the sirens of the Fliegeralarm wail; the Russians are eighty kilometers away. The electric power plant isn’t running, the methanol rectification columns no longer exist, three of the four acetylene gasometers have been blown up. Prisoners “retrieved” from all the camps in eastern Poland pour haphazardly into our Lager every day; the minority are sent to work, the majority leave immediately for Birkenau and the Chimney. The ration has been reduced still further. Ka-Be is overflowing, the E-Häftlinge have brought scarlet fever, diphtheria, and petechial typhus into the camp. But Häftling 174517 has been promoted to specialist and has the right to a new shirt and underpants and has to be shaved every Wednesday. No one can claim to understand 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 workbenches covered with hundreds of familiar objects. The glassware draining in a corner, the precision scales, a Heraeus oven, a Höppler thermostat. The smell makes me start like the lash of a whip: the faint aromatic odor of organic chemistry laboratories. The large semi-dark classroom at the university, my fourth year, the mild air of May in Italy is evoked for a moment with brutal violence and immediately vanishes.

Herr Stawinoga assigns us our workplaces. Stawinoga is a German Pole, still young, with an energetic yet sad and tired face. He is also Doktor: not of chemistry, but (ne pas chercher à comprendre) of linguistics; all the same, he is the 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 24°C. We think that they can even make us wash glassware, sweep the floor, carry hydrogen cylinders, anything to remain here, and the problem of winter will be solved for us. And then, on further consideration, even the problem of hunger should not be difficult to solve. Will they really want to search us every day when we leave? And, even if they do, what about every time we ask to go to the latrine? Obviously not. And there is soap, gas, alcohol here. I will stitch a secret pocket inside my jacket, and make a deal with the Englishman who works in the repair shop and trades in gas. We’ll 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 searches can prevent it. So it seems that fate, taking unsuspected paths, has arranged that we three, the object of envy of ten thousand condemned men, will suffer neither hunger nor cold this winter. This means a strong probability of not falling seriously ill, of being safe from frostbite, of getting through the selections. In such conditions, those less experienced than us about things in the Lager might even be tempted by the hope of survival and the thought of liberty. Not us, we know how these things go; this is all a gift of fate, to be enjoyed as intensely as possible and at once; there is no certainty about tomorrow. At the first piece of glassware I break, the first measurement error, the first failure to pay attention, I will go back to waste away in the snow and the wind until I, too, 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 dull, muffled rumble of the

artillery now echoes uninterrupted in the empty silence of Buna. One breathes an air of tension, an air of resolution. The Poles no longer work, the French again walk with their heads high. The English wink at us and greet us surreptitiously with a V sign: and not always surreptitiously. But the Germans are deaf and blind, encased in an armor of obstinacy and willful refusal to know. Once again they have named a date for the start of production of synthetic rubber: it will be February 1, 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 behavior is not considered 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 begins to heal, even if the whole body will die within a day.

Every morning now, when the squads are divided, the Kapo calls the three of us for the Laboratory before all the others, die drei Leute vom Labor. In the camp, at night and in the morning, nothing distinguishes me from the flock, but during the day, at work, I am sheltered and warm, and nobody beats me; I steal and sell soap and gas without serious risk, and perhaps I will get a coupon for a pair of leather shoes. Besides, can this be called work? To work is to push carts, carry ties, break stones, shovel earth, grip with bare hands the repugnant iciness of frozen iron. Whereas I sit all day, I have a notebook and a pencil, and they have even given me a book to refresh my memory on analytical methods. I have a drawer where I can put my cap and gloves, and when I want to go out I have only to tell Herr Stawinoga, who never says no and asks no questions if I delay; he appears to be suffering in his flesh for the ruin that surrounds him. My comrades in the Kommando envy me, and they are right; should I not call myself content? But, in the morning, as soon as I escape the raging wind and cross the threshold of the Laboratory I find at my side the companion of all moments of respite, of Ka-Be, of the Sundays when we rest—the pain of remembering, the old fierce anguish of feeling myself a man

again, which attacks me like a dog the moment my consciousness comes out of the darkness. Then I take my pencil and notebook and write what I could never tell anyone. Then, there are the women. How long since I’ve seen a woman? In Buna we quite often met the Ukrainian and Polish women workers, in trousers and leather jackets, heavy and violent like their men. They were sweaty and disheveled in summer, bundled up in thick clothes in winter. They worked with spades and pickaxes, and did not make us feel that we were working next to women. It’s different here. Faced with the girls in the Laboratory, we three feel ourselves sink into the ground with shame and embarrassment. We know what we look like: we see one another and sometimes we happen to see our own reflection in a clean window. We are ridiculous and repulsive. Our heads are bald on Monday, and covered by a short light-brown mold by Saturday. We have swollen, yellow faces, permanently marked by the cuts of the hasty barber, and often by bruises and numb sores; our necks are long and knobbly, like plucked chickens. Our clothes are incredibly filthy, stained with mud, grease, and blood: Kandel’s trousers come only halfway down his calves, exposing his bony, hairy ankles; my jacket slips off my shoulders as if off a wooden clothes hanger. We are full of fleas, and often scratch ourselves shamelessly; we have to ask to go to the latrine with humiliating frequency. Our wooden clogs are intolerably noisy and are encrusted with alternate layers of mud and regulation grease. Then, too, we are used to our smell, but the girls are not and never miss a chance of letting us know. It is not the generic smell of the badly washed but the smell of the Häftling, faint and sweetish, which greeted us on our arrival in the Lager and which tenaciously pervades the dormitories, kitchens, washhouses, and latrines of the Lager. One acquires it immediately and never loses it: “So young and already stinking!” is the way we greet new arrivals. To us the girls seem like creatures from another world. There are three young German girls, besides Fräulein Liczba, the Polish warehouse keeper, and Frau Mayer, the secretary.

They have smooth, rosy skin, nice colorful clothes that are clean and warm, and long, well-brushed blond hair; they speak with grace and self-possession, and, instead of keeping the Laboratory neat and clean, as they ought to, they smoke in the corners, eat bread and jam tarts in front of us, file their nails, break a lot of glassware and then try to blame us; when they sweep, they sweep our feet. They don’t speak to us, and they turn up their noses when they see us shuffling around the Laboratory, squalid and dirty, awkward and unsteady in our clogs. I once asked Fräulein Liczba for some information, and she did not reply but, with a look of annoyance on her face, turned to Stawinoga and spoke to him quickly. I didn’t understand the sentence, but I clearly made out “Stinkjude,” and my blood froze. Stawinoga told me that we should address him directly with any question about the work. These girls sing, just as girls sing in laboratories all over the world, and it makes us deeply unhappy. They chat among themselves: they talk about the rationing, about their boyfriends, their homes, the approaching holidays. . . . “Are you going home on Sunday? No, I’m not, traveling is so uncomfortable!” “I’m going for Christmas. Only two weeks and it will be Christmas again; it hardly seems real, the year has gone by so quickly!” . . . The 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 thought about many faraway things: my work, the end of the war, good and evil, the nature of things, and the laws that govern human actions; and also about the mountains, about singing, love, music, poetry. I had an enormous, deep-rooted, foolish faith in the benevolence of fate; to kill and to die seemed to me matters alien and literary. My days were happy and sad, but I regretted them equally, they were all full and affirmative; the future stood before me as a great treasure. What is left today of the life of that time is only enough to make me suffer hunger and cold; I’m not even alive enough to be able to kill myself.

If I spoke German better I could try to explain all this to Frau Mayer; but she would certainly not understand, or if she were intelligent enough, and good enough, 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 a man condemned to death. Or perhaps she would give me a coupon for half a liter of civilian soup. The year has gone by so quickly.

The Last One

By now Christmas is approaching. Alberto and I are walking side by side in the long gray formation, bent forward to better resist the wind. It is night and it is snowing; it is not easy to stay on our feet, and it’s even more difficult to stay in step and in line; every now and again someone in front of us stumbles and falls in the black mud, and we have to be careful to avoid him and get back in our place in the column. Ever since I’ve been in the Laboratory, Alberto and I have worked separately, and on the return march we always have a lot of things to tell each other. They are not usually things of a lofty nature: about work, or our comrades, or the bread, or the cold. But for a week now there has been something new: every evening Lorenzo brings us three or four liters of soup from the Italian civilian workers. To solve the problem of transport, we had to procure a menaschka, as it is called here: that is, a zinclined pot, made to order, more like a bucket than like a pot. Silberlust, the tinsmith, made it for us from two pieces of a gutter, in exchange for three rations of bread; it is a splendid, sturdy, capacious container, with the characteristic shape of a neolithic tool. In the whole camp only a few Greeks have a menaschka larger than ours. Besides the material advantages, it has brought a noticeable improvement in our social standing. A menaschka like ours is a certificate of nobility, a heraldic emblem: Henri is becoming our friend and speaks to us on equal terms; L. has assumed a paternal and patronizing air; and, as for Elias, he is perpetually at our side, and although on the one hand he spies on us persistently to discover the secret of our organisacja, on the other he overwhelms us with incomprehensible declarations of solidarity and affection, and deafens us with a litany of fantastic obscenities and oaths in Italian and French that he learned who knows where, and by which he obviously means to honor us.

As for the moral aspect of this new state of affairs, Alberto and I are forced to agree that there’s nothing to be very proud of; but it’s so easy to find excuses! 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 we’ll need to make only a single expedition a day to the remote corner of the site where Lorenzo is now working. We talk about Lorenzo and how to reward him; later, if we return, we will of course do everything we can for him, but what’s the use of talking about that? He knows as well as we do how unlikely it is that we’ll return. We ought to do something at once; we could try to have his shoes repaired at the shoemaker’s shop in our Lager, where repairs are free (it seems a paradox, but officially everything is free in the extermination camps). Alberto will try: he is a friend of the head shoemaker, perhaps a few liters of soup will be enough. We talk about three new undertakings of ours, and we agree that for obvious reasons of professional secrecy it’s inadvisable to discuss them openly: it’s a pity, our personal prestige would be greatly increased. The first is my brainchild. I knew that the Blockältester of Block 44 was short of brooms and I stole one at the worksite; as far as that goes, there is nothing extraordinary. The difficulty was how to smuggle the broom into the Lager on the return march, and I solved it in what I believe to be a completely original way: I broke up my stolen property into handle and head, 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), where I put it back together. For this I needed to find a piece of tinplate, a hammer, and nails in order to join the two pieces of wood. The whole business took only 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 formal order for two more brooms “of the same model.” But Alberto had other irons in the fire. In the first place, he had put the finishing touches on Operation File and twice

already had carried it out successfully. Alberto goes to the tool warehouse, asks for a file, and chooses a fairly large one. The warehouse keeper 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 sharp as they come, who helps Alberto more for love of the art than out of self-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 “one file” back to the warehouse and sells the other. And he has just achieved his masterpiece, an audacious new combination, of singular elegance. It should be said that for some weeks Alberto had been entrusted with a special duty: in the morning, at the worksite, he is given a bucket with pliers, screwdrivers, and several hundred celluloid labels of different colors, which he has to mount on special brackets in order to tag the numerous and lengthy pipes for hot and cold water, steam, compressed air, gas, naphtha, vacuum, etc., that run in all directions throughout the Polymerization Department. It should also be said (and this seems to have nothing to do with it: but does not brilliance perhaps consist in finding or creating connections between apparently unrelated types of ideas?) that for all us Häftlinge the shower is a distinctly unpleasant affair for various reasons (the water is inadequate and cold, or else boiling, there is no changing room, we don’t have towels or soap, and during our enforced absence we can easily be robbed). Since the shower is obligatory, the Blockälteste need an inspection system that enables them to apply sanctions against anyone who evades it. Usually, a trusted member of the Block is placed at the door, and, like Polyphemus, touches each man as he comes out to feel if he is wet; if he is, he gets a ticket, and if he is dry he gets five blows from a truncheon. One can claim one’s bread the following morning only by presenting the ticket. Alberto’s attention was focused on the tickets. In general they are only wretched pieces of paper that are given back damp, crumpled, and unrecognizable. Alberto knows the Germans, and the Blockälteste are all German, or Germantrained: they love order, systems, bureaucracy; furthermore,

although they are aggressive, quick-tempered louts, they take a childish delight in glittering, multicolored objects. Thus the theme is stated, and its brilliant development follows. Alberto systematically stole a series of labels of the same color; 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 one Block, he went to the Blockältester and offered him his Spezialität at the mad price of ten rations of bread, paid in installments. The customer accepted enthusiastically, and Alberto now has at his disposal a marvelous and fashionable article, guaranteed to be accepted in every barrack, one color per barrack (no Blockältester wants to be regarded as stingy or reactionary). Even more important, he doesn’t have to worry about competitors, as he alone has access to the basic material. Isn’t it well thought out?

We talk about these things, stumbling from one puddle to the next, between the black of the sky and the mud of the road. We talk and we walk. I carry our two empty bowls, Alberto the happy weight of the full menaschka. Once again the music from the band, the ceremony of Mützen ab, caps off smartly in front of the SS; once more Arbeit Macht Frei, and the Kapo’s announcement: “Kommando 98, zwei und sechzig Häftlinge, Stärke stimmt,” sixty-two prisoners, number correct. But the column has not broken up, they have made us march as far as Roll Call Square. Is there to be a roll call? It is not a roll call. We have seen the crude glare of the floodlight and the wellknown profile of the gallows. For more than an hour the squads continued to return, wooden clogs clattering harshly on the frozen snow. When all the Kommandos had returned, the band suddenly stopped, and a rasping 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 floodlight. All this pomp, this ruthless ceremony are not new to us. I have already been present at thirteen public hangings since I

entered the camp; but on the other occasions the crimes were ordinary, thefts from the kitchen, sabotage, attempts to escape. Today it is different. Last month one of the crematoriums at Birkenau was blown up. None of us know (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 at Birkenau a few hundred men, helpless and exhausted slaves like us, found in themselves the strength to act, to bring to maturity the fruits of their hatred. The man who is to die in front of us today took part in the revolt in some way. It’s said that 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 eyes: and perhaps the Germans will not understand that this solitary death, the death that has been reserved for him as a man, will bring him glory, not infamy. At the end of the German’s speech, which nobody understood, the rasping voice of before again rose up: “Habt ihr verstanden?” Did you understand? Who answered “Jawohl”? Everybody and nobody: it was as if our cursed resignation had taken shape by itself, as if it had become a collective voice above our heads. But everybody heard the cry of the doomed man, it pierced the thick, ancient barriers of inertia and submission, it struck the living core of the man in each of us: “Kamaraden, ich bin der Letzte!” (Comrades, I am the last!) I wish I could say that from among us, an abject flock, a voice had risen, a murmur, a sign of assent. But nothing happened. We remained standing, bent and gray, heads bowed, and we did not uncover them until the German ordered us to do so. The trapdoor opened, the body writhed horribly; the

band began playing again, and we, once again in our line, filed past the final tremors of the dying man. At the foot of the gallows, the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their work is done, and well done. The Russians can come now: there are no more strong men among us, the last one is hanging above our heads, and, as for the others, a few nooses were enough. The Russians can come: they will find only us, the subdued, the lifeless, worthy now of the undefended death that awaits us. To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t 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 revolt, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.

Alberto and I went back to the barrack, and we couldn’t look each other in the face. That man must have been tough, he must have been made of another metal than we are, if this condition, which has broken us, could not bend him. Because we, too, are broken, defeated: even if we have been able to adapt, even if we have at last learned how to find our food and to withstand the exhaustion and the cold, even if we return home. We have lifted the menaschka onto the bunk and divided it, we have satisfied the daily fury of hunger, and now we are oppressed by shame.

The Story of Ten Days

We had been hearing the rumble of the Russian cannons sporadically for months when, on January 11, 1945, I fell ill with scarlet fever and was once more admitted to Ka-Be. Infektionsabteilung: that is to say, a small room, which in fact was very clean, with ten bunks on two levels, a wardrobe, three stools, and a commode with a pail for bodily needs. All in a space of three meters by five. It was difficult to climb up to the upper bunks, for there was no ladder; so when a patient got worse he was transferred to a lower bunk. When I was admitted, I was the thirteenth. Of the twelve others, four—two French political prisoners and two young Hungarian Jews—had scarlet fever; there were three with diphtheria, two with typhus, and one suffering from a repellent facial erysipelas. The other two had more than one illness and were incredibly emaciated. 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 hence rest, and I believed that I was still in good enough shape not to fear either the aftereffects of scarlet fever or the selections. Thanks to my by now long experience of camp life I had managed to bring with me all my personal belongings: a belt of braided electrical wire, the knife-spoon, a needle with three pieces of thread, five buttons, and, finally, eighteen flints that I had stolen from the Laboratory. By patiently paring with a knife, you could make, from each of these, three smaller flints, just the right gauge for a normal cigarette lighter. They were valued at six or seven rations of bread. I spent four peaceful days. Outside it was snowing and very cold, but the building was heated. I was given strong

doses of sulfa drugs, I suffered from an intense nausea and was hardly able to eat; I had no wish to talk. The two Frenchmen with scarlet fever were likable. They were country men 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, whose name was Arthur, was a small, thin peasant. The other, his bunk companion, was Charles, a schoolteacher, thirty-two years old; instead of a nightshirt he had been given a summer undershirt, which was ridiculously short. On the fifth day the barber came. He was a Greek from Salonika: 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, and he wasn’t excessively brutal. Before he entered, I heard him speaking excitedly for a long time in the corridor with a doctor, a compatriot of his. He seemed to have an odd look on his face, but, because the expressions of the Levantines are different from ours, I couldn’t tell whether he was frightened or happy or excited. He knew me, or at least he knew that I was Italian. When it was my turn I climbed laboriously down from the bunk. I asked him in Italian if there was some news: he stopped shaving me, squinted at me in a grave and allusive manner, pointed to the window with his chin, and then made a sweeping gesture with his hand toward the west. “Morgen, alle Kamarad weg.” He looked at me for a moment with his eyes wide open, as if waiting for a startled reaction, and then added, “Todos, todos,” and returned to his work. He knew about my flints and shaved me with a certain gentleness. The news stirred no immediate emotion in me. For months I had not known pain, joy, or fear, except in that detached and distant manner which is characteristic of the Lager, and which might be described as conditional: if I still had my old

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 that would accompany the evacuation of the camp and its liberation. In any case, Askenazi’s news was merely a confirmation of rumors that had already been circulating for some days: that the Russians were at Cz stochowa, a hundred kilometers to the north; that they were at Zakopane, a hundred kilometers to the south; that at Buna the Germans were already preparing mines for sabotage. 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 ended there. The French were different, they were still fresh. “Did you hear?” I said to them. “Tomorrow the camp is going to be evacuated.” They overwhelmed me with questions. “Where to? On foot? . . . The sick, too? Those who can’t walk?” They knew that I was an old prisoner and understood German, and they assumed that I knew much more about the matter than I wanted to admit. I didn’t know anything more: I told them so, but they continued to ask questions. How annoying. But of course they had been in the Lager for only a few weeks and had not yet learned that in the Lager one does 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, on a twentykilometer march. The others would remain in Ka-Be with caretakers to be chosen from among the less seriously ill patients. 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 brightened. 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 was eloquent. He was already equipped for the march. As soon as he left, the two Hungarian boys began to speak excitedly to each other. They had nearly recovered but were extremely debilitated. It was obvious that they were afraid to stay with the sick and were deciding to leave with the healthy. It was not a question of reasoning: I, too, would probably have followed the instinct of the herd if I hadn’t felt so weak; terror is supremely contagious, and a frightened man’s immediate response is to flee. Outside the barrack the camp sounded unusually agitated. One of the two Hungarians got up, went out, and returned half an hour later with a load of filthy rags. He must have taken them from the warehouse for clothes to be disinfected. He and his comrade dressed feverishly, putting on rag after rag. One could see that they were in a hurry to get the matter over with before the fear itself made them hesitate. It was crazy of them to think of walking even for an hour, weak as they were, especially in the snow, and with those broken-down shoes found at the last minute. I tried to explain this, but they looked at me without answering. Their eyes were like those of frightened animals. Just for a moment it crossed 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 learned much later that, unable to go on, they had been killed by the SS a few hours after the march began. It was obvious that I, too, needed a pair of shoes. But still it took me perhaps an hour to overcome nausea, fever, and inertia. I found a pair in the corridor. (The healthy prisoners had ransacked the storeroom where patients’ shoes were kept and had taken the best ones; the shoddiest, broken and unpaired, were lying all over the place.) Just then I met Kosman, the Alsatian. As a civilian he had been a Reuters correspondent in Clermont-Ferrand; he, too, was excited and

euphoric. He said, “If you return before me, write to the mayor of Metz that I’m on the way 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 went back to bed. Late that night the Greek doctor returned with a knapsack on his back and a balaclava. He threw a French novel onto my bunk. “Keep it, read it, Italian. You can give it back 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 goodbye to me from the window. We had been inseparable: we were “the two Italians” and most of the time our foreign comrades got our names mixed up. 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 had not been able to infect him. So he left and I remained. We said goodbye; it didn’t take many words, we had already said everything countless times. We did not think we would be separated for very long. He had found a pair of sturdy leather shoes in fairly good condition: he was one of those people who immediately find what they need. He, too, was cheerful and confident, like all those who were leaving. It was understandable: something great and new was about to happen; we could finally feel around us a force that was not Germany’s; we could concretely feel that hated world of ours on the verge of collapse. Or at least those who were healthy, and who, though tired and starving, were able to move, could feel this. But, inevitably, one who is too weak, or naked, or barefoot, thinks and feels in a different manner, and what dominated our thoughts was the paralyzing sensation of being utterly helpless, and in the hands of fate. All the healthy prisoners (except for a few prudent ones, who at the last moment undressed and hid in the hospital bunks) left on the night of January 18, 1945. They must have been about twenty thousand, coming from different camps. Practically every one of them died during the evacuation

march: Alberto was among them. One day, perhaps, someone will write their story. So we remained in our bunks, alone with our illnesses, and with our inertia that was stronger than fear. In all of Ka-Be we numbered perhaps eight hundred. In our room eleven of us remained, each in his own bunk, except for Charles and Arthur, who slept together. With the rhythm of the great machine of the Lager extinguished, for us began ten days outside the world and time. JANUARY 18. During the night of the evacuation the camp kitchens had continued to function, and the following morning the last distribution of soup took place in the infirmary. The central-heating plant had been abandoned; in the barrack a little heat lingered, 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 20°C below zero; most of the patients had only a nightshirt, and some of them not even that. Nobody knew what our situation was. Some SS men had remained, some of the guard towers were still occupied. About midday an SS officer made a tour of the barracks. He appointed a chief in each of them, selecting him 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 maintained 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 reluctantly translated what the SS man had said. I found it irritating that they were afraid: they hadn’t yet experienced a month of the Lager, they still hardly suffered from hunger, they were not even Jews, and they were afraid. There was one more distribution of bread. I spent the afternoon reading the book left by the doctor: it was very interesting and I can remember it with peculiar accuracy. I also made a visit to the neighboring ward in search of blankets;

many of the sick had been sent out of there and their blankets were free. I brought back some quite heavy ones. When Arthur heard that they came from the dysentery ward, he wrinkled his nose: “Y’avait point besoin de le dire”; in fact, they were stained. But I thought that in any case, given what awaited us, we might as well sleep warmly covered. It was soon night, but the electric light was still working. We saw with tranquil fear that an armed SS man was standing in a corner of the barrack. 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 the searchlights on the guard towers. In the distance photoelectric beams were visible. A cluster of intense lights burst out in the sky, and remained there, motionless, crudely illuminating the terrain. One could hear the roar of the planes. Then the bombing started. It was nothing new: I climbed down from my bunk, put my bare feet in my shoes, and waited. It seemed far away, perhaps over Auschwitz. But then there was an explosion nearby, and, before you could think, a second and a third, loud enough to burst one’s eardrums. Windows were breaking, the building shook, the spoon I had stuck in a joint of the wooden wall fell out. Then it seemed to be over. Cagnolati, a young country boy, also from the Vosges, had apparently never experienced an air raid. He had jumped out of his bed naked and was crouching in a corner, screaming. After a few minutes it was obvious that the camp had been hit. Two barracks were burning fiercely, two others were destroyed, but they were all empty. Dozens of patients arrived, naked and pitiful, from a barrack threatened by fire: they asked for shelter. 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 were trailing bandages. There seemed no danger to our barrack, so long as the wind did not change.

The Germans were not there. The towers were empty. Today I think that if only because an Auschwitz existed no one in our age should speak of Providence. But in that hour the memory of Biblical salvations in times of extreme adversity undoubtedly passed like a wind through the mind of each one of us. Sleep was impossible; a window was broken and it was very cold. I was thinking that we should look for a stove to set up, and get coal, wood, and food. I knew that all this was essential, but without some help I would never have had the energy to act. I spoke to the two Frenchmen. JANUARY 19. The Frenchmen agreed. We got up at dawn, the three of us. I felt ill and helpless, I was cold and afraid. The other patients looked at us with respectful curiosity: didn’t we know that patients were not allowed to leave Ka-Be? And if the Germans had not all departed? But they said nothing, they were glad that someone was willing to try. The Frenchmen had no idea of the topography of the Lager, but Charles was courageous and robust, while Arthur was shrewd, and had a peasant’s practical common sense. We went out into the wind of a freezing, foggy day, clumsily wrapped in blankets. What we saw resembled nothing that I had ever seen or heard described. The Lager, scarcely dead, was already in a state of decomposition. No more water or electricity: broken windows and doors were banging in the wind, loose sheets of iron were screeching on the roofs, ashes from the fire drifted high and far. To the work of the bombs was added the work of man: ragged, feeble, skeleton-like, the sick who were able to move dragged themselves in all directions over the frozen ground, like an invasion of worms. They had ransacked the empty barracks in search of food and wood; they had violated with

senseless fury the grotesquely adorned rooms of the hated Blockälteste, forbidden to the ordinary Häftlinge until the previous day; no longer in control of their bowels, they had fouled everywhere, polluting the precious snow, now the only source of water in the whole camp. Around the smoking ruins of the burned barracks, groups of the sick lay clinging to the ground, sucking up its last warmth. Others had found potatoes somewhere and were roasting them on the embers of the fire, looking around fiercely. A few had had the strength to light a real fire, and were melting snow over it in makeshift containers. We headed to the kitchens as fast as we could; but already the potatoes were almost gone. We filled two sacks and left them with Arthur. 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 to me the task of getting it to our room and ran back to the sacks. There he found Arthur unconscious from the cold. Charles hoisted up both sacks and carried them to safety, then he took care of his friend. Meanwhile, though I could barely stand, I did my best to maneuver the heavy wheelbarrow. I heard the roar of an engine and an SS man entered the camp on a motorcycle. As always when we saw their hard faces, I felt overwhelmed by 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 and uncover one’s head. I had no cap 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 barrack, and went off. Only later did I realize the risk I had run. I finally reached the entrance of our barrack and unloaded the stove into Charles’s hands. The effort left me gasping for breath; large black spots danced before my eyes. We had to get it going. The hands of all three of us were paralyzed, and the icy metal stuck to the skin of our fingers,

but it was urgent to have the stove working, so that we could warm ourselves and boil the potatoes. We had found wood and coal, and also embers from the burned barracks. Once the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and then Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, with typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to the three of us who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before, such an event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said “Eat your own bread, and, if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. This was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment marked the start of the process by which we who had not died slowly turned from Häftlinge into men again. Arthur recovered quite well, but from then on he always avoided exposing himself to the cold; he took on the upkeep of the stove, the cooking of the potatoes, the cleaning of the room, and the care of the patients. Charles and I shared the various outside tasks. There was still an hour of light: an expedition yielded us half a liter of spirits and a tin of yeast, thrown away in the snow by someone; we distributed boiled potatoes and a spoonful of yeast per person. I thought vaguely that it might help with the lack of vitamins. Darkness fell; in the entire camp ours was the only room with a stove, and we were very proud of it. Many of the sick from other wards crowded around the door, but Charles’s imposing stature held them back. Nobody, neither we nor they, considered that the inevitable mixing with our sick would make it extremely dangerous to stay in our room, and that to fall ill of diphtheria in those conditions was more surely fatal than jumping from the fourth floor. I myself was aware of it, but I didn’t dwell 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 anyway beyond any possible action on our part. And it didn’t even

cross my mind that I could have gone to another room, in another barrack, with less danger of infection. Here was the stove, our achievement, which spread a wonderful warmth; here I had a bed; and, last, by now a tie bound us, the eleven patients of the Infektionsabteilung. Occasionally we heard the thunder of artillery, near and far, and at intervals the crackle of automatic rifles. In the darkness, broken only by the glow of the embers, Charles, Arthur, and I sat smoking cigarettes made of herbs we had found in the kitchen, and spoke of many things, both past and future. In the middle of this endless plain, frozen and overrun by war, in the small dark room teeming with germs, we felt at peace with ourselves and with the world. We were utterly exhausted, but it seemed to us that, after so long a time, we had finally accomplished something useful—perhaps like God after the first day of creation. JANUARY 20. Dawn came, and it was my turn to light the stove. Along with a general feeling of weakness, my aching joints reminded me at every moment that the scarlet fever was far from over. The thought of having to plunge into the freezing air to find a light in the other barracks made me shudder with disgust. I remembered the flints: I trickled some spirits on a piece of paper and from a flint patiently scraped a small pile of black dust onto it, then scraped the flint more vigorously with my knife. And there it was: after a few sparks, the pile caught fire and from the paper rose the thin pale flame of the alcohol. Arthur climbed down from his bed enthusiastically and heated three potatoes per person from those boiled the day before; afterward, Charles and I, hungry and shivering violently, left again to explore the ruins of the camp. We had enough food (that is, potatoes) for two days only; as for water, we were forced to melt the snow, a torturous operation in the absence of large containers, and yielding a blackish, muddy liquid that had to be filtered. The camp was silent. Other starving specters wandered around like us, exploring: beards unkempt, eyes hollow, limbs

skeletal and yellowish in tattered garments. Unsteady on their legs, they went in and out of the empty barracks, carrying off the most varied objects: axes, buckets, ladles, nails. Anything might be of use, and the more far-seeing were already thinking of profitable trade with the Poles of the surrounding countryside. In the kitchen two men were scuffling over the last few dozen putrid potatoes. They had grabbed each other by their ragged shirts, and were fighting with curiously slow and uncertain movements, abusing each other in Yiddish between their frozen lips. In the courtyard of the warehouse there were two large piles of cabbages and turnips (large, tasteless turnips, the basis of our diet). They were so frozen that they could be separated only with a pickax. Charles and I took turns, using all our strength with each stroke, and we got out about fifty kilos. There was still more: Charles discovered a packet of salt and (“Une fameuse trouvaille!”) a barrel of water, perhaps fifty liters, frozen into a huge block. We loaded everything onto a small cart (the carts had been used to distribute the rations to the barracks; there were a great number of them abandoned everywhere), and we turned back, pushing it laboriously over the snow. That day we contented ourselves again with boiled potatoes and slices of turnip roasted on the stove, but Arthur promised important innovations for the following day. In the afternoon I went to the former clinic, searching for anything that might be useful. Others had preceded me: everything had been smashed by inexpert looters. Not a bottle intact, on the floor a layer of rags, excrement, and bandages, a naked, contorted corpse. But here was something that had escaped my predecessors: a truck battery. I touched the poles with a knife—a small spark. It was charged. That evening our room had light.

From my bed, I could see a long stretch of the road through the window: for three days now the Wehrmacht, in flight, had

been passing by in waves. Armored 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 view, the grinding of their tracks could be heard. Charles asked, “Ça roule encore?” “Ça roule toujours.” It seemed as if it would never end. JANUARY 21. But it did end. At dawn on the 21st we saw the plain deserted and lifeless, white as far as the eye could see under the flight of the crows, deathly sad. I would almost have preferred to see something moving again. Even the Polish civilians had disappeared, hiding who knows where. The wind, too, seemed to have stopped. I wanted only one thing: to stay in bed under my blankets and give in to the complete exhaustion of muscles, nerves, and will; waiting, indifferent as a dead man, for it to end or not to end. But Charles had already lit the stove, the man Charles, our active, trusting friend, and he called me to work: “Vas-y, Primo, descends-toi de là-haut; il y a Jules à attraper par les oreilles . . .” “Jules” was the chamber pot, which every morning had to be grabbed by the handles, carried outside, and emptied into the cesspool; this was the first task of the day, and if you remember that it wasn’t possible to wash your hands, and that three of us were ill with typhus, you can understand that it was not a pleasant job. We had to get the cabbages and turnips under way. While I went to search for wood and Charles collected snow to melt, 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 as the days passed his voice

took on an increasingly sinister nasal timbre, reminding us that diphtheria seldom forgives. Alcalai was a Jewish glazier from Toulouse; he was quiet and sensible, and suffered from erysipelas on his face. Schenck was a Slovak merchant, Jewish: convalescing from typhus, he had a formidable appetite. Likewise Towarowski, the Franco-Polish Jew, who was stupid and talkative, but useful to our community because of his expansive optimism. So while the sick men worked 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, since, naturally, nobody cared anymore about their upkeep, and the dysentery patients (more than a hundred) had fouled every corner of Ka-Be, filling all the buckets, all the vats formerly used for the rations, all the pots. You couldn’t take a step without watching your feet; in the dark it was impossible to get around. Although we suffered from the cold, which remained acute, we thought with horror of what would happen if there was a thaw: infections would spread unchecked, the stench would be suffocating, and, besides, once the snow melted we would be left definitively without water. After a long search, we finally found a small area of floor that wasn’t excessively soiled in a place formerly used as a washhouse. We got a good fire going, then, to save time and complications, we disinfected our hands, rubbing them with chloramine mixed with snow. The news that soup was cooking spread rapidly through the crowd of the semi-living; a throng of starving faces gathered at the door. Charles, with ladle uplifted, made a short, vigorous speech, which, although it was in French, needed no translation. The majority dispersed, but one man came forward. He was a Parisian, a tailor for the fashionable (he said), suffering from tuberculosis. In exchange for a liter of soup he offered to

make us clothes from the many blankets still to be found in the camp. Maxime proved to be really skillful. The following day Charles and I were in possession of jacket, trousers, and gloves of a rough, strikingly colored fabric. In the evening, after our first soup, enthusiastically distributed and greedily devoured, the great silence of the plain was broken. From our bunks, too tired to be really worried, we listened to the bursts from mysterious artillery, which appeared to be positioned on all points of the horizon, and to the whistle of the shells over our heads. I was thinking that life outside was beautiful and would be beautiful again, and that it would be truly a pity to let ourselves be submerged now. I woke up the sick men 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 should all now think about returning home, and that, as far as it depended on us, certain things had to be done and others avoided. Each of us should carefully look after his own bowl and spoon; no one should offer to others any soup that he might have left over; no one should get out of bed except to go to the latrine; anyone who was in need of anything should turn only to us three. Arthur in particular was responsible for supervising discipline and hygiene, and should remember that it was better to leave bowls and spoons dirty rather than wash them, with the danger of mixing up those of a diphtheria patient with those of someone suffering from typhus. I had the impression that by now the sick men were too indifferent to everything to pay attention to what I had said; but I had great faith in Arthur’s diligence. JANUARY 22. If it is courageous to face 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 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 intense pleasure; mugs of beer, transformed

into a yellowish ice; a chessboard with an unfinished game. In the dormitories there were a lot of valuable things. We loaded ourselves up with a bottle of vodka, various medicines, newspapers and magazines, and four excellent quilts, one of which is in my house in Turin today. Cheerful and heedless, we carried the fruits of our expedition back to the room, leaving them in Arthur’s care. Only that evening did we learn what happened perhaps half an hour later. Some SS men, perhaps lost, but armed, entered the abandoned camp. They found that eighteen Frenchmen had settled in the Waffen SS dining hall. They killed them all methodically, with a shot to the back of the neck, and lined up the contorted bodies in the snow on the road; then they left. The eighteen corpses lay exposed until the arrival of the Russians; nobody had the strength to bury them. In any case, by now in all the barracks there were beds occupied by corpses, as stiff as boards, whom nobody troubled to remove. The ground was too frozen for graves to be dug; bodies were piled in a trench, but already in the first days the pile had grown higher than the pit and was obscenely visible from our window. Only a wooden wall separated us from the ward of the dysentery patients, where many were dying and many were dead. The floor was covered by a layer of frozen excrement. None of the sick men had strength enough to come out from under their blankets to search for food, and those who had done so earlier had not returned to help their comrades. In one bed, next to the partition, clinging to each other to better withstand the cold, there were two Italians. I often heard them talking, but, since I was speaking only French, for a long time they were not aware of my presence. That day by chance they heard my name, pronounced by Charles with an Italian accent, and from then on they never ceased groaning and pleading. Naturally I would have liked to help them, given the means and the strength, if for no other reason than to stop their obsessive howls. In the evening, when all the work was done, I overcame fatigue and disgust, and dragged myself to their ward, groping my way along the dark, filthy corridor, with a

bowl of water and the remainder of the day’s soup. The result was that from then on, through the thin wall, the whole diarrhea ward called my name, day and night, in the accents of all the languages of Europe, accompanied by incomprehensible prayers, yet I could bring them no relief. I felt close to tears, I could have cursed them. The night held ugly surprises. Lakmaker, in the bunk under mine, was a poor human wreck. He was (or had been) a Dutch Jew, seventeen years old, tall, thin, and meek. He had been in bed for three months; I have no idea how he had escaped the selections. He had had typhus and scarlet fever successively; at the same time a serious heart defect had manifested itself and he was crusted with bedsores, so that by now he could lie only on his stomach. Nevertheless, he had a ferocious appetite. He spoke only Dutch, and none of us could understand him. Perhaps the cause of it all was the cabbage and turnip soup: Lakmaker had wanted two helpings. In the middle of the night he groaned and then threw himself out of his bed. He tried to reach the latrine, but he was too weak and fell to the floor, weeping and shouting loudly. Charles lit the lamp (the battery turned out to be providential), and we were able to assess the seriousness of the accident. The boy’s bed and the floor were filthy. The smell in the small area was rapidly becoming intolerable. We had only a minimal supply of water and neither blankets nor straw mattresses to spare. And the poor wretch, suffering from typhus, was a terrible source of infection, and he certainly couldn’t be left all night in that muck, groaning and shivering with cold. 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 well as possible with straw taken from the mattress, and lifted him into the remade bed in the only position in which the unfortunate boy could lie. He scraped the floor with a scrap piece of metal, diluted a little chloramine,

and finally sprinkled disinfectant over everything, including himself. I measured his self-sacrifice by the weariness I would have had to overcome in myself to do what he had done. JANUARY 23. Our potatoes were gone. For days the rumor had circulated through all the barracks that an enormous pit of potatoes lay somewhere outside the barbed wire, not far from the camp. Unknown pioneers must have carried out patient explorations, or else someone knew precisely where the place was. In fact, by the morning of the 23rd a section of the barbed wire had been beaten down and a double procession of miserable wretches went in and out through the opening. Charles and I departed, into the wind of the leaden plain. We were beyond the broken barrier. “Dis donc, Primo, on est dehors!” It was true; for the first time since the day of my arrest I found myself free, without armed guards, without fences between me and my home. Perhaps four hundred meters from the camp were the potatoes—a treasure. Two extremely long trenches, full of potatoes and covered by alternate layers of soil and straw to keep them from freezing. No one would die of hunger anymore. But getting them out was by no means easy work. Because of the cold, the surface of the earth was as hard as iron. Strenuous work with a pickax made it possible to break the crust and lay bare the store; but the majority preferred to climb into holes abandoned by others and continue to dig them deeper, handing the potatoes to their companions standing outside. An old Hungarian had been surprised there by death. He lay frozen in the posture of a starving man: head and shoulders under a pile of earth, belly in the snow, hands outstretched toward the potatoes. Somebody who came later moved the

body about a meter, unblocking the hole, and continued the work. From then on our food improved. Besides boiled potatoes and potato soup, we offered our patients potato pancakes, from 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 in an ever more nasal tone, that day he was unable to force down any food; his throat had somehow closed up, and every mouthful threatened to suffocate him. I went to look for a Hungarian doctor who had been left as a patient in the barracks opposite. When he heard talk of diphtheria he pulled back and ordered me to leave. For pure propaganda purposes I gave everyone nose drops of camphorated oil. I assured Sertelet that they would bring him some relief; I even tried to convince myself. JANUARY 24. Liberty. The breach in the barbed wire gave us its concrete image. If you thought about it carefully, it signified no more Germans, no more selections, no work, no beatings, no roll calls, and perhaps, later, return home. But it took an effort to convince ourselves, 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 the pit. Despite the potatoes, everyone was extremely weak: in the camp none of the sick got better, while many became ill with pneumonia and diarrhea. Those who were unable to move, or lacked the energy to do so, lay lethargic in their bunks, stiff with cold, and nobody noticed when they died. The others were all incredibly tired: after months and years of the Lager a man needed more than potatoes to regain his strength. When, with the cooking done, Charles and I had dragged the twenty-five liters of the daily soup from the washhouse to our room, we threw ourselves panting on our

bunks, while the meticulous, domestic-minded Arthur divided the soup, taking care to save the three rations of rabiot pour les travailleurs and a little from the bottom of the pot pour les italiens d’à côté. In the second room of the Infectious Disease ward, also next to ours, and occupied mainly by tuberculosis patients, the situation was quite different. All those who were physically able to had gone to settle in other barracks. Their weaker and more seriously ill comrades died, one by one, in solitude. I went there one morning to try and borrow a needle. A sick man was gasping for breath in one of the upper bunks. He heard me, raised himself to sitting, then fell, dangling headfirst over the edge toward me, with his chest and arms stiff and his eyes white. The man in the bunk below automatically reached his arms up to support the body and then realized that he was dead. He slowly withdrew from under the weight, and the other slid to the floor and remained there. Nobody knew his name. But in Barrack 14 something new had happened. It was occupied by patients recovering from operations, some of them in fairly good condition. They organized an expedition to the English prisoner-of-war camp, which it was assumed had been evacuated. It was a fruitful undertaking. They returned dressed in khaki, with a cart full of wonders never seen before: margarine, custard powder, lard, soybean flour, brandy. That night there was singing in Barrack 14. None of us felt strong enough to walk the two kilometers to the English camp and return with a load. But indirectly the successful expedition proved advantageous to many. The unequal distribution of goods caused industry and commerce to flourish once more. In our small room, with its lethal atmosphere, we started a candle factory: the candles, poured into cardboard molds, had wicks soaked in boric acid. The wealthy occupants of Barrack 14 bought up our entire production, paying us in lard and flour. I myself had found the block of beeswax in the Elektromagazin; I remember the look of disappointment

among those who saw me carry it away and the dialogue that followed: “What do you intend to do with that?” It was inadvisable to reveal a trade secret. I heard myself replying with the words I had often heard spoken by the old inmates of the camp, expressing their favorite boast: that they were “good prisoners,” adaptable types, who always managed to get by—“Ich verstehe verschiedene Sachen. . . .” I can do a lot of different things. . . . JANUARY 25. It was Sómogyi’s turn. He was a Hungarian chemist, about fifty years old, thin, tall, and taciturn. Like the Dutchman, he was recovering from typhus and scarlet fever. But something new occurred: he was running a high 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 mattress. Divide it among the three of you. I won’t be eating anymore.” We couldn’t find anything to say, but for the time being we didn’t touch the bread. Half his face was swollen. As long as he remained conscious, he was closed in a bitter silence. But in the evening, and for the whole night, and for two days, without interruption, the silence was broken by his delirium. Following a last, interminable dream of submission and slavery, he began to murmur “Jawohl” with every breath, regularly and continuously like a machine, “Jawohl,” every time his poor rib cage subsided, thousands of times, so that you wanted to shake him, suffocate him, or at least make him change the word. I never understood so clearly as at that moment how laborious is the death of a man. Outside there was still the vast silence. The number of crows had increased considerably and everyone knew why. Only at long intervals did the dialogue of the artillery reawaken. We all said to one another that the Russians would arrive soon, at once; we all proclaimed it, we were all sure of it, but

at bottom nobody really believed it. Because in the Lager one loses the habit of hope, and even of faith in one’s own reasoning. It is useless to think in the Lager, because events happen for the most part in an unpredictable manner; and it is harmful, because it keeps alive a sensitivity that is a source of pain, and which some providential natural law dulls when suffering passes a certain limit. As one tires of joy, fear, and pain itself, so, too, one can tire of waiting. By January 25, eight days after breaking our ties with that ferocious world which nonetheless was 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 again. We could speak of everything. I was fascinated by Arthur’s account of how Sundays were spent in Provenchères, in the Vosges, and Charles almost cried when I told him the story of the armistice in Italy, of the grim and desperate beginning of the partisan Resistance, of the man who betrayed us and our capture in the mountains. In the darkness, behind and above us, the eight invalids did not miss a syllable, even those who did not understand French. Only Sómogyi implacably confirmed his dedication to death. JANUARY 26. We were lying in a world of dead men and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the Germans in triumph, had been brought to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat. It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; he who shares his bed with a corpse, having lost all restraint, is not a man. He who has waited for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit blameless, farther from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pygmy or the most vicious sadist. Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near 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, and for

this we owe one another gratitude; it is why my friendship with Charles will endure. But thousands of meters above us, in the gaps between the gray clouds, the complicated miracles of aerial duels were unfolding. Above us, exposed, helpless, and unarmed, men of our time sought mutual death with the most refined of instruments. One 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 a minute the life of a single one of us. The saraband stopped at night and the room was once again filled with Sómogyi’s monologue. In utter darkness I woke with a start. “L’ pauv’ vieux” was silent; he had finished. With the last gasp of life, he had fallen to the floor from his bunk: I heard the thud of his knees, of his hips, of his shoulders, of his head. “La mort l’a chassé de son lit,” Arthur described it. We certainly could not carry him out during the night. There was nothing to do but go back to sleep. JANUARY 27. Dawn. On the floor, the shameful disorder of skin and bones, the Sómogyi thing. There are more urgent tasks: we cannot wash, we cannot touch him until we have cooked and eaten. And, besides, “. . . rien de si dégoutant que les débordements,” Charles said justly; the latrine had to be emptied. The living are more demanding; the dead can wait. We began to work as we did every day. The Russians arrived as Charles and I were carrying Sómogyi a little distance outside. He was very light. We overturned the stretcher onto the gray snow. Charles took off his cap. I was sorry that I didn’t have a cap. Of the eleven men in 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

until now; 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 in Auschwitz. In April, at Katowice, I met Schenck and Alcalai in good health. Arthur has happily rejoined his family and Charles has returned to his profession as a teacher; we have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him again one day. Avigliana–Turin, December 1945–January 1947

Appendix I wrote this appendix in 1976 for the school edition of If This Is a Man, in order to answer the questions that were repeatedly addressed to me by student readers. Yet since they coincide substantially with the questions I get from adult readers, it seemed to me fitting to incorporate my answers into this edition as well.

Someone wrote long ago that books, like human beings, have a fate of their own, unpredictable, different from what was wished for or expected. This book, too, has had a strange fate. It was born long ago: its birth certificate can be found on one of its pages (page 135), where you read that I “write what I could never tell anyone.” The need to tell was so strong in us that I began to write the book there, in that German laboratory permeated by cold, war, and prying glances, although I knew that under no circumstances would I be able to keep those notes, scribbled any way I could—that I would have to throw them away immediately, because if they were found on me they would cost me my life. But I wrote the book as soon as I returned, in a few months: the memories were burning inside me. The manuscript, rejected by some of the big publishers, was accepted in 1947 by a small publishing house run by Franco Antonicelli; 2500 copies were printed. Then the publishing house closed, and the book fell into oblivion, partly because, in that harsh period after the war, people had little desire to return in memory to the years of suffering they had just endured. The book finally found new life in 1958, when it was reprinted by Einaudi, and since then the interest of the public has not wavered. The book has been translated into six languages, and adapted for the radio and the theater. It has been greeted by students and teachers with an enthusiasm that has far surpassed my expectations and those of the publisher. Hundreds of students, from all over Italy, have asked me to comment on the book, in writing or, if possible, in

person. Within the limits of my other duties, I have satisfied these requests, willingly adding to my two jobs a third, that of introducing and commenting on myself, or, rather, that distant self who lived through the experience of Auschwitz and wrote about it. In the course of these numerous encounters with student readers, I’ve had to answer many questions: naïve or knowing, emotional or provocative, superficial or profound. I soon realized that some of these questions recurred repeatedly —that they never failed to come up. And so they must originate in a justified and reasonable curiosity, which in some way the book didn’t satisfy. I propose to answer these questions here. 1. In your book there are no expressions of hatred or bitterness toward the Germans, or a desire for revenge. Have you forgiven them? I am not by nature a person easily roused to hatred. I consider it a crude and brutish feeling, and I prefer my actions and thoughts, as far as possible, to be based, instead, on reason. And so I’ve never cultivated hatred in myself as a primitive desire for revenge, for suffering inflicted on a real or presumed enemy, or for a private vendetta. I should add that, as far as I can see, hatred is personal, directed toward a person, a name, or a face, whereas our persecutors at the time had neither face nor name, as you can understand from these pages: they were remote, invisible, inaccessible. Wisely, the Nazi system ensured that direct contacts between slaves and masters were reduced to a minimum. You will have noticed that in this book only a single encounter between the authorprotagonist and an SS officer is described, and, not coincidentally, it takes place in the final days of the Lager, as it was collapsing, when the system had broken down. Furthermore, in the months when this book was written— that is, in 1946—Nazism and fascism seemed truly faceless: they seemed to have returned to nothing, vanished like a monstrous dream, justly and deservedly, as ghosts disappear at the crowing of the cock. How could I harbor bitterness, or desire revenge, against a crowd of ghosts?

Not many years later, Italy and the rest of Europe realized that that was an ingenuous illusion: fascism was far from dead; it was only hidden, encysted. It was molting, and would reappear in a new guise, a little less recognizable, a little more respectable, more suited to the new world that had emerged from the catastrophe of the Second World War, which fascism itself had brought on. I have to confess that, confronted by certain familiar faces, certain old lies, certain figures in search of respectability, a certain tolerance, a certain complicity, I feel a temptation to hatred, and with some violence. But I am not a Fascist; I believe in reason and discussion as supreme tools of progress, and so I place justice before hatred. For that very reason, in writing this book, I deliberately assumed the calm and sober language of the witness, not the lament of the victim or the anger of the avenger: I thought that my word would be more credible and useful the more objective it appeared and the less impassioned it sounded; only in that way does the witness in court fulfill his function, which is to prepare the ground for the judge. It is you who are the judges. I would not, however, want my refraining from explicit judgment to be confused with an indiscriminate forgiveness. No, I have forgiven none of the guilty, nor am I disposed now or in the future to forgive any of them, unless they can demonstrate (in deeds: not in words, and not too late) that they are aware of the crimes and errors of fascism, ours and other nations’, and are determined to condemn them, to uproot them from their own conscience and that of others. In that case, yes, I, though not a Christian, am willing to follow the Jewish and Christian commandment to forgive my enemy; but an enemy who repents has ceased to be an enemy. 2. Did the Germans know? Did the Allies know? How could the genocide, the extermination of millions of human beings, have taken place in the heart of Europe without anyone knowing anything? The world in which we in the West live today displays many serious flaws and dangers, but compared with the world of yesterday it enjoys a huge advantage: everyone can immediately know everything about everything. Information today is the “fourth estate”: in theory, at least, the reporter and

the journalist have a clear path everywhere; no one can stop them or remove them or silence them. It’s easy: if you want, you listen to the radio of your country or any other country; you go to the newsstand and choose the newspaper you prefer, an Italian paper of any political stripe, or American, or Soviet, within a vast array of alternatives; you buy and read the books you want, without risk of being charged with “anti-Italian activities” or having your house searched by the political police. Of course it’s not easy to avoid all biases, but at least you can choose the type of bias that you prefer. Things are different in an authoritarian state. There is a single Truth, proclaimed from on high; all the newspapers are the same, and all repeat that same unique truth. So, too, do the radio broadcasts, and you can’t listen to those of other countries, because in the first place it’s a crime, and you risk ending up in prison, and, in the second place, your country’s transmitters emit on the appropriate wavelengths a signal that jams foreign broadcasts so that they can’t be heard. As for books, only those approved of by the State are translated and published; for others, you have to look abroad, and introduce them to your country at your own risk, because they’re considered more dangerous than drugs or explosives. If you’re found with them at the border, they are confiscated and you are punished. Books of earlier periods that are not approved or are no longer approved are publicly burned in the town squares. So it was in Italy between 1924 and 1945, and in Nazi Germany; so it is still in many countries, among which it grieves me to have to include the Soviet Union, though it fought heroically against fascism. In an authoritarian state it is considered permissible to alter the truth, to rewrite history after the fact, and to distort the news, suppressing truths and adding falsehoods—information is replaced by propaganda. In fact, in such a country you are not a citizen, who holds rights, but, rather, a subject, and as such you owe the State (and the dictator who embodies it) fanatic loyalty and servile obedience. It’s clear that in these conditions it becomes possible (if not always easy: it’s never easy to violate the core of a human being) to erase even large fragments of reality. In Fascist Italy

the assassination of the Socialist deputy Matteotti1 was carried out successfully and, after a few months, successfully hushed up; and Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, showed themselves far superior to Mussolini in this work of controlling and hiding the truth. Yet it wasn’t possible to conceal the existence of the enormous system of concentration camps from the German people, nor was it in fact (from the Nazi point of view) desirable. Creating and maintaining an atmosphere of undefined terror was part of Nazism’s goal: it was useful for people to know that opposing Hitler was extremely dangerous. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Germans were imprisoned in the Lagers from the first months of Nazism—Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, Jews, Protestants, and Catholics— and the whole country knew it, and knew that in the Lager people suffered and died. Nevertheless, it’s true that the great mass of Germans didn’t always know the more atrocious details of what happened later in the camps: the methodical, industrialized extermination on the scale of millions, the toxic gas chambers, the vile exploitation of the corpses—all that was not meant to be known, and few did know, until the end of the war. Among the precautions taken to maintain secrecy was the use of cautious, cynical euphemisms in the language of officialdom: not “extermination” but “final solution,” not “deportation” but “transfer,” not “killing by gas” but “special treatment,” and so on. Hitler rightly feared that this appalling information, if it was known, would compromise the nation’s blind faith in him and the morale of the fighting troops. Furthermore, the Allies would find out and use it as propaganda; this happened, but the horrors of the Lagers, which were described many times by Allied radio broadcasts, were not generally believed, because of their very enormity. The most convincing summary of the German situation at the time that I’ve found is in the book Der SS Staat (The Theory and Practice of Hell), by Eugen Kogon, a political prisoner at Buchenwald who became a professor of political science at the University of Munich:

What did the Germans know about the concentration camps? Beyond the fact of their existence, almost nothing, and even today they know little. Without a doubt, the method of keeping the details of the terrorist system secret, thus making the horror vague, and therefore more profound, turned out to be effective. As I’ve said elsewhere, even many officials of the Gestapo didn’t know what happened in the Lagers to which they sent their prisoners; the majority of the prisoners themselves had a very imprecise idea of the functioning of their camp and the methods that were employed. How could the German people have known? Those who entered the camps found themselves faced with an unfathomable universe, totally new to them: this is the best demonstration of the power and effectiveness of the secrecy. And yet . . . and yet, there was not a German who did not know of the existence of the camps, or who considered them sanatoriums. There were few Germans who did not have a relative or acquaintance in the camps, or who didn’t at least know that this one and that one had been sent there. All the Germans had witnessed anti-Semitic barbarities: millions of them had watched with indifference, or with curiosity, or with scorn, or maybe with malicious pleasure, the burning of the synagogues or the humiliation of Jews forced to kneel in the mud on the streets. Many Germans had learned something from foreign radio broadcasts, and many had come in contact with prisoners working outside the Lagers. Not a few Germans had, on the streets or in the train stations, run into wretched groups of detainees: in a circular dated November 9, 1941, and addressed by the chief of police and the security services to all . . . police officers and commanders of the Lagers we read: “In particular, it must be stated that during the transfers on foot, for example from the station to the camp, a not negligible number of prisoners fall down dead or faint from exhaustion. . . . It’s impossible to prevent the population from knowing about such events.” Nor could a German not know that the prisons were overflowing, and that executions were constantly taking place throughout the country; the judges and police officials, the lawyers, priests, and social workers who knew generally that the situation was very serious numbered in the thousands. Many businessmen had supplier relationships with the SS in the Lagers, many industrialists who wished to hire slave workers applied to the administrative and economic officials of the SS, and many employees of the hiring office . . . were aware of the fact that numerous big companies were using the slave workforce. Not a few workers were engaged in activities near the concentration camps or even inside them. Various university professors collaborated with Himmler’s medical research institutes, and various state doctors and doctors in private institutes collaborated with professional murderers. Many members of the air force had been transferred to the employment of the SS, and they, too, must have been aware of what happened there. Many high Army officers knew of the mass slaughter of Russian prisoners of war in the Lagers, and many soldiers and members of the military police must have known precisely what frightful horrors were committed in the camps, in the ghettoes, in the cities and countryside of the occupied Eastern territories. Is it possible that any one of these statements is false?

In my opinion, none of those statements are false, but another should be added to complete the picture: in spite of the various possible ways of getting information, the majority of the

Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; rather, they wanted to not know. It’s certainly true that state terrorism is a very strong weapon, and hard to defend against; but it’s also true that the German people, as a whole, didn’t even try. In Hitler’s Germany a particular code of behavior was widespread: those who knew didn’t speak, those who didn’t know didn’t ask questions, those who asked questions didn’t get answers. In this way the typical German citizen acquired and protected his ignorance, which seemed to him a sufficient justification for his adherence to Nazism: closing his mouth, his eyes, and his ears, he constructed the illusion of not knowing, and thus of not being complicit in, what was happening on his doorstep. To know and to make known would have been a way (essentially not so dangerous) of distancing oneself from Nazism; I think that the German people, as a whole, did not resort to it, and of this deliberate omission I consider them fully guilty. 3. Were there prisoners who escaped from the camps? Why were there no mass revolts? These are among the questions that are most frequently asked, and so they must originate in some particularly urgent curiosity or need. My interpretation is optimistic: for the young people of today freedom is a right that cannot under any circumstances be relinquished, and so for them the idea of prison is immediately linked to the idea of escape or revolt. It’s true that under the military codes of many countries the prisoner of war is bound to try to get free however he can, in order to return to his post as a fighter, and that under the Hague Convention an escape attempt is not supposed to be punished. The theme of escape as a moral obligation is a constant in romantic literature (remember the Count of Monte Cristo?), in popular literature, and in movies, in which the hero, unjustly (or perhaps justly) incarcerated, always tries to escape, even in the most unlikely circumstances, and his attempt is invariably crowned with success. Perhaps it’s good that the condition of the prisoner, nonfreedom, is felt as unjust, abnormal: as an illness, in other

words, that must be cured by escape or rebellion. But, unfortunately, this picture bears very little resemblance to the reality of the concentration camps. The number of prisoners who tried to escape, for example from Auschwitz, was a few hundred, and those who succeeded a few dozen. Escape was difficult and extremely dangerous: the prisoners were weakened, as well as demoralized, by hunger and ill treatment; their heads were shaved; they wore striped clothing that was immediately recognizable and wooden shoes that hindered rapid and silent movement; they had no money and, in general, didn’t speak Polish, the local language; they had no contacts in the area, and, besides, its geography was unfamiliar. Moreover, to deter escape attempts, fierce reprisals were instituted: anyone who was recaptured was hanged publicly in Roll Call Square, often after being brutally tortured. When an escape was discovered, the friends of the escapee were considered his accomplices and were starved to death in prison cells; the entire barrack was forced to stand for twenty-four hours; and sometimes the parents of the “guilty” person were arrested and deported to the Lager. SS soldiers who killed a prisoner in the course of an escape attempt were given a special leave, and so it often happened that an SS soldier shot at a prisoner who had no intention of escaping, just for the purpose of getting the leave. This fact artificially increased the official number of cases of escape recorded; as I mentioned, the real number was very small. Given the situation, only a few “Aryan” (that is, non-Jewish, in the terminology of the time) Polish prisoners managed to escape successfully—prisoners who didn’t live far from the Lager, and who therefore had a place to go and the assurance that they would be protected by the population. In the other camps the situation was analogous. As for the absence of rebellion, here the matter is somewhat different. First of all, we should recall that in some camps uprisings did take place: in Treblinka, in Sobibór, and even in Birkenau, one of the subcamps of Auschwitz. They did not have much numerical weight: like the analogous Warsaw Ghetto uprising, they represent, rather, examples of extraordinary moral force. In all instances, they were planned

and led by prisoners who were in some sense privileged, and so in better physical and spiritual condition than the ordinary prisoners. This should not be surprising: only at first glance does it seem paradoxical that the ones who revolt are those who suffer least. Even outside the Lager, uprisings are rarely led by the subproletariat. The “ragged” do not rebel. In the camps for political prisoners, or where the politicals predominated, their experience of conspiracy proved valuable and often led, rather than to open revolts, to fairly effective activities of resistance. Depending on the camp and the time, the prisoners managed, for example, to blackmail or corrupt SS officials, curbing their indiscriminate powers; sabotage the work for the German war industries; organize escapes; communicate with the Allies by radio, providing news of the atrocious conditions in the camps; improve the treatment of the sick, replacing SS doctors with prisoner-doctors; “guide” the selections, sending spies or traitors to their death and saving prisoners whose survival had for some reason particular importance; and prepare to resist, militarily as well, in case, with the approach of the front, the Nazis decided (as in fact they often did decide) to totally liquidate the Lagers. In the camps that were predominantly Jewish, like the ones in the Auschwitz zone, any sort of resistance, active or passive, was particularly difficult. Here the prisoners, in general, were without any organizational or military experience; they came from all the countries of Europe and spoke different languages, and so didn’t understand one another; above all, they were more starving, weaker, and more exhausted than the others, because their conditions of life were harsher, and because often they had already had a long life of hunger, persecution, and humiliation in the ghettos. As a result, their sojourn in the Lager was tragically short; they were, in other words, a fluctuating population, continually thinned by death, and renewed by the ceaseless arrival of new convoys. It’s understandable that in a human fabric so deteriorated and so unstable the seed of revolt did not easily take root. One might ask why the prisoners who had just got off the trains, and waited for hours (sometimes for days) to enter the

gas chambers, didn’t rebel. To what I’ve already said I should add here that for this feat of collective death the Germans had perfected a diabolically clever and versatile strategy. In the majority of cases, the new arrivals didn’t know what they were facing: they were greeted with cold efficiency but not brutally, invited to strip “for a shower,” sometimes given a towel and soap, and promised hot coffee afterward. The gas chambers were camouflaged as shower rooms, with pipes, taps, dressing rooms, clothes hooks, benches, etc. However, if the prisoners gave the least sign of knowing or suspecting their imminent fate, the SS or their collaborators moved in brutally and without warning against these baffled and desperate people, racked by five or ten days in sealed freight cars, shouting, threatening, kicking, firing shots, and unleashing against them dogs that were trained to kill. Given the situation, the statement, sometimes put forward, that the Jews didn’t rebel out of cowardice seems absurd and offensive. No one rebelled. It need only be recalled that the gas chambers of Auschwitz were tested on a group of three hundred Russian prisoners of war, young men trained as soldiers, politically sophisticated, and not hindered by the presence of women and children: and they did not rebel, either. I would like to add a final consideration. The deep-rooted awareness that one must not bow to oppression but, rather, resist was not widespread in Fascist Europe, and was particularly weak in Italy. It was the heritage of a small circle of politically active men, but fascism and Nazism had isolated them, expelled them, terrorized and even destroyed them. We must not forget that the first victims of the German Lagers, numbering hundreds of thousands, were the members of the anti-Nazi political parties. Without their expertise, the popular will to resist, to organize a resistance, did not arise until much later, with the help of the European Communist parties, which, after Germany, in June 1941, suddenly attacked the Soviet Union, breaking the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939, threw themselves into the fight against Nazism. Finally, to reproach the prisoners for failing to rebel represents an error of historical perspective: it means expecting from them a political

consciousness that today is a nearly common heritage but at the time belonged only to an élite. 4. Have you returned to Auschwitz since the liberation? I returned to Auschwitz in 1965, on the occasion of a ceremony commemorating the liberation of the camps. As I’ve mentioned in my books, the concentration-camp empire of Auschwitz was made up not of just one Lager but of some forty: the camp of Auschwitz itself was constructed on the outskirts of the city of that name (O wi cim in Polish), had a capacity of around twenty thousand prisoners, and was, so to speak, the administrative capital of the complex. Then, there was the Lager (or more precisely the group of Lagers, from three to five, depending on circumstances) of Birkenau, which held as many as sixty thousand prisoners, of whom around forty thousand were women, and where the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens were situated; and, finally, there was a constantly varying number of labor camps, some as far as hundreds of kilometers away from the “capital.” My camp, called Monowitz, was the biggest of these, and held as many as twelve thousand prisoners. It was situated about seven kilometers east of Auschwitz. The entire area is at present part of Poland. I didn’t have a strong feeling upon visiting the Central Camp: the Polish government has transformed it into a kind of national monument, the barracks have been cleaned and painted, trees have been planted, flower beds laid out. There is a museum in which pitiable relics are displayed: tons of human hair, hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyeglasses, combs, shaving brushes, dolls, children’s shoes. But still it’s a museum, something static, arranged, manipulated. The whole camp seemed like a museum to me. As for my Lager, it no longer exists; the rubber factory it was attached to is now in Polish hands and has expanded to occupy the area completely. And yet when I entered the Birkenau Lager, which I had never seen as a prisoner, I felt a violent anguish. Here nothing is changed: there was mud, and there is still mud, or suffocating dust in summer; the barracks (the ones that weren’t burned during the passage of the front) remain as they were,

low, dirty, constructed of loose planks, with a floor of packed earth; there are no bunks but bare wooden boards, up to the ceiling. Nothing has been beautified here. With me was my friend Giuliana Tedeschi, a survivor of Birkenau. She showed me that on every board of 1.8 by 2 meters as many as nine women slept. She pointed out that from the small window the ruins of the crematorium were visible; at that time, you could see the flame at the top of the chimney. She had asked the older inmates: “What is that fire?” And they answered: “It’s we who are burning.” Faced with the grim evocative power of those places, each of us survivors behaves in a different way, but two typical categories can be identified. The first category is made up of those who refuse to return, or even talk about the subject; those who would like to forget, but can’t, and are tormented by nightmares; and those who, instead, have forgotten, have repressed everything, and who began to live again from zero. I’ve noticed that in general these are individuals who ended up in the Lager “through bad luck,” that is, without a precise political commitment. Their suffering was a traumatic experience, but it had no meaning, taught them nothing, like an accident or an illness: for them the memory is something alien, a painful body that intruded on their life, and which they have tried (or are still trying) to eliminate. The second category is made up of former “political” prisoners, or people who had had some political education or religious conviction, or a strong moral conscience. For these survivors, remembering is a duty: they don’t want to forget, and above all they don’t want the world to forget, because they understand that their experience was not without meaning, and that the Lagers were not an accident, an unforeseeable historical event. The Nazi Lagers were the apex, the crown of European fascism, its most monstrous manifestation; but there was fascism before Hitler and Mussolini, and, in forms both open and disguised, it has survived the defeat of the Second World War. Anywhere in the world, if one begins by denying the fundamental freedoms of Man, and equality between men, one is heading toward a concentration-camp system, and this is a trajectory that is difficult to stop. I know many former

prisoners who understand clearly what a terrible lesson their experience holds, and who every year return to “their” camp leading groups of young people. I would gladly do that if I had the time, and if I didn’t know that I could achieve the same goal by writing books and discussing them with students. 5. Why do you speak about only the German Lagers, and not the Russian ones? As I wrote in response to the first question, I prefer the role of witness to that of judge: I have testimony to offer, about the things I endured and saw. My books are not history books: in writing them I limited myself strictly to reporting the facts of which I had direct experience, and excluded those that I learned later from books or newspapers. You will note, for example, that I haven’t quoted the figures for the massacre of Auschwitz, nor have I described the details of the gas chambers and the crematoriums. I didn’t know those facts when I was in the Lager, and I learned them only afterward, when the whole world learned them. For the same reason I don’t generally speak about the Russian Lagers: luckily for me I wasn’t there, and would be able to repeat only what I’ve read—that is, what everyone who is interested in the subject knows. And yet it’s clear that by saying this I neither can nor wish to avoid the duty, which every man has, to make a judgment and form an opinion. It seems to me that, besides the obvious resemblances, substantial differences can be observed between the Soviet Lagers and the Nazi concentration camps. The main difference consists in the purpose. The German Lagers constitute something unique in the admittedly bloody history of humanity: to the old goal of eliminating or terrifying political adversaries they added a modern and monstrous goal, that of annihilating from the world entire peoples and cultures. Starting around 1941, they became gigantic machines of death: gas chambers and crematoriums were planned deliberately to destroy lives and human bodies on a scale of millions; the horrific record belongs to Auschwitz, with 24,000 dead in a single day, in August 1944. The Soviet camps certainly were not and are not places for a pleasant stay, but not even in the

darkest years of Stalinism was the death of the prisoners explicitly sought. Death was frequent, and tolerated with brutal indifference, but not in essence deliberate; it was, in other words, a by-product of hunger, cold, disease, exhaustion. In this grim comparison between two models of hell it should also be added that in the German Lagers, in general, one entered not to come out: no end other than death was expected. In the Soviet camps, on the contrary, there was always an end: in Stalin’s time the “guilty” were sometimes given very long sentences (even fifteen or twenty years), with frightening carelessness, but a hope of freedom, however slight, existed. From this fundamental difference others emerge. The relations between guards and prisoners in the Soviet Union are less inhuman: they all belong to the same people, they speak the same language, they are not “supermen” and “submen,” as under Nazism. The sick are attended to, if poorly; in the face of work that is too hard a protest is conceivable, either individual or collective; corporal punishment is rare and not so brutal; it’s possible to receive letters and food packages from home—in other words, the human personality is not repudiated, and totally lost. By contrast, at least regarding Jews and Gypsies, in the German Lagers the slaughter was almost complete: it didn’t even stop at children, who were killed in the gas chambers by the hundreds of thousands, something unique among the atrocities of human history. As a general rule, the mortality rates are very different between the two systems. In the Soviet Union, it seems that in the harshest periods mortality was around 30 percent, including all who entered, and that is certainly an intolerably high figure; but in the German Lagers the mortality rate was 90 to 98 percent. The recent Soviet innovation in which certain dissident intellectuals have been abruptly declared insane, shut up in psychiatric institutions, and subjected to “treatments” that not only cause terrible suffering but distort and weaken mental functions seems very serious to me. It demonstrates that dissent is feared: the intent is no longer to punish but to destroy it, by means of drugs (or the fear of drugs). Maybe the technique isn’t so widespread (it seems that in 1975 there were no more than a hundred of these political inmates), but it’s

odious, because it entails a vile use of science, and unforgivable prostitution on the part of the doctors who slavishly comply with the wishes of authority. It indicates an extreme contempt for democratic debate and civil liberties. By contrast, regarding the quantitative aspect, the Lager phenomenon in the Soviet Union at present appears to be in decline. Around 1950, it seems, there were millions of political prisoners; according to data from Amnesty International (an apolitical organization whose goal is to help all political prisoners, in all countries, and independent of their opinions), there are today (1976) around twelve thousand. Finally, the Soviet camps remain a deplorable manifestation of illegality and inhumanity. They have nothing to do with socialism, and stand out as an ugly stain on Soviet socialism; they should instead be considered a barbaric remnant of tsarist absolutism, from which the Soviet rulers are unable or unwilling to free themselves. Anyone who reads The House of the Dead, written by Dostoyevsky in 1862, would have no difficulty recognizing the same features in the prison described by Solzhenitsyn a hundred years later. But it’s possible, in fact easy, to imagine a socialism without Lagers; in many parts of the world it has been realized. A Nazism without Lagers, on the other hand, is unthinkable. 6. Which of the individuals in If This Is a Man did you see again after the liberation? Unfortunately, the majority of the individuals who appear in these pages died, either during the days in the Lager or during the tremendous evacuation march mentioned in the last chapter of the book. Others died later from diseases contracted while in prison, and there are still others I’ve never been able to trace. A few survived, and I was able to maintain or reestablish contact with them. Jean, the Pikolo of “The Canto of Ulysses,” is alive and well. His family was destroyed, but he married after his return, now has two children, and leads a quiet life as a pharmacist in a provincial French city. We sometimes meet in Italy, where he comes for vacations; other times I’ve gone to see him. Oddly, he has forgotten a lot about his year in Monowitz;

predominant are the atrocious memories of the journey of evacuation, during which he saw all his friends (including Alberto) die of exhaustion. I see the person I call Piero Sonnino quite frequently, and it is he who appears as Cesare in The Truce. He, too, after a difficult period of readjustment, found a job and has a family. He lives in Rome. He recounts willingly and vividly the hardships he endured in the camp and during the journey home, but in his narratives, which often become like dramatic monologues, he tends to highlight the adventures in which he was the hero rather than the tragic events he witnessed. I’ve also seen Charles again. He was taken prisoner in the hills of the Vosges, near his home, where he was a partisan, in November 1944, and had been in the Lager for only a month; but that month of suffering, and the savage events he witnessed, marked him profoundly, destroying his joy in life and the wish to build a future for himself. Returning home after a journey not that different from the one I recounted in The Truce, he took up his profession as a teacher in the tiny school in his village, where he also taught the children to raise bees and plant a tree nursery, of firs and pines. He’s been retired for a few years; he recently married a colleague, a woman his age, and together they’ve built a new house, which is small but comfortable and pretty. I went to see him twice, in 1951 and 1974. The last time, he told me about Arthur, who lives in a nearby village: he is old and ill, and doesn’t wish to receive visits that might reawaken former anguish. Dramatic, unexpected, and joyful for both of us was a reunion with Mendi, the “modernist rabbi” who is mentioned briefly in the chapter “Chemistry Examination.” He recognized himself when, in 1965, he happened to read the German translation of this book: he remembered me, and wrote me a long letter, addressing it to the Jewish Community of Turin. We corresponded at length, informing each other of the fates of our common friends. In 1967, I went to see him in Dortmund, in West Germany, where he was then a rabbi: he was the same as he had been, “stubborn, courageous, keen,” and also extraordinarily cultured. He married an Auschwitz

survivor and they have three grown children; the entire family intends to move to Israel. I never again saw Doktor Pannwitz, the chemist who subjected me to a cold “state examination,” but I learned about him from that Doktor Müller who is the subject of the chapter “Vanadium” in my book The Periodic Table. With the arrival of the Red Army imminent, he behaved like a bully and a coward: he ordered his civilian workers to hold out to the end; he forbade them to get on the last train that was departing for the area behind the lines but got on it himself at the last moment, taking advantage of the confusion. He died in 1946 of a brain tumor. 7. How do you explain the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews? Hatred of the Jews, improperly called anti-Semitism, is a specific case of a wider phenomenon, and that is aversion toward those who are different from us. Undoubtedly, it originates in a zoological phenomenon: animals belonging to different groups of a single species manifest signs of intolerance toward one another. This happens even among domestic animals: we know that a hen from one henhouse, introduced into another, is pecked for several days, as a sign of rejection. The same happens among rats and bees and, in general, all species of social animals. Now, man is certainly a social animal (Aristotle confirmed it), but we would be in trouble if all the zoological urges that survive in man were tolerated! Human laws are useful precisely for this: to restrain animal impulses. Anti-Semitism is a typical instance of intolerance. For intolerance to develop, there must be a perceptible difference between the two groups that come into contact: it can be a physical difference (blacks and whites, dark-haired people and blonds), but our complicated civilization has made us sensitive to more subtle differences, such as language, or dialect, or even accent (southern Italians forced to move to the north are well aware of this); religion, with all its external manifestations and its profound influence on daily life; ways of dressing or gesturing; public and private habits. The

tortured history of the Jewish people has meant that Jews almost everywhere display one or more of these differences. In the extremely complex tangle of peoples and nations in conflict with one another, the history of the Jewish people has some particular characteristics. The Jews were (and in part still are) the repository of a strong internal bond, both religious and traditional in nature; as a result, in spite of their numerical and military inferiority, they opposed the Roman conquest with desperate courage, and though they were defeated, deported, and dispersed, the bond survived. The Jewish colonies that developed along all the coasts of the Mediterranean and, later, in the Middle East, Spain, the Rhineland, southern Russia, Poland, Bohemia, and elsewhere remained stubbornly faithful to that bond, which had been consolidated in the form of an immense body of written laws and traditions, a minutely codified religion, and a particular and conspicuous set of rituals, which pervaded all the actions of daily life. The Jews, a minority in all their settlements, were therefore different, recognizable as different, and often proud, rightly or wrongly, of their differences. All this made them vulnerable, and they were harshly persecuted, in almost all countries and all centuries; some reacted to persecution by assimilating, or by blending in with the surrounding population, the majority by immigrating again, to more hospitable countries. In that way, however, their “differentness” was renewed, exposing them to new restrictions and persecutions. Although in its deepest essence anti-Semitism is an irrational instance of intolerance, it assumed a predominantly religious, or, rather, theological, guise in all Christian countries, starting with the establishment of Christianity as a state religion. According to St. Augustine, the Jews are condemned to diaspora by God himself, and for two reasons: because they are being punished for not having recognized Christ as the Messiah, and because their presence in all countries is necessary to the Catholic Church, which itself is everywhere, so that everywhere the deserved unhappiness of the Jews may be visible to the faithful. Thus the diaspora and segregation of the Jews will never end: with their sufferings, they must forever bear witness to their error and, consequently,

to the truth of the Christian faith. And since their presence is necessary, they are to be persecuted but not killed. Yet the Church did not always seem so moderate: since the early centuries of Christianity a heavier charge has been brought against the Jews, that they are, collectively and eternally, responsible for the crucifixion of Christ, in other words, the “deicide people.” This formulation, which appears in the Easter liturgy in remote times, and was suppressed only by Vatican II (1962–1965), is at the origin of various pernicious and constantly revived popular beliefs: that by poisoning wells, Jews spread the plague; that they habitually profane the sacred Host; that at Passover they kidnap Christian babies and smear their blood on the unleavened bread. These beliefs have offered a pretext for numerous bloody slaughters, and also for the mass expulsion of the Jews from France and England, and then from Spain and Portugal (1492–1498). Passing through an uninterrupted series of massacres and migrations, we reach the nineteenth century, which is marked by a general awakening of national consciences and recognition of the rights of minorities: with the exception of tsarist Russia, in all Europe the legal restrictions placed on Jews, which had been called for by the Christian churches, were lifted (depending on the place and time, the obligation to reside in ghettos or special areas, the obligation to wear a mark on their clothing, the prohibition against entering certain careers or professions, the prohibition against mixed marriages, and so on). Anti-Semitism survives, however, especially in countries where a crude religiosity continued to point to Jews as the killers of Christ (in Poland and Russia), and where nationalistic claims had left a wake of general aversion toward neighbors and foreigners (in Germany but also in France, where, at the end of the nineteenth century, an alliance of priests, nationalists, and the military unleashed a violent wave of anti-Semitism, based on the false charge of high treason brought against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army). In Germany, especially, for the entire previous century an uninterrupted series of philosophers and politicians had promoted the fanatical theory that the German people, for too

long divided and humiliated, were supreme in Europe and perhaps the world, the heir to remote and noble traditions and civilizations, and made up of individuals essentially homogeneous by blood and race. The German people were therefore meant to establish a strong military state, hegemonic in Europe, and clothed in an almost divine majesty. This idea of the mission of the German nation survived the defeat of the First World War, and emerged strengthened by the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. It was appropriated by one of the most sinister and evil characters in history, the political agitator Adolf Hitler. The German bourgeois and industrialist classes heed his fiery speeches: Hitler looks promising, he manages to turn against the Jews the loathing that the German proletariat feels for the classes that led the country to defeat and economic disaster. Within a few years, starting in 1933, Hitler is able to take advantage of the anger of a humiliated country and the nationalist pride roused by the prophets who preceded him: Luther, Fichte, Hegel, Wagner, Gobineau, Chamberlain, Nietzsche. He is obsessed by the thought of a dominant Germany, not in the distant future but immediately, and not through a civilizing mission but by force of arms. Everything that is not Germanic appears to him inferior, in fact despicable, and Germany’s prime enemies are the Jews, for reasons that Hitler proclaims with dogmatic fury: because they have “different blood”; because they are related to other Jews, in England, in Russia, in America; because they are heirs of a culture in which people argue and discuss before obeying, and are forbidden to bow before idols, while he aspires to be venerated as an idol, and doesn’t hesitate to proclaim that “we must not trust intelligence and conscience but place all our faith in instincts.” Finally, many German Jews hold important positions in the economy, in finance, in the arts, in science, and in literature: Hitler, a failed painter and failed architect, pours out onto the Jews the resentment and envy of frustration. This seed of intolerance, falling on ground that is already prepared, takes root there with incredible vigor but in new forms. Anti-Semitism in the Fascist mold, which the Word proclaimed by Hitler awakens in the German people, is more

barbaric than all its precedents. It melds artificially distorted biological doctrines, according to which the weak races should yield to the strong; absurd folk beliefs that common sense had buried for centuries; and ceaseless propaganda. Extremes never before seen are reached. Judaism is not a religion that one can escape by baptism, or a cultural tradition that one can abandon for another: it is a human subspecies, a race different and inferior to all others. The Jews are only apparently human beings: in reality they are something different, abominable and indefinable, “whose distance from the Germans is greater than the distance between man and ape.” They are responsible for everything, for rapacious American capitalism and Soviet Bolshevism, for the defeat of 1918, the inflation of 1923; liberalism, democracy, socialism, and communism are Satanic Jewish inventions, which threaten the monolithic solidity of the Nazi state. The passage from theoretical preaching to practical action was rapid and brutal. In 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, the first concentration camp, Dachau, came into being. In May of that year the first pyre of books by Jewish writers or enemies of Nazism was set alight (more than a hundred years earlier Heine, a German Jewish poet, had written, “Where they have burned books they will end in burning men”). In 1935 anti-Semitism was codified in a set of monumental and extremely detailed laws, the Nuremberg Laws. In 1938, in a single night of disturbances led from the top, 191 synagogues and thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed. In 1939 the Jews of newly occupied Poland were shut in ghettos. In 1940 the Auschwitz Lager was opened. In 1941–42 the extermination machine was fully functioning; in 1944 the number of victims rose into the millions. The hatred and contempt spread by Nazi propaganda found their fulfillment in the daily activity of the extermination camps. Here was not only death but a host of maniacal and symbolic details, all intended to demonstrate and confirm that Jews, and Gypsies, and Slavs are beasts, fodder, garbage. Recall the tattoo of Auschwitz, which branded men with the mark that is used for oxen; the journey in cattle cars that were never opened, forcing the deportees to lie for days in their own

filth; the number used in place of the name; the failure to distribute spoons (and yet the storehouses of Auschwitz, at liberation, contained quintals of them), so that the prisoners would have to lick up their soup like dogs; the pitiless exploitation of the corpses, treated like some anonymous matter, the gold extracted from the teeth, the hair serving as material for textiles, the ashes for agricultural fertilizers; men and women debased to guinea pigs, used in medical experiments and then killed. The very method that was chosen (after careful experimentation) for extermination was openly symbolic. The same poison gas employed for disinfesting ships’ holds and rooms infested by bedbugs or lice was to be used, and was used. As is well-known, the work of extermination was quite far advanced. The Nazis, although they were engaged in a bitter war that by this point was defensive, manifested an inexplicable hurry: the convoys of victims intended for the gas chambers, or to be transferred from the Lagers near the front, had precedence over military transports. The extermination wasn’t completed only because Germany was defeated. The political will that Hitler dictated a few hours before killing himself, with the Russians a few meters away, ended thus: “Above all, I order the government and the German people to maintain the racial laws in full force, and to fight relentlessly the poisoner of all nations, international Judaism.” Summing up, we can therefore state that anti-Semitism is a specific case of intolerance; that for centuries it had a mainly religious character; that in the Third Reich it was exacerbated by the nationalistic and militaristic propensity of the German people, and by the peculiar “differentness” of the Jewish people; that it was easily disseminated throughout Germany and, in large part, Europe, thanks to the effectiveness of Fascist and Nazi propaganda, which needed a scapegoat on which to unload all blame and all resentments; and that the phenomenon was brought to a fever pitch by Hitler, a maniacal dictator.

Yet I have to admit that these generally accepted explanations do not satisfy me: they are reductive, not commensurate, not proportional to the facts to be explained. In rereading the accounts of Nazism, from its murky beginnings to its violent end, I can’t escape the impression of a general atmosphere of unrestrained madness that seems to me unique in history. This collective madness, this derailment, is usually explained by assuming a combination of many different factors, insufficient if taken singly, and the biggest of these factors is the personality of Hitler, and his profound interaction with the German people. Certainly his personal obsessions, his capacity for hatred, his preaching of violence found a farreaching echo in the frustration of the German people, which came back to him multiplied, confirming his delirious conviction that he was the Hero prophesied by Nietzsche, the Superman redeemer of Germany. Much has been written on the origin of his hatred of the Jews. It has been said that Hitler poured out on the Jews his hatred of the entire human race; that he recognized in Jews some of his own defects, and that, hating the Jews, he hated himself; that the violence of his loathing came from the fear that he might have “Jewish blood” in his veins. Yet again: these do not seem to me adequate explanations. It doesn’t seem right to explain a historical phenomenon by placing all the blame on an individual (those who carry out horrific orders are not innocent!), and, besides, it is always difficult to interpret the deep motivations of an individual. The hypotheses that have been proposed justify the facts only in part; they explain the quality but not the quantity. I have to admit that I prefer the humility with which some of the most serious historians (Bullock, Schramm, Bracher) confess that they do not comprehend Hitler’s furious anti-Semitism and, following him, Germany’s. Perhaps what happened cannot be comprehended, or, rather, shouldn’t be comprehended, because to comprehend is almost to justify. Let me explain: “to comprehend” a human intention or behavior means (etymologically as well) to contain it, to contain the author, put oneself in his place, and identify with him. Now, no normal man will ever be able to

identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and innumerable others. This burdens us, and yet it brings us relief: because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) not be comprehensible to us. They are words and deeds that are not human but, rather, counter-human, without historical precedent, barely comparable to the cruelest events of the biological struggle for existence. War can be traced back to this struggle, but Auschwitz has nothing to do with war; it is not an episode of war, it is not an extreme form of war. War is an everlasting terrible fact: it is deplorable but it is in us, it has a rationality, we “comprehend” it. But there is nothing rational about the Nazi hatred: it’s a hatred that is not in us; it’s outside of man, a poisonous fruit arising from the deadly trunk of fascism, but outside and beyond fascism itself. We can’t understand it; but we can and must understand its roots, and be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, recognizing is necessary, because what has happened can happen again, consciences can again be seduced and obscured: even our own. For this reason, reflecting on what happened is a duty for all of us. Everyone has to know, or remember, that Hitler and Mussolini, when they spoke in public, were believed, applauded, admired, and adored like gods. They were “charismatic leaders”; they possessed a secret power of seduction that came not from the credibility or the rightness of the things they said but from the inspiring way in which they said them, from their eloquence, their dramatic art—perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently practiced and mastered. The ideas they proclaimed weren’t always the same, and in general were abnormal, or foolish, or cruel; and yet they were praised, and followed by millions of the faithful to their death. It should be remembered that those faithful, including the diligent men who carried out inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the bureaucrats ready to believe and to obey without question, like Eichmann, like Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, like

Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, like the French soldiers twenty years later, murderers of the Algerians, like the American soldiers thirty years later, murderers in Vietnam. We must therefore be distrustful of those who try to convince us using tools other than reason, or of charismatic leaders: we must be wary of delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it’s difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it’s best to be suspicious of all prophets; it’s better to give up revealed truths, even if they thrill us by their simplicity and their splendor, even if we find them convenient because they can be acquired for nothing. It’s better to content ourselves with other, more modest and less exciting truths, those which are gained laboriously, little by little and without shortcuts, through study, discussion, and reasoning, and which can be verified and proved. It’s obvious that this prescription is too simple to suffice in all cases: a new fascism, with its wake of intolerance, bullying, and servitude, could originate outside our country and be imported into it, arriving on tiptoe, perhaps, and called by other names; or it could be unleashed from inside with a violence that would rout all defenses. Then the counsels of wisdom are no longer useful, and we have to find the strength to resist: in this case, too, the memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not long ago, can be a support and a warning. 8. What would you be today, if you hadn’t been a prisoner in the Lager? What do you feel when you remember that time? To what factors do you attribute your survival? Strictly speaking, I don’t know and I can’t know what I would be today if I hadn’t been in the Lager: no man knows his future, and here it would be a matter of describing a future that didn’t exist. There is some sense in trying to make predictions (though they are bound to be approximate) about the behavior of a population, and yet it’s difficult, or impossible, to predict the behavior of an individual, even on a scale of days. Similarly, the physicist can tell very precisely how long it will take a gram of radium to lose half its radioactivity, but he absolutely can’t say when a single atom of that radium will decay. If a man heads toward a fork in the

road, and doesn’t take the one to the left, it’s obvious that he’ll take the one to the right; but our choices are almost never between two alternatives alone. Every choice is followed by others, all multiple, and so on into infinity; and, finally, our future also depends heavily on external factors, completely extraneous to our deliberate choices, and on internal factors, of which we are not aware. For these obvious reasons, we can’t know our own future or that of our neighbor; for the same reasons, no one can say what his past would have been “if.” I can, however, formulate one particular statement, and it’s this: if I hadn’t had the experience of Auschwitz, I probably would not have written anything. I would have had no motivation, no incentive, to write: I had been a mediocre student in Italian and poor in history; physics and chemistry interested me more, and I then chose a profession, chemist, that had nothing in common with the world of the written word. It was the experience of the Lager that forced me to write. I didn’t have to fight laziness, problems of style seemed to me ridiculous, I miraculously found time to write without ever missing an hour of my daily work. It seemed to me that I had this book ready in my head, that I had only to let it out, let it fall onto the paper. Many years have passed: the book has had many vicissitudes, and it has positioned itself, oddly, like an artificial memory, but also like a defensive barrier, between my very ordinary present and the savage past of Auschwitz. I say this with hesitation, because I wouldn’t want to seem cynical: when I remember the Lager today, I no longer feel a violent or painful emotion. On the contrary: the much longer and more complex experience of a writer and witness has been superimposed upon the brief and tragic experience of the deportee, and the sum is distinctly positive; overall, that past has made me richer and more confident. A friend of mine, deported as a young woman to the women’s Lager at Ravensbrück, says that the camp was her university. I think I could say the same—that, by experiencing and then writing about and reflecting on those events, I have learned many things about men and the world.

I should, however, hasten to make clear that this positive outcome was a good fortune that only a very few had: of the Italian deportees, for example, only about 5 percent returned, and among these many had lost their family, their friends, their possessions, health, equilibrium, youth. The fact that I survived, and returned unharmed, in my view is due principally to luck. Preexisting factors played only a small role, such as my training in mountain life, and my profession as a chemist, which allowed me some privileges in the last months of prison. Maybe an unfailing interest in the human spirit also helped me, and the will not only to survive (which was common to many) but to survive for the precise purpose of recounting the things we had witnessed and had endured. And perhaps, finally, what also counted was the will, which I tenaciously preserved, to always recognize, even in the darkest days, in my companions and myself, men and not things, and thus to avoid that total humiliation and demoralization that led many to spiritual shipwreck. November 1976 1. Giacomo Matteotti (1885–1924) was a Socialist member of the Italian Parliament. He was kidnapped and murdered after denouncing the fraud and violence perpetrated by the Fascists during the elections of 1924. It soon came out that the Fascists were responsible for the crime, but Mussolini nevertheless was able to inaugurate his dictatorship several months later.

Translator’s Afterword

Primo Levi had a passion for languages, as well as for words. It emerges very clearly in the text of If This Is a Man, in the repeated references to the Babel of tongues in Auschwitz, in the repetition of commands and words in the camp, in the recognition of the inadequacy of language itself to express “this offense, the demolition of a man.” Describing the Carbide Tower, he gives the word for “brick” in eight languages, and says, “They were cemented by hate, hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel; and that is what we call it: Babelturm, Bobelturm.” Levi, having established his reputation as a writer, in his later works often explored the potential of changes and permutations in language and dialect. Understandably, he turned primarily to Piedmont, his home region. In the story of Argon, the first element of The Periodic Table (1975), he recalled, with a certain nostalgia, the distortion of Hebrew words in the language of Piedmontese Jewish families. The experiences and travels to foreign parts recounted by Faussone, the rigger hero of The Wrench (1978), provided the appropriate setting in which to render the impure syntax of Italian translated from Piedmontese dialect: “Nowadays, in factories here in Turin, a different Italian-Piedmontese has emerged, child of a peasant culture, where new expressions, new words, new metaphors have replaced the earlier vocabulary.” When he visited New York in 1985, he was attracted by the “rudimentary hybrid” language of Italian immigrants—fruttistoro for “fruit store” (or greengrocer), tracca for “truck,” a house “senza stima” (without heating, or steam). In his second book, The Truce (1963), in which he described the long return journey from Auschwitz (via Poland and Russia), he tried to converse in Yiddish and was ironically amused when he was laughed at by young Jewish Russian girls: “You don’t speak Yiddish, so you aren’t Jews!” In an interview twenty years later, he explained: “I travel linguistically. The languages I know (I speak them badly, but read them fluently) are French, English, German, and I would

add Piedmontese (I have a passion for linguistics, albeit unreciprocated, which consists of an amateurish but continuous study of these languages and dialects). They, too, serve me in my writing. One cannot know one’s own language or use Italian correctly if one doesn’t know other languages: it is a concrete, even a tangible experience, above all when one translates.” Already at Auschwitz, but above all in the many months he spent at Katowice and elsewhere in Poland, Levi discovered what he called the “archipelago” of the Ashkenazi communities destroyed by the Nazis. From Lithuania and Poland to Moldavia and Ukraine, these communities all spoke Yiddish; only Jewish immigrants in the United States continued to speak it, but, as Levi observed, it endured as a written language in the works of novelists such as the Nobel Prize–winning Isaac Bashevis Singer. The intense religious and social life of the Ashkenazi Jews was “a cultural universe that was unknown in Italy, and today has disappeared.” Levi was so struck by this world that, soon after his return to Turin, in February 1946, he wrote a poem entitled “Ostjuden.” For Levi “the slaughter and dispersion of Judaism in Eastern Europe has been of irreparable damage to all humanity.” He was certainly responsible for proposing the Congress on Judaism in Eastern Europe, which took place in Turin in February 1984, and which he described as the largest meeting on the theme held in Italy, and perhaps anywhere in Europe, since the Second World War. Throughout his life, Levi read, reflected, and wrote about the cultural world of the Ashkenazi; and he dedicated to them his only novel, If Not Now, When? (1982), the story of a Russian-Polish Jewish resistance group that vindicated the ability of the Jews to defend themselves militarily. In a conversation with the novelist Philip Roth, Levi explained that he had wanted to counter the commonplace that Jews were meek and had been humiliated by centuries of persecution: “I also nurtured the ambition of becoming the first Italian writer to describe the Yiddish world.” Levi was not religious, as he repeatedly explained: “I constructed a Jewish culture not because my parents were Jewish, but much later, after the war, when I found that I had

come to possess a supplementary culture, and I tried to develop it. But this has never been the case of religion. It is as if my religious sensibility had been amputated; I never had it.” It is evident that Levi was fascinated by the practices based on the traditions that characterized the daily life of Ashkenazi Jews, from the “onerous and obsessive” religious teaching of children, based on the interpretation of the Talmud, to eating kosher according to the precepts of the rabbis that Levi had found in a book by a Kraków rabbi, Shulkhàn arùkh (The Table for a Banquet). But only when he was in Poland did he begin to feel a need to learn Yiddish, “a fascinating language for linguists (and not just for them) that is intrinsically a multilanguage . . . the language of a wandering people.”

The first edition of Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man) was published in 1947 by a small anti-Fascist publisher in Levi’s native city, Turin. It did not circulate widely, except in the cultural circles there, probably because of the urgency of reconstructing the city, which had suffered heavy Allied bombings during the war. When I arrived in Turin, in 1956, to start my doctoral research on Piedmontese history, the city was still only of middling size, with half a million inhabitants. It was a very hospitable place, especially to a young Englishman from Oxford, and I rapidly made friends. By then, I had met my future wife, Anna Debenedetti, and her family, including her uncle, Leonardo De Benedetti, who had returned from Auschwitz with Levi, and who lived with Anna’s family for some years. Levi brought Leonardo the first drafts of what would be the chapters of Se questo è un uomo in the months that he wrote them. Anna remembers reading them on thin, closely typed paper. Levi wrote with a sense of urgency, “without hesitations and without order,” immediately after his return to Turin, in December 1945, and continuing until January 1947. Many years later he recalled the driving need to recount the experience while he was still in Auschwitz, in the Chemical Kommando, to the point where he took the risk of jotting down notes with pencil and paper (which he then destroyed), “an absurd and futile audacity.” The hope of survival was

identified with a different, more precise hope: “We did not hope to live and recount, but to live in order to recount.” He recalled that he had become “a tireless, overbearing, maniacal narrator,” repeating his story dozens of times to friends, enemies, and strangers. If This Is a Man was written both as a personal “act of liberation” and as a testimonial, to bear witness. As he later explained in The Truce, he had an overwhelming need to recount “an avalanche of urgent things to tell the civilized world, my own but belonging to everyone, things of blood, things that, it seemed to me, would shake every conscience to its foundations.” Many years afterward, he explained with characteristic irony that, in the immediacy of his survival, he felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (a literary reference dear to Levi), “who grabs the wedding guest on the way to the wedding, to inflict on him his story of evil.” The need to recount the atrocity of Auschwitz remained with him throughout his life: “I realized that the only way to save myself was to describe it. Writing was an act of liberation, if I had not written the book probably I would have remained a damned soul.” Levi, working, and living, from Monday to Saturday at a factory outside Turin, wrote the chapters of If This Is a Man on the train as he traveled to work, through the lunch break, in the factory itself despite the din of the machines, and during the night; then he typed the text. He later described how he wrote The Truce in the evenings, after a day’s work: “I needed on average a full hour to change my skin, that is, to become a writer in place of a chemist.” I have little doubt that he had in mind Machiavelli’s description of his change of clothes before entering his study. Even after the publication of If This Is a Man, Levi never lost the compulsion to testify. In addition to his writings, he tirelessly visited schools to talk about Auschwitz, and in 1972 he suggested to his Italian publisher a school edition of If This Is a Man, for which he wrote a preface and notes, and which was hugely successful; he was also ready to give interviews, especially in his later years. It was an obligation, he explained, to “assume the calm, sober language of the witness.” In The Periodic Table, the book that—published thirty years after If

This Is a Man—brought him an international reputation, he reflected that in the camp “I must have developed a strange callousness, if I was then not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me.” On various occasions, in later years, he ascribed the clarity and concision of his language to the “mental habits” of his training as a chemist: “My model was that of the weekly reports, a normal practice in factories: they must be concise, precise, and written in a language accessible to all levels of the firm’s hierarchy.” He attributed to that model his remarkable capacity to describe persons, places, and “events” as if they were “samples,” “specimens in sealed packages, to be identified, analyzed, and weighed.” But in a broader sense, already in If This Is a Man, and subsequently in all his books, Levi’s observations expressed an ethnological sensibility toward his immediate surroundings, from the pavements of Turin to the joggers in New York’s Central Park. It’s not surprising that, later, he translated into Italian two books by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Initially the chapters that Levi wrote on his return to Turin were not conceived as a book; some were published in a provincial political weekly. In 1958, the preeminent Italian publisher Giulio Einaudi contracted to republish the original 1947 edition of If This Is a Man, and that became the standard edition. Levi made substantial additions and then continued to introduce small changes and modifications to the text, even at the proof stage and, subsequently, in later editions. I have become particularly aware of this through the occasional discrepancies between my original translation of If This Is a Man and the Italian text in Levi’s complete works (Opere I), edited by Marco Belpoliti and published by Einaudi in 1997. We now know that this was intrinsic to Levi’s mode of writing, with minor changes not only in the successive editions of his first book but in many of the short stories subsequently collected in books, and (perhaps most notably) in his final book, The Drowned and the Saved.

I read the first edition of Se questo è un uomo soon after I came to Turin, and was convinced, no doubt influenced by the fact that I am Jewish, that the book needed to circulate in

English. In the arrogant innocence of my youth, I think I had already decided that I would translate the book myself; certainly I did not consider how to find a publisher. My impression was (and still is) that, until well after the Eichmann trial in 1961, knowledge of the Nazi extermination camps was not widespread in England, except among Jews. The term “Holocaust,” which has become generalized since the late 1970s, is—as Levi pointed out—improper, since it is derived from the Greek word for “sacrifice.” “‘Holocaust’ means literally ‘wholly burnt’ and refers to the sacrifice of animals to the gods. When it first appeared it irritated me considerably.” The Hebrew word Shoah entered into general usage only after Levi’s death, in 1987. The Debenedetti family introduced me to Primo, who was obviously delighted at the prospect of an English translation. He took me at my word, without any knowledge of my capacities as a translator (nor for that matter did I know anything about them). He told me early on that he had not been consulted about the French translation and that he was very dissatisfied with it. Perhaps this underlay his proposal that we work together closely. It was fundamental for Levi that his descriptions of and ethical reflections on the Nazi extermination camps not lose their efficacy in translation. Compared with that of most authors, his interest in the translation of his books was exceptional. Years later, when Se questo è un uomo had been translated into a multitude of languages, he told me that he had bought a grammar and dictionary in Romanian so as to be able to read the translation. Most important of all was the translation into German, which was published very soon after my English translation. Levi insisted on a clause in the contract saying that the translator send him each chapter as soon as it was ready. The translation had to be “intimately faithful,” for the obvious reason that it was a book to be read by Germans about their recent past. “Perhaps it is my presumption,” he wrote to the translator (in a letter published subsequently as the preface to the German edition), that “I, prisoner number 174517, am able to speak to the Germans through you, to remind them of what they did, and to say to them: ‘I am alive, and I would like to understand you so that I can judge you.’”

We arranged to meet regularly in the evenings in his flat, just around the corner from the Debenedetti home. His timetable was fashioned by his employment as an industrial chemist in a factory at Settimo, just outside Turin. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening for the best part of a year, I went to Levi’s apartment with the latest pages of my translation. The commitment to our regular meetings worked effectively in obliging me not to interrupt my rhythm of translation. In reality, I never felt it as a burden, least of all in the sense of the splendid description by the Italian writer Luciano Bianciardi (La vita agra; It’s a Hard Life) of the obligation to translate a daily quota of pages in order to earn a living. In different circumstances (not as a source of income), this was something I was later to experience with other translations in which I found myself engaged professionally as a historian. Initially when I brought my translated pages to Primo, we concentrated almost exclusively on them. The unusual circumstances of our arrangement, and the mutual pleasure that we increasingly derived from it, created for us a particular moment of insulated detachment from the normality of routine. I cannot remember the exact year, but (on the basis of the textual differences) it must have coincided with the Einaudi edition in 1958. Primo and I always spoke in Italian. His spoken English was then still fairly poor; I imagine he became fluent as he traveled increasingly as an industrial chemist. He had read exceptionally widely in English, as well as in French, still normal in Turin in those years, and, after his return from Auschwitz, in German. He put to good use his remarkable memory when he was not fully convinced that I had adequately rendered the precise weight of his wording. He had astonishing recall and I was regularly amazed at the range and aptness of the English phrases that he quoted to me as providing possible alternatives for what he regarded as too flat a translation. Readers of his works will not be surprised that Melville and Conrad, as well as Coleridge, were present; far more unusually—which is why I still remember it—was a phrase from the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible. Even

though for the most part I rejected his suggestions, essentially as not sounding right, or not reading well in the specific context, they served the purpose of making me search for what would be right. Perhaps at this point it is opportune to recall that half a century ago the complexities, ambiguities, and compromises that have become inherent in the expression of one culture in the language of another were not yet discussed; even less had the techniques of translation acquired the status of a specialized discipline. Professional translators were of course present in Italy, as in England and the United States, but the quality of their production was extremely variable. At the most humdrum level, the “false friends” trap of translation was probably more common than today (I remember my motherin-law’s delight in reading in an Italian translation that “oysters [ostriche, in Italian] bury their head in the sand”); at the other extreme, some distinguished Italian writers—such as Cesare Pavese in his translation of Moby-Dick—took inventive liberties in a stylish and effective rendering of the original text. I had never received literary training, primarily because of the excessive specialization in English grammar schools, particularly marked during what were the years of transition to a new national system of examination. I was, and remain, impressed by the breadth and quality of the education provided by the Italian liceo (as by the French lycée), which leaves a lifelong cultural imprint, visible to the present day in the reading habits and musical interests of Italian bourgeois families. I had always read reasonably widely, particularly the great Western and Russian novelists and prose writers, but never poetry. I note, somewhat to my embarrassment, that the only cut pages in my 1951 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy are those of the Canto of Ulysses, which I read with new understanding after a discussion with Primo. When, at the end of our collaboration, I explained to him that I did not feel capable of translating his powerful and essential introductory poem, he reassured me and translated it himself. During the lengthy period of our translation of If This Is a Man, I was ever more conscious of the direct influence on me, a young foreigner, of Levi’s culture and personality.

Increasingly, as the translation advanced, we talked about other things, never (that I can remember) about Auschwitz, but about Turin, Piedmont, the differences in social behavior between English and Italians, and much, much else. I lived the experience as a particularly important and enjoyable part of my daily life. I did not appreciate its abnormality, probably because I was so young and inexperienced (and still so close to the leisure and apparently unlimited availability of time of my undergraduate years). By the end, the translation had almost become an excuse for the intimacy of spending an evening with an old friend. When the translation was finally completed, we both felt the loss of these evenings. With his quiet observation of his fellows, Primo had identified my concern to learn more about contemporary Italy, and gave me Viaggio in Italia (Travels in Italy), a book by an intelligent and cultured journalist and novelist, Guido Piovene. And soon afterward, although, as he explained to me, he regarded himself as outside the Turin Jewish community, Primo accepted my request that he be my best man when Anna and I had a religious marriage. On our frequent visits to Turin, we would always spend an evening with him, in his or the Debenedetti apartment. As I look back on our intense and concentrated discussions of my translation of If This Is a Man, it now seems to me evident that, for Primo, there was no separation between content and literary form, even if he was not aware of this when he wrote the book: expression and above all language were fundamental to the sense of responsibility he felt to render comprehensible to ordinary people the experience and significance of Auschwitz; this is even more evident in the textual changes he made in the 1958 Einaudi edition. The intensity of the contrast in the language of his writing about Auschwitz and that of his description of the renewed hopes of a ravaged Europe that he first witnessed during the seemingly infinite journey back to Italy is immediately apparent: the essentialist need to deploy style and language to express the message of Auschwitz was replaced by a liberating sequence of adventures and sketches expressed in a far more literary fashion, in which Primo gave vent to his primary quality of curiosity, with the irony that characterizes so many of his later

writings. Years afterward, he told us with slightly rueful amusement that, although he had changed all the names of the personages he wrote about, with the exception of Leonardo (De Benedetti), one of them—Cesare from Rome—had recognized himself and felt deeply offended. A small American publisher, Orion Press, had contacted me for the rights to the translation of Se questo è un uomo. I don’t know how he knew about it, but Ian Thomson (Primo Levi’s most authoritative biographer) explains that Orion had an office in Florence. I sent the completed text to the Londonbased partner, but never received my (very small) fee. Months later, to my surprise, I received the proofs while Anna and I were on our honeymoon. I protested to the New York partner and refused to return the corrected proofs until I received payment. I made a number of corrections, but evidently too late, as I now find that I noted them in the margins of my copy of the book. If This Is a Man was published by Orion in the United States in 1959, and the following year by André Deutsch in Britain; regrettably, the subsequent editions of If This Is a Man in the United States were published under the highly inappropriate title Survival in Auschwitz.

It seems to me fitting to conclude this afterword with a comment on Primo Levi’s views and personal experiences of translating. As I look back on the cultural differences between my inexperience and his vast readings of English literature, and the friendship that developed in the many months of discussing the text of If This Is a Man, it now seems to me evident that his prime concern was that “our” translation should be as literal as possible with respect to the original. I am sure that he absorbed and learned much about the complications of translation from our lengthy period of direct collaboration, but as an author, in a different way from me. For this revised version of If This Is a Man, which appears more than a half century after the original, I have used the definitive text of Se questo è un uomo, included in the 1997 Einaudi edition of Primo Levi’s Complete Works. I have made what I believe to be improvements in the translation, and I

owe thanks to Peter Hennig for sending me a substantial list of alternative words and phrases, some of which I have adopted. —STUART WOOLF

Contents The Thaw The Big Camp The Greek Katowice Cesare Victory Day The Dreamers Heading South Heading North A Little Hen Old Roads The Forest and the Path Vacation Theater From Starye Doroghi to Iasi From Iasi to the Line The Reawakening

In the savage nights we dreamed Dense and violent dreams Dreamed with soul and body: Of returning; eating; telling. Until the dawn command Resounded curt and low: “Wstawa ”;

And our hearts broke in our breasts. Now we’re home again.

Our bellies are full, We’ve finished with telling. It’s time. Soon we’ll hear again The strange command: “Wstawa .”

(TRANS. J. GALASSI)

The Thaw

In the first days of January 1945 the Germans, under pressure from the approaching Red Army, had hastily evacuated the Silesian mineral basin. While elsewhere, in analogous conditions, they hadn’t hesitated to destroy by fire or weaponry the Lagers, together with their inhabitants, in the district of Auschwitz they acted differently: orders from on high (apparently dictated by Hitler himself) decreed that they “retrieve,” at whatever cost, every able-bodied man. Thus all the healthy prisoners were evacuated, under frightful conditions, to Buchenwald and to Mauthausen, while the sick were abandoned to themselves. The Germans’ original intention to leave no man alive in the concentration camps can be deduced from various clues; but a violent nighttime aerial attack, and the speed of the Russian advance, led them to change their mind, and to flee, leaving their duty and their task incomplete. In the Buna-Monowitz infirmary eight hundred of us remained. Of these, around five hundred died of their illnesses or of cold or hunger before the Russians arrived, and two hundred others, in spite of aid, in the days immediately following. The first Russian patrol came in view of the camp around midday on January 27, 1945. Charles and I were the first to catch sight of it: we were carrying to the common grave the body of Sómogyi, the first of the men in our room to die. We overturned the stretcher onto the dirty snow, because the grave was by now full, and no other burial could be given: Charles took off his cap, to salute the living and the dead. Four young soldiers on horseback, machine guns under their arms, proceeded warily along the road that followed the perimeter of the camp. When they reached the fences, they paused to look, and, with a brief, timid exchange of words, turned their gazes, checked by a strange embarrassment, to the

jumbled pile of corpses, to the ruined barracks, and to us few living beings. They seemed to us miraculously physical and real, suspended (the road was higher than the camp) on their enormous horses, between the gray of the snow and the gray of the sky, motionless under the gusts of a damp wind that threatened thaw. It seemed to us, and so it was, that the void filled with death in which for ten days we had wandered like spent stars had found a solid center, a nucleus of condensation: four armed men, but not armed against us; four messengers of peace, with rough boyish faces under the heavy fur helmets. They didn’t greet us, they didn’t smile; they appeared oppressed, not only by pity but by a confused restraint, which sealed their mouths, and riveted their eyes to the mournful scene. It was a shame well-known to us, the shame that inundated us after the selections and every time we had to witness or submit to an outrage: the shame that the Germans didn’t know, and which the just man feels before a sin committed by another. It troubles him that it exists, that it has been irrevocably introduced into the world of things that exist, and that his goodwill availed nothing, or little, and was powerless to defend against it. So for us even the hour of freedom struck solemn and oppressive, and filled our hearts with both joy and a painful sense of shame, because of which we would have liked to wash from our consciences and our memories the monstrosity that lay there; and with anguish, because we felt that this could not happen, that nothing could ever happen that was good and pure enough to wipe out our past, and that the marks of the offense would remain in us forever, and in the memories of those who were present, and in the places where it happened, and in the stories that we would make of it. Since—and this is the tremendous privilege of our generation and of my people —no one could ever grasp better than us the incurable nature of the offense, which spreads like an infection. It is foolish to think that it can be abolished by human justice. It is an inexhaustible source of evil: it breaks the body and soul of

those who are drowned, extinguishes them and makes them abject; rises again as infamy in the oppressors, is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation. These things, at the time not clearly discerned, and noted by the majority only as a sudden wave of mortal fatigue, accompanied the joy of liberation. Therefore few among us ran to the saviours, few fell in prayer. Charles and I stood still near the ditch overflowing with livid limbs, while others knocked down the fence; then we returned with the empty stretcher, to bring the news to our companions. For the rest of the day nothing happened, a thing that did not surprise us, and that we had long since become accustomed to. In our room the bunk of the dead Sómogyi was immediately occupied by old Thylle, to the visible disgust of my two French companions. Thylle, as far as I knew then, was a “red triangle,” a German political prisoner, and was one of the old inhabitants of the Lager; as such, he had belonged by right to the aristocracy of the camp, had done no manual labor (at least in recent years), and had received food and clothing from home. For these reasons the German political prisoners were rarely guests of the infirmary, where, on the other hand, they enjoyed various privileges: most important, they avoided the selections. Since, at the moment of the liberation, Thylle was the only “political,” he had been invested by the SS in flight with the job of barracks chief of Block 20, which was made up of our room of highly contagious sick people, along with the TB ward and the dysentery ward. Being German, he had taken this provisional appointment very seriously. During the ten days that separated the departure of the SS from the arrival of the Russians, while each man fought his last battle against hunger, cold, and illness, Thylle had carried out diligent inspections of his new domain, checking the state of the floors and the bowls and the number of blankets (one for every inmate, whether living or dead). On one of his visits to our room he had even praised Arthur for the

order and cleanliness he had been able to maintain; Arthur, who didn’t understand German, and even less Thylle’s Saxon dialect, had answered “Vieux dégoutant” and “Putain de boche.” Nevertheless Thylle, from that day on, with obvious abuse of his authority, had got in the habit of coming every night to our room to make use of the comfortable slop bucket that was installed there—the only one in the whole camp whose maintenance was seen to regularly, and the only one situated near a stove. Thus, until that day old Thylle had been a stranger to me, and therefore an enemy; in addition, he was powerful, and therefore a dangerous enemy. For people like me, that is to say the general population of the Lager, there were no other nuances: during the entire long year I spent in the Lager, I had never had either the curiosity or the occasion to investigate the complex structures of the camp hierarchy. The shadowy edifice of evil powers lay entirely above us, and our gaze was turned to the ground. And yet it was this Thylle, an old militant hardened by innumerable struggles for his party and within his party, and ossified by ten years of fierce and ambiguous life in the Lager, who was the companion and confidant of my first night of freedom. For the whole day, we had had too much to do to have time to comment on the event, which we nevertheless felt marked the crucial point of our entire existence; and perhaps unconsciously we had sought activity, precisely for the purpose of not having time, because in the face of freedom we felt lost, emptied, atrophied, unsuited to our role. But night came, our sick companions slept, and Charles and Arthur also slept the sleep of innocence, since they had been in the Lager only a month, and hadn’t absorbed its poison: I alone, although I was exhausted, couldn’t sleep, because of the very weariness and the illness. All my limbs ached, the blood pulsed convulsively in my head, and I felt invaded by fever. But it wasn’t only this. As if a dike had given way just at the moment when every threat seemed to diminish, when hope of a return to life ceased to be insane, I was overwhelmed by a new and vaster suffering, which had been buried and relegated to the margins of consciousness by

other, more urgent sufferings: the pain of exile, of my distant home, of solitude, of lost friends, of lost youth, and of the multitude of corpses all around. In my year in Buna I had seen four-fifths of my companions die, but I had never endured the concrete presence, the siege of death, its sordid breath close by, outside the window, in the next bunk, in my own veins. I therefore lay in a sick half-sleep that was full of baleful thoughts. But I soon realized that someone else was awake. Superimposed on the heavy breathing of the sleepers there was at times a hoarse and irregular panting, interrupted by coughing and by stifled groans and sighs. Thylle was weeping, a weary, shameless old man’s weeping, unbearable as an old man’s nudity. Perhaps he noticed, in the dark, some movement of mine; and the solitude, which until that day both of us, for different reasons, had sought, must have weighed as much on him as on me, because in the middle of the night he asked me, “Are you awake?” and not waiting for the answer he climbed laboriously up to my bunk and without asking permission sat down beside me. It wasn’t easy to make myself understood by him, not only for reasons of language but also because the thoughts that lay in our breasts on that long night were endless, marvelous, terrible, and above all confused. I told him that I suffered from homesickness; and he, who had stopped crying, said to me, “Ten years—ten years!” and, after ten years of silence, in a thin, strident voice, he began singing the “Internationale,” grotesque and solemn at the same time, leaving me disturbed, distrustful, and moved.

Morning brought the first signs of freedom. Twenty Polish civilians, men and women, arrived (evidently ordered by the Russians), and with very little enthusiasm got busy organizing and cleaning the barracks and getting rid of the corpses. Around midday a frightened child appeared, dragging a cow by the halter; he made us understand that it was for us, and that the Russians had sent it, then he abandoned the beast and fled in a flash. I can’t say how, the poor animal was butchered

in a few minutes, gutted, and cut up, and its remains were dispersed throughout all the corners of the camp where survivors lurked. Starting the next day, we saw more Polish girls going around the camp, pale with pity and disgust: they cleaned the sick and treated the wounds as well as they could. They also lit an enormous fire in the middle of the camp, which they fed with debris from the bomb-damaged barracks, and on which they cooked soup in any containers they could find. Finally, on the third day, we saw entering the camp a four-wheeled cart, driven cheerfully by Yankel, a Häftling: he was a young Russian Jew, perhaps the only Russian among the survivors, and as such he found himself naturally filling the function of interpreter and liaison with the Soviet command. Amid sonorous cracks of the whip he announced that he was charged with bringing to the central Auschwitz Lager, now transformed into a gigantic quarantine hospital, all the living among us, in small groups of thirty or forty a day, and beginning with the most seriously ill. Meanwhile the thaw had arrived, which we had been dreading for days, and as the snow melted the camp became a squalid swamp. The corpses and the garbage made the soft, foggy air unbreathable. Nor had death ceased reaping: the sick died by the dozens in their cold beds, and here and there on the muddy streets, as if struck by lightning, the most voracious survivors died. Blindly following the imperious command of our ancient hunger, they had stuffed themselves on the rations of meat that the Russians, still engaged in combat on the nearby front, sent irregularly to the camp: sometimes a little, sometimes nothing, sometimes in mad abundance. But I was aware only fitfully and indistinctly of all that was happening around me. It seemed that the weariness and the illness, like fierce, vile beasts, had been lying in wait for the moment when I was stripped of every defense to assault me from behind. I lay in a feverish torpor, only half conscious, watched over in a brotherly way by Charles, and tormented by thirst and by acute pain in my joints. There were neither doctors nor medicines. My throat also hurt, and half of my face was swollen: the skin had become red and rough, and

stung like a burn; perhaps I was suffering from several illnesses at once. When my turn came to get into Yankel’s cart, I was no longer able to stand up. I was hoisted onto the cart by Charles and Arthur, along with a load of dying men from whom I did not feel very different. It was raining, and the sky was low and dark. While the slow pace of Yankel’s horses hauled me toward very distant freedom, the barracks where I had suffered and had grown up passed before my eyes for the last time, along with Roll Call Square, where, side by side, stood the gallows and a giant Christmas tree, and the gateway of slavery, on which the three mocking words, now hollow, could still be read: Arbeit Macht Frei, Work makes us free.

The Big Camp

At Buna we didn’t know much about the “Big Camp,” properly known as Auschwitz: the Häftlinge transferred from camp to camp were few, not talkative (no Häftling was), and not easily believed. When Yankel’s cart crossed the famous threshold, we were stunned. Buna-Monowitz, with its twelve thousand inhabitants, was a village by comparison: what we entered was a vast metropolis. Not one-story wooden “Blocks” but countless grim square buildings of bare brick, three stories high and exactly the same; between these ran paved streets, straight or at right angles, as far as the eye could see. It was all deserted, silent, crushed under the low sky, a place of mud and rain and abandonment. Here, too, as at every turning point of our long journey, we were surprised to be greeted by a bath, when we needed so many other things. But this was not a bath of humiliation, a grotesque-diabolical-ritual bath, a black-Mass bath like the one that had marked our descent into the concentration-camp universe, nor was it a functional, antiseptic, highly technological bath, like that of our passage, many months later, into the hands of the Americans; rather, it was a bath in the Russian manner, on a human scale, extemporaneous and rough. I don’t mean to question whether a bath, for us in those conditions, was fitting: it was in fact necessary, and not unwelcome. But in it, and in each of those three memorable washings, it was easy to see, behind the concrete, literal aspect, a great symbolic shadow, the unconscious desire, on the part of the new authority that each time absorbed us into its sphere, to strip us of the vestiges of our former life, to make of us new men, conforming to its models, to impose on us its brand.

The strong arms of two Soviet nurses removed us from the cart. “Po malu, po malu!” (“Slowly, slowly!”): those were the first Russian words I heard. The two girls were energetic and skilled. They led us into one of the Lager facilities that had been hastily put back in working order, stripped us, indicated that we were to lie down on the wooden lattice that covered the floor, and, with compassionate hands, but without much ceremony, they soaped us, rubbed us, massaged and dried us from head to foot. The operation went smoothly and quickly with all of us, apart from some moralistic-Jacobin protests from Arthur, who proclaimed himself libre citoyen, and in whose subconscious the contact of those female hands with his bare skin was in conflict with ancestral taboos. But it met a serious stumbling block when the turn came of the last man in the group. None of us knew who he was, because he wasn’t able to speak. He was a phantom, a bald little man, gnarled as a vine, skeletal, crumpled by a horrible contraction of all his muscles. He had been removed bodily from the cart, like an inanimate block, and now he lay on the ground on one side, curled up and rigid, in a desperate position of defensiveness, with his knees pressed against his forehead, his elbows locked to his sides, and his hands in a wedge with the fingers pointed toward his shoulders. The Russian nurses, perplexed, tried in vain to lay him on his back, at which he emitted sharp cries, like a mouse. Besides, it was a futile effort; his limbs yielded elastically under the force, but as soon as they were let go they snapped back to their initial position. Then the women made up their minds and carried him under the shower just as he was; and since they had precise orders, they washed him as well as they could, forcing sponge and soap into the woody knot of that body; at the end, they rinsed him conscientiously, pouring a couple of buckets of tepid water over him. Charles and I, naked and steaming, watched the scene with pity and horror. While one of the arms was extended, we saw for an instant the tattooed number: he was a 200000, one from the Vosges. “Bon Dieu, c’est un français!” Charles said, and turned in silence to the wall.

They gave us a shirt and underpants, and led us to a Russian barber, so that, for the last time in our career, our heads could be shaved. The barber was a dark-skinned giant, with wild, feverish eyes: he was impetuous and violent in the practice of his art, and for reasons unknown to me he carried a machine gun over his shoulder. “Italian Mussolini,” he said to me, glaring, and to the two Frenchmen, “Fransé Laval”; and here one can see how little general ideas help the understanding of individual cases. At this point we parted: Charles and Arthur, recovered and relatively healthy, joined the group of Frenchmen, and disappeared from my view. I was sick, and was taken to the infirmary, summarily examined, and rushed to a new Infectious Diseases Ward. This infirmary was such in intention, and also because it was in fact teeming with sick people (the Germans in flight had left, in Monowitz, Auschwitz, and Birkenau, only the most seriously ill, and these had all been collected by the Russians in the Big Camp): it was not, nor could it be, a place of care, because there were only a few dozen doctors, for the most part sick themselves, and a complete lack of medicines and medical supplies, while at least three-quarters of the five thousand inmates of the camp needed medical attention. The area I was assigned to was an enormous dark room, filled to the roof with suffering and laments. For perhaps eight hundred sick people, there was only one doctor on duty, and no nurse; it was the sick themselves who had to provide for their most urgent needs. I spent a single night there, which I remember as a nightmare; in the morning, the corpses, in the bunks or left in a heap on the floor, could be counted by the dozen. The following day I was transferred to a smaller place, which contained only twenty bunks: in one of these I lay for three or four days, oppressed by a very high fever, conscious only at intervals, incapable of eating, and tormented by an atrocious thirst.

On the fifth day the fever vanished: I felt light as a cloud, hungry, and ice-cold, but my head was clear, my eyes and ears as if sharpened by the enforced vacation, and I was able to resume contact with the world. In the course of those few days, an enormous change had taken place around me. It had been the last great swing of the scythe, the closing of accounts: the dying were dead, in everyone else life was beginning to flow tumultuously. Outside the windows, although it was snowing hard, the grim streets of the camp were no longer deserted, in fact they were swarming with a rapid, confused, and noisy coming and going, which seemed an end in itself. Until late at night one heard shouts, cheerful or angry, one heard cries, songs. Nevertheless, my attention, and that of my bunkmates, could rarely escape the obsessive presence, the mortal assertive force of the smallest and most defenseless among us, the most innocent, a child, Hurbinek. Hurbinek was a nothing, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He appeared to be about three; no one knew anything about him; he didn’t know how to talk and didn’t have a name. That odd name, Hurbinek, had been assigned by us, perhaps by one of the women, who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the child every so often emitted. He was paralyzed from the lower back down, and his thin, sticklike legs had atrophied; but his eyes, lost in his pinched, triangular face, flashed, terribly alive, full of demand, of insistence, of the will to be unchained, to shatter the tomb of his muteness. The speech that he lacked, that no one had taken care to teach him, the need for speech, persisted in his gaze with explosive urgency: it was a gaze both savage and human, or, rather, mature and judgmental, so charged with force and pain that none of us could sustain it. No one except Henek: a strong, healthy Hungarian boy of fifteen whose bed was next to mine. Henek spent half his days beside Hurbinek’s bed. He was maternal rather than paternal: it’s likely that, if our precarious shared life had been extended beyond a month, Hurbinek would have learned to speak from Henek, certainly more than from the Polish girls, who were

too tender yet too empty, intoxicating him with caresses and kisses but avoiding intimacy. Henek, on the other hand, sat beside the little sphinx, calm and persistent, immune to the sad power that emanated from him; he brought him food, arranged his blankets, cleaned him with skillful hands, devoid of repugnance; and he talked to him, in Hungarian, naturally, in a slow, patient voice. After a week, Henek announced seriously, but without a hint of presumption, that Hurbinek had “said a word.” What word? He didn’t know, a difficult word, not Hungarian: something like “mass-klo,” “matisklo.” At night we strained our ears: it was true, every so often from Hurbinek’s corner came a sound, a word. Not always exactly the same, in truth, but it was certainly an articulated word, or, rather, slightly different articulated words, experimental variations on a theme, a root, maybe a name. Hurbinek continued his obstinate experiments as long as he lived. In the following days, we all listened to him in silence, anxious to understand—and there were among us speakers of all the languages of Europe—but Hurbinek’s word remained secret. No, it was certainly not a message, not a revelation: perhaps it was his name, if he had even been blessed with one; perhaps (according to one of our hypotheses) it meant “eat,” or “bread”; or possibly “meat” in Bohemian, as one of us, who knew that language, maintained, with solid arguments. Hurbinek, who was three years old and had perhaps been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to his last breath, to gain entrance into the world of men, from which a bestial power had banned him; Hurbinek, nameless, whose tiny forearm had been marked with the tattoo of Auschwitz—Hurbinek died in early 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 Hurbinek’s, was a nickname. His real name, which was König, had been altered to Henek, the

Polish diminutive of Henry, by the two Polish girls, who, although they were at least ten years older, felt for Henek an ambiguous friendliness that soon became open desire. Henek-König, alone in our microcosm of affliction, was neither ill nor convalescent; rather, he enjoyed splendid health in body and spirit. He was small in stature and had a gentle face, but he was built like an athlete; affectionate and helpful with Hurbinek and with us, he nevertheless harbored calmly bloodthirsty instincts. The Lager, a death trap, a “bone mill” for everyone else, had been for him a good school; in a few months it had made him a quick, shrewd, fierce, and prudent young carnivore. In the long hours we spent together, he told me the essential facts of his short life. He was born and lived on a farm in Transylvania, in the woods, near the Romanian border. On Sundays, he often went with his father through the woods, both of them carrying guns. Why guns? To hunt? Yes, to hunt; but also to shoot Romanians. And why shoot Romanians? Because they are Romanians, Henek explained to me, with disarming simplicity. And, every so often, they shot at us. He had been captured and deported to Auschwitz with his whole family. The others had been killed immediately: he had declared to the SS that he was eighteen and a mason, although he was fourteen and a student. So he had entered Birkenau; but in Birkenau he had instead insisted on his actual age, had been assigned to the children’s Block, and, being the oldest and strongest, had become its Kapo. The children in Birkenau were like birds of passage: after a few days, they were transferred to the Block for experiments, or directly to the gas chambers. Henek had immediately understood the situation, and as a good Kapo had got “organized,” had established solid relations with an influential Hungarian Häftling, and had survived until the liberation. When there were selections in the children’s Block, it was he who chose. Didn’t he feel remorse? No: why should he? Was there another way to survive? During the evacuation of the Lager, he had, wisely, hidden: from his hiding place, through a cellar window, he had seen the Germans empty out the fabled warehouses of Auschwitz in

a great hurry, and had noted how, in the confusion of departure, they had scattered on the street a good quantity of canned food. They hadn’t taken the time to retrieve the cans but had tried to destroy them by running over them with their tanks. Many cans were stuck in the mud and snow, undamaged: at night, Henek went out with a sack and collected a fantastic treasure of cans, dented, flattened, but still full: meat, lard, fish, fruit, vitamins. He hadn’t told anyone, naturally: he told me, because my bed was next to his, and I could be useful as a guard. In effect, since Henek spent many hours wandering through the Lager, in mysterious undertakings, while I was unable to move, my work as a guard was quite useful to him. He trusted me. He arranged the sack under my bed, and in the following days he repaid me with a fair recompense in kind, authorizing me to take those extra rations that he considered suitable, in quality and quantity, to my condition as a sick person and to the extent of my services.

Hurbinek was not the only child. There were others, in relatively good health; they had established a small “club” of their own, very restricted and private, into which the intrusion of adults was evidently unwelcome. They were wild and sensible little animals, who chattered among themselves in languages I didn’t understand. The most authoritative member of the clan was not more than five years old, and his name was Peter Pavel. Peter Pavel didn’t talk to anyone and didn’t need anyone. He was a fine, strong, fair-haired child, with an intelligent, impassive face. In the morning he got 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 carefully. Then he disappeared for the whole day, making only a brief appearance to collect his soup in that same bowl. Finally he returned for dinner; he ate, went out again, returned shortly afterward with a chamber pot, placed it in the corner behind the stove, sat there for a few minutes, left with the chamber pot, returned without it, climbed slowly up to his place, meticulously arranged the covers and the pillow, and slept until morning without changing position.

A few days after my arrival, I saw, apprehensively, a known face appear: the pathetic and unpleasant profile of the Kleine Kiepura, the mascot of Buna-Monowitz. Everyone in Buna knew him: he was only twelve and the youngest of the prisoners. Everything about him was irregular, starting with his very presence in the Lager, which normally children did not enter alive: no one knew how or why he had been admitted, and at the same time everyone knew it all too well. His situation was irregular, since he didn’t march to work but sat in semi-seclusion in the officials’ Block; and, finally, his appearance was notably irregular. He had grown too fast and awkwardly: very long arms and legs stuck out from his short, stocky upper body, like a spider’s; and beneath his pale face, whose features were not without childish grace, an enormous jaw protruded, more prominent than his nose. The Kleine Kiepura was the attendant and favorite of the Lager-Kapo, the Kapo of all the Kapos. No one loved him except his protector. In the shadow of authority, well fed and well dressed, exempt from the work, he had led until the last day the ambiguous and frivolous existence of a favorite, full of gossip, informing, and twisted affections; his name, wrongly, I hope, was always whispered in the most outrageous cases of anonymous denunciations to the political section and the SS. Therefore everyone feared him and avoided him. Now the Lager-Kapo, stripped of all power, was marching to the west, and the Kleine Kiepura, recovering from a slight illness, had followed our fate. He had a bed and a bowl, and he inserted himself into our limbo. Henek and I said a few cautious words to him, since we felt toward him distrust and a hostile compassion; but he barely answered us. He was silent for two days; he stayed in his bunk all curled up, with his gaze fixed on emptiness and his fists clenched on his chest. Then he suddenly started to talk, and we missed his silence. The Kleine Kiepura talked to himself, as if in a dream; and his dream was to have worked his way up and become a Kapo. We couldn’t understand if it was madness or a childish, sinister game: relentlessly, from the height of his bed, which was near the ceiling, the boy sang and whistled the marches of Buna, the

brutal rhythms that marked our weary steps every morning and every evening; and he shouted imperious commands in German to a mass of nonexistent slaves. “Get up, pigs, do you understand? Make the beds, hurry up; clean your shoes. All together, check for lice, check the feet. Show your feet, swine! Dirty again, you, sack of s——. Pay attention, I’m not joking. I catch you again and you’ll go to the crematorium.” Then, shouting in the manner of the German soldiers: “Line up, close ranks, fall in. Collar down: in step, keep time. Hands on the pant seams.” And then, after a pause, in an arrogant, strident voice: “This is not a sanatorium. This is a German Lager, it’s called Auschwitz, and the only way out is through the Chimney. If you like it, that’s it. If you don’t like it, all you have to do is go and touch the electric fence.” The Kleine Kiepura disappeared after a few days, to the relief of all. Among us, weak and ill, but filled with timid and fearful joy in our regained freedom, his presence was offensive, like that of a corpse, and the compassion he roused in us was mixed with horror. We tried in vain to wrench him out of his delirium: the infection of the Lager was too far advanced in him.

The two Polish girls who carried out (in reality quite badly) the nursing duties were called Hanka and Jadzia. Hanka was a former Kapo, as could be deduced from her unshaved head, and even more certainly from her aggressive ways. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four; she was of medium height, with an olive complexion and hard, coarse features. In that atmosphere of Purgatory, full of sufferings past and present, of hope and pity, she spent days in front of the mirror, or filing her fingernails and toenails, or parading before the indifferent and ironic Henek. She was, or considered herself, higher in rank than Jadzia, though in fact it didn’t take much to surpass in authority a creature so withdrawn. Jadzia was a small, timid girl, with a sickly pink complexion; her wrapping of anemic flesh was tortured, lacerated from the inside, ravaged by a continuous

secret storm. She wanted, needed, had a compelling necessity for a man, any man, immediately, all men. Every man who passed through the camp attracted her: attracted her physically, heavily, the way a magnet attracts iron. Jadzia stared at him with spellbound, dazed eyes; she got up from her corner, advanced toward him with the uncertain step of a sleepwalker, sought contact with him. If the man moved away, she followed at a distance, silently, for a little way, then, eyes lowered, returned to her inertia; if the man waited for her, Jadzia enveloped him, incorporated him, took possession of him, with the blind, mute, tremulous, slow but sure movements that amoebas demonstrate under the microscope. Her first and principal objective was, naturally, Henek, but Henek didn’t want her; he mocked her, insulted her. Still, like the practical boy he was, he took an interest in the case, and mentioned it to Noah, his great friend. Noah didn’t live in our room; rather, he lived in no place and in all places. He was a nomadic, free man, happy in the air he breathed and the earth he walked on. He was the Scheissminister of free Auschwitz, the superintendent of the latrines and black wells; but in spite of this responsibility, like a gravedigger’s (which he had taken on voluntarily), there was nothing base about him, or, if there was, it was overcome and canceled out by the force of his vital strength. Noah was a very young Pantagruel, as strong as a horse, greedy and lewd. As Jadzia wanted all men, so Noah wanted all women: but while the feeble Jadzia was limited to spreading her flimsy nets, like a reef mollusk, Noah, a high-flying bird, cruised through all the streets of the camp, from dawn to dark, on the box of his repulsive cart, cracking the whip and singing lustily. The cart stood at the entrance to every Block, and while his foul stinking henchmen carried out their dirty task, cursing, Noah wandered through the women’s rooms like an oriental prince, wearing a varicolored jacket with an arabesque design, covered with patches and braid. His love meetings were like hurricanes. He was the friend of all the men and the lover of all the women. The flood was over; in the black sky of Auschwitz Noah saw the rainbow shine, and the world was his, to repopulate.

Frau Vitta—rather, Frau Vita (or Life), as everyone called her—loved all human beings with a simple, brotherly love. Frau Vita, with her ravaged body and her sweet open 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 once, with a Triestine talkativeness, laughing and crying; she was in good health, but profoundly wounded, ulcerated by what she had undergone and seen in a year of the Lager, and in those final horrible days. In fact she had been “commanded” to transport corpses, pieces of corpses, wretched anonymous remains, and those last images weighed on her like a mountain; she tried to exorcise them, to wash herself of them, throwing herself headlong into tumultuous activity. She was the only one who took care of the sick and the children; she did it with frenzied compassion, and when she had time left she washed the floors and windows with savage fury, she noisily rinsed the bowls and glasses, she ran through the rooms carrying messages, true or fictitious; she returned out of breath, and sat panting on my bed, her eyes wet—hungry for words, for intimacy, for human warmth. At night, when all the day’s work was done, she jumped out of her bed, incapable of enduring solitude, and danced alone amid the beds, to the sound of her own songs, hugging affectionately to her breast an imaginary partner. It was Frau Vita who closed the eyes of André and Antoine. They were two young farmers from the Vosges, who had been my companions during the ten days of the interregnum, both ill with diphtheria. It seemed to me that I had known them for centuries. In an odd parallel, they were stricken simultaneously by a form of dysentery that soon proved to be very serious, of tubercular origin; and in a few days the scale of their fate tipped. They were in neighboring beds, they didn’t complain, they endured the atrocious abdominal attacks with clenched teeth, not understanding their fatal nature; they spoke only to each other, timidly, and did not ask anyone for help. André was the first to go, while he was speaking, in the middle of a sentence, the way a candle goes out. For two days no one came to remove him: the children went to look at him with baffled curiosity, then continued playing in their corner.

Antoine remained silent and alone, shut up in a wait that transfigured him. He was reasonably well nourished, but in two days he underwent a poignant metamorphosis, as if sucked up by his neighbor. Along with Frau Vita we managed, after many vain attempts, to get a doctor to come: I asked him, in German, if there was something to do, if there was hope, and urged him not to answer in French. He answered in Yiddish, with a short sentence that I didn’t understand; then he translated it into German: “Sein Kamerad ruft ihn,” his companion is calling him. Antoine obeyed the call that night. They were not yet twenty, and had been in the Lager only a month. And finally Olga came, on a silent night, to bring me the grim news of the Birkenau camp, and of the fate of the women in my transport. I had been waiting for her for many days: I didn’t know her personally, but Frau Vita, who in spite of the medical prohibitions also visited the sick in the other wards, in search of sufferings to relieve and passionate conversations, had informed us of each other’s presence, and had organized the illicit meeting, in the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping. Olga was a Croatian Jewish partisan, who in 1942 had hidden in the region of Asti, and had been interned there; so she belonged to that wave of several thousand foreign Jews who had found hospitality, and a brief peace, in the paradoxical, officially anti-Semitic Italy of those years. She was a woman of great intelligence and culture, strong, beautiful, and wise; deported to Birkenau, she had survived, alone of her family. She spoke Italian perfectly; out of gratitude and temperament, she had soon become a friend of the Italian women in the camp and, more specifically, of those who had been deported in my convoy. She told me their story with her eyes on the floor, in the light of a candle. The furtive glow drew from the shadows only her face, emphasizing the precocious wrinkles, and transforming it into a tragic mask. A bandanna covered her head; she untied it suddenly, and the mask became macabre, like a skull. Olga’s head was bare, except for a covering of short gray fuzz.

They had all died. All the children and all the old people, immediately. Of the five hundred and fifty people I had lost track of when I entered the Lager, only twenty-nine women had been admitted to Birkenau: of these, only five had survived. Vanda had been gassed, fully conscious, in the month of October; she herself, Olga, had obtained two sleeping pills for her, but they were not enough.

The Greek

Toward the end of February, after a month in bed, I felt not recovered but stable. I had the clear impression that, until I got myself (maybe with an effort) into a vertical position, and put shoes on my feet, I wouldn’t regain health and strength. So on one of the rare examination days, I asked to be discharged. The doctor examined me, or made a show of examining me; he verified that the desquamation of the scarlet fever had stopped; he told me that as far as he was concerned I could go; he urged me ridiculously not to expose myself to fatigue or cold, and wished me good luck. So I cut myself a pair of walking shoes from a blanket, grabbed as many cloth jackets and pants as I could find around (since no other garments could be had), said goodbye to Frau Vita and Henek, and left. I was rather shaky on my feet. Just 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 clothes, who was looking for men to get rid of the snow; he grabbed me, deaf to my protests, handed me a shovel, and added me to a team of shovelers. I offered him the five cigarettes, but he rejected them with irritation. He was an ex-Kapo, and naturally had remained in service: who else would have made people like us shovel snow? I tried to shovel, but it was physically impossible. If I could get around the corner no one would see me anymore, but it was essential to get rid of the shovel; to sell it would have been interesting, but I didn’t know to whom, and to carry it with me, even for a few steps, was dangerous. There wasn’t enough snow to bury it. I finally dropped it through the window of a cellar, and was free. I went into a Block. There was a guard, an old Hungarian, who didn’t want to let me in, but the cigarettes persuaded him.

Inside it was warm, full of smoke and noise and unknown faces; but in the evening I, too, was given some soup. I was hoping for a few days of rest and gradual practice for an active life, but I didn’t know I had been unlucky. Immediately, the next morning, I fell into a Russian transport heading for a mysterious transit camp.

I can’t recall exactly how and when my Greek emerged out of the nothingness. In those days and in those places, shortly after the front passed, a high wind blew over the face of the Earth: the world around us seemed to have returned to a primal Chaos, and was swarming with deformed, defective, abnormal human examples; and each of them was tossing about, in blind or deliberate motion, anxiously searching for his own place, his own sphere, as the cosmogonies of the ancients say, poetically, of the particles of the four elements. I, too, overwhelmed by the whirlwind, thus found myself many hours before dawn on a freezing night, after a copious snowfall, loaded onto a horse-drawn military cart, along with a dozen companions I didn’t know. The cold was intense; the sky, thick with stars, was growing light in the east, promising one of those marvelous sunrises of the plain that, in the time of our slavery, we watched interminably from Roll Call Square in the Lager. Our guide and escort was a Russian soldier. He sat on the box singing to the stars at the top of his lungs, and every so often addressed himself to the horses in that strangely affectionate way Russians have, with gentle inflections and long modulated phrases. We had questioned him about our destination, naturally, but without learning anything comprehensible, except that, as it seemed from some rhythmic puffing and a piston-like movement of his elbows, his task was evidently limited to taking us to a railroad. So in fact it was. When the sun rose, the cart stopped at the foot of a slope; above ran the tracks, severed and torn up for fifty meters by a recent bombardment. The soldier pointed out to us one of the two stumps, helped us get down from the cart (and it was necessary: the trip had lasted almost two hours, the

cart was small, and many of us, because of our uncomfortable position and the penetrating cold, were so stiff we couldn’t move), said goodbye to us with cheerful, incomprehensible words, turned the horses, and went off, singing sweetly. As soon as the sun rose it disappeared behind a veil of fog; from the height of the railroad slope one could see only an endless, flat, deserted countryside, buried in snow, without a roof, without a tree. Hours passed: none of us had a watch. As I said, we were a dozen. There was a Reichsdeutscher, an ethnic German, who, like many other “Aryan” Germans, after the liberation had assumed relatively courteous and frankly ambiguous manners (this was an amusing metamorphosis, which I had seen happen in others: sometimes progressively, sometimes in a few minutes, at the first appearance of the new bosses with the red star, on whose broad faces it was easy to read a tendency not to be too particular). There were two tall, thin brothers, Viennese Jews in their fifties, silent and cautious like all the old Häftlinge; an officer from the regular Yugoslav Army, who seemed unable to shake off the submissiveness and inertia of the Lager, and looked at us with empty eyes. There was a kind of human wreck, of an indefinable age, who talked to himself without stopping, in Yiddish: one of the many whom the savage life of the camp had half destroyed, leaving them to survive wrapped in (and perhaps protected by) a thick armor of insensitivity or obvious madness. And there was, finally, the Greek, with whom destiny was to join me for an unforgettable vagabond week. His name was Mordo Nahum, and at first sight he appeared unremarkable, except for his shoes (leather, almost new, of an elegant model: a true miracle, given the time and the place), and the sack that he carried on his back, which had a considerable mass and a corresponding weight, as I was to verify in the days that followed. In addition to his own language, he spoke Spanish (like all the Jews of Salonika), French, a broken Italian but with a good accent, and, I found out later, Turkish, Bulgarian, and a little Albanian. He was forty; he was quite tall, but he walked bent over, with his head forward, as if he were nearsighted. He was red-haired and red-

skinned, he had large pale, watery eyes, and a big hooked nose, which gave his entire person an aspect at once rapacious and clumsy, as of a nocturnal bird surprised by the light, or a predator fish out of its natural element. He was recovering from an unspecified illness, which had caused spells of a very high, debilitating fever; even then, on the first nights of the journey, he sometimes fell into a state of prostration, shivering and delirious. Yet, without feeling particularly attracted to each other, we were brought together by two common languages, and by the fact—very noticeable in the circumstances—that we were the only two Mediterraneans in the little group. The wait was interminable; we were hungry and cold, and were forced to stand or lie in the snow, because as far as the eye could see there was neither roof nor shelter. It must have been nearly noon when, heralded from a distance by puffing and smoke, the hand of civilization was charitably extended toward us, in the form of a puny little train consisting of three or four freight cars hauled by a small locomotive, of the type that in normal times is used to maneuver cars around a station. The train stopped in front of us, at the edge of the cut-off track. Some Polish peasants got out, but we couldn’t get any information from them that made sense: they looked at us with blank faces, and avoided us as if we were contagious. In fact we were, probably in the literal sense, and, besides, our appearance could not have been pleasing; but we had deluded ourselves that we would receive a more cordial welcome from the first “civilians” we met after our liberation. We all got into one of the cars, and the little train started up again almost immediately, backward, pushed, rather than pulled, by the toy locomotive. At the next stop two peasant women got on, and, once the initial distrust and the difficulty of the language had been overcome, we learned from them some important geographic facts and some information that, if true, to our ears sounded little less than disastrous. The break in the tracks was not far from a place called Neu Berun, where a branch line from Auschwitz, since destroyed, had once ended. One of the two trunks that went off from the

break led to Katowice (to the west), the other to Kraków (to the east). Both these places were around sixty kilometers from Neu Berun, which, in the frightful condition in which the war had left the line, meant at least two days of travel, with an uncertain number of stops and transfers. The train we were on was traveling toward Kraków: until a few days earlier the Russians had been shunting into Kraków an enormous number of former prisoners, and now all the barracks, the schools, the hospitals, the convents were overflowing with people in a state of acute need. The very streets of Kraków, according to our informants, were swarming with men and women of all races, who in the blink of an eye had been transformed into smugglers, black marketeers, or even thieves and bandits. For several days now, the former prisoners had been concentrated in other camps, around Katowice: the two women were very surprised to find us traveling toward Kraków, where, they said, the Russian garrison itself was suffering deprivation. Having heard our story, they consulted briefly with each other, then declared themselves certain that it must have been simply an error of our guide, the Russian cart driver, who, with little experience of the country, had directed us to the eastern stub rather than the western. This information threw us into a tangle of doubts and anguish. We had hoped for a short and safe journey, toward a camp equipped to welcome us, toward an acceptable surrogate for our homes; and that hope was part of a much larger hope, hope in a right and just world, miraculously reestablished on its natural foundations after an eternity of disruptions, mistakes, and slaughters, after our long time of endurance. It was a naïve hope, like all hopes that rest on sharp divisions between evil and good, between past and future: but we lived on them. That first crack, and the many others, large and small, that inevitably followed, was a cause of suffering for many of us, the more deeply felt because it had not been foreseen: since one does not dream for years, for decades, of a better world without imagining it to be perfect. Instead no, something had happened that only a very few sages among us had predicted. Freedom, improbable, impossible freedom, so far from Auschwitz that only in

dreams had we dared to hope for it, had arrived: but it had not brought us to the Promised Land. It was around us, but in the form of a pitiless, deserted plain. More trials awaited us, more labors, more hunger, more cold, more fears. I had now been without food for twenty-four hours. We sat on the wooden floor of the train car, close against one another to protect ourselves from the cold; the tracks were uneven, and at every jolt our heads, infirm on our necks, bumped against the wooden sides. I felt exhausted, not only in my body: like an athlete who has run for hours, using up all his resources, the natural ones first, and then the ones that are squeezed out, created from nothing in moments of extreme need; an athlete who arrives at the finish line, and, in the act of collapsing, exhausted, on the ground, is brutally pulled to his feet and forced to start running again, in the dark, toward another finish line, an unknown distance away. I had bitter thoughts: that nature rarely grants compensation, and neither does human society, being timid and slow to diverge from nature’s gross schemes; and such an achievement would represent, in the history of human thought, the ability to see in nature not a model to follow but a shapeless block to carve, or an enemy to fight.

The train traveled slowly. In the evening, dark, apparently deserted villages appeared; then utter night descended, atrociously frigid, with no lights in the sky or on the earth. Only the jolting of the car kept us from slipping into a sleep that the cold would have rendered fatal. Finally, after interminable hours of traveling, perhaps around three in the morning, we stopped in a small, dark, badly damaged station. The Greek was delirious; none of the others—some out of fear, some out of pure inertia, some in the hope that the train would leave soon—wanted to leave the car. I got out, and wandered in the darkness with my ridiculous baggage until I saw a lighted window. It was the telegraph room, full of people; there was a glowing stove. I went in, wary as a wild dog, ready to vanish at the first threatening gesture, but no one noticed me. I collapsed onto the floor and fell asleep instantly, as one learns to do in the Lager.

I woke some hours later, at dawn. The booth was empty. The telegrapher saw me raise my head, and placed beside me, on the floor, a gigantic slice of bread and cheese. I was stunned (besides being half paralyzed by cold and sleep), and I’m afraid I didn’t thank him. I stuffed the food into my stomach and went outside: the train hadn’t moved. In the car, my companions lay stupefied; seeing me, they roused themselves, all except the Yugoslav, who tried in vain to move. The cold and the lack of movement had paralyzed his legs: if you touched him he screamed and groaned. We had to massage him a long time, and then cautiously move the limbs, the way you clear a rusty machine. It had been a terrible night for everyone, perhaps the worst of our entire exile. I talked about it with the Greek: we found ourselves in agreement in deciding to form an alliance with the purpose of avoiding by any means another freezing night, which we felt we wouldn’t survive. I think that the Greek, thanks to my nighttime expedition, in some way overestimated my qualities as a débrouillard et démerdard, as people used, elegantly, to say. As for me, I confess that I counted chiefly on his large sack, and the fact that he was a Salonikan, which, as everyone at Auschwitz knew, was a guarantee of sophisticated mercantile skills, of knowing how to get by in all circumstances. Liking, on both sides, and respect, on one, came later. The train departed, and by a tortuous and indeterminate route brought us to a place called Szczakowa. Here the Polish Red Cross had established a wonderful hot-food service: a fairly substantial soup was distributed, at all hours of the day and night, to anyone who showed up, without distinction. A miracle that no one of us would have dared dream of in his boldest dreams; in a certain sense, it was the Lager reversed. I don’t remember the behavior of my companions. I proved to be so greedy that the Polish nurses, although accustomed to the starving clientele of the place, made the sign of the cross. We departed again in the afternoon. The sun shone. Our wretched train stopped at sunset, with engine trouble; in the distance the belltowers of Kraków glowed red. The Greek and

I got out of the car, and went to question the engineer, who was standing in the snow, completely dirty, busily contending with jets of steam bursting from some broken pipe. “Maschina kaput,” he answered concisely. We were no longer slaves, we were no longer protected, we had emerged from guardianship. For us the hour of trial had come. The Greek, restored by the hot soup of Szczakowa, felt in fairly good health. “On y va?” “On y va.” So we left the train and our bewildered companions, whom we would never have to see again, and set off on foot in a dubious search for the Civilized World.

Following his peremptory request, I was carrying the famous load. “But it’s your stuff!” I had tried in vain to protest. “Precisely because it’s mine. I organized it and you carry it. It’s the division of labor. Later, you’ll profit from it, too.” So we walked, he first and I second, on the trampled snow of a street on the outskirts; the sun had set. I’ve already mentioned the Greek’s shoes; as for me, I wore a pair of odd shoes such as in Italy I’ve seen worn only by priests: of very delicate leather, up to the anklebone, with two large pins and no laces, and two side pieces of an elastic material that were supposed to ensure that they closed and stayed on. I also wore a good four pairs of pants of Häftling material, a cotton shirt, a jacket that was also striped, and that’s all. My baggage consisted of a blanket and a cardboard box in which I had first saved some pieces of bread but which was now empty—all things that the Greek looked at with unconcealed contempt and scorn. We had been grossly deceived about the distance to Kraków: we would have to go at least seven kilometers. After twenty minutes of walking, my shoes were gone; the sole of one had fallen off, and the other was coming undone. The Greek had until then preserved a meaningful silence. When he saw me put down the bundle, and sit on a stone marker to observe the disaster, he asked me: “How old are you?” “Twenty-five,” I answered.

“What is your profession?” “I’m a chemist.” “Then you’re a fool,” he said calmly. “Anyone who doesn’t have shoes is a fool.” He was a fine Greek. Few times in my life, before or since, have I felt such concrete wisdom hanging over my head. I could hardly object. The validity of the argument was palpable, obvious: the two formless wrecks on my feet, and the two shining marvels on his. There was no excuse. I was no longer a slave, but, after the first steps on the path of freedom, here I was sitting on a post, with my feet in my hand, clumsy and useless as the broken-down locomotive we had just left. So did I deserve freedom? The Greek seemed dubious. “. . . But I had scarlet fever, I was in the infirmary: the shoe warehouse was far away, we weren’t allowed to get near it, and then they said it had been ransacked by the Poles. And didn’t I have the right to think that the Russians would provide them?” “Words,” said the Greek. “Everybody knows how to say words. I had a forty degree fever, and I didn’t know if it was day or night. But one thing I knew, that I needed shoes and other things, so I got up and went to the warehouse to study the situation. And there was a Russian with a machine gun in front of the door; but I wanted shoes, and I walked around it, I broke a window, and I went in. So I had shoes, and also the sack and everything that’s in the sack, which will be useful later. That is foresight; yours is stupidity, it’s not taking account of the reality of things.” “You’re the one who’s full of words now,” I said. “I may have made a mistake, but now we have to get to Kraków before night, with shoes or without.” And so saying I struggled, with my numb fingers, and with some bits of wire I had found on the road, to at least temporarily tie the soles to the uppers. “Forget it, you’ll get nowhere like that.” He handed me two pieces of strong cloth he had dug out of his bundle, and

showed me how to wrap up shoes and feet, so as to be able to walk as well as possible. Then we continued in silence. The outskirts of Kraków were anonymous and bleak. The streets were utterly deserted; the shop windows were empty, all the doors and windows were barred or smashed. We reached the end of a tram line. I hesitated, since we had no way to pay for a ride, but the Greek said, “Get on, then we’ll see.” The car was empty; after a quarter of an hour the driver appeared, and not the conductor (from which you see that once again the Greek was right; and, as will be seen, he was right in all the affairs that followed, except one); we left, and during the journey we found with joy that one of the passengers who got on was a French soldier. He explained to us that he was billeted in an ancient convent, which the tram would soon pass; at the next stop, we would find a barrack requisitioned by the Russians and full of Italian soldiers. My heart rejoiced: I had found a home. In reality everything did not go so smoothly. The Polish sentinel on guard at the barrack first invited us curtly to go away. “Where?” “What do I care? Away from here, anywhere.” After much persistence and prayer, he was finally induced to call an Italian marshal, evidently the one who made decisions on admitting other guests. It wasn’t simple, he explained to us: the barrack was already full to overflowing, the rations were limited; that I was Italian he could admit, but I wasn’t a soldier; as for my companion, he was Greek, and it was impossible to have him come in among former combatants in Greece and Albania—certainly scuffles and brawls would break out. I responded with my greatest eloquence, and with genuine tears in my eyes: I guaranteed that we would stay only one night (and thought to myself: once inside . . .), and that the Greek spoke Italian well and anyway would scarcely say a word. My arguments were weak and I knew it; but the Greek knew how all the military services of the world function, and while I was talking he was digging in the sack hanging on my shoulders. Suddenly he pushed me aside and silently placed under the nose of the Cerberus a dazzling can of pork, adorned with a multicolored label, and

with futile instructions in six languages on the right way to handle the contents. So we won a roof and a bed in Kraków.

It was now night. Contrary to what the marshal wished us to believe, inside the barrack the most sumptuous abundance reigned: there were lighted stoves, candles and carbide lamps, food and drink, and straw to sleep on. The Italians were arranged ten or twelve to a room, but we at Monowitz had been two per cubic meter. They wore good military clothes, padded jackets, many had wristwatches, all had hair shiny with brilliantine; they were noisy, cheerful, and kind, and overwhelmed us with attentions. As for the Greek, he was practically carried triumphantly. A Greek! A Greek is here! The news spread from room to room, and soon a festive crowd had gathered around my stern ally. They spoke Greek, some fluently, these veterans of the most pitiful military occupation that history records: they recalled with vivid sympathy places and events, in tacit, gallant recognition of the desperate valor of the invaded country. But there was something more, which opened the way for them: mine was not an ordinary Greek, he was visibly a master, an authority, a super Greek. In a few minutes of conversation, he had performed a miracle, had created an atmosphere. He possessed the right equipment: he could speak Italian, and (what was more important, and is lacking in many Italians themselves) he knew what to talk about in Italian. He astonished me: he proved to be an expert in girls and spaghetti, in Juventus and opera, war and gonorrhea, wine and the black market, motorcycles and dodges. Mordo Nahum, with me so laconic, quickly became the center of the evening. I saw that his eloquence, his successful effort at captatio benevolentiae were not motivated only by opportunistic considerations. He, too, had fought in the Greek campaign, with the rank of sergeant: on the other side, of course, but this detail at this moment seemed negligible to everyone. He had been at Tepelenë, as had many Italians, too; he had, like them, suffered cold, hunger, mud, and bombardments; and at the end he, like them, had been captured by the Germans. He was a colleague, a fellow soldier.

He told curious war stories. Once, after the Germans broke through the front, he, along with six of his soldiers, had been ransacking the second floor of a bombed, abandoned villa in search of provisions, and had heard suspicious noises on the floor below; he had cautiously gone down the stairs with the machine gun on his hip, and had run into an Italian sergeant who with six soldiers was doing the same job on the ground floor. The Italian had leveled his gun, in turn, but the Greek had pointed out that in those conditions a gun battle would be especially stupid, that they were both, Greeks and Italians, in the same soup, and that he didn’t see why they couldn’t make a small separate local peace and continue searching in their respective occupied territories—a proposal that the Italian had readily agreed to. For me, too, it was a revelation. I knew he was nothing but a somewhat shady merchant, expert in scams and without scruples, egotistical and cold, and yet I felt that, encouraged by the sympathy of his listeners, a new warmth flowered in him, an unsuspected humanity, singular but genuine, and rich in promise. Late at night, from somewhere or other, a flask of wine appeared. It was the final blow: for me everything was celestially shipwrecked in a warm purple haze, and I barely managed to crawl on all fours to the bed of straw that the Italians, with maternal care, had made in a corner for the Greek and me. Day had barely broken when the Greek woke me. Alas, disappointment! Where had the jovial guest of the night before gone? The Greek who was before me was hard, secretive, taciturn. “Get up,” he said in a tone that admitted no response. “Put on your shoes, get the sack, and let’s go.” “Go where?” “To work. To the market. Do you think it’s right to let someone support us?” To this argument I felt completely resistant. It seemed to me that, apart from being comfortable, it was extremely natural for someone to support me, and also right. I had found

the previous night’s explosion of national solidarity—rather, of spontaneous humanity—wonderful, thrilling. Besides, full of self-pity as I was, it seemed to me just, and good, that the world should finally feel compassion for me. In any case, I didn’t have shoes, I was sick, I was cold, I was tired; and finally, in the name of heaven, what in the world could I do at the market? I set out these considerations, which to me were obvious. But “C’est pas des raisons d’homme,” he answered, in irritation: I had to realize that I had insulted an important moral principle of his, that he was seriously shocked, that on that point he was not disposed to negotiate or discuss. Moral codes, all of them, are rigid by definition: they do not admit nuances, or compromises, or mutual contamination. They are accepted or rejected entire. This is one of the main reasons that man is a herd animal, and more or less consciously seeks proximity not to his neighbor in general but only to one who shares his deep convictions (or his lack of such convictions). I had to realize, with disappointment and amazement, that such precisely was Mordo Nahum: a man of profound convictions, which, moreover, were very far from mine. Now, we all know how difficult it is to have business relations—indeed, to live together—with an ideological opposite. Fundamental to his ethic was work, which he felt as a sacred duty but which he understood in a very broad sense. Work was that and only that which leads to gain without limiting freedom. The concept of work thus also includes, for example, besides certain legal activities, smuggling, theft, fraud (not robbery: he wasn’t a violent man). On the other hand, he considered reprehensible, because humiliating, all activities that do not involve initiative or risk, or that assume discipline and hierarchy: that is, any employee relationship, any providing of services, which, even if it was well compensated, he considered altogether “servile work.” But it wasn’t servile work to plow one’s own field, or sell fake antiquities to tourists at the port. As for the loftier activities of the spirit, creative work, I quickly understood that the Greek was divided. These were a matter of delicate judgments, to be made case by case: it was

permissible, for example, to pursue success in itself, even by selling fake paintings or bad literature, or anyway by harming one’s neighbor, but it was reprehensible to persist in following an unprofitable ideal, and sinful to withdraw from the world in contemplation. Permissible, however, in fact commendable, was the path of the man who devotes himself to meditation and acquiring wisdom, provided he doesn’t believe that he should receive his bread for nothing from the civilized world: even wisdom is goods, and can and should be exchanged. Since Mordo Nahum was not a fool, he understood clearly that his principles could not be shared by individuals of different origin and upbringing, and in particular by me; but he was firmly convinced of them, and it was his ambition to translate them into acts, to show me their general validity. In conclusion, my proposal to sit calmly and wait for bread from the Russians could only appear to him detestable: because it was “bread not earned”; because it involved a relationship of subjugation; and because every kind of order, of structure, was for him suspect, whether it led to a loaf every day or a pay envelope every month.

So I followed the Greek to the market, not so much because I was convinced by his arguments as through inertia and curiosity. The evening before, while I was navigating in a sea of vinous fogs, he had diligently informed himself of the location, customs, tariffs, demands, and supplies of the free market of Kraków, and duty called him. We left, he with the sack (which I carried), I in my decrepit shoes, by virtue of which every single step became a problem. The market of Kraków had grown up spontaneously, right after the front passed by, and in a few days had occupied an entire neighborhood. You could buy or sell anything, and the whole city made its way there: bourgeois residents sold furniture, books, paintings, clothes, and silver; peasants padded like mattresses offered meat, chickens, eggs, cheese; children, their noses and cheeks reddened by the frigid wind, sought smokers for the rations of tobacco that the Soviet

military administration distributed with peculiar generosity (three hundred grams a month for everyone, even newborns). I was overjoyed to meet a small group of fellow countrymen: skilled types, three soldiers and a girl, cheerful and openhanded, who in those days were doing excellent business with hot pancakes, made with strange ingredients in a doorway not far away. After a first general survey, the Greek decided on shirts. Were we partners? Well, he would contribute capital and mercantile experience; I, physical work and my (tenuous) knowledge of German. “Go,” he said, “and take a look at all the stalls where shirts are sold, ask how much they cost, say it’s too much, then come back and report. Don’t attract too much attention.” I prepared unwillingly to carry out this market research: I harbored in myself old hunger and cold, and inertia, and at the same time curiosity, carelessness, and a new, piquant desire to start conversations, to open human relations, to flaunt and waste my boundless freedom. But the Greek, behind the backs of my interlocutors, followed me with a harsh eye: hurry up, damn it, time is money, business is business. I came back from my tour with some prices for reference, which the Greek made a mental note of, and with a certain number of disjointed philological notions: that “shirt” is said something like kosciúla; that Polish numerals resemble Greek ones; that “how much is it” and “what time is it” are said approximately ile kostúie and ktura gogína; a genitive ending in -ego that made clear to me certain Polish curses often heard in the Lager; and other shreds of information that filled me with a silly, childish joy. The Greek calculated in his head. One shirt could be sold for between fifty and a hundred zloty; an egg cost five or six zloty; with ten zloty, according to the information of the Italians with the pancakes, one could get soup and main course at the soup kitchen for the poor, behind the cathedral. The Greek decided to sell one of the three shirts he had, and to eat at that soup kitchen; the rest he would invest in eggs. Then we would see what to do.

So he handed me the shirt, and told me to display it, and to shout, “Shirt, gentlemen, shirt.” For “shirt” I already had the information; for “gentlemen” I thought the correct form was panowie, a word that I had heard used a few minutes earlier by my competitors, and that I interpreted as the vocative plural of pan, sir. On the latter term, besides, I had no doubts: it appears in an important dialogue in The Brothers Karamazov. It must have been the right word, because several clients spoke to me in Polish, asking me incomprehensible questions about the shirt. I was embarrassed: the Greek intervened authoritatively, pushed me aside, and conducted the negotiations directly; they were long and laborious but ended happily. At the invitation of the buyer, the exchange of property took place not in the public square but in a doorway. Seventy zloty, equal to seven meals or a dozen eggs. I don’t know about the Greek: I for fourteen months had not had at my disposal such an amount of foodstuffs, all at once. But was it really at my disposal? That seemed dubious: the Greek had pocketed the sum in silence, and with his whole attitude gave me to understand that he intended to administer the proceeds himself. We made the rounds of the egg sellers’ stalls, where we learned that, for the same price, hard-boiled and raw eggs could be acquired. We bought six, to dine on: the Greek made his purchase with extreme care, choosing the largest after minute comparisons and after many perplexities and second thoughts, utterly indifferent to the critical gaze of the seller. The soup kitchen was behind the cathedral: it remained to find out which, among the many beautiful churches of Kraków, was the cathedral. Whom to ask, and how? A priest went by: I would ask the priest. Now, that priest, young and with a kind face, understood neither French nor German; as a result, for the first and only time in my post-scholastic career, I got some use out of years of classical studies by initiating in Latin the strangest and most tangled of conversations. From the first request for information (“Pater optime, ubi est mensa pauperorum?”) we talked confusedly about everything, about my being a Jew, about the Lager (“castra”? “Lager” was better, unfortunately understood by anyone), about Italy, about

the inadvisability of speaking German in public (which I came to understand later, through direct experience), and about countless other things, to which the unusual guise of the language gave a curious flavor of the pluperfect. I had completely forgotten hunger and cold, since the need for human contact should truly be numbered among the elemental needs. I had even forgotten the Greek; but he hadn’t forgotten me, and showed up brutally after a few minutes, ruthlessly interrupting the conversation. Not that he was against human contact, and not that he didn’t understand the good of it (he had shown it the night before in the barrack): but these were things outside of working hours, for holidays, accessories, not to be mixed with that serious and strenuous business that is daily work. He responded to my weak protests only with a harsh look. We set off; the Greek was silent for a long time, then, in conclusive judgment of my assistance, he said to me thoughtfully, “Je n’ai pas encore compris si tu es idiot ou fainéant.” Guided by the priest’s valuable information, we reached the soup kitchen, which was a very depressing place, but warm and full of delicious smells. The Greek ordered two soups and a single portion of beans with lard: it was the punishment for the unsuitable and foolish way I had behaved that morning. He was angry; but once he had swallowed the soup he softened noticeably, so much that he left me a good quarter of his beans. Outside it had begun to snow, and a savage wind was blowing. Maybe it was pity for my striped garments, or indifference toward the rules; for a large part of the afternoon, the kitchen staff left us alone, thinking, and making plans for the future. The Greek’s mood seemed to have changed: maybe the fever had returned, or maybe, after the solid business of the morning, he felt on vacation. He felt, in fact, in a benevolently pedagogical mood. Gradually, as the hours passed, the tone of his conversation imperceptibly warmed, and at the same time the relationship that bound us was changing: from master– slave at noon, to boss–employee at one, to master-disciple at two, to older brother–younger brother at three. The conversation returned to my shoes, which neither of us, for different reasons, could forget. He explained to me that to be

without shoes is a very grave offense. In war, there are two things you must think of above all: in the first place shoes, in the second food, and not the other way around, as the populace maintains—because someone who has shoes can go around looking for food, while the opposite is not true. “But the war is over,” I objected; and I thought it was over, like many in those months of truce, in a more universal sense than one dares to think today. “There is always war,” Mordo Nahum answered, memorably. We all know that no one is born with a set of rules, that each of us constructs his own along the way or, ultimately, on the store of his experiences, or those of others, similar to his; and so the moral universe of each of us, properly interpreted, coincides with the sum of our previous experiences, and thus represents a condensed version of our biography. The biography of my Greek was linear: that of a strong, cold man, solitary and logical, who had moved from childhood within the rigid meshes of a mercantile society. He was (or had been) open also to other aspirations: he wasn’t indifferent to the sky and the sea in his country, the pleasures of home and family, dialectic encounters. But he had been conditioned to push all this to the margins of his day and of his life, so that it did not disturb what he called the travail d’homme. His had been a life of war, and he considered cowardly and blind anyone who rejected that universe of iron. The Lager had come to us both: I had perceived it as a monstrous distortion, an ugly anomaly of my history and the history of the world, he as a sad confirmation of well-known things. “There is always war,” man is a wolf toward man: an old story. Of his two years in Auschwitz he never spoke to me. He talked to me, instead, eloquently, about his many activities in Salonika, of the batches of goods bought, sold, smuggled by sea, or at night across the Bulgarian border; of the scams shamefully endured and those gloriously perpetrated; and, finally, of the happy, tranquil hours passed on the shore of the gulf, after the day of work, with his merchant colleagues, in certain cafés on stilts that he described with unusual abandon, and of the long conversations that were held there. What conversations? About money, about customs,

about freight charges, naturally; but also about other things. What is to be understood by “knowledge,” by “spirit,” by “justice,” by “truth.” What is the nature of the fragile tie that binds the soul to the body, how it is established at birth and released at death. What is freedom, and how to reconcile the conflict between freedom of the spirit and fate. What follows death, too; and other grand Greek things. But all this in the evening, of course, when the trafficking was done, with coffee or wine or olives, a brilliant game of intellect among men active also in idleness: without passion. Why the Greek told me these things, why he confessed to me, isn’t clear. Maybe, in front of me, who was so different, so foreign, he felt alone, and his conversation was a monologue. We left the soup kitchen in the evening, and returned to the Italians’ barrack. After much insistence, we had got permission from the Italian colonel in charge to stay in the barrack one more night, only one. No ration, and we were not to attract any attention—he didn’t want to have trouble with the Russians. The next morning, we would have to leave. For dinner each of us had two of the eggs acquired in the morning, saving the last two for breakfast. After the events of the day, I felt much “younger” compared with the Greek. When it came to the eggs, I asked if he knew how to distinguish between a raw egg and a hard-boiled one from the outside (you spin the egg rapidly, on a table, for example; if it’s hard it spins for a long time, if it’s raw it stops almost immediately): it was a minor skill I was proud of. I hoped that the Greek didn’t know it, and so I would be able to rehabilitate myself in his eyes, if in a small way. But the Greek looked at me with his cold, wise serpent’s eyes: “What do you take me for? Do you think I was born yesterday? You think that I never dealt in eggs? Come on, tell me some item I’ve never dealt in!” I had to make my retreat. The episode, in itself negligible, was to return to my mind many months later, in the middle of summer, in the heart of White Russia, on the occasion of my third and last encounter with Mordo Nahum.

We left the following morning, at dawn (this is a tale interwoven with cold dawns), with Katowice as our goal: it had been confirmed that there actually existed various transit centers for scattered Italians, French, Greeks, and so on. Katowice was only about eighty kilometers from Kraków: little more than an hour by train in normal times. But in those days there wasn’t a twenty-kilometer section of track without a transfer, many bridges had been blown up, and because of the terrible state of the line the trains proceeded very slowly during the day and at night didn’t run at all. It was a labyrinthine journey, which lasted three days, with nighttime stops in places ridiculously far from the junction between the two ends: a journey of cold and hunger, which brought us the first day to a place called Trzebinia. Here the train stopped, and I went out onto the platform to stretch my legs, which were stiff with cold. Maybe I was among the first dressed in “zebra stripes” to appear in that place called Trzebinia: I was immediately at the center of a dense circle of the curious who questioned me volubly in Polish. I answered as well as I could in German; and in the middle of the group of workers and peasants a middle-class man came forward, in a felt hat, with eyeglasses and a leather portfolio in his hand—a lawyer. He was Polish, he spoke French and German well, he was polite and kind; in short, he possessed all the qualities that enabled me finally, after the long year of slavery and silence, to recognize in him the messenger, the spokesman from the civilized world—the first I had met. I had an avalanche of urgent things to tell the civilized world, my own but belonging to everyone, things of blood, things that, it seemed to me, would shake every conscience to its foundations. The lawyer really was polite and kind: he questioned me, and I spoke dizzily of my so recent experiences, of Auschwitz, nearby and yet, it seemed, unknown to all, of the massacre I alone had escaped, everything. The lawyer translated into Polish for the public. Now, I did not know Polish, but I knew how to say “Jew,” and how to say “political”; and I quickly realized that the translation of my account, although heartfelt, was not faithful.

The lawyer described me to the audience not as an Italian Jew but as an Italian political prisoner. I asked for an explanation, surprised and almost offended. He answered, embarrassed, “C’est mieux pour vous. La guerre n’est pas finie.” The words of the Greek. I felt the warm wave of feeling free, of feeling myself a man among men, of feeling alive, recede into the distance. I was suddenly old, wan, tired beyond any human measure: the war isn’t over, war is forever. My listeners trickled away; they must have understood. I had dreamed something like that, we all had, in the Auschwitz night: to speak and not be listened to, to find freedom again and remain alone. Soon, I remained alone with the lawyer; after a few minutes, he, too, left me, apologizing urbanely. He urged me, as the priest had, to avoid speaking German. When I asked why, he answered vaguely, “Poland is a sad country.” He wished me good luck and offered me some money, which I refused; he seemed to me moved. The locomotive whistled its departure. I got back in the freight car, where the Greek was waiting for me, but I didn’t tell him what had happened. It wasn’t the only stop: others followed, and at one of these, at night, we realized that Szczakowa, the place where there was hot soup for everyone, was not far. It was in fact north, and we were supposed to go west, but since at Szczakowa there was hot soup for all, and we had no plan other than to satisfy our hunger, why not head to Szczakowa? So we got out, waited for the right train, and showed up many more times at the Red Cross counter; I believe that the Polish nurses recognized me easily, and remember me still. As night fell, we settled ourselves to sleep on the floor, right in the middle of the waiting room, since all the places along the sides were occupied. Perhaps made compassionate or curious by my outfit, a few hours later a Polish gendarme arrived, whiskered, ruddy, and corpulent. He questioned me in vain in his language; I answered with the first sentence one learns in any unknown language, and that is Nie rozumiem po polsku, I don’t understand Polish. I added, in German, that I

was Italian, and that I spoke a little German. At which, a miracle! the gendarme began to speak Italian. He spoke a terrible Italian, guttural and aspirated, studded with new, invented curses. He had learned it, and this explains everything, in a valley near Bergamo, where he had worked some years as a miner. He, too, and he was the third, urged me not to speak German. I asked why: he answered with an eloquent gesture, passing his index and middle fingers, like a knife, between chin and larynx, and adding cheerfully, “Tonight all Germans kaput.” Certainly it was an exaggeration, and yet an opinion-hope. But in fact the next day we met a long train of freight cars, closed from the outside; it was headed east, and through the peepholes many human faces could be seen, in search of air. That sight, strongly evocative, roused in me a knot of confused and opposing feelings, which even today I would have a hard time sorting out. The gendarme, very kindly, proposed to the Greek and me that we spend the rest of the night in the warmth of the guardroom; we accepted willingly, and in the unusual environment did not wake until late in the morning, after a restorative sleep. We left Szczakowa the next day, for the last stop on the journey. We reached Katowice without incident; there really did exist a transit camp for Italians, and one for Greeks. We separated without many words; but at the moment of farewell, in a fleeting yet distinct way, I felt a solitary wave of friendship move in me toward him, veined with faint gratitude, contempt, respect, animosity, curiosity, and regret that I wouldn’t see him again. I did see him again, in fact: twice. I saw him in May, in the glorious and turbulent days of the end of the war, when all the Greeks in Katowice, a hundred, men and women, filed past our camp singing, headed to the station: they were leaving for their country, for home. At the head of the column was he, Mordo Nahum, lord among the Greeks, and he was holding the white-and-blue banner: but he put it down when he saw me, left the crowd to greet me (a little ironically, since he was

leaving and I was staying: but it was right, he explained, because Greece belonged to the United Nations), and with an unusual gesture he extracted from his famous sack a gift: a pair of pants, of the type used in Auschwitz in the last months, and that is with a large “window” on the left hip, held together by a piece of striped fabric. Then he disappeared. But he was to reappear one more time, many months later, against the most unlikely background and in the most unexpected incarnation.

Katowice

The transit camp of Katowice, which welcomed me, hungry and tired, after the week of wandering with the Greek, was situated on a small rise, in an outlying neighborhood called Bogucice. In its time, it had been a tiny German Lager, and had housed the miner slaves employed in a coal mine that opened in the vicinity. It was made up of a dozen small brick single-story barracks; the double fence of barbed wire was still in place, though by now purely symbolic. The gate was guarded by a Soviet soldier, with a sleepy, lazy air. On the other side of the camp there was a big hole in the fence, through which one could go out without even ducking; the Russian command didn’t seem to be worried about it in the least. The kitchens, the dining room, the infirmary, the washhouses were outside the fence, so the gate was the site of continuous traffic. The sentinel was a gigantic Mongol of around fifty, armed with machine gun and bayonet; he had enormous gnarled hands, a drooping gray mustache like Stalin’s, and eyes of fire, but his fierce, barbaric appearance was utterly incongruous with his innocuous duties. He had no replacement, and so he was dying of boredom. His behavior toward those who entered and exited was unpredictable: at times he demanded one’s propusk—that is to say, a pass—at other times he asked only one’s name and, at still others, a little tobacco, or even nothing. On some days, however, he rejected everyone ferociously, but he made no objection if he then saw someone going out through the hole at the back, which was certainly visible. When it was cold, he tranquilly left his guard post, went into one of the rooms where he could see a smoking stove, threw his machine gun down on a cot, lit his pipe, and offered vodka if he had some, or if he didn’t asked around for it, and cursed disconsolately if he didn’t get any. Sometimes he even handed the machine gun to the first of us who happened

by, making it clear by means of gestures and shouts that he was to replace him at the guard post; then he napped near the stove. When I arrived with Mordo Nahum, the camp was occupied by an extremely mixed population, of about four hundred people. There were French, Italians, Dutch, Greeks, Czechs, Hungarians, and others; some had been civilian workers in the Todt Organization,1 others interned soldiers, still others former Häftlinge. There were also about a hundred women. In fact, the organization of the camp was entrusted largely to individual or group initiatives, but nominally it was subject to a Soviet Kommandantur, which was the most picturesque example of a Gypsy band one can imagine. There was a captain, Ivan Antonovich Egorov, a little man no longer young, with a rough and aloof manner; three “old lieutenants”; an athletic and jovial sergeant; a dozen members of the Territorial Army2 (among whom was the sentinel described above); a quartermaster; a doktorka;3 a doctor, Pyotr Grigorievich Dancenko, who was very young, a great drinker, smoker, and lover, and indifferent to the job; a nurse, Marya Fyodorovna Prima, who quickly became my friend; and an undefined group of girls, as solid as oaks. It was hard to tell if these girls were military or militarized or auxiliaries or civilians or looking for something to do. Their duties were various and vague: as laundresses, cooks, typists, secretaries, waiters, current lovers of this one or that, occasional fiancées, wives, daughters. The entire caravan lived in harmony, without a schedule or rules, near the camp, housed in the rooms of an abandoned elementary school. The only one who paid attention to us was the quartermaster, who seemed to be the highest in authority, if not in rank, of the entire command. On the other hand, the hierarchical relations were all indecipherable: the Russians talked to one another for the most part with friendly simplicity, like a large temporary family, without military-style formalities; sometimes furious quarrels and fistfights broke out, even between officers and soldiers, but they ended rapidly

without disciplinary consequences and without rancor, as if nothing had happened. The war was about to end, the long, long war that had devastated their country; for them it was already over. It was the great truce, for the hard time that was to follow hadn’t yet begun, nor had the cursed name of the cold war been uttered. They were cheerful, sad, and tired, and were satisfied with food and wine, like the companions of Ulysses after beaching their ships. And yet, under the careless and anarchic appearance, it was easy to discern in them, in each of those coarse, open faces—in the good soldiers of the Red Army, the capable men of Russia old and new, gentle in peace and fierce in war, strong with an inner discipline born of goodwill, mutual love, and love of country—a discipline that was stronger, precisely because it was internal, than the mechanical and servile discipline of the Germans. It was easy to understand, living among them, why the former, and not the latter, had ultimately prevailed.

One of the barracks in the camp was inhabited exclusively by Italians, almost all of them civilian workers, who had moved to Germany more or less voluntarily. They were masons and miners, no longer young, calm, sober, hardworking people, and kindhearted. The Italian in charge, to whom I was directed to be “registered,” was, however, very different. The accountant Rovi had not been elected by the others or invested by the Russians but had appointed himself camp chief; in fact, although he was an individual of rather meager intellectual and moral qualities, he possessed to a conspicuous degree the virtue that, under every sky, is most essential for gaining power, and that is love of power itself. Witnessing the behavior of a man who acts not according to reason but according to his own deep impulses is a spectacle of great interest, similar to that enjoyed by the naturalist who studies the activities of an animal with complex instincts. Rovi had won his post by acting with the same atavistic spontaneity with which the spider constructs its web, since, like the spider

without a web, Rovi couldn’t survive without a position. He had immediately begun to weave; he was basically a fool, and didn’t know a word of German or Russian, but from the first day he secured the services of an interpreter and presented himself ceremoniously to the Soviet command as a plenipotentiary for the interests of the Italians. He had organized a desk, with forms (written by hand, in beautiful writing with flourishes), stamps, pencils of various colors, and a ledger; although he wasn’t a colonel, or in fact even a soldier, he had hung outside the door a large sign that read “Italian Command—Colonel Rovi”; and he had surrounded himself with a small court of dishwashers, scribes, sacristans, spies, messengers, and bullies, whom he remunerated in kind, with provisions purloined from the rations for the community, and exempted from any work for the common good. His courtiers, who, as always happens, were much worse than him, ensured (even by force, though it was seldom necessary) that his orders were carried out, served him, gathered information for him, and flattered him intensely. With surprising foresight, which is to say by means of a highly complex and mysterious mental process, he had understood the importance, indeed the necessity, of possessing a uniform, since he had to deal with people in uniform. He had got one that was quite imaginative, in fact theatrical, with a pair of Soviet boots, a Polish railway worker’s cap, and jacket and pants found I don’t know where, which seemed to be made of thick wool and perhaps they were. He had insignia sewn on the lapels, gold threads on the cap, stripes and chevrons on the sleeves, and a chest full of medals. On the other hand, he wasn’t a tyrant, or a bad administrator. He had the good sense to keep oppression, extortion, and abuse within modest limits, and possessed an undeniable vocation for paperwork. Now, since those Russians were curiously sensitive to the fascination of paperwork (even if its possible rational significance escaped them), and seemed to love bureaucracy with the platonic and spiritual love that does not achieve possession and doesn’t desire it, Rovi was benevolently tolerated, if not exactly admired, in the environs of the Kommandantur. Further, he was bound to Captain

Egorov by a paradoxical, improbable bond of sympathy between misanthropes: for both were sad, dutiful, disgusted, dyspeptic individuals, and in the general euphoria sought isolation. In the Bogucice camp, I found Leonardo, who was already valued as a doctor, and was besieged by an unremunerative but numerous clientele; he came, like me, from Buna, and had arrived in Katowice several weeks earlier, following less tortuous paths. Among the Häftlinge in Buna there was an excess of doctors, and very few (in practice, only those who had mastered German, or were very skilled in the art of survival) had managed to be recognized as such by the medical chief of the SS. So Leonardo had not enjoyed any privilege; he had been subjected to the most severe manual labor and had lived his year in the Lager in an extremely precarious way. He didn’t tolerate hard work and cold well, and had been admitted to the infirmary many times, for swellings on his feet, infected wounds, and general debility. Three times, in three selections in the infirmary, he had been chosen to die in the gas chambers, and three times the solidarity of his colleagues in charge had riskily saved him from his fate. Besides luck, however, he possessed another virtue essential in those places: an unlimited capacity to endure, a silent courage, not innate, not religious, not transcendent, but deliberate and willed hour by hour, a manly patience, which sustained him miraculously at the edge of collapse. The Bogucice infirmary was set up in the same school that housed the Russian Command, in two small, fairly clean rooms. It had been created out of nothing by Marya Fyodorovna. Marya was a military nurse around forty, like a forest cat, with oblique, wild eyes, a short nose with flared nostrils, and agile, silent movements. In fact, she came from the forest: she was born in the heart of Siberia. Marya was an energetic, gruff, disorderly, and impatient woman. She obtained medicines partly by normal administrative means, collecting them from the Soviet military stores, partly through the multiple channels of the black market, and partly (and it was the largest part) by actively

cooperating in ransacking the warehouses of the former German Lagers and abandoned German infirmaries and pharmacies, whose stock, in turn, was the result of previous looting carried out by the Germans in all the nations of Europe. Thus every day the infirmary of Bogucice received supplies without plan or method: hundreds of boxes of specialized pharmaceutical products, bearing labels and instructions for use in all the languages, which had to be sorted and catalogued for possible use. Among the things I had learned in Auschwitz, one of the most important was that it is essential to avoid being “ordinary.” All paths are closed to those who seem useless, all are open to one who performs a function, even the most inane. So, after consulting with Leonardo, I introduced myself to Marya, and offered my services as a polyglot pharmacist. Marya Fyodorovna examined me with an eye expert in weighing males. Was I doktor? Yes, I was, I maintained, aided in the misunderstanding by the strong linguistic overlap. The Siberian did not in fact speak German, but (although she wasn’t Jewish) she knew a little Yiddish, learned who knows where. I didn’t have a very professional or attractive appearance, but maybe I would do in the back room. Marya drew from her pocket a creased and crumpled piece of paper, and asked me my name. When to “Levi” I added “Primo,” her green eyes lit up, suspicious at first, then questioning, finally benevolent. Then we’re practically relatives, she explained: I was Primo and she Prima—Prima was her surname, her família, Marya Fyodorovna Prima. Very good, I could start work. Shoes and clothes? Well, it wasn’t a simple matter, she would talk to Egorov and certain of her acquaintances, maybe later something could be found. She scribbled my name on the piece of paper, and the next day solemnly handed me my propusk, a permit with a rather homemade look, 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 laborers, and every morning I went to work in the infirmary. Marya Fyodorovna handed me hundreds of multicolored little boxes to sort, and gave me small friendly presents: packets of glucose (very welcome); licorice and mint lozenges; shoelaces; sometimes a packet of salt or pudding mix. One evening, she invited me to have tea in her room, and I noticed that on the wall over her bed hung seven or eight photographs of men in uniform, most of them portraits of known faces, that is, of 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 many years now, and they had all been through the war together. After a few days, since my job as pharmacist left me plenty of free time, Leonardo called on me to help in the clinic. The Russians intended it to serve only the inhabitants of the Bogucice camp; in reality, since the treatment was free and there was nothing formal about it, Russian soldiers, civilians from Katowice, people passing through, beggars, and dubious types who wanted nothing to do with the authorities also showed up to ask for an examination or for medicines. Neither Marya nor Dr. Dancenko found anything to object to in this state of affairs. (Dancenko never found anything to object to in anything; he didn’t care about anything except courting the girls, with gallant charm, like a grand duke in an operetta, and early in the morning, when he arrived for a rapid inspection, he was already drunk and happy.) A few weeks later, however, Marya summoned me, and with a very officious expression informed me that, “by orders from Moscow,” the activity of the clinic had to be checked scrupulously. Thus I was to keep a record, and note down every evening the name and age of the patients, their illness, and the type and quantity of medicines administered or prescribed. In itself, the thing didn’t seem unreasonable, but certain practical details had to be decided, which I discussed with Marya. For example, how would we verify the identity of the patients? Marya considered that objection negligible: if I wrote

down the stated personal information, “Moscow” would certainly be satisfied. A more serious difficulty emerged, however: in what language should the record be kept? Not in Italian or French or German, which neither Marya nor Dancenko knew. In Russian, then? No, I didn’t know Russian. Marya thought about it, perplexed, then she brightened and exclaimed, “Galina!” Galina would resolve the situation. Galina was one of the girls attached to the Kommandantur; she knew German, so I would be able to dictate the reports to her in German and she would translate them into Russian on the spot. Marya immediately sent for Galina (Marya’s authority, although of an ill-defined nature, appeared to be great), and so began our collaboration. Galina was eighteen, and was from Kazatin, in Ukraine. She was dark-haired, pretty, and vivacious; she had an intelligent face with sensitive, delicate features, and among all her companions she was the only one who dressed with a certain elegance, and whose shoulders, hands, and feet were of acceptable dimensions. She spoke German reasonably well; with her help the famous reports were laboriously compiled evening after evening, with a stub of a pencil, in a file of grayish paper that Marya had given me, like a holy relic. How do you say “asthma” in German? and “ankle”? and “sprain”? and what are the corresponding Russian terms? At every lexical obstacle we were forced to stop, overcome by doubt, and resort to complicated gestures, ending in squeals of laughter on the part of Galina. Much more rarely on my part. In front of Galina I felt weak, ill, and dirty; I was painfully conscious of my wretched appearance, of my crudely shaved beard, of my clothes from Auschwitz; I was acutely aware of Galina’s gaze, which was still almost childlike, and in which a tentative pity was accompanied by a definite repulsion. Still, after several weeks of working together, we had established an atmosphere of tenuous mutual confidence. Galina gave me to understand that the business of the reports was not so serious after all, that Marya Fyodorovna was “old and crazy,” and we had only to give the pages back to her

covered with writing; and that Dr. Dancenko was busy with completely other business (known to Galina in an astonishing abundance of detail), with Anna, with Tanja, with Vassilissa, and the reports interested him “like last year’s snow.” So the time devoted to the grim bureaucratic gods diminished, and Galina took advantage of the pauses to tell me her story, in bits and pieces, as she smoked. Two years earlier, in the middle of the war, in the Caucasus, where she had taken refuge with her family, she had been recruited by this very Kommandantur: recruited in the simplest way, that is to say stopped in the street and taken to the Command to type some letters. There she had gone and there remained; she hadn’t managed to break away (or, more likely, I thought, she hadn’t even tried). The Kommandantur had become her real family; she had followed it for tens of thousands of kilometers, through the devastated areas behind the lines and along the endless front, from the Crimea to Finland. She didn’t have a uniform, or even a status or a rank: but she was useful to her fighting companions, she was their friend, and so she followed them, because there was the war, and each one had to do his duty; and then the world was big and varied, and it’s wonderful to travel through it when you’re young and without a care. Galina had no cares, not even the shadow of one. You would meet her in the morning going to the washhouse, with a sack of laundry balanced on her head, and singing like a lark; or in the offices of the Command, barefoot, pounding on the typewriter; or on Sunday walking on the ramparts, arm in arm with a soldier, never the same one; or at night on the balcony, romantically rapt, while a shabby Belgian suitor serenaded her on a guitar. She was a sharp, ingenuous country girl, a bit flirtatious, very lively, not especially well educated, not especially serious; and yet you felt the same virtue operating in her, the same dignity, as in her companion-boyfriends, the dignity of someone who works and knows why, who fights and knows he is right, who has his life before him. In the middle of May, a few days after the end of the war, she came to say goodbye to me. She was leaving; they had told her she could go home. Did she have a travel order? Did she

have money for the train? “No,” she answered laughing, “nye nada, there’s no need, these things always arrange themselves.” And she disappeared, sucked up by the emptiness of the Russian space, into the pathways of her boundless country, leaving behind a bitter scent of earth, of youth, of joy.

I also had other duties: to help Leonardo in the clinic, naturally; and to help him in the daily inspection for lice. This last job was necessary in those places and those times, when epidemic typhus spread, fatally. The job was not very pleasant: we had to go through all the barracks, and ask each person to strip to the waist and show us his shirt, in whose folds and seams the lice customarily nested, and suspended their eggs. This type of lice have a red spot on their back: according to a joke that was tirelessly repeated by our clients, that spot, observed under strong enough magnification, would reveal itself to be formed by a tiny hammer and sickle. They are also called “the infantry,” whereas fleas are the artillery, mosquitoes the air force, bedbugs the parachutists, and cockroaches the sappers. In Russian they’re called vshi; I learned that from Marya, who had given me a second file, in which I was to mark the number and name of those who had lice that day, and underline recidivists in red. Recidivists were rare, with the single notable exception of the Ferrari. The Ferrari, to whose name the article was added because he was Milanese, was a marvel of inertia. He was part of a small group of common criminals, formerly detained in the San Vittore Prison, who in 1944 had been offered the choice between prison in Italy and work in Germany, and who had chosen the latter. There were about forty, almost all thieves or fences; they were a colorful, rowdy, self-contained microcosm, a perpetual source of trouble for the Russian Command and for accountant Rovi. But the Ferrari was treated by his colleagues with open contempt, and was thus relegated to an enforced solitude. He was a short man of around forty, thin and yellow, almost bald, with an absent expression. He spent his days lying on his cot, and was an indefatigable reader. He read whatever came to

hand: Italian, French, German, Polish newspapers and books. Every two or three days, during the examination, he said to me, “I finished that book. Do you have another to lend me? But not in Russian, you know I don’t understand Russian well.” He wasn’t a polyglot; in fact, he was practically illiterate. But he “read” every book just the same, from the first line to the last, identifying with satisfaction the individual letters, pronouncing them in a whisper, and laboriously reconstructing words, whose meaning he didn’t care about. To him it was enough: the way, at different levels, others find pleasure in doing crossword puzzles, or solving differential equations, or calculating the orbits of asteroids. So he was a singular individual, and his story confirmed it. He willingly told it to me, and I repeat it here. “For many years I went to the school for thieves in Loreto. There was a mannequin with bells and a wallet in his pocket. You had to get the wallet out without the bells ringing, and I never succeeded. So I was never authorized to steal; they had me act as a lookout. I was a lookout for two years. You don’t earn much and you’re at risk. It’s not a nice job. “I racked my brains, and one fine day I thought that, license or not, if I wanted to earn my bread I had to set off on my own. “There was the war, the evacuation, the black market, a crowd of people on the trams. It was on the 2, at Porta Lodovica, because around there no one knew me. Near me there was a lady with a big purse; in her coat pocket, you could feel by touch, was the wallet. I got out the saccagno, very slowly . . .” I must here insert a brief technical aside. The saccagno, the Ferrari explained to me, is a precision tool that you get by breaking in two the blade of an ordinary razor, freehand. It’s used to cut purses and pockets, so it has to be very sharp. It’s also used occasionally, in matters of honor, to disfigure; and that’s why people with scarred faces are called saccagnati. “. . . slowly, and I started to cut the pocket. I had almost finished when a woman, not the one with the pocket, but

another one, started shouting, ‘Stop thief, stop thief.’ I wasn’t doing anything to her, she didn’t know me, and she didn’t know the one with the pocket. She wasn’t even from the police, she was someone who had nothing to do with it. The fact is, the tram stopped, they caught me, I ended up in San Vittore, from there to Germany, and from Germany here. You see? That’s what can happen if you take the initiative.” From then on, the Ferrari had taken no initiative. He was the most submissive and most docile of my clients: he immediately stripped without protesting, he presented his shirt with the inevitable lice, and the morning after submitted to the disinfection without acting like an offended prince. But the next day the lice, who knows how, were there again. He was like that: he took no initiatives, he put up no resistance, not even to lice. • • •

My professional activity brought at least two advantages: the propusk and better food. The kitchen of the camp at Bogucice was, to tell the truth, quite generous; we were assigned the Russian military ration, which consisted of a kilo of bread, two soups every day, one kasha (that is, a plate with meat, lard, millet, or other vegetables), and Russian-style tea, diluted, abundant, and sugary. But Leonardo and I had to make up for the damage caused by a year in the Lager: we were still racked by an uncontrollable hunger, largely psychological, and the ration wasn’t enough for us. Marya had authorized us to have our midday meal in the infirmary. The infirmary kitchen was managed by two Parisian maquisardes, working-class women, no longer young, who were also veterans of the Lager, where they had lost their husbands; they were silent and sorrowful, and on their prematurely aged faces sufferings both long-past and recent were as if dominated and contained by the energetic moral conscience of political fighters.

One, Simone, worked in our dining hall. She ladled the soup once, and a second time. Then she looked at me, almost with apprehension. “Vous répétez, jeune homme?” I timidly nodded yes, ashamed of that animal voracity. Under Simone’s severe gaze, I rarely dared to répéter a fourth time. As for the propusk, it constituted more a sign of social distinction than a specific advantage. In fact, anyone could easily go out through the hole in the fence, and go into the city as free as a bird in the air. And, for example, many of the thieves did, to go and practice their art in Katowice or even farther away; they didn’t return, or came back to the camp after several days, often giving different personal information, amid the general disinterest. However, the propusk allowed one to go to Katowice without having to make the long journey through the mud that surrounded the camp. With the return of health and good weather, I, too, felt with increasing intensity the temptation to go on a cruise through the unknown city: what was the use of being free if we still spent our days within a frame of barbed wire? Besides, the population of Katowice regarded us with sympathy, and had allowed us free passes on the trams and to the cinemas. I talked about it one night with Cesare, and we decided on a general program for the next days, during which we would combine the useful with the pleasant, that is to say, business with vagabonding. 1. The Todt was created in Germany in 1940 for the recruitment of foreign workers. 2. An army made up of ex-soldiers who in wartime were enlisted for auxiliary services behind the lines and inside the country. 3. A woman doctor.

Cesare

I had met Cesare in the last days of the Lager, but it was a different Cesare. In the Buna camp abandoned by the Germans, the ward for infectious diseases, in which the two Frenchmen and I managed to survive and to establish a semblance of civilization, represented an island of relative well-being; in the neighboring ward, for patients with dysentery, death prevailed uncontested. Through the wooden wall, a few centimeters from my head, I heard Italian spoken. One evening, mobilizing the little energy I had left, I decided to go and see who was living back there. I walked down the dark, frigid corridor, opened the door, and was plunged into a realm of horror. There were a hundred bunks: half were occupied by corpses that had frozen in the cold. Only two or three candles broke the darkness; the walls and ceiling were lost in shadow, so that you seemed to be entering an enormous cave. There was no heat, except for the infected breath of the fifty patients who were still alive. In spite of the cold, the stench of feces and death was so intense that it took your breath away and you had to do violence to your own lungs to force them to take in that polluted air. Yet fifty were still alive. They were huddled under the covers; some groaned or cried, others struggled out of their bunks to evacuate on the floor. They called out names, prayed, cursed, begged for help in all the languages of Europe. I groped my way along one of the aisles between the bunks, stumbling and staggering in the dark on the layer of frozen excrement. At the sound of my footsteps, the cries redoubled: clawlike hands emerged from under the covers, held me by my clothes, coldly touched my face, tried to bar my path. Finally I reached the dividing wall, at the end of the aisle, and found the men I was looking for. They were two

Italians in a single bunk, entangled with each other to protect themselves from the cold: Cesare and Marcello. I knew Marcello well: he came from Cannaregio, the ancient ghetto of Venice; he had been at Fòssoli with me, and had crossed the Brenner in the freight car next to mine. He was healthy and strong, and until the last weeks of the Lager he had held on, valiantly enduring hunger and toil; but the winter cold had subdued him. He no longer spoke, and, in the light of the match I lit, I had trouble recognizing him: a yellow face, all nose and teeth, a black beard; his eyes shining and dilated by delirium, staring into space. For him there was little to be done. Cesare, on the other hand, I scarcely knew, since he had come to Buna from Birkenau a few months earlier. He asked for water, before food: water, because he had had nothing to drink for four days, and the fever was burning him and the dysentery emptied him. I brought it to him, along with the remains of our soup; and I didn’t know that I was thus bringing the basis of a long and singular friendship. His capacity for recovery must have been extraordinary, because I found him in the camp of Bogucice, two months later, not only recovered but practically glowing with health, and lively as a cricket; and yet he was the veteran of a further adventure that had put to an extreme test the natural qualities of his character, strengthened in the hard school of the Lager. After the arrival of the Russians, he, too, had been admitted into Auschwitz among the sick, and since his illness wasn’t serious, and his constitution strong, he was soon cured —in fact, a little too soon. Around the middle of March, the German armies in retreat had been concentrated around Breslau, and had tried a last desperate counteroffensive in the direction of the Silesian mineral basin. The Russians were taken by surprise: perhaps overestimating the adversary’s initiative, they had rushed to prepare a defensive line. A long anti-tank trench was required, which would block the valley of the Oder between Oppeln and Gleiwitz: hands were scarce, the job colossal, the need urgent, and the Russians acted as they usually did, in an extremely brusque and hasty manner.

One morning around nine, Russian soldiers had suddenly blocked some of the main streets in Katowice. In Katowice, and throughout Poland, there was a shortage of men: the male population of working age had disappeared, imprisoned in Germany and Russia, scattered in partisan bands, slaughtered in battle, in bombings, in 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 carts, in search of food and coal in the shops and the markets. The Russians had lined them up four abreast with their bags and everything, led them to the station, and sent them to Gleiwitz. At the same time—that is, five or six days before I arrived with the Greek—they had surrounded the camp in Bogucice, yelling like cannibals, and shooting into the air to intimidate anyone who tried to escape. They had silenced without ceremony their peaceful colleagues in the Kommandantur, who had timidly tried to intervene, had entered the camp with their machine guns leveled, and forced everyone out of the barracks. In the central area of the camp a sort of caricatural version of the German selections had taken place. A far less bloody version, since it meant going to work, not to death; on the other hand, improvised and much more chaotic. While some of the soldiers went through the barracks to flush out the recalcitrant, and then pursued them in a mad race, like a great game of hide-and-seek, others stood at the threshold and examined one by one the men and women who were gradually presented to them by the hunters, or who presented themselves of their own accord. The judgment bolnoy or zdorovy (sick or healthy) was pronounced collegially, by acclamation, not without noisy disputes in controversial cases. The bolnoy were sent back to the barracks, the zdorovy lined up in front of the fence. Cesare had been among the first to grasp the situation (“to catch the drift,” as he said), and, acting with admirable astuteness, had just missed getting away: he had hidden in the woodshed, a place no one had thought of, and stayed there

until the hunt was over, quiet and still under the logs, pulling down a pile on top of himself. And then some idiot, in search of a hiding place, had plunged in, along with the Russian who was pursuing him. Cesare had been fished out and declared healthy, purely out of reprisal, because he had emerged from the woodpile looking like Christ on the Cross, or, rather, a half-witted cripple, who would have moved a stone to pity: he was trembling, foaming at the mouth, and walking all lopsided, dragging one leg, his eyes crossed and wild. They had added him just the same to the line of the healthy; after a few seconds, with a sudden inversion of tactics, he had tried to take to his heels and return to the camp through the hole in the fence. But he had been caught, had got a slap and a kick in the shins, and had resigned himself to defeat. The Russians had sent them to Gleiwitz on foot, more than thirty kilometers; there they had settled them as well as possible in stalls and haylofts, and had forced them to live a dog’s life. Little to eat, and sixteen hours a day of pick and shovel, rain or shine, a Russian always standing there with his machine gun pointed: the men in the trench, and the women (those from the camp and the Polish women found in the streets) peeling potatoes, cooking, and cleaning. It was hard; but in Cesare the humiliation burned more than the work and the hunger. To get caught like that, like a kid, he who had had a stall at Porta Portese! All Trastevere would have laughed at him. He had to rehabilitate himself. He worked for three days: on the fourth, he traded his bread for two cigars. One he ate; the other he soaked in water and kept in his armpit all night. The next day he was ready to report sick: he had everything necessary, a very high fever, horrendous stomach pains, vertigo, vomiting. They put him to bed, he stayed there until the poison had cleared out, then at night he slipped away easily, and returned to Bogucice in stages, with a tranquil conscience. I found a way of settling him in my room, and we were not separated again until the journey home. • • •

“Here we go again,” Cesare said, putting on his trousers, his face grim, when, a few days after his return, the nighttime quiet of the camp was dramatically shattered. It was pandemonium, an explosion. Russian soldiers were running up and down the halls, banging on the doors of the rooms with the butt of their machine guns, shouting agitated and incomprehensible orders; soon afterward the general staff arrived, Marya with her hair in tangled locks, Egorov and Dancenko half dressed, followed by accountant Rovi, dazed and sleepy but in full uniform. We were to get up and get dressed immediately. Why? Had the Germans returned? Were they moving us? No one knew anything. We finally managed to capture Marya. No, the Germans hadn’t broken through the front, but the situation was equally serious. Inspektsiya: that very morning a general was arriving, from Moscow, to inspect the camp. The entire Kommandantur was in the grip of panic and desperation, as if the day of reckoning had arrived. Rovi’s interpreter galloped from room to room, shouting orders and counterorders. Brooms, rags, buckets appeared; everyone was mobilized, wash the windows, remove trash piles, sweep the floors, polish the knobs, clear out the spiderwebs. Everyone set to work, yawning and cursing. Two, three, four o’clock passed. Around dawn, we began to hear talk of ubornaya: the camp latrine in fact presented a nasty problem. It was a brick building, situated right in the middle of the camp, and conspicuous, impossible to hide or to disguise. For months no one had seen to cleaning or maintaining it: inside, the floor was submerged by an inch of stagnant filth, so that we had set down on it large stones and bricks, and to enter you had to jump from one to the next in precarious balance. From the doors and cracks in the walls the sewage overflowed outside, crossed the camp in the form of a fetid rivulet, and disappeared downhill amid the fields. Captain Egorov, who was sweating blood and had completely lost his head, chose a crew of ten men and sent

them into the place with brooms and buckets of chlorine, with the job of cleaning up. But it was clear to a child that ten men, even if provided with proper equipment, and not just brooms, would need at least a week; and as for the chlorine, all the perfumes of Arabia would not have been enough to decontaminate the place. A clash between two necessities frequently produces foolish decisions, where it would be wiser to let the dilemma resolve itself on its own. An hour later (and the entire camp was buzzing like a disturbed beehive), the crew was called back, and all twelve of the Territorials from the Command arrived, with wood, nails, hammers, and rolls of barbed wire. In the blink of an eye all the doors and windows of the scandalous latrine were closed up, barred, sealed with boards of fir three inches thick, and all the walls, up to the roof, were covered by an inextricable knot of barbed wire. Decency was safe: the most diligent of inspectors would not have been physically able to set foot there. Noon came, evening came, and of the general no trace. The next morning it was talked about a little less; the third day no one talked about it at all, the Russians of the Kommandantur returned to their habitual and benevolent carelessness and neglect, two boards were taken down from the back door of the latrine, and everything returned to order. An inspector did come, however, some weeks later; he came to check the functioning of the camp and, more precisely, the kitchens, and he wasn’t a general but a captain who wore an armband bearing the initials of the NKVD, with its slightly sinister reputation. He came, and he must have found his duties particularly pleasant, or the girls of the Kommandantur, or the air of Upper Silesia, or the neighborhood of the Italian cooks: because he didn’t leave, and stayed to inspect the kitchen every day until June, when we left, without evidently practicing any other useful activity. The kitchen, managed by a barbaric cook from Bergamo and an indefinite number of fat, shiny volunteer assistants, was situated just inside the enclosure, and consisted of a shed filled almost entirely by the two large cooking pots, which rested on

a concrete stove. You entered by going up two steps, and there was no door. The inspector did his first inspection with great dignity and seriousness, taking notes in a notebook. He was a very tall and lanky Jew of around thirty, with a handsome, ascetic face, like Don Quixote. But on the second day he unearthed, from who knows where, a motorcycle, and was struck by such an ardent love that from then on they were never seen apart. The inspection ceremony became a public spectacle, with numerous of the bourgeois citizens of Katowice always present. The inspector arrived around eleven, like a whirlwind; he braked suddenly, with a horrible screech, and, pivoting on his front wheel, skidded the rear wheel in a quarter circle. Without stopping, he advanced toward the kitchen, head lowered like a charging bull; drove up the two steps with frightening jolts; made two rapid figure eights around the pots, the open exhaust blasting away; flew back down the stairs, gave the public a military salute with a radiant smile, leaned forward over the handlebars, and disappeared in a cloud of noise and blue-green smoke. The game went smoothly for several weeks; then, one day, neither motorcycle nor captain was seen. The latter was in the hospital with a broken leg; the former in the loving hands of a group of Italian aficionados. But they were soon back in circulation: the captain had made a shelf like a frame, and there he rested his leg in its cast, in a horizontal position. His face’s noble pallor had attained an ecstatic happiness; in that setup, he resumed with scarcely reduced vehemence his daily inspections.

Only when April came, and the last snows melted, and the mild sun had dried the Polish mud, did we begin to feel truly free. Cesare had already been to various cities, and he insisted that I join him on his expeditions: I finally decided to overcome my inertia, and we left together on a splendid day in early April. At the request of Cesare, who was interested in the experiment, we did not leave through the hole in the fence. I

went out first, through the main gate; the sentinel asked my name, then asked for my permit, and I showed it to him. He checked: the name corresponded. I went around the corner and passed the rectangle of paper to Cesare through the barbed wire. The sentinel asked Cesare his name; Cesare answered, “Primo Levi.” He asked for the permit; again the name corresponded, and Cesare left in full legality. Not that Cesare cared much about acting legally; but he liked refinements, virtuosities, cheating his neighbor without causing him to suffer. We went into Katowice as cheerful as schoolboys on vacation, but at every step our carefree mood clashed with the scene we were entering. At every step we came upon traces of the immense tragedy that had touched us and miraculously spared us. Mute and hurried graves at every intersection, of Soviet soldiers who had died in combat, without a cross but surmounted by a red star. An endless war cemetery in a city park, crosses and stars mixed, almost all bearing the same date: the date of the battle for the streets, or perhaps of the last German extermination. In the middle of the main street, three, four German tanks, apparently undamaged, had been transformed into trophies and monuments. The idealized extension of the gun on one of these led to an enormous hole halfway up the house opposite: the monster had died in the act of destroying. Everywhere ruins, skeletons of concrete, beams of blackened wood, people in rags, with a savage and starving look. At the important intersections street signs had been put up by the Russians, oddly in contrast with the shine and prefabricated precision of the analogous German signs, seen before, and the American ones that we saw later: crude, rough wooden boards, the names scribbled by hand, with tar, in uneven Cyrillic characters. Gleiwitz, Kraków, Cz stochowa; or, rather, since the name was too long, “Cz stoch” on one board and “owa” on a smaller one, nailed beneath it. And yet the city was alive, after the nightmare years of the Nazi occupation and the hurricane passage of the front. Many shops and cafés were open; even the free market was flourishing; the trams were functioning, the coal mines, the school, the cinemas. On that first day, since between us we

didn’t have a cent, we were content with a reconnaissance tour. After a few hours of walking in the sparkling air our chronic hunger became acute. “Come with me,” Cesare said. “We’re going to have breakfast.” He led me to the market, to the area where the fruit stalls were. Under the malevolent eyes of the fruit seller at the first stall, he took a strawberry, a single, very large one, chewed it slowly, with the air of a connoisseur, then shook his head. “Nyé ddobre,” he said severely. (“It’s Polish,” he explained. “It means they’re no good.”) He passed to the next stall, and repeated the scene; and so on with all until the last. “Well? What are you waiting for?” he said to me then, with cynical pride. “If you’re hungry, just do like me.” Of course, it was not with the technique of the strawberries that we would get ourselves settled: Cesare had grasped the situation, which was that it was time to devote ourselves seriously to commerce. He explained his feeling: he was my friend, and didn’t ask anything. If I wanted I could go to the market with him, maybe even give him a hand and learn the trade, but it was indispensable for him to find a true partner, who had available some initial capital and a certain experience. In fact, to tell the truth he had already found him, a fellow named Giacomantonio, an old acquaintance of his from San Lorenzo who had the face of a jailbird. The form of the partnership was very simple: Giacomantonio would buy, he would sell, and they would divide the proceeds into equal parts. Buy what? Everything, he said—whatever he came across. Cesare, although he was barely over twenty, boasted a surprising education in commodities, comparable to the Greek’s. But, beyond the superficial analogies, I soon realized that between him and the Greek was an abyss. Cesare was full of human warmth, always, in all the hours of his life, not only outside working hours, like Mordo Nahum. For Cesare “work” was at times an unpleasant necessity, at times an amusing opportunity for encounters, and not a cold obsession, or a Lucifer-like affirmation of himself. One was free, the other a slave to himself; one miserly and reasonable, the other

generous and inventive. The Greek was a lone wolf, eternally at war with everyone, old before his time, enclosed in the circle of his bleak ambition. Cesare was a child of the sun, a friend of the whole world. He didn’t know hatred or scorn, he was as varying as the sky, joyful, sly, and ingenuous, reckless and cautious, very ignorant, very innocent, and very civilized. I didn’t want to enter into the arrangement with Giacomantonio, but I willingly accepted Cesare’s invitation to go with him to the market on occasion, as an apprentice, interpreter, and porter. I accepted not only out of friendship and to escape the boredom of the camp but above all because to watch Cesare’s undertakings, even the most modest and trivial, was a unique experience, a vivid and bracing spectacle, which reconciled me to the world and rekindled the joy in life that Auschwitz had extinguished. A virtue like Cesare’s is good in itself, in an absolute sense; it confers nobility on a man, redeems many possible defects, saves his soul. But equally, and on a more practical level, it constitutes a precious store for one who intends to engage in commerce in the public squares; in fact, no one was insensitive to Cesare’s charm, neither the Russians of the Command, nor his assorted companions in the camp, nor the citizens of Katowice who frequented the market. Now, it’s equally clear that, by the harsh laws of commerce, what is an advantage to the seller is a disadvantage to the buyer, and vice versa. April was coming to an end, and the sun was already hot and bold, when Cesare came to get me after the clinic closed. His sinister partner had pulled off a series of brilliant coups: for fifty zloty altogether he had bought a ballpoint pen that didn’t write, a stopwatch, and a woolen shirt in reasonably good condition. This Giacomantonio, with the expert nose of the fence, had had the excellent idea of keeping watch at the station in Katowice, waiting for the Russian convoys returning from Germany: those soldiers, by now demobilized and on the way home, were the most carefree clients imaginable. They were joyous, easygoing, loaded with booty, they didn’t know the local prices, and they needed money.

Besides, it was worthwhile to spend a few hours at the station outside of any utilitarian purpose, just to see the extraordinary spectacle of the Red Army returning home: a spectacle at once as choral and solemn as a Biblical migration and as vagabond and colorful as a circus parade. Long convoys of freight cars, used as troop trains, stopped in Katowice: they were equipped to travel for months, maybe even to the Pacific, and they housed randomly, by the thousands, soldiers and civilians, men and women, former prisoners, Germans now prisoners themselves, and, in addition, freight, furniture, animals, dismantled industrial installations, provisions, war matériel, pieces of junk. They were moving villages: some cars contained what appeared to be a family nucleus, one or two double beds, a mirrored closet, a stove, a radio, chairs, and tables. Between one car and the next, makeshift electrical wires were hung, coming from the first car, which contained a generator; they were used for lighting, and also to hang out the laundry to dry (and get covered with soot). When in the morning the sliding doors opened, men and women appeared against the background of these domestic interiors, half dressed, with broad sleepy faces: they looked around in bewilderment, without knowing what part of the world they were in, then they got out to wash in the cold water of the hydrants, and offered tobacco and pages of Pravda for rolling cigarettes. So I left for the market with Cesare, who proposed to resell (maybe to the Russians themselves) the three objects described above. The market had by now lost its primitive character as a fair of human miseries. Rationing had been abolished, or rather had fallen into disuse; from the rich surrounding countryside arrived the peasants’ carts with quintals of lard and cheese, eggs, chickens, sugar, fruit, butter: a garden of temptations, a cruel challenge to our obsessive hunger and our lack of money, an imperious incitement to get some. Cesare sold the pen immediately, for twenty zloty, without negotiation. He did not need an interpreter; he spoke only Italian, or, rather Roman, or, rather the dialect of the Roman ghetto, sprinkled with mangled Hebrew words. Certainly he had no other choice, since he didn’t know other languages:

but, unknown to him, this ignorance worked strongly in his favor. Cesare “was playing on his home field,” to put it in sports terms. His clients, on the other hand, straining to interpret his incomprehensible speech and his unfamiliar gestures, were distracted from the necessary concentration; if they made counteroffers, Cesare didn’t 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 ignorant of it, and was fascinated by it. Cesare, besides, was a first-class mime: he waved the shirt in the sun, holding it tight by the collar (there was a hole under the collar, but he held it just in the place where the hole was), and proclaimed its praises with torrential eloquence, with novel and inane additions and digressions, calling on this or that person among his listeners with an obscene nickname that he invented on the spot. He broke off abruptly (he knew by instinct the oratorical value of pauses), kissed the shirt affectionately, and then, in a resolute yet emotional voice, as if it would grieve his heart to be separated from it, and he could be induced to only for love of his neighbor, said, “You, fatso, how much would you give me for this cosciuletta?” The fatso was bewildered. He looked at the cosciuletta with longing, and out of the corner of his eye glanced to either side, half hoping and half fearing that someone else would make the first offer. Then he advanced hesitantly, held out an uncertain hand, and muttered something like “Pingísci.” Cesare drew the shirt to his breast, as if he had seen an asp. “What did he say, that fellow?” he asked me, as if suspecting he had received a mortal insult; but it was a rhetorical question, since he recognized (or guessed) the Polish numbers more quickly than I did. “You’re nuts,” he said then, peremptorily, pointing an index finger at his temple and spinning it like a drill. The public roared and laughed, obviously rooting for the fantastic foreigner, who had come from the ends of the earth to work wonders in their squares. The fatso stood gaping, rocking like a bear from one foot to the other. “Du ferík,” Cesare resumed

pitiless (he meant to say “verrückt”); then, to clarify, he added, “Du meshugge.” A hurricane of wild laughter exploded: this they had all understood. The Hebrew meshugge, which survives in Yiddish, is universally understood in all of Central and Eastern Europe: it means “crazy,” but it contains the secondary idea of vain, melancholy, foolish, lunar madness. The fatso scratched his head and pulled up his pants, filled with embarrassment. “Sto,” he said then, looking for peace. Sto zlotych, a hundred zloty. The offer was interesting. Cesare, somewhat tamed, turned to the fatso as man to man, in a persuasive tone, as if to convince him of an involuntary yet gross error. He spoke for a long time, openheartedly, with warmth and familiarity, saying, “You see? You understand? You don’t agree?” “Sto zlotych,” the man repeated, stubbornly. “This fellow is from Capurzio!” Cesare said to me. Then, as if suddenly tired out, and in an ultimate attempt at agreement, he put a hand on the man’s shoulder and said maternally, “Listen. Listen, friend. You haven’t understood me well. Let’s do like this, let’s come to an agreement. You give me so much”—and he drew 150 with his finger on his stomach —“you give me sto pingisciu, and I put it on your back. All right?” The fatso snorted and shook his head no, with his eyes down; but Cesare’s clinical eye had caught a sign of capitulation—an imperceptible movement of the hand toward the back pocket of the pants. “Come on! Cough up those pignonze!” Cesare pressed him, beating the iron while it was hot. The pignonze (the Polish word, which was hard to spell but whose sound was so oddly familiar, fascinated Cesare and me) were finally coughed up, and the shirt handed over; but Cesare energetically tore me away from my ecstatic admiration. “Hey, friend. Let’s clear off; otherwise he’ll figure out about the hole.” Thus, out of fear that the client would prematurely notice the hole, we cleared off (or rather took our leave), giving up on the unsalable stopwatch. We walked at a

dignified pace to the nearest corner, then sneaked away, as fast as our legs would carry us, and returned to the camp by back streets.

Victory Day

Life in the camp at Bogucice, in the clinic and the market, rudimentary human relations with Russians, Poles, and others, rapid alternations of hunger and a full stomach, of hopes for return and disappointments, expectation and uncertainty, regimentation and improvisation—like a pallid form of military life in a temporary, foreign environment—roused in me uneasiness, homesickness, and chiefly boredom. It was on the other hand consonant with Cesare’s habits, character, and aspirations. At Bogucice, he flourished, visibly, from day to day, like a tree in which the spring sap is rising. He now had a fixed place in the market and a loyal clientele, conjured by him out of nothing: the Bearded Lady, Skin and Bones, Redneck, at least three Big Butts, Travel Order, Franchestein, a Juno-like girl he called Lady Courtroom, and various others. In the camp, he enjoyed an unquestioned prestige: he had quarreled with Giacomantonio, but many others gave him goods to sell, with no contract, out of pure trust, so he always had money. One evening he disappeared: he didn’t show up at the camp for dinner, or in the room to sleep. Naturally, we reported nothing to Rovi, not to mention the Russians, in order not to cause trouble; yet when his absence extended for three days and three nights, even I, who by nature am not very apprehensive, and was even less so about Cesare, began to feel a slight anxiety. Cesare returned at dawn on the fourth day, battered and surly, like a cat returning from a witches’ ride over the roofs. He had shadows under his eyes, but in their depths flashed a proud light. “Leave me alone,” he said as soon as he came in, although no one had asked him anything, and the majority were still snoring. He dropped onto his cot, making a show of extreme exhaustion; but after a few minutes, unable to resist the pressure of the great news that was gnawing at him inside,

he came over to me, though I was barely awake. Hoarse and grim, as if he’d been dancing with the witches for three nights, he said, “We’re there. I’m set. I got myself a pagninca, a girl.” To me the news didn’t seem particularly exciting. He certainly wasn’t the first: already several other Italians, especially among the soldiers, had got a girl in the city. Pagninca—the Polish panienka—is the exact equivalent of segnorina for signorina, and equally disfigured in sound.4 It wasn’t a very arduous undertaking, because men were scarce in Poland, and many of the Italians had “settled” themselves, driven not only by the national myth of the Italian lover but also by a more profound and serious need, by nostalgia for a home and affection. As a consequence, in some cases the dead or distant spouse was replaced not only in the heart and bed of the woman but in all his duties, and you could see Italians going down into the coal mines with Poles to take “home” the pay envelope, or serving at the counter in a shop, and, on Sunday, strange families decorously walked on the ramparts, the Italian arm in arm with the Pole, and holding a child too fair by the hand. But, Cesare explained, his case was different (they’re all different, always, I thought, yawning). His pagninca was beautiful, unmarried, refined, clean, in love with him, and so also economical. She was experienced as well; her only defect was that she spoke Polish. So, if I was his friend, I had to help him. I wasn’t able to help much, I explained, wearily. In the first place, I didn’t know more than thirty words of Polish; in the second, I was absolutely ignorant of the sentimental language that he needed; in the third, I didn’t feel in the right mood to go along with him. But Cesare wouldn’t give in; maybe the girl understood German. He had in mind a very precise program; so would I do him a favor and not be obstructionist, and explain to him how you say this in German, and that, and this other thing. Cesare overestimated my linguistic knowledge. The things he wanted to know are not taught in any German course, much less had I had occasion to learn them in Auschwitz; besides,

they were subtle and idiosyncratic questions, making me suspect that these things don’t exist in any language but Italian and French. I expressed my doubts, but Cesare looked at me in vexation. I was sabotaging him, it was clear: it was all envy. He put his shoes back on and left muttering curses. He returned after midday and threw down in front of me a pocket Italian–German dictionary, bought for twenty zloty at the market. “This has everything,” he said, with the air of someone who will not admit further discussion or quibbles. It didn’t have everything, unfortunately: it lacked even the essential, that which a mysterious convention expunges from the universe of printed paper—a waste of money. Cesare went out again, disappointed in culture, friendship, and printed paper itself. From then on, he only rarely reappeared in the camp: the girl provided generously for all his needs. At the end of April he disappeared for a whole week. Now, that was not an ordinary end of April: it was the memorable one of 1945. Unfortunately, we were unable to understand the Polish newspapers, but the type size of the headlines that increased by the day, the names that could be read, the very air that one breathed in the streets, and the Kommandantur made us understand that victory was near. We read, “Vienna,” “Koblenz,” “Rhine”; then “Bologna,” then, with an excitement full of emotion, “Turin” and “Milan.” Finally, “Mussolini” in big block letters, followed by a frightening and indecipherable past participle; and finally, in red ink and on half a page, the conclusive announcement, cryptic and exultant: “Berlin Upadl!” On April 30, Leonardo and I and a few others who had passes were summoned by Captain Egorov: with a curiously sly and embarrassed expression that was unfamiliar he told us through the interpreter that we would have to give back the propusk; the next day we would receive a new one. Naturally we didn’t believe him, but we had to hand over the paper just the same. The order seemed absurd and slightly repressive and

increased our anxiety and expectation, but the next day we understood the reason. The next day was May 1; on May 3 there was some important Polish rite; on May 8 the war ended. The news, no matter that it was expected, burst like a hurricane: for eight days, the camp, the Kommandantur, Bogucice, Katowice, all of Poland, and the entire Red Army let themselves go in a paroxysm of delirious excitement. The Soviet Union is a gigantic country, and holds in its heart gigantic tumults, among them a Homeric capacity for joy and abandon, a primitive vitality, a pure pagan talent for demonstrations, rites, choral revelry. In a few hours, the atmosphere had become torrid. There were Russians everywhere, emerging like ants from an anthill: they all embraced as if they knew one another, they sang, they shouted; although many were unsteady on their legs they danced together, and overwhelmed with their embraces anyone they met on the street. They fired their guns into the air, and sometimes, too, not into the air: a young soldier, still beardless, a parashyutist, was brought to the infirmary pierced by a musket shot from the abdomen to the back. Miraculously, it hadn’t damaged vital organs. The child soldier stayed in bed for three days, and submitted tranquilly to the medications, looking at us with eyes as blank as the sea; then, one evening, when a troop of celebrating fellow soldiers passed by in the street, he leaped out from under the covers, completely dressed in uniform and boots and, like a good parachutist, before the eyes of all the other patients, jumped down to the street from the second-floor window. The already tenuous vestiges of military discipline vanished. In front of the camp gate on the evening of May 1, the sentinel was snoring, lying drunk on the ground, his machine gun over his shoulder; then he was seen no more. It was useless to ask the Kommandantur for anything urgently needed: the person responsible wasn’t there or was in bed sleeping off a hangover, or was engaged in mysterious frantic preparations in the school gym. It was lucky that the kitchen and the infirmary were in Italian hands.

What sort of preparations they were we soon learned. The Russians were organizing a grand celebration for the day of the end of the war: a theatrical presentation with choruses, dancing, and recitations, offered by them to us, the guests of the camp. To us Italians: because, in the meantime, following a complicated movement of other nationalities, we remained a large majority in Bogucice, in fact, almost alone, with a few French and Greeks. Cesare returned on one of those tumultuous days. He was in worse condition than the first time: muddy up to his hair, ragged, distraught, and afflicted by a monstrous stiff neck. He was carrying a bottle of vodka, new and full, and his first order of business was to find another, empty bottle; then, dark and depressed, he constructed an ingenious funnel with a piece of cardboard, poured out the vodka, broke the bottles into little pieces, gathered the shards in a package, and in great secrecy went to bury them in a hole at the back of the camp. Something terrible had happened. One evening when he returned from the market to the girl’s house, he had found a Russian: he had seen in the hall the military coat with belt and holster, and a bottle. He had taken the bottle, under the category of partial damages, and had sagely left; but the Russian, it seems, had come after him, perhaps because of the bottle, or maybe driven by retroactive jealousy. Here his account became more obscure and less credible. He had tried in vain to escape and had become convinced that the entire Red Army was on his heels. He had ended up at the amusement park, but there, too, the hunt had continued—all night. The last hours he had spent trapped under the public dance floor, while all Poland danced on his head: but he had not left the bottle, because it represented all that remained to him of a week of love. He had destroyed the original receptacle out of prudence, and insisted that the contents be drunk immediately by us, his friends. The drinking was melancholy and silent.

May 8 arrived: a day of elation for the Russians, of distrustful vigil for the Poles, for us of joy deeply veined with

homesickness. From that day, in fact, our homes were no longer forbidden, no front of war any longer separated us, no concrete obstacle, only papers and offices; we felt that homecoming was now owed to us, and every hour spent in exile weighed on us like lead; the utter lack of news from Italy weighed on us even more. We went anyway, all together, to see the Russian performance, and it was a good thing. The theater had been improvised in the school gym; for that matter, everything was improvised, the actors, the seats, the chorus, the program, the lights, the curtain. Conspicuously improvised was the tailcoat worn by the MC, Captain Egorov himself. Egorov appeared onstage completely drunk, wearing immense trousers whose waist came up to his armpits, while the tails brushed the floor. He was in the grip of an inconsolable alcoholic sadness, and announced in a sepulchral voice the various comic or patriotic numbers on the program, between deep sobs and outbursts of tears. His balance was dubious: at crucial moments he clung to the microphone, and then the noise of the audience was suddenly suspended, as when an acrobat jumps from a trapeze into the void. Everyone appeared on the stage: the entire Kommandantur. Marya as director of the chorus, which was excellent, like all Russian choruses, and sang “Moyà Moskvà” (“My Moscow”) with marvelous momentum and harmony, and undisguised good faith. Galina appeared by herself, in a Circassian costume and boots, performing a dizzying dance in which she revealed fantastic and unsuspected athletic gifts: she was inundated with applause, and she thanked the audience, emotionally, with innumerable eighteenth-century-style bows, her face as red as a tomato and her eyes shining with tears. Dr. Dancenko and the mustachioed Mongol were an equally good duo, who, although full of vodka, performed one of those diabolical Russian dances in which the dancers leap into the air, squat, kick, and pirouette on their heels like a spinning top. Then came a singular imitation of Chaplin’s Tramp, impersonated by one of the vigorous girls of the Kommandantur, with a large bosom and rear, but scrupulously

faithful to the prototype, in bowler hat, mustache, old shoes, and cane. And finally, announced by Egorov in a mournful voice, and greeted by the Russians with a wild shout of acclaim, Vanka Vstanka appeared on the stage. Who Vanka Vstanka is I couldn’t say precisely: maybe a popular Russian stock character. In this case, he was a shepherd, a timid fool in love, who wants to declare himself to his sweetheart and doesn’t dare. The sweetheart was the giant Vassilissa, the raven-haired brawny Valkyrie responsible for the dining hall, who was capable of knocking down with the back of her hand a disorderly diner or an importunate suitor (and more than one Italian had had proof of it). But on the stage who would have recognized her? She was transfigured by her role; the gray-haired Vanka Vstanka (in reality one of the old lieutenants), his face plastered with pink and white powder, wooed her from a distance, in the courtly manner of Arcadia, for twenty melodious stanzas, unfortunately incomprehensible to us, holding out toward his beloved trembling supplicant hands, which she rebuffed with smiling but determined graciousness, warbling politely mocking replies. But little by little the distance diminished, while the noise of the applause increased proportionately; after many skirmishes, the two shepherds exchanged modest kisses on the cheek and ended by vigorously, voluptuously rubbing against each other, back-to-back, to the uncontainable enthusiasm of the audience. We left the theater slightly dazed, but almost moved. The show had satisfied us inwardly. It had been improvised in a few days, and that was obvious; it had been a homemade show, without pretenses, plain, often childish. Yet it assumed something that was not improvised but ancient and strong: a youthful, innate, intense capacity for joy and expression, a loving and friendly intimacy with the stage and with the audience, far from empty display and cerebral abstraction, from convention and a lazy imitation of models. So in its limited way it had been a warm, vivid show, not vulgar, not ordinary, full of freedom and affirmation. The next day everything returned to order, and the Russians, apart from some faint shadows around their eyes,

had assumed their usual faces. I met Marya in the infirmary and told her that I had had a very good time, and that all of us Italians had greatly admired the theatrical talents of her and her colleagues: which was the pure truth. Marya was, by habit and by nature, a not very methodical but very concrete woman, solidly fixed within the tangible outline of the round of the clock and the domestic walls, a friend to men in the flesh and hostile to the smoke of theories. But how many human minds are capable of resisting the slow, fierce, incessant, insensibly penetrating force of rhetoric? She answered with didactic seriousness. She thanked me officiously for the praise, and assured me that she would share it with the rest of the Command. Then she informed me in very pompous terms that dancing and singing are subjects taught in school in the Soviet Union, as is performance; that it is the duty of a good citizen to try to improve all his abilities or natural talents; that the theater is one of the most valuable instruments for collective education; and other pedagogical platitudes, which sounded absurd and vaguely irritating to my ear, still bursting with the previous night’s great wind of vitality and comic force. For that matter, Marya herself (“old and crazy,” in the judgment of the eighteen-year-old Galina) seemed to possess a second personality, very distinct from the official one, since she had been seen the evening before, after the theater, drinking like a bottomless pit and dancing like a bacchante late into the night, tiring out innumerable partners, like a furious rider who breaks beneath himself horse after horse.

Victory and peace were celebrated in another way, too, which almost, indirectly, cost me very dearly. In mid-May a soccer match took place between the team from Katowice and a delegation of us Italians. It was in fact a rematch: a first, not very serious match had been held two or three weeks earlier, which the Italians had won by a wide margin against an anonymous pickup team of Polish miners from the outskirts.

But for the rematch the Poles came up with a first-class team; the rumor was that some players, including the goalie, had been brought for the occasion from Warsaw, no less, while the Italians, alas, were not able to do likewise. This goalie was a nightmare. He was a tall, lanky, fairhaired man, with an emaciated face, a concave chest, and lazy Apache-like movements. He had none of the snap, the emphatic contractions, or the neurotic unease of the professional; he stood in the goal with insolent condescension, leaning on a post as if he were merely watching the game, with a look at once outraged and outrageous. And yet the few times the ball was kicked into the goal by the Italians he was in its path, as if by chance, but without ever making an abrupt movement. He extended a long arm, just one, which seemed to come out of his body like the horns of a snail and had the same invertebrate and sticky quality. Indeed, the ball clung to him solidly, losing all its living force; it slid over his chest, then down along his body and leg to the ground. The other hand he never even used: he kept it ostentatiously in his pocket during the entire match. The game took place on a field on the city’s outskirts quite far from Bogucice, and, for the occasion, the Russians authorized a free pass for the entire camp. The match was bitterly fought not just between the two contending teams but between both of these and the referee, because the referee— guest of honor, occupant of the authorities’ box, director of the competition, and linesman at the same time—was the captain from the NKVD, the ineffectual inspector of the kitchens. Now, with his fracture perfectly healed, he seemed to follow the game with intense interest, but not of a sporting nature: it was a mysterious interest, perhaps aesthetic, perhaps metaphysical. His behavior was irritating, in fact exhausting, to judge from the many experts present among the spectators; in another way it was hilarious, and worthy of a comic of the great school. He constantly interrupted the game, at random, with aggressive whispering and with a sadistic preference for the moments when the action was taking place at the goal. If the players didn’t pay attention to him (and they soon stopped

paying attention, because the interruptions were so frequent), he climbed over the edge of the box with his long, booted legs, plunged into the fray, whistling like a train, and kept trying, in every way possible, until he got possession of the ball. Then sometimes he held it in his hand, spinning it in all directions with a suspicious air, as if it were an unexploded bomb; at other times, with imperious gestures, he had it placed in a specific spot on the ground, then, unsatisfied, approached it, moved it a few inches, walked around it thoughtfully for a while, and finally, as if convinced of who knows what, signaled for the game to continue. At still other times, when he managed to get the ball between his feet, he made everyone move away, and he kicked it at the goal with all his might; then he turned radiantly to the spectators, who were bellowing with rage, and gave a long salute, clasping his hands over his head like a victorious prizefighter. He was, however, strictly impartial. In these conditions, the game (which was deservedly won by the Poles) dragged on for more than two hours, until six in the evening, and would probably have been extended until night if it had depended only on the captain, who wasn’t at all worried about the time, acted on the field like the Master after God, and seemed to get a mad and inexhaustible pleasure from his misunderstood function as referee. But around sunset the sky rapidly darkened, and when the first drops of rain fell the whistle blew, signaling the end. The rain soon became a deluge: Bogucice was far, there was no shelter on the way, and we returned to the barracks soaked. The next day I was sick, with an illness that remained mysterious for a long time. I couldn’t breathe freely. It seemed that in the working of my lungs there was a blockage, a sharp pain, a deep stabbing, situated somewhere above the stomach but behind, near the back; and this prevented me from taking in air beyond a certain point. And this point diminished, from day to day, from hour to hour; the ration of air allowed me was reduced in a slow, constant, terrifying progression. The third day I could no longer move; the fourth, I lay supine on my cot, motionless, with my breath very short and fast, like that of a very hot dog.

4. The American and British soldiers of the Allied armies in Italy said “segnorina” instead of “signorina.”

The Dreamers

Leonardo tried to hide it from me, but he couldn’t understand the illness, and he was seriously worried. What it was exactly was difficult to establish, since his entire professional arsenal was reduced to a stethoscope, and to get the Russians to admit me to the civilian hospital in Katowice would be not only difficult but inadvisable; from Dr. Dancenko there was not much help to be hoped for. So for several days I lay motionless, swallowing a few mouthfuls of broth, since with every movement I tried to make, and every solid mouthful I tried to swallow, the pain reawakened angrily and cut off my breath. After a week of tortured immobility, Leonardo, by tapping my back and my chest, managed to distinguish a sign: it was a dry pleurisy, nesting treacherously between the two lungs, against the mediastinum and the diaphragm. He then did much more than you normally expect from a doctor. He became a clandestine merchant and smuggler of medicines, valiantly helped by Cesare, and he traveled on foot dozens of kilometers through the city, from one address to another, in pursuit of sulfonamides and intravenous calcium. In terms of medicines he didn’t have much success, because the drugs were scarce and could be found only on the black market and at prices inaccessible to us; but he found something better. He discovered in Katowice a mysterious brother, who had available a not exactly legal but wellequipped office, a medicine cabinet, a lot of money, and free time, and who was, finally, Italian, or almost. In truth, everything about Dr. Gottlieb was wrapped in a thick fog of mystery. He spoke Italian perfectly, but German, Polish, Hungarian, and Russian just as well. He came from Fiume, from Vienna, from Zagreb, and from Auschwitz. He had been in Auschwitz, but in what capacity and condition he never said, nor was he a man whom it was easy to question.

Nor was it easy to understand how he had survived in Auschwitz, since he had an ankylosed arm. And it was even harder to imagine by what secret pathways, and by what fantastic arts, he had managed to stay together with a brother and an equally mysterious brother-in-law, and to become in the few months after leaving the Lager, and in defiance of the Russians and the laws, a wealthy man and the most esteemed doctor in Katowice. He was a remarkably endowed man. He gave off intelligence and shrewdness the way a radio gives off energy: with the same silent and penetrating continuity, without effort, without pause, without signs of exhaustion, in all directions at once. That he was a skillful doctor was evident at the first contact. Whether, then, this professional excellence was only one aspect, one facet, of a lofty intellect, or whether it was in fact his instrument of discernment, his secret weapon for making friends and enemies, for nullifying prohibitions, for turning nos into yeses, I could never establish; this, too, was part of the cloud that enveloped him and moved with him. It was an almost visible cloud, which made it hard to decipher his gaze and the features of his face, and led one to suspect— under every action, every phrase, every silence—a tactic and a technique, the pursuit of imperceptible ends, a continuous shrewd work of exploration, elaboration, integration, and possession. But the intelligence of Dr. Gottlieb, completely intent on practical ends, was nevertheless not inhuman. Confidence, the habit of victory, faith in himself were so abundant that he had a large supply left over to use for helping his less well endowed neighbor, and especially to help us, we who had escaped like him from the death trap of the Lager, a circumstance he turned out to be oddly sensitive to. Gottlieb brought me health like a thaumaturge. He came a first time to examine the situation, then several more times, equipped with vials and syringes, and a last time, when he said, “Rise and walk.” The pain had disappeared, my breath was free; I was very weak and hungry, but I rose and was able to walk.

Nevertheless, for some three weeks I didn’t leave the room. I spent the endless days in bed, reading eagerly the few odd books I could get my hands on: an English grammar in Polish, Marie Walewska: le tendre amour de Napoléon, an elementary trigonometry textbook, Rouletabille à la guerre (Rouletabille at War), I forzati della Cajenna (The Prisoners of the Cajenna), and an odd novel of Nazi propaganda, Die Grosse Heimkehr (The Great Repatriation), which depicted the tragic fate of a Galician village of pure German stock, attacked, looted, and finally destroyed by the fierce Poland of Marshal Beck. It was sad to be within the four walls while outside the air was full of spring and victory and from the nearby woods the wind brought stirring odors of moss, of new grass, of mushrooms; and it was humiliating to have to depend on my companions even for the most elementary needs, to get food from the dining room, to get water, in the first days even to change position in the bed. There were about twenty in the dormitory, including Leonardo and Cesare; but the biggest of them, the most remarkable, was the oldest, the Moor of Verona. He must have been descended from a race tenaciously bound to the earth, since his real name was Avesani, and he was from Avesa, the washermen’s neighborhood of Verona celebrated by Berto Barbarani. He was more than seventy, and it showed: he was a large, rugged old man, with the skeleton of a dinosaur, tall and straight in the hips, and still as strong as a horse, although his gnarled joints had stiffened with age and toil. His bald head, nobly convex, was surrounded at the base by a crown of white hair; but his gaunt, wrinkled face had a jaundiced color, and his eyes, flashing violently yellow and veined with blood, were sunk under enormous arched eyebrows, like ferocious dogs at the back of their dens. In the Moor’s skeletal yet powerful breast, a gigantic but undefined anger boiled without respite: a senseless anger against everyone and everything, against the Russians and the Germans, against Italy and the Italians, against God and men, against himself and against us, against the day when it was day and the night when it was night, against his fate and all fates,

against his trade, although it was in his blood. He was a mason; he had laid bricks for fifty years—in Italy, in America, in France, then in Italy again—and finally in Germany, and every brick was mortared with curses. He cursed continually, but not mechanically, he cursed methodically and deliberately, bitterly, stopping to look for the right word, often correcting himself, and racking his brains when he couldn’t find the right word; then he cursed the curse that wouldn’t come. It was clear that he was besieged by a hopeless senile dementia, but there was grandeur in his dementia, and also force, and a barbaric dignity, the trampled dignity of a beast in a cage, the same that redeems Capaneus and Caliban. The Moor almost never got off his cot. He would lie there all day, with his enormous bony yellow feet sticking out half a meter into the room. On the floor next to him sat a large shapeless bundle, which none of us would ever have dared touch. It contained, it seems, all his possessions on this earth; a heavy woodsman’s ax was hanging on the outside. The Moor usually stared into emptiness with his bloodshot eyes and was silent; but the least stimulus, a noise in the corridor, a question addressed to him, an incautious stumble against his cumbersome feet, an attack of rheumatism, and his deep chest rose like the sea swelling in a storm, and the mechanism of vituperation started up again. Among us he was respected, and feared with a vaguely superstitious fear. Only Cesare went near him, with the impertinent familiarity of the birds that scratch around on the rhinoceros’s rocky back, and he enjoyed provoking his anger with foolish and indecent questions. Next to the Moor lived the inept Ferrari of the lice, the last in his class in the school in Loreto. But in our dormitory he wasn’t the only member of the brotherhood of San Vittore; it was represented notably by Trovati and Cravero as well. Trovati, Ambrogio Trovati—known as Tramonto (Sunset) —wasn’t more than thirty; he was small in stature, but muscular and very agile. Tramonto, he had explained, was a stage name: he was proud of it, and it fit him to a T, because he was dim-witted, and got by on extravagant improvisations,

in a state of perpetual frustrated rebellion. He had spent his adolescence and youth between prison and the stage, and the two institutions did not seem to be clearly differentiated in his confused mind. Prison in Germany, then, must have been the final blow. In his conversation, the true, the possible, and the fanciful were tangled up in a variable and inextricable knot. He spoke of prison and the courtroom as of a theater where no one is truly himself but rather plays, demonstrates his skill, enters into another’s skin, takes a role; and the theater, in turn, was a grand obscure symbol, a shadowy instrument of perdition, the external manifestation of a subterranean, spiteful, and omnipresent sect, which rules to the detriment of all, and which comes to your house, seizes you, puts a mask on you, makes you become what you are not and do what you don’t want to do. This sect is Society: the great enemy, against which he, Tramonto, had been fighting forever, and he was always defeated but, every time, rose again heroically. It was Society that had come to look for him, to challenge him. He lived in innocence, in the earthly paradise: he was a barber, owner of a shop, and had been visited. Two messengers had come to tempt him, to make him the Satanic proposal of selling the shop and devoting himself to art. They well knew his weak point: they had flattered him, praised his physique, his voice, his expression, and the mobility of his face. He had resisted two, three times, then he had given in, and, with the address of the movie studio in his hand, had set off for Milan. But the address was false, he was sent away from every door to another door, until he had understood the plot. The two messengers, in the shadows, had followed him with the movie camera pointed, they had stolen all his words and gestures of disappointment, and so had made him an actor without his realizing it. They had stolen the image, the shadow, the soul. It was they who had caused him to fade, and baptized him Tramonto, Sunset. So it was over for him: he was in their hands. The shop sold, no contracts, almost no money, some little part every so often, some stealing to make ends meet, until his great epic, the pulpable homicide. He had met on the street one of his two

tempters, and had stabbed him; he had been accused of pulpable homicide, and for that crime he was dragged into court. But he hadn’t wanted lawyers, because the whole world, down to the last man, was against him, and he knew it. And yet he had been so eloquent, and had laid out his arguments so well, that the court had absolved him immediately with a great ovation, and everyone wept. This legendary trial was at the center of Trovati’s cloudy memory; he relived it in every moment of the day, he spoke of nothing else, and often, in the evening after dinner, he forced us all to indulge him and perform his trial as a sort of medieval religious pageant. He assigned each of us a part—you the judge, you the prosecutor, you the jurors, you the court clerk, you others the spectators—and he assigned the parts in a peremptory manner. But the accused, and at the same time the defense attorney, was always and only he, and at every performance, when the moment came for his torrential harangue, he first explained, in a rapid “aside,” that pulpable homicide is when the murderer sticks the knife not in the chest, or in the stomach, but here, between the heart and the armpit, in the flesh, and it’s less serious. He spoke without stopping, passionately, for an hour straight, wiping real sweat from his forehead; then, throwing over his left shoulder a nonexistent toga with a broad gesture, he concluded, “Go, go, O serpents, and deposit your venom!” The third from San Vittore, the Turinese Cravero, was on the other hand a complete thief, unadulterated, without nuances, of a type you rarely find, in whom the abstract criminal hypotheses of the penal code seem to take shape and human form. He was familiar with all the jails of Italy, and in Italy he had lived (he admitted it shamelessly, in fact proudly) on stealing, robbing, and pimping. Thanks to these skills, he had found no difficulty in settling himself in Germany: he had worked for only a month with the Todt Organization, in Berlin, then he had disappeared, fading easily into the dark background of the local underworld. After two or three attempts, he had found a widow who was suitable. He helped her with his experience, found clients,

and took care of the financial aspect in contentious cases, stabbing included; she welcomed him. In that house, in spite of the difficulties of the language, and certain curious habits of his protégée, he was perfectly comfortable. When the Russians were at the gates of Berlin, Cravero, who didn’t like turmoil, had raised anchor, abandoning the woman, who dissolved in tears. But still he had been overtaken by the rapid advance and, moving from camp to camp, had ended up in Katowice; yet he didn’t stay long. In fact he was the first of the Italians who decided to try to get home by his own means. Accustomed as he was to living outside every law, the obstacle of the many frontiers to cross without documents, and of the fifteen hundred kilometers to traverse without money, didn’t worry him too much. Since he was heading to Turin, he very politely offered to take a letter to my house. I accepted, with a certain thoughtlessness, as it turned out; I accepted because I was sick, because I have a great innate faith in my neighbor, because the Polish mail system wasn’t functioning, and because Marya Fyodorovna, when I proposed that she write a letter for me to the countries of the West, had turned pale and changed the subject. Leaving Katowice in mid-May, Cravero arrived in Turin in the record time of a month, slipping like an eel through innumerable blockades. He tracked down my mother, delivered the letter (and it was the only sign of life from me that reached its destination in nine months), and explained to her confidentially that I was in an extremely worrisome state of health. Naturally I hadn’t put that in the letter, but I was alone, sick, abandoned, without money, in urgent need of help, and in his opinion it was urgent to act immediately. Of course the undertaking wasn’t easy; but he, Cravero, my brotherly friend, was available. If my mother gave him two hundred thousand lire, in two or three weeks he would bring me safely home. In fact, if the young lady (my sister, who was present at the interview) would like to come with him . . . It is to the credit of my mother and sister that they didn’t immediately trust the messenger. They put him off, asking him

to come back in a few days, because the sum wasn’t available. Cravero went down the stairs, stole my sister’s bicycle, which was in the entranceway, and disappeared. Two years later, at Christmas, he wrote me an affectionate card of good wishes from the New Prisons, in Turin. On the evenings when Tramonto exempted us from the performance of his trial, Signor Unverdorben often claimed our attention. A mild, old, and touchy little man from Trieste answered to this strange and beautiful name. Signor Unverdorben, who wouldn’t respond to anyone who didn’t call him “signore,” and insisted on being addressed with the polite “you” form, had had a long, adventurous double existence, and, like the Moor and Tramonto, was the prisoner of a dream or, rather, of two. He had inexplicably survived the Lager of Birkenau, and had come out with a horrendous abscess on his foot; he couldn’t walk, and was the most assiduous and obsequious of those who offered me company and assistance during my illness. He was also very talkative, and if he hadn’t often repeated himself, as old people do, his confidences would make up a separate novel. He was a musician, a great unappreciated musician, composer, and orchestra conductor. He had composed an opera, The Queen of Navarre, which had been praised by Toscanini; but the manuscript lay unpublished in a drawer, because his enemies, searching among his papers with vile patience, had finally discovered that four consecutive measures of the score were identical to four measures in Pagliacci. His good faith was obvious, crystal clear, but in these matters the law is no joke. Three measures, all right, four no. Four measures constitute plagiarism. Signor Unverdorben was too much of a gentleman to dirty his hands with lawyers and lawsuits; he had manfully said goodbye to art and made a new life as a cook on transatlantic liners. So he had traveled widely, and had seen things that no one else had seen. Mainly, he had seen extraordinary animals and plants, and many secrets of nature. He had seen the crocodiles of the Ganges, which have a single rigid bone that goes from the tip of the nose to the tail, are very fierce, and run like the wind; but, precisely because of this singular structure, they can

move only forward and back, like a train on a track, and so all you have to do is place yourself next to them, just a little to the side of the straight line that constitutes their length, to be safe. He had seen the jackals of the Nile, who drink while they run in order not to be bitten by fish; at night their eyes shine like lanterns, and they sing in hoarse human voices. He had seen Malaysian cabbages, which are made like ours but much bigger; if you merely touch their leaves with a finger, you can’t extricate it, and the arm and then the entire person of the incautious are drawn in, slowly but irresistibly, into the monstrous sticky heart of the carnivorous plant, and digested little by little. The only remedy, which almost no one knows, is fire, but you have to act quickly; the little flame of a match under the leaf that has grabbed the prey is enough, and the plant’s vitality melts. In this way, thanks to his quickness and knowledge of natural history, Signor Unverdorben had saved the captain of his ship from certain death. Then, there are some little black snakes that dwell in the bleak sands of Australia, and attack man from a distance, in the air, like rifle shots; one bite can make a bull fall on its back. But everything in nature is connected, there is no offense against which there is not a defense, every poison has its antidote: you just have to know it. The bite of these reptiles is readily healed if it’s treated with human saliva, but not that of the person who has been attacked. Thus, no one ever travels alone in those lands. In the long Polish evenings, the air of the dormitory, heavy with tobacco and human odors, was saturated with foolish dreams. This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of being uprooted: the dominion of the unreal over the real. All of us dreamed dreams of the past and of the future, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythic and improbable enemies: perverse, subtle cosmic enemies, who pervaded everything, like the air. All, with the exception possibly of Cravero and certainly of D’Agata. D’Agata didn’t have time to dream, because he was obsessed by the fear of bedbugs. No one liked these uncomfortable companions, naturally, but we had all ended up getting used to them. They were not few and scattered but a solid army, which with the arrival of spring had invaded all

our beds; they nested during the day in the cracks in the walls and the wooden bunks, and left on forays as soon as the bustle of the day ceased. We had willingly resigned ourselves to giving up to them a small portion of our blood; it was less easy to get used to feeling them running furtively over our faces and body, under our clothes. Only those who had the good fortune to be heavy sleepers, and who could fall into unconsciousness before the bugs awakened, slept peacefully. D’Agata, who was a tiny, sober, reserved, and very clean Sicilian mason, was reduced to sleeping during the day, and he spent the nights curled up on his bed, looking around with eyes dilated by horror, by wakefulness, and by his agonizing wait. He gripped tight in his hand a rudimentary contraption, which he had made with a stick and a piece of metal mesh, and the wall next to him was covered with a lurid constellation of bloody spots. At first these habits were derided: was his skin more sensitive than that of the rest of us? But then pity prevailed, mixed with a trace of envy—because, among us all, D’Agata was the only one whose enemy was concrete, present, tangible, and could be fought, beaten, crushed against the wall.

Heading South

I had walked for hours in the marvelous morning air, breathing it like a medicine deep into my battered lungs. I wasn’t very steady on my legs, but I had an imperious need to retake possession of my body, to reestablish contact, cut off for almost two years, with trees and grass, with the heavy brown earth in which you could feel the seeds trembling, with the ocean of air that carried the pollen of the firs, wave upon wave, from the Carpathians to the dark streets of the mining city. I had been doing this for a week, exploring the outskirts of Katowice. The sweet weakness of convalescence ran in my veins. Also running in my veins, in those days, were strong doses of insulin, which had been prescribed, found, bought, and injected by the joint treatments of Leonardo and Gottlieb. While I walked, the insulin silently fulfilled its miraculous duty; it circulated with the blood in search of sugar, and saw to its diligent combustion and conversion to energy, distracting it from other, less suitable destinations. But the sugar it found wasn’t much: suddenly, dramatically, almost always at the same time, the supply was exhausted. Then my legs folded under me, I saw everything turn black, and I was forced to sit down on the ground wherever I was, cold and overcome by an attack of furious hunger. Here the works and gifts of my third protector, Marya Fyodorovna Prima, came to my aid: I took out of my pocket a packet of glucose and gulped it down greedily. After a few minutes, the light returned, the sun grew warm again, and I could resume my walk. Returning to the camp that morning, I found an unusual scene. In the middle of the open space stood Captain Egorov, surrounded by a dense crowd of Italians. In one hand he was holding a large revolver, which, however, he was using only to emphasize with broad gestures the crucial passages of the speech he was making. Of his speech little could be

understood. Essentially two words, because he kept repeating them, but those two words were heavenly messages: “ripatriatsiya” and “Odyessa.” Repatriation by way of Odessa, therefore: return. The whole camp instantly went wild. Captain Egorov was lifted off the ground, revolver and all, and carried in precarious triumph. People roared, “Home! Home!” through the corridors, others packed their bags, making as much noise as they could, and throwing out the windows rags, paper, broken shoes, and all kinds of junk. In a few hours the whole camp emptied, under the Olympian eyes of the Russians; some went to the city to take leave of their girls, some in a pure and simple barrage of merrymaking, some to spend their last zloty on provisions for the journey or in other more futile ways. With that last program in mind Cesare and I went to Katowice, carrying in our pockets our own savings and those of five or six companions. In fact, what would we find at the border? We didn’t know, but, from what we had seen until now of the Russians and their methods of proceeding, it didn’t seem likely that at the border we would find money changers. Therefore, common sense, along with our happy state of mind, advised us to spend to the last zloty the small sum we had at our disposal: to use it up, for example, by organizing a grand Italian lunch, of spaghetti with butter, which we had been longing for since time immemorial. We went into a food shop, put all our assets on the counter, and explained our intentions as well as we could to the shopkeeper. I told her, as usual, that I spoke German but was not German; that we were Italians who were leaving, and that we wanted to buy spaghetti, butter, salt, eggs, strawberries, and sugar in the most fitting proportions and for an amount of sixty-three zloty, not one more or one less. The shopkeeper was a wrinkled old crone, with a crotchety and distrustful expression. She looked at us attentively through tortoiseshell glasses, then said plainly, in excellent German, that in her view we were not Italians at all. First, we spoke German, even if rather badly; then, and principally, Italians have black hair and passionate eyes, and we had neither. At

most, she could concede that we were Croatians; in fact, now that she thought about it, she had just met some Croatians who resembled us. We were Croatians, the thing was unquestionable. I was quite annoyed, and said to her brusquely that we were Italians, whether she liked it or not—Italian Jews, one from Rome and one from Turin—that we came from Auschwitz and were going home, and we wanted to buy and pay, and not waste time in nonsense. Jews from Auschwitz? The old woman’s look softened, even her wrinkles seemed to relax. Then it was a different situation. She invited us into the back of the shop, had us sit down, offered us glasses of real beer, and without delay she told us proudly her fabulous story: her epic, close in time but already broadly transfigured into a chanson de geste, refined and polished by innumerable repetitions. She knew about Auschwitz, and everything about Auschwitz interested her, because she had been at risk of going there. She wasn’t Polish, she was German: at one time she kept a shop in Berlin, with her husband. They hadn’t liked Hitler, and maybe they had been imprudent in letting their unusual opinions leak out in the neighborhood: in 1935 her husband was taken away by the Gestapo, and she had never learned anything more about him. It had been a great sorrow, but one has to eat, and she had continued her business until ’38, when Hitler, “der Lump,” had given on the radio the famous speech in which he declared he was going to war. Then she was angry and had written to him. She had written personally, “To Herr Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of the Reich, Berlin,” sending him a long letter in which she advised him firmly not to go to war because too many people would die, and, further, she showed him that if he did he would lose, because Germany couldn’t win against the whole world, and even a child would understand that. She had signed her name, last name, and address: then she had waited. Five days later the Brownshirts arrived and under the pretext of doing a search they had ransacked and wrecked her house and shop. What had they found? Nothing, she wasn’t

active politically: only the draft of the letter. Two weeks later they called her to the Gestapo. She thought they would beat her and send her to the Lager: instead they had treated her with boorish contempt, told her they should hang her, but were convinced that she was just eine alte blöde Ziege, a stupid old goat, and the noose would be wasted on her. But they had withdrawn her business license and expelled her from Berlin. She had scraped out a living in Silesia on the black market and by her wits, until, following her predictions, the Germans lost the war. Then, since the whole neighborhood knew what she had done, the Polish authorities had quickly granted her a license for a food store. So now she lived peacefully, fortified by the thought of how much better the world would have been if the powerful of the Earth had taken her advice.

On the eve of departure, Leonardo and I handed over the keys to the clinic and said goodbye to Marya Fyodorovna and Dr. Dancenko. Marya appeared silent and sad; I asked her why didn’t she come to Italy with us, and she blushed as if I had made her a dishonest proposal. Dancenko interrupted; he was carrying a bottle of alcohol and two pieces of paper. First we thought that the alcohol was his personal contribution to the medical supplies for the journey; but no, it was for the farewell toasts, which were dutifully exchanged. And the paper? We learned to our amazement that the Command expected from us two declarations of thanks for the humaneness and the propriety with which we had been treated at Katowice; Dancenko also begged us to mention explicitly him and his work, and to add to our name the qualification “Doctor of Medicine” when we signed. This Leonardo could do and did; but in my case it would be a lie. I was bewildered, and tried to make Dancenko understand; but he was astonished at my formality and, beating with his finger on the piece of paper, told me irritably not to make trouble. I signed as he wished: Why deprive him of some small help to his career? But the ceremony wasn’t over yet. In turn, Dancenko drew out two testimonials, written by hand in fine calligraphy on two pieces of lined paper, evidently torn from a school

notebook. On the one meant for me, he declared with casual generosity that “The doctor of medicine Primo Levi, of Turin, offered for four months his capable and diligent services to the Infirmary of this Command, and has thereby deserved the gratitude of all the workers of the world.”

The next day, the dream we had had forever became a reality. In the station at Katowice the train awaited us: a long train of freight cars, which we Italians (we were around eight hundred) took possession of with noisy cheer. Odessa, and then a fantastic journey by sea through the gateways of the east, and then Italy. The prospect of traversing many hundreds of kilometers in those rough cars, sleeping on the bare floor, didn’t worry us at all, nor did the laughable food supplies delivered to us by the Russians: some bread, and a tin of soy margarine for each car. It was American margarine, heavily salted and hard, like Parmesan cheese: evidently meant for tropical climates, it had ended up in our hands by unimaginable pathways. The rest, the Russians assured us with their habitual carelessness, would be distributed during the journey. That train filled with hope left in mid-June of 1945. There was no escort, no Russian on board: in charge of the convoy was Dr. Gottlieb, who had spontaneously attached himself to us, and who contained in his person the duties of interpreter, doctor, and consul of the itinerant community. We felt in good hands, far from any doubt or uncertainty; the ship was waiting for us in Odessa. The journey lasted for six days, and if in the course of it we were not driven by hunger to begging or stealing, and in fact reached its end fairly well nourished, the credit goes exclusively to Dr. Gottlieb. Immediately after our departure it became clear that the Russians of Katowice had sent us off at our peril, without making any provisions or arrangements with their colleagues in Odessa and the intermediate stops. When our convoy stopped in a station (and it stopped often and long, because the regular traffic and military transports had precedence), no one knew what to make of us. The

stationmasters and officers in charge of services watched us arrive with astonished and desperate eyes, anxious in turn only to get rid of our inconvenient presence. But Gottlieb was there, sharp as a sword; there was no bureaucratic tangle, no barrier of negligence, no official obstinacy that he could not defeat in a few minutes, each time in a different way. Every difficulty dissolved into a mist before his boldness, his deep imagination, his saber-like quickness. From each encounter with the monster of a thousand faces, which dwells wherever forms and documents accumulate, he returned to us radiant with victory like a St. George after the duel with the dragon, and he told us about its rapid turns, too conscious of his superiority to glory in it. The officer in charge at the station, for example, had demanded our travel order, which notoriously didn’t exist; Gottlieb had said that he would get it and had gone into the telegraph office nearby and fabricated one in a few instants, drafted in the most plausible bureaucratic jargon, on an ordinary piece of paper that he had covered thickly with stamps, seals, and illegible signatures, rendering it as holy and venerable as an authentic emanation of Power. Or, again, he had presented himself to the quartermaster of a Kommandantur, and had respectfully notified him that eight hundred Italians were stopped at the station and had nothing to eat. The quartermaster had replied “Nicevò,” his storehouse was empty, he needed authorization, he would take care of it the next day, and had rudely tried to show him the door, like some ordinary annoying petitioner; but Gottlieb had smiled and said, “Comrade, you haven’t understood properly. These Italians have to have food, and today—the order is from Stalin.” And the provisions had arrived in a flash. But for me that journey was excruciating. I was surely recovered from pleurisy, but my body was in open rebellion, and seemed determined to make a mockery of doctors and medicines. Every night, while I slept, fever furtively invaded me: an intense fever, of an unknown nature, which reached its peak near morning. I woke prostrate, only half conscious, and with a wrist, or an elbow, or a knee immobilized by stabbing pains. I lay like that, on the floor of the train car or the cement

of a platform, racked by delirium and pain, until midday; then, in a few hours, everything returned to order and around evening I felt almost normal. Leonardo and Gottlieb looked at me perplexed and powerless. The train passed through cultivated plains, gloomy cities and villages, dense, wild forests that I thought had disappeared millennia earlier from the heart of Europe: conifers and birches so thick that, to reach the sunlight, by mutual agreement they were forced to push desperately upward, in an oppressive verticality. The train advanced as if through a tunnel, in a green-black shadow, amid the smooth bare trunks, under a high, unbroken vault of thickly interlaced branches. Rzeszów, Przemy l with its threatening fortifications, L’viv. In L’viv, a skeleton city devastated by bombing and by war, the train stopped for the night in a downpour. The roof of our car wasn’t watertight: we had to get out and seek shelter. With a few others, we couldn’t find anything better than the railway workers’ underpass: dark, two inches of mud, and fierce drafts. But the fever arrived punctually at midnight, like a compassionate blow to the head, bringing me the ambiguous kindness of unconsciousness. Ternopol, Proskurov. The train reached Proskurov at sunset, the locomotive was uncoupled, and Gottlieb assured us that we wouldn’t leave until morning. We therefore settled ourselves to spend the night in the station. The waiting room was large: Cesare, Leonardo, Daniele, and I took possession of a corner. Cesare left for the town as the one assigned to provisions, and soon returned with eggs, salad, and a packet of tea. We lit a fire on the floor (we were not the only ones, or the first: the room was scattered with the remains of innumerable campsites of people who had preceded us, and the ceiling and walls were smoke-blackened like those of an old kitchen). Cesare cooked the eggs, and made a generous and sugary tea. Now, either that tea was stronger than ours in Italy, or Cesare had mistaken the amounts, for in a short time every trace of sleep and weariness vanished, and we felt instead invigorated by an unusual state of mind—eager, cheerful,

tense, lucid, sensitive. Therefore, every event and every word of that night has remained imprinted in my memory, and I can describe it as if it were yesterday. The daylight disappeared extremely slowly, first rosy, then purple, then gray; the silvery splendor of a warm full moon followed. Next to us, as we smoked and talked animatedly, were two very young girls dressed in black, sitting on a wooden chest. They were speaking to each other: not in Russian but in Yiddish. “Do you understand what they’re saying?” Cesare asked. “A few words.” “Come on, then: start up. See if they’ll go along.” That night everything seemed easy to me, even understanding Yiddish. With unusual boldness, I turned to the girls, greeted them, and, making an effort to imitate their pronunciation, asked in German if they were Jewish, and I said that we four were, too. The girls (they were perhaps sixteen or eighteen years old) burst into laughter. “Ihr sprecht keyn Jiddisch, ihr seyd ja keyne Jiden!” “You don’t speak Yiddish: so you aren’t Jews!” In their language, the statement had a strict logic. And yet we really were Jews, I explained. Italian Jews: Jews in Italy and all of Western Europe don’t speak Yiddish. This, for them, was a great novelty, a comically odd thing, as if someone were to declare that there exist Frenchmen who don’t speak French. I tried to recite to them the beginning of the Shema, the basic Jewish prayer: their incredulity diminished but their merriment increased: who had ever heard Hebrew pronounced in such a ridiculous way? The older was named Sore: she had a small, keen, mischievous face, full of curves and asymmetrical dimples; our limping and laborious conversation seemed to give her an intense enjoyment, and stimulated her like tickling. But then, if we were Jews, were all the others, too? she asked, indicating with a circular gesture the eight hundred Italians who filled the room. What difference was there

between us and them? The same language, the same faces, the same clothes. No, I explained to her, they were Christians, they came from Genoa, Naples, Sicily; some of them might have Arab blood in their veins. Sore looked around in bewilderment, this was confusing. In her country things were very clear: a Jew is a Jew, and a Russian a Russian, there are no doubts or ambiguities. They were evacuees, she told me. They were from Minsk, in Belorussia; when the Germans were approaching, their family had asked to be transferred to the interior of the Soviet Union, to escape the massacres of Eichmann’s Einsatzkommandos. The request had been taken literally: they had been sent four thousand kilometers away from their city, to Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, to the gates of the Roof of the World, in view of mountains seven thousand meters high. She and her sister were still children; then their mother died and their father was mobilized for some job or other on the border. The two of them had learned Uzbek, and many other basic things: to take life day by day, to travel over continents with one suitcase for two, to live, in short, like birds of the air, who do not spin or weave or care about tomorrow. Such they were, Sore and her silent sister. Like us, they were on the road of return. They had left Samarkand in March, setting off as a feather abandons itself to the wind. Partly in a truck, partly on foot, they had crossed the Karakum, the Desert of Black Sand; they had arrived by train in Krasnovodsk, on the Caspian Sea, and there had waited until a fisherman ferried them to Baku. From Baku they had continued by any available means, since they had no money, but in exchange a boundless faith in the future and in their neighbor, and an innate and intact love of life. Everyone around us was sleeping; Cesare restlessly witnessed the conversation, asking me every so often if the preliminaries were over and we had got to the point; then, disappointed, he went outside in search of more solid adventures. The peacefulness of the waiting room and the story of the two sisters were abruptly interrupted around midnight. A door

that by a short corridor connected the waiting room with a smaller one, reserved for soldiers in transit, was brutally flung open, as if by a gust of wind. On the threshold a very young, drunk Russian soldier appeared. He looked around with unfocused eyes, then he set off forward, head down, with frightening tacking maneuvers, as if the floor had suddenly sloped sharply under him. Three Soviet officers were standing in the corridor, engrossed in discussion. The soldier, reaching them, braked, stiffened to attention, saluted militarily, and the three responded decorously to his salute. Then he took off again in semicircles, like a skater, passed precisely through the door to the outside, and we could hear him vomiting and hiccuping noisily on the platform. He came back inside with a slightly less shaky step, again saluted the three impassive officers, and disappeared. After a quarter of an hour, the scene was repeated, identically, as in a nightmare: dramatic entrance, pause, salute, rapid journey obliquely among the legs of the sleepers toward the open air, discharge, return, salute; and so on, an infinite number of times, at regular intervals, without the three ever devoting to him anything but a distracted glance and a correct salute, hand to cap. So that memorable night passed until the fever overwhelmed me; then I lay on the floor, shivering. Gottlieb came, bringing with him an unusual drug: half a liter of raw vodka, a clandestine distillate that he had bought from some peasants in the neighborhood. It smelled of mold, vinegar, and fire. “Drink,” he said, “drink it all. It will do you good, and besides we don’t have anything else here for your illness.” I drank the infernal potion, not without effort, burning my jaws and throat, and soon fell into nothingness. When I woke the next morning, I felt oppressed by a great weight, but it wasn’t the fever or a bad dream. I lay buried under a layer of other sleepers, in a kind of human incubator: people who had arrived during the night and had found no other place except on top of those who were already sleeping on the floor. I was thirsty: thanks to the combined action of the vodka and the animal warmth, I must have lost many liters of sweat. The singular treatment was completely successful; the fever and the pain disappeared for good, and did not return.

The train left again, and in a few hours we reached Zhmerynka, a railroad hub 350 kilometers from Odessa. Here a great surprise and a fierce disappointment awaited us. Gottlieb, who had conferred with the military commander of the place, made his way through the train, car by car, and told us that we all had to get out: the train would not continue. Wouldn’t continue why? And how and when would we arrive at Odessa? “I don’t know,” Gottlieb answered, embarrassed. “No one knows. All I know is we have to get out of the train, arrange ourselves somehow on the platforms, and wait for orders.” He was very pale and obviously disturbed. We got out, and spent the night in the station; Gottlieb’s defeat, his first, seemed to us a bad sign. The next morning, our guide, along with his inseparable brother and brother-inlaw, had disappeared. They had vanished into thin air, with all their considerable baggage; someone said he had seen them whispering with the Russian railway workers, and during the night get on a military train traveling from Odessa to the Polish border. We remained in Zhmerynka for three days, oppressed by worry, frustration, or fear, according to our temperaments and the scraps of information we managed to extort from the Russians in the place. These showed no surprise about our fate and our forced sojourn, and answered our questions in the most disconcerting ways. One Russian told us that yes, several ships had left from Odessa with English and American soldiers who were going home, and we, too, sooner or later, would be embarked: we had food, Hitler was gone, why complain? Another told us that the week before a convoy of Frenchmen, traveling to Odessa, had been stopped at Zhmerynka and rerouted to the north “because the tracks were cut off.” A third informed us that he had seen with his own eyes a transport of German prisoners heading to the Far East; according to him, the situation was clear, were we not allies of the Germans? Well, they would send us, too, to dig trenches on the Japanese front. To complicate things, on the third day another convoy of Italians arrived in Zhmerynka, from Romania. These had an

appearance very different from ours: there were some six hundred men and women, well dressed, with suitcases and trunks, some with cameras around their necks: like tourists. They looked down at us, as if we were poor relations; they had traveled here on a regular train, with passenger cars, paying their fare, and were in order—with passports, money, travel documents, timetable, and collective travel permit—for Italy by way of Odessa. If we could only get the Russians to include us with them, then we, too, would reach Odessa. With much condescension, they gave us to understand that they, in fact, were important people: they were civilian and military officials from the Italian legation in Bucharest, and also various people who, after the Armir5 was disbanded, had remained in Romania with diverse duties, or to fish in the troubled waters. There were among them entire families, husbands with genuine Romanian wives, and numerous children. But, unlike the Germans, the Russians do not possess the slightest talent for distinctions and classifications. A few days later, we were all traveling north, toward an imprecise goal that was, in any case, a new exile. Italian-Romanians and Italian-Italians, all in the same freight cars, all with a heavy heart, all at the mercy of the indecipherable Soviet bureaucracy, an obscure and gigantic power, not malevolent toward us but suspicious, careless, ignorant, contradictory, and in its effects as blind as a force of nature. 5. The Armir, or Armata Italiana in Russia, was the unit of the Italian Army that fought in Russia during the Second World War.

Heading North

In the few days we spent in Zhmerynka we were reduced to begging, which, in those conditions, had nothing particularly tragic about it, compared with the much more serious prospect of an imminent departure for an unknown destination. Deprived as we were of Gottlieb’s talent for improvisation, we had immediately felt the full impact of the superior economic power of the “Romanians”: they could pay five or ten times as much as we could for any goods, and they did so, because they, too, had exhausted their food supplies, and they, too, guessed that we were leaving for a place where money would count for little, and it would be difficult to save it. We were camped at the station, and we often went into the inhabited area. Low, lopsided houses, constructed with a curious and amusing indifference to geometry and standards: façades almost aligned, walls almost vertical, angles almost straight; but here and there a pilaster that looked like a column, with a showy scrolled capital. Thick roofs of straw, dark smoky interiors, where you glimpsed the enormous central stove and on it the straw pallets for sleeping, the black icons in a corner. At one intersection a storyteller was singing, a white-haired, barefoot giant; he stared at the sky with unseeing eyes, and at intervals bent his head and made the sign of the cross with his thumb on his forehead. On the main street, nailed to two stakes stuck in the muddy ground, was a wooden tablet with Europe painted on it, and now faded by the suns and rains of many summers. It must have been used for following bulletins from the war, but it had been painted from memory, as if seen from an extreme distance: France was definitely a coffeepot, the Iberian peninsula a head in profile, with the nose sticking out from Portugal, and Italy an authentic boot, on a very slight angle, with the sole and the heel smooth and aligned. In Italy only

four cities had been marked: Rome, Venice, Naples, and Dronero. Zhmerynka was a large agricultural village, in former times a marketplace, as one could deduce from the vast central square, of beaten earth, with numerous parallel rows of iron bars for tying up the beasts by the halter. Now it was absolutely empty: only, in one corner, in the shadow of an oak, a tribe of nomads was camped, a vision arising from long-ago millennia. Men and women, they were covered by goatskins, tied to their limbs by leather straps; on their feet they wore sandals of birch bark. There were several families, twenty people, and their house was an enormous cart, massive as a tank, made of roughly squared interlocking beams, resting on powerful solid wooden wheels; the four large shaggy horses that could be seen grazing a little beyond must have had a hard time hauling it. Who were they, where had they come from, and where were they going? We didn’t know; but at the time we felt them singularly close, like us tossed by the wind, like us entrusted to the changeability of a distant and unknown arbiter, who was symbolized by the wheels that transported us and them, in the stupid perfection of a circle without beginning and without end. Not far from the square, along the railroad tracks, we ran into another fateful apparition. A stockpile of tree trunks, heavy and rough like everything in that country where the subtle and the refined have no place: among the trunks, lying facedown in the sun, burned by the sun, were a dozen stray German prisoners, in a feral state. No one watched them, no one commanded them or took care of them; from every appearance, they had been forgotten, simply abandoned to their lot. They were dressed in faded rags, in which the proud uniforms of the Wehrmacht could still be recognized. Their faces were gaunt, bewildered, savage; accustomed to live, to work, to fight within the rigid framework of Authority, their support and their nourishment, when that authority ceased they became impotent, weak, lifeless. Those good subjects, good

executors of all orders, good instruments of power, possessed in themselves not a parcel of power. They were emptied and inert, like dead leaves piled by the wind in hidden corners; they hadn’t sought safety in flight. They saw us, and some moved toward us with uncertain steps, like automatons. They asked for bread: not in their language but, rather, in Russian. We refused, since our bread was precious. But Daniele didn’t refuse: Daniele, whose strong wife, whose brother, parents, and no fewer than thirty relatives the Germans had killed; Daniele, who was the sole survivor of the raid on the ghetto of Venice, and who since the day of the liberation had fed on his grief, took out some bread, and showed it to those specters, and placed it on the ground. But he demanded that they come to get it, crawling on the earth: which they did docilely. That groups of former Allied prisoners had embarked at Odessa months earlier, as some Russians had told us, must have been true, since the station in Zhmerynka, our temporary and hardly intimate residence, still bore signs of them: a triumphal arch made of branches, now withered, that bore the slogan “Long live the United Nations”; and enormous horrible portraits of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, with quotations celebrating the victory against the common enemy. But the short season of harmony among the three great allies must now be reaching its end, since the portraits were faded and washed out by the bad weather, and were taken down during our stay. A painter arrived; he put up a scaffolding along the façade of the station, and canceled out under a layer of plaster the slogan “Workers of all the world, unite!” in place of which we saw, with a faint chill, another, very different one appear, letter by letter: “Vperèd na zapàd,” “On toward the west.” The repatriation of the Allied soldiers was now over, but other convoys arrived and departed southward right before our eyes. They were also Russian transports, but very distinct from the glorious homely military transports that we had seen passing through Katowice. These were the transports of Ukrainian women who were returning from Germany: women only, since the men had gone as soldiers or partisans, or the Germans had killed them.

Their exile had been different from ours, and from that of the prisoners of war. Not all, but in large part, they had abandoned their country “willingly.” A coerced, blackmailed willingness, distorted by lies and by subtle, heavy Nazi propaganda, which threatened and blandished through manifestos, newspapers, radio: yet a willingness, an assent. Hundreds of thousands of women, from sixteen to forty, peasants, students, workers, had left the ruined fields, the closed schools, the ravaged workshops, for the bread of the invaders. Not a few were mothers, and for bread they had left their children. In Germany they had found bread, barbed wire, hard labor, German order, slavery, and shame; and bearing the weight of the shame they were now coming home, without joy and without hope. Russia the conqueror had no indulgence for them. They returned home in freight cars, often open, and divided horizontally by a wooden partition so that the space could be better employed: sixty, eighty women in a car. They had no baggage: only the threadbare, faded dresses they wore. Youthful bodies, still strong and healthy, but closed and bitter faces, furtive eyes, a disturbing, animal-like humiliation and resignation; no voice came from those tangles of limbs, which unknotted lazily when the convoys stopped in the station. No one was waiting for them, no one seemed aware of them. Their inertia, their isolation, their painful lack of modesty were those of humiliated and tamed animals. We alone watched with pity and sadness their passing, new testimony and a new aspect of the pestilence that had devastated Europe.

We left Zhmerynka at the end of June, oppressed by a heavy anguish arising from disappointment and from the uncertainty of our fate, and finding an obscure resonance and confirmation in the scenes we had witnessed there. Including the “Romanians,” we were fourteen hundred Italians. We were loaded into some thirty freight cars, which were attached to a train heading north. No one in Zhmerynka knew or wished to explain our destination; but we went north, away from the sea, away from Italy, toward prison, solitude, darkness, winter. In spite of everything, we considered it a

good sign that provisions hadn’t been distributed for the journey: maybe it wouldn’t be long. We traveled in fact only for two days and a night, with very few stops, through a majestic and monotonous landscape of desert steppes, forests, remote villages, slow, wide rivers. Crammed into the freight cars, we were uncomfortable: the first night, taking advantage of a stop, Cesare and I got out to stretch our legs and look for a better arrangement. We noted that at the front of the train were various passenger cars and an infirmary car: it appeared empty. “Why not get in?” Cesare proposed. “It’s prohibited,” I said foolishly. Why in fact should it be prohibited, and by whom? Besides, we had already observed on various occasions that the Western (and in particular German) religion of the differentiating ban does not have deep roots in Russia. The infirmary car was not only empty but offered sybaritic refinements. Functioning washrooms, with water and soap; a very gentle suspension that muffled the jolting of the wheels; marvelous little beds hung on adjustable springs, complete with white sheets and warm blankets. At the head of the bed I had chosen, I found an extra gift of fate, a book in Italian: The Boys of Via Paal, which I had never read as a child. While our companions had declared us lost, we spent a dreamlike night. The train crossed the Berezina at the end of the second day of the journey, while the sun—as red as a pomegranate, sinking obliquely amid the trees in an enchanted slow motion —clothed in bloody light the waters, the woods, and the epic plain, still scattered with the remains of weapons and baggage wagons. The journey ended a few hours later, in the middle of the night, at the peak of a violent storm. We were made to get out in the downpour, in absolute darkness, broken here and there by lamps. We walked for half an hour, Indian file, through the grass and the mud, each gripping like a blind man the man who preceded him, and I don’t know who was leading the leader; finally, soaked to the bone, we approached an enormous dark building, half destroyed by bombs. The rain continued, the floor was muddy and wet, and more water fell through the holes in the roof: we waited for day in a laborious, passive waking sleep.

A splendid day dawned. We went outside, and only then realized that we had spent the night in the orchestra seats of a theater, and that we were in an extensive complex of damaged and abandoned Soviet barracks. All the buildings had been ransacked and plundered in the meticulous German manner. The German armies in retreat had carried off everything that could be carried off: windows and doors, grates, railings, the entire systems of lighting and heating, water pipes, even the fence stakes. The walls had been stripped down to the last nail. From an adjacent railroad junction the rails and the ties had been torn up—with a machine just for the purpose, the Russians told us. More than a sack, in other words: the genius of destruction, of counter-creation, here as at Auschwitz; the mystique of the void, beyond any requirement of war or impulse to plunder. But they had not been able to carry off the unforgettable frescoes that covered the walls inside: the work of some anonymous poet-soldier, naïve, strong, and crude. Three giant horsemen, equipped with swords, helmets, and clubs, stopping on a height, and gazing over a boundless horizon of virgin lands to conquer. Stalin, Lenin, Molotov, reproduced with reverent affection in intent, with sacrilegious audacity in effect, and recognizable principally and respectively by the mustache, the little beard, and the eyeglasses. A foul spider, at the center of a spiderweb as big as the wall: it has a black tuft between the eyes, a swastika on its back, and underneath is written, “Death to Hitler’s invaders.” A tall, fair-haired Soviet soldier in chains raises a manacled hand to judge his judges; and these, hundreds of them, all against one, sitting on the benches of a courtroom-amphitheater, are disgusting maninsects, with pinched, crushed, gray and yellow faces, ghoulish as skulls, and they draw back, one against the other, like lemurs who flee the light, driven into the void by the prophetic gesture of the hero-prisoner. In these spectral barracks, and under the open sky, in vast courtyards invaded by weeds, thousands of foreigners were camped, in transit like us, belonging to all the nations of Europe.

The kind warmth of the sun began to penetrate the damp earth, and everything around us was steamy. I walked a few hundred meters away from the theater, heading into the thick grass of a meadow where I intended to undress and dry in the sun: and right in the middle of the meadow, as if he were waiting for me, whom should I see but Mordo Nahum, my Greek, almost unrecognizable for his magnificent plumpness and the improvised Soviet uniform he wore. And he looked at me with pale owl’s eyes, lost in his rosy, round, red-bearded face. He welcomed me with fraternal cordiality, ignoring a malicious question of mine about the United Nations that had managed things so badly for them, the Greeks. He asked how I was: Did I need anything? food? clothes? Yes, I couldn’t deny it, I needed many things. “It will be provided,” he answered, mysterious and magnanimous. “I count for something here.” He paused briefly, and added, “Do you need a woman?” I looked at him dumbfounded; I was afraid I hadn’t understood. But the Greek, with a broad gesture, took in with his hand three-quarters of the horizon: and then I saw that in the tall grass, near and far, some twenty large girls lay stretched out in the sun, napping. They were blond, rosy creatures, with powerful backs, big bones, and placid, bovine faces, and were dressed in various crude and incongruous outfits. “They come from Bessarabia,” the Greek explained. “They’re all my employees. The Russians like them this way, white and heavy. It was a big pagaille here before; but since I’ve taken charge, everything runs wonderfully—cleanliness, variety, discretion, and no question about the money. It’s a good business, too, and sometimes moi aussi j’y prends mon plaisir.” There returned to mind, in a new light, the episode of the hard-boiled egg, and the Greek’s contemptuous challenge: “Come on, tell me some article I’ve never dealt in!” No, I didn’t need a woman, or at least not in that sense. We parted after a friendly conversation; and after that, since the whirlwind that had convulsed that old Europe, dragging it into a wild contra dance of separations and meetings, had come to

rest, I never saw my Greek master again, or heard news of him.

A Little Hen

The transit camp where I had so fortuitously seen Mordo Nahum again was called Slutsk. Anyone who looked on a good map of the Soviet Union for the small town that bears this name could, with a little patience, find it, in White Russia, a hundred kilometers south of Minsk. But on no map is the village called Starye Doroghi, our final destination, marked. In July 1945, ten thousand persons were staying in Slutsk; I say “persons” because any more restrictive term would be inaccurate. There were men, and also a good number of women and children. There were Catholics, Jews, Orthodox, and Muslims; there were whites and yellows and various blacks in American uniform; German, Poles, French, Greeks, Dutch, Italians, and others; and also Germans who claimed to be Austrians, Austrians who declared they were Swiss, Russians who called themselves Italians, a woman dressed as a man, and even, standing out amid the ragged crowd, a Magyar general in full uniform, quarrelsome and colorful and as stupid as a rooster. We were comfortable in Slutsk. It was hot, even too hot; we slept on the ground, but there was no work and there was food for everyone. In fact, the food service was marvelous: it was assigned by the Russians, in rotation by the week, to each of the main nationalities represented in the camp. We ate in a vast, light, clean room; every table had eight places, all you had to do was arrive at the right time and sit down, without checks or shifts or lines, and immediately the procession of volunteer cooks arrived, with surprising dishes, along with bread and tea. During our brief stay the Hungarians were in charge: they made spicy stews, and enormous portions of spaghetti with parsley, overcooked and wildly sweetened. In addition, faithful to their national idols, they had formed a Gypsy orchestra: six provincial musicians, in velvet trousers and doublets of embroidered leather, majestic and sweaty, who

started with the Soviet national anthem, the Hungarian, and “Hatikva” (in honor of the large nucleus of Hungarian Jews), and then continued with frivolous, interminable czardas, until the last diner had laid down his fork. The camp wasn’t fenced. It consisted of crumbling buildings, one or two stories high, aligned on the four sides of a vast, empty grassy space, probably the old parade ground. Under the burning sun of the Russian summer, this appeared dotted with people sleeping, or busy delousing themselves, mending their clothes, or cooking over makeshift fires, and was animated by more active groups, playing ball or ninepins. The center was dominated by an enormous low square wooden shed, with three entrances, all on the same side. Over the three doorways, in large Cyrillic letters traced in red lead by an uncertain hand, were written three words: “Muzhskaya,” “Zhenskaya,” “Ofitserskaya,” that is to say For Men, For Women, For Officials. It was the camp latrine, and its most prominent feature. Inside, there was only a floor of rough boards and a hundred square holes, ten by ten, like a gigantic Rabelaisian multiplication table. There were no subdivisions between the compartments intended for the three sexes; or if there had been they had disappeared. The Russian administration paid absolutely no attention to the camp, so as to make one doubt that it 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 that you could anchor your memory to. One day we tried leaving the rectangle of the barracks, and going out into the plain to gather edible grasses: but after half an hour of walking we found ourselves as if in the middle of the sea, at the center of the horizon, without a tree, a height, a house to take as a goal. To us Italians, used to the background of mountains and hills, and the plain crowded with the signs of human presence, the immense, heroic Russian space was dizzying, and made our hearts heavy with painful memories. We tried to cook the grasses we had gathered, but got almost nothing useful.

I had found in an attic an obstetrics tract, in German, with a lot of colored illustrations, in two heavy volumes: and since printed paper is for me a vice, and for more than a year I had been starved for it, I spent my time reading randomly, or sleeping in the sun in the wild grass. One morning, with mysterious, lightning-like speed, the news spread that we were to leave Slutsk, on foot, to be settled in Starye Doroghi, seventy kilometers away, in a camp for Italians alone. The Germans, in such circumstances, would have covered the walls with bilingual announcements, clearly printed, specifying the hour of departure, the approved baggage, the timetable, and the death penalty for the recalcitrant. The Russians, on the other hand, let the order spread on its own, and allowed the march to organize itself. The news provoked a certain turmoil. In ten days, we had settled ourselves in Slutsk, more or less comfortably, and in particular we were afraid of leaving the overwhelming abundance of the Slutsk kitchens for who knows what wretched situation. Besides, seventy kilometers is a lot; none of us were in shape for such a long march, and few had proper shoes. We tried in vain to get more precise information from the Russian Command: all we could find out was that we were to leave the morning of July 20, and that a real Russian Command did not appear to exist. On the morning of July 20 we gathered in the central square, like an immense caravan of Gypsies. At the last minute we learned that there was a railroad line between Slutsk and Starye Doroghi, yet only the women and children were allowed to travel by train, along with the usual well-connected types, and the no less usual clever ones. On the other hand, to get around the tenuous bureaucracy that ruled our fates did not take exceptional astuteness; but not many of us realized it at the time. The order to depart was given around ten, and immediately afterward a counterorder. Numerous other false departures followed this one, so that we got moving only around midday, without having eaten.

A major highway passes through Slutsk and Starye Doroghi, the one that connects Warsaw with Moscow. In those days it was in complete disrepair: it consisted of two side lanes, of bare earth, meant for horses, and one in the center, formerly paved but then torn up by explosions and the tracks of the armored tanks, and so not very different from the other two. The road traverses an endless plain, almost without inhabited places, and is therefore made up of long straight stretches: between Slutsk and Starye Doroghi there was a single, barely noticeable curve. We left with a certain bravado: the weather was splendid, we were fairly well nourished, and the idea of a long walk in the heart of that legendary country, the Pripet Marshes, had in itself a certain fascination. But our opinion very quickly changed. In no other part of Europe, I believe, can you walk for ten hours and find yourself always in the same place, as in a nightmare: always ahead of you the road leads straight to the horizon, always on both sides is steppe and forest, and always behind you the road goes straight to the opposite horizon, like the wake of a ship; and there are no villages, no houses, no smoke, not a milestone that in some way might indicate that a little distance has been gained; and you do not meet a living soul, except flocks of crows, or a hawk cruising lazily in the wind. After several hours of walking, our column, initially compact, meandered for two or three kilometers. At the tail end was a Russian military cart, drawn by two horses and driven by a sullen, monstrous noncommissioned officer: he had lost his lips in battle, and from the nose to the chin his face was a terrifying skull. I think he was supposed to pick up the exhausted; instead, he was busy diligently retrieving the baggage that was gradually abandoned on the road by people who were too tired to carry it farther. For a while we had the illusion that he would give it back upon our arrival, but the first person who tried to stop and wait for the cart was greeted by shouts, cracks of the whip, and inarticulate threats. This was the end of the two volumes of obstetrics, which constituted by far the weightiest part of my personal baggage.

At sunset, our group was proceeding by itself. Beside me walked the mild and patient Leonardo; Daniele, limping and enraged by thirst and tiredness; Signor Unverdorben, with a friend of his from Trieste; and Cesare, of course. We stopped to rest at the single curve that interrupted the fierce monotony of the road; there was a roofless hut, perhaps the only visible remains of a village destroyed by the war. Behind it, we discovered a well, where we slaked our thirst with pleasure. We were tired and our feet were swollen and covered with sores. I had long ago lost my archbishop’s shoes, and had inherited from somewhere or other a pair of bicycle shoes, as light as feathers; but they were tight, and I was forced to take them off periodically and walk barefoot. We held a short council: what if that fellow made us walk all night? It wouldn’t be surprising: once at Katowice the Russians had made us unload boots from a train for twentyfour hours straight, working alongside us themselves. Why not hide in the woods? We would arrive at Starye Doroghi at our own pace the next day; the Russian certainly didn’t have a roster for taking a roll call, the night was announcing itself as warm, there was water, and, among the six of us, we had not much but something for dinner. Though the hut was in ruins, there was still a bit of roof to shelter us from the dew. “Excellent,” said Cesare. “I’m for it. Tonight, I want to get a roast chicken.” So we hid in the woods until the cart with the skeleton had passed, waited until the last stragglers had left the well, and took possession of our campground. We spread out our blankets, opened our bags, lit a fire, and began to prepare dinner, with bread, millet kasha, and a can of peas. “What a meal,” said Cesare. “What peas. You didn’t understand. I want to celebrate tonight, and I want to make a roast chicken.” Cesare is an indomitable man: going around the markets of Katowice with him had already convinced me of that. It was futile to insist that to find a chicken at night, in the Pripet Marshes, without knowing Russian and without money to pay

for it, was a senseless proposition. It was pointless to offer him a double ration of kasha to quiet him. “You all stay here with your lousy little kasha: I’m going to look for a chicken by myself, but then you won’t see me again. I say goodbye to you and the Russians and the hut—I’m off, and I’ll get back to Italy by myself. Maybe even by way of Japan.” It was then that I offered to go with him. Not so much because of the chicken or because of the threats; but I love Cesare, and I like to see him at work. “Bravo, Lapé,” Cesare said to me. Lapé is me: Cesare named me long ago, and he still calls me that, for the following reason. It’s well-known that in the Lager we had shaved heads; when we were liberated, our hair, and mine especially, after a year of being shaved, had grown back oddly soft and smooth. At that time mine was still very short, and Cesare claimed that it reminded him of the skin of a rabbit. Now, “rabbit,” or rather “rabbit skin,” in the mercantile jargon in which Cesare specializes, is lapé. Daniele, however, the bearded and bristly and frowning Daniele, thirsting for revenge and justice like an ancient prophet, was called Corallí, because, Cesare said, if coralline—glass beads—rained down you would thread them all. “Bravo, Lapé,” he said to me, and explained his plan. Cesare is in fact a man with crazy ideas, but then he pursues them with great practical sense. He hadn’t dreamed the chicken: from the hut, to the north, he had glimpsed a path that was well trodden, and thus recent. It was likely that it led to a village; now, if there was a village, there were also chickens. We went outside: it was almost dark by now, and Cesare was right. On the brow of a barely perceptible undulation in the earth, perhaps two kilometers away, between the trees, we could see a light shining. So we set off, stumbling through the stubble, followed by swarms of voracious mosquitoes. We carried with us the only goods for barter that our group was willing to part with: our six plates, common earthenware plates that the Russians had at one point distributed as part of our barracks equipment.

We walked in the dark, careful not to lose the path, and we periodically shouted. From the village no one answered. When we were a hundred meters away, Cesare stopped, took a deep breath, and cried, “Hey, you Russians. We’re friends. Italianski. Do you have a chicken to sell?” This time there was an answer: a flash in the darkness, a sharp crack, and the whine of a bullet, a few meters above our heads. I lay down on the ground, gently, so as not to break the plates, but Cesare was furious, and remained standing: “Damn you! We’re friends, I told you. Sons of a bitch, give us a chance. We want a chicken. We’re not thieves, we’re not Deutschi, we’re Italianski!” There were no more gunshots, and already human outlines could be glimpsed on the edge of the height. We approached cautiously, Cesare in front, continuing his persuasive speech, and I behind, ready to throw myself to the ground again. Finally we reached the village. There were no more than five or six houses around a tiny square, and there, waiting for us, was the entire population, some thirty people, the majority old peasant women, plus children and dogs, all obviously alarmed. A large bearded old man emerged from the small crowd, the one who had fired the shot; he was still pointing the gun at us. Cesare now considered that he had performed his role, which was the strategic one, and called me to my duties. “It’s your turn now. What are you waiting for? Come on, explain to them that we’re Italians, that we don’t want to hurt anyone, and that we want to buy a chicken to roast.” Those people looked at us with suspicious curiosity. They seemed to have decided that, although dressed like escaped prisoners, we weren’t dangerous. The old ladies had stopped chattering, and even the dogs were quiet. The old man with the gun asked us some questions that we didn’t understand; I know only a hundred words of Russian, and none of them suited the situation, with the exception of “Italianski.” So I repeated “Italianski” several times, until the old man began in turn to say “Italianski” for the benefit of the bystanders.

Meanwhile Cesare, more concrete, had taken the plates out of the bag, displayed five of them in full view, on the ground, as if at the market, and held the sixth in his hand, tapping the edge with his nail to let them hear that it had the right sound. The peasant women watched, amused and intrigued. “Tarelki,” said one. “Tarelki, da!” I answered, happy to have learned the name of the goods we were offering, at which one of them extended a hesitant hand toward the plate that Cesare was demonstrating. “Hey, what are you thinking?” he said, pulling it back alertly. “We’re not giving them away.” And he turned to me angrily. So what was I waiting for, why wasn’t I asking for a chicken in exchange? What was the use of my studies? I was embarrassed. Russian, they say, is an Indo-European language, and chickens must have been known to our common ancestors in an epoch long before their subdivision into the various modern ethnic families. His fretus, that is to say, on that fine logic, I tried to say “chicken” and “bird” in all the ways known to me, but obtained no evident results. Cesare was also perplexed. Cesare, in his heart of hearts, had never been fully convinced that the Germans spoke German, and the Russians Russian, except out of a peculiar spitefulness; he was further persuaded, deep down, that only out of a refinement of that spitefulness did they claim not to understand Italian. Spite, or extreme and outrageous ignorance: open barbarity. There were no other possibilities. So his bewilderment was rapidly turning into rage. He muttered and cursed. Was it possible that it was so difficult to understand what a chicken is, and that we wished to exchange six plates for one? A chicken, the kind that go around pecking, scratching, and saying “cockaday.” Without much faith, grim and scowling, he performed a terrible imitation of the habits of chickens, squatting on the ground, scraping with one foot then the other, and pecking here and there with his hand in a wedge shape. Between curses, he also went “cockaday”; but, of course, that interpretation of the chicken’s sound is highly artificial; it exists exclusively in Italy and has not spread elsewhere.

So we got no results. They looked at us in astonishment, and certainly took us for madmen. Why, for what purpose, had we come from the ends of the Earth to do this mysterious clowning in their square? Now furious, Cesare even tried to produce an egg, and meanwhile insulted them in fantastic ways, making still more obscure the meaning of his performance. At this indecorous show, the chatter of the old ladies rose an octave and became the sound of an agitated wasps’ nest. When I saw one of them approach the bearded fellow, and speak to him nervously, looking in our direction, I realized that the situation was in jeopardy. I made Cesare get up from his unnatural postures, calmed him, and with him went over to the man. I said, “Please, sir,” and led him near a window, from which the light of a lantern illuminated a rectangle of earth fairly well. Here, painfully conscious of many suspicious looks, I drew a chicken in the dirt, complete with all its attributes, including—out of an excessive zeal for specifics— an egg behind. Then I got up and said, “You plates. We eat.” A brief consultation followed, then an old woman, her eyes sparkling with joy and acuity, emerged from the group: she took two steps forward and in a shrill voice uttered, “Kura! Kuritsa!” She was very proud and pleased that she was the one who had solved the puzzle. From all directions laughter and applause broke out, and voices: “Kuritsa, kuritsa!” And we, too, clapped our hands, captivated by the game and by the general enthusiasm. The old woman bowed, like an actress at the end of the performance; she disappeared and after a few minutes reappeared with a hen, already plucked. She swung it comically under Cesare’s nose, as a double check; and when she saw that he reacted positively, she loosened her grip, picked up the plates, and carried them off. Cesare, who knew because at one time he had had a stall at Porta Portese, assured me that the curizetta was fat enough and was worth our six plates; we carried it back to the hut, waked our companions, who were already asleep, lit the fire again,

cooked the chicken, and ate it in our fingers, because we no longer had any plates.

Old Roads

The chicken, and the night spent in the open, did us good, like a medicine. After a solid sleep, which restored us, even though we had slept on the bare ground, we woke in the morning in excellent health and mood. We were happy because there was sun, because we felt free, because of the good smell that came from the earth, and also partly because two kilometers away were people who were not mean, in fact shrewd and inclined to laughter, who had indeed shot at us but then had welcomed us kindly and had even sold us a chicken. We were happy because that day (we didn’t know about tomorrow: but what may happen tomorrow isn’t always important) we could do things that for too long we hadn’t done: drink water from a well, lie in the sun in the tall, vigorous grass, smell the summer air, light a fire and cook, go into the woods for strawberries and mushrooms, smoke a cigarette looking at a high sky cleared by the wind. We could do these things, and we did, with childish joy. But our reserves were reaching an end: one cannot live on strawberries and mushrooms, and none of us (not even Cesare, urbanized and a Roman citizen “since the time of Nero”) were morally and technically equipped for a precarious life of vagabondage and agricultural thieving. The choice was clear: either immediate reentry into civilized society or starvation. From civilized society, and that is from the mysterious camp of Starye Doroghi, thirty kilometers of a dizzyingly straight road separated us, however. We would have to do it all at once, and then maybe we would arrive in time for the evening ration; or we could camp along the road again, in freedom, but with empty stomachs. We made a rapid survey of our possessions. It wasn’t much: eight rubles between us all. It was difficult to establish what their buying power was, at that time and in that place; our previous monetary experiences with the Russians had been

erratic and absurd. Some of them accepted with no trouble money from any country, even German or Polish; others were suspicious, afraid of being swindled, and accepted only exchanges in kind or metal coins. Of the latter, the most unexpected types were in circulation, coins from tsarist times, emerging from atavistic family hiding places, British pounds, Scandinavian kroner, even old coins from the AustroHungarian Empire. By contrast, in Zhmerynka the walls of one of the station latrines were studded with German marks, meticulously pasted to the wall, one by one, with an unmentionable material. In any case, eight rubles wasn’t much: worth one or two eggs. It was decided collegially that Cesare and I, now accredited as ambassadors, should go back to the village, and see there what could best be bought with eight rubles. We set off, and along the way an idea occurred to us: not goods but services. The best investment would be to rent from our friends a horse and cart to Starye Doroghi. Maybe the money wasn’t much, but we could try to offer some item of clothing, since it was very hot. So we showed up in the farmyard and were welcomed with affectionate greetings and complicit laughter from the old ladies and by a furious barking of dogs. When silence was restored, I said, fortified by my Michael Strogoff and other long-ago readings, “Telega. Starye Doroghi,” and displayed the eight rubles. There followed a confused murmur. Strange to say, no one had understood. Nevertheless, my task presented itself as less arduous than that of the night before; in a corner of the farmyard, under a shed, I had noticed a four-wheeled farm cart, long and narrow, with sides rising in a V shape—in other words, a telega. I touched it, a little impatient with the obtuseness of these people: was this not a telega? “Tyelyega!” the bearded man corrected me, with paternal severity, outraged by my barbaric pronunciation. “Da. Tyelyega na Starye Doroghi. We pay. Eight rubles.” The offer was laughable: the equivalent of two eggs for thirty plus thirty kilometers on the road, twelve hours of travel.

But the bearded man put the rubles in his pocket, disappeared into the barn, returned with a mule, tied him between the shafts, made a sign to us to get in, loaded in some sacks, still silently, and we departed toward the main road. Cesare called the others, and we didn’t miss the chance to act important in front of them. We would have a comfortable journey in the telega, or rather in the tyelyega, and a triumphant entry into Starye Doroghi, all for eight rubles: that’s what knowledge of languages and diplomatic ability meant. We later realized (and, unfortunately, so did our companions) that, in reality, the eight rubles had been practically wasted: the bearded man had to go to Starye Doroghi anyway, on his own business, and maybe he would have taken us for nothing. We got on the road around midday, lying on the sacks, which were not too soft. However, it was much better than walking; among other things, we could enjoy the countryside at our ease. This was unusual for us, and wonderful. The plain, which the day before had oppressed us with its solemn emptiness, was no longer strictly flat. It was rippled by slight, barely perceptible undulations, perhaps ancient dunes, no more than a few meters high, but just enough to break the monotony, rest the eye, and create a rhythm, a measure. Between one undulation and the next lay ponds and marshes, large and small. The exposed earth was sandy, and bristling here and there with wild thickets of brush; elsewhere were tall trees, but rare and isolated. On both sides of the road lay shapeless rusty relics, artillery, carts, barbed wire, helmets, oil drums: the remains of the two armies that for so many months had confronted each other in those places. We had entered the region of the Pripet Marshes. The road and the land were deserted, but just before sunset we noticed that someone was following us: a man who walked vigorously in our direction, black against the white dust. He was gaining ground slowly but continuously: soon he was in shouting distance, and we recognized in him the Moor, Avesani from Avesa, the big old man. He, too, had spent the

night in some hiding place, and now was marching toward Starye Doroghi at a tempestuous pace, his white hair windblown, his bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead. He advanced as steady and powerful as a steam engine: tied to his back was the famous heavy pack, and, hanging from it, his ax flashed, like the scythe of Kronos. He prepared to pass us as if he didn’t see us or recognize us. Cesare called to him and invited him to get in. “The dishonor of the world. Nasty inhuman pigs,” the Moor promptly replied, giving voice to the blasphemous litany that constantly occupied his mind. He passed us, and continued his mythic march toward the horizon opposite the one he had arisen from. Signor Unverdorben knew much more about the Moor than we did; we learned then that the Moor was not (or was not only) an old lunatic. The pack had a reason, and so, too, had the wandering life of the old man. A widower for many years, he had a daughter, only one, now nearly fifty, and she was in bed, paralyzed; she would never be cured. For this daughter the Moor lived. Every week he wrote her a letter destined not to arrive; for her alone he had worked all his life, and had become dark as the wood of the walnut and hard as stone. For her alone, the Moor, wandering the world, put in his sack whatever he happened on, any object that offered even the slightest possibility of being enjoyed or exchanged. We met no other living beings until we reached Starye Doroghi.

Starye Doroghi was a surprise. It wasn’t a village; rather, a tiny village did exist, in the middle of the woods, some distance from the road; but we learned that later, and then we also learned that the name means “Old Roads.” Instead, the quarters meant for us, for all fourteen hundred Italians, was a single giant edifice, isolated on the edge of the road amid untilled fields and outgrowths of the forest. It was called Krasny Dom, the Red House, and in fact it was abundantly red, inside and out.

It was a truly singular construction, which had expanded at random in all directions like a lava flow; it was impossible to figure out if it was the work of many contradictory architects or of a single crazy one. The oldest part, now overpowered and suffocated by wings and rooms built later, haphazardly, consisted of a three-story block, subdivided into small rooms perhaps formerly given over to military or administrative offices. But around this block there were all sorts of things: a room for lectures or meetings, a series of school classrooms, kitchens, washrooms, a theater with at least a thousand seats, an infirmary, a gym; and, next to the main entrance, a storeroom with mysterious brackets, which we interpreted as a repository for skis. But in Starye Doroghi, too, as in Slutsk, nothing or almost nothing remained of the furniture and the fixtures; there was not only no water but even the pipes had been removed, as had the stoves in the kitchens, the seats in the theater, the desks in the classrooms, the banisters of the stairs. The stairs were the most obsessive element of the Red House. There was a profusion of them in the vast building: grand, lengthy staircases that led to absurd cubbyholes full of dust and rubbish; others that were narrow and uneven, interrupted halfway by a column erected quickly to prop up a dangerous ceiling; fragments of lopsided, forked, anomalous stairs connecting the floors of adjacent rooms that were on different levels. Memorable among all of them was a mammoth stairway along one of the façades whose steps, three meters wide, rose fifteen meters from a courtyard invaded by weeds, and led nowhere. Around the Red House there was no fence, not even a symbolic one, as at Katowice. There was not even a real system of surveillance; often a Russian soldier, usually a very young one, was stationed at the entrance, but he had no duties regarding the Italians. His task was only to keep other Russians from coming at night to bother the Italian women in their dormitories. The Russians, officers and soldiers, lived in a wooden barrack not far away, and others, passing through on the road, occasionally stayed there; but they seldom concerned

themselves with us. Those who were concerned with us were a small group of Italian officers, former prisoners of war, rather arrogant and rude; they were deeply conscious of their status as military men, they displayed contempt and indifference toward us civilians, and, a thing that didn’t fail to amaze us, they maintained good relations with the Soviets of equal rank in the barrack nearby. In fact, they enjoyed a privileged situation not only with respect to us but also with respect to the Soviet troops: they ate at the Russian officers’ mess, wore new Soviet uniforms (without ranks) and good military boots, and slept in camp beds with sheets and blankets. But there was no reason for complaint on our part, either. We were treated exactly like the Russian soldiers in terms of food and lodging, and were not subjected to any particular obedience or discipline. Only a few Italians worked, those who had volunteered spontaneously for kitchen or bathroom duty, or the electrical power unit, and Leonardo as a doctor, and I as a nurse; but by now, with the good weather, the sick were very few, and our job was a sinecure. Anyone who wanted to could leave. Many did, some out of pure boredom or a spirit of adventure, others in an attempt to cross the borders and return to Italy; but they all came back, after a few weeks or months of wandering, for, if the camp was neither guarded nor gated, the distant frontiers were, and heavily. No ideological pressure was brought to bear by the Russians, or, rather, no attempt to discriminate among us. Our community was too complicated. Former soldiers of the Armir, former partisans, former Häftlinge from Auschwitz, former workers in the Todt, former common criminals and prostitutes from San Vittore, whether we were Communists or monarchists or Fascists—toward us the Russians cultivated the most impartial indifference. We were Italians and that was enough: the rest was vse ravno, all the same. We slept on wooden planks covered with sacks of straw: fifty centimeters per man. At first we protested, because it seemed very little: but the Russian commander politely pointed out that our claim was unfounded. At the head of each

plank the names of the Soviet soldiers who had occupied these places before us could still be read, scribbled in pencil; we might judge for ourselves, there was a name every fifty centimeters. The same could be said, and was said, of the food. We received a kilo of bread a day: rye bread, almost unleavened, moist and acid, but it was a lot, and it was their bread. And the daily “kasha” was their “kasha”: a small dense block of lard, millet, beans, meat, and spices, nourishing but fiercely indigestible; after several days of experimenting we learned to make it edible by boiling it for several hours. Then, three or four times a week, fish was distributed, ryba. It was a large raw, unsalted river fish, of dubious freshness and full of bones. What to do with it? Few of us could get used to eating it as it was (as many Russians did); as for cooking it, we lacked pans, condiments, salt, and skill. Soon we were convinced that the best thing to do was sell it back to the Russians themselves, to the peasants in the village or the soldiers passing through. This meant a new career for Cesare, who soon arrived at a high degree of technical perfection. On the morning of the fish days, Cesare made the rounds of the rooms, equipped with a piece of wire. He collected the “ribba,” strung them eye to eye on the wire, put the foulsmelling garland over his shoulder, and disappeared. He returned many hours later, sometimes in the evening, and distributed equally among those who had commissioned him rubles, cheese, quarter chickens, and eggs, to everyone’s advantage but principally his own. With the first profits of his commerce he bought a steelyard scale, as a result of which his professional prestige increased notably. But to bring to completion a certain plan he had he needed another instrument, of less obvious usefulness: a syringe. There was no hope of finding one in the Russian village, and so he came to me in the infirmary, to ask if I could lend him one. “What do you want to do with it?” I asked.

“What do you care. A syringe. You’ve got a lot here.” “What size?” “The biggest you have. Even if it’s a little beat up, it doesn’t matter.” There was one, in fact, of twenty cubic centimeters, splintered and practically unusable. Cesare examined it carefully, and declared that it would do. “But what do you need it for?” I asked again. Cesare looked at me grimly, irritated by my lack of tact. He told me that it was his business, an idea he had, an experiment, and that it might go well and might not, and who did I think I was, sticking my nose in his private affairs. He wrapped up the syringe carefully and went off like an insulted prince. Yet the secret of the syringe didn’t last long: life at Starye Doroghi was too idle for gossip and interference in other people’s affairs not to proliferate. In the days that followed, Cesare was seen by Sora Litizia going for water with a bucket and carrying it into the woods; he was seen by the Stellina in the woods itself, sitting on the ground with the bucket in the middle of a circle of fish, which “he seemed to be feeding”; and finally he was met in the village by Rovati, his competitor: he was without the bucket and was selling fish, but they were very strange fish, fat, hard, and round, not flat and soft like the ones in our ration. Like many scientific discoveries, the idea of the syringe had originated in a failure and a chance observation. A few days before, Cesare had traded fish in the village for a live chicken. He had returned to the Red House convinced that he had done some excellent business: for only two fish he had gotten a fine hen, no longer young and with a slightly melancholy look, but extraordinarily large and fat. But, after he had killed and plucked it, he realized that something was wrong; the hen was asymmetrical, her stomach was all on one side, and offered to the touch something hard, mobile, and elastic. It wasn’t an egg: it was a large watery cyst. Cesare, naturally, had taken remedial action, and had managed to resell the animal right away to no less than

accountant Rovi, earning still more: but then, like a Stendhalian hero, he had thought about it. Why not imitate nature? Why not try with fish? At first he had tried to fill them with water using a straw, through the mouth, but it all came out. Then he had thought of the syringe. With the syringe he noticed some progress in many cases, but it depended on the point where he gave the injection: according to this, the water came out again, right away or soon afterward, or it stayed inside indefinitely. Then Cesare had dissected several fish with a knife, and had established that, to have a permanent effect, the injection had to be given in the air bladder. In this way the fish, which Cesare sold by weight, earned from 20 to 30 percent more than the normal ones, and they also had a much more attractive appearance. Certainly, ribba so treated could not be sold twice to the same customer; but one could easily sell them to the demobilized Russian soldiers who passed along the road straight to the east, and who would realize the business of the water only when they were many kilometers away. But one day he returned with a grim expression; he was without fish, without money, and without goods: “I got caught.” For two days there was no way to speak a word to him, he was huddled on his bed, bristling like a porcupine, and he came down only for meals. He had had an adventure different from the usual kind. He told me about it later, on a long warm evening, warning me not to tell anyone, since, if it became known, his business reputation would suffer. In fact, the fish hadn’t been violently seized by a fierce Russian, as he had first tried to make us think: the truth was different. He had given the fish as a present, he confessed, filled with shame. He had gone to the village and, to avoid customers who had previously been burned, he hadn’t showed up on the main street but had taken a path that went into the woods. After a few hundred meters he had seen a small, isolated cottage, or rather, a hut built of unmortared bricks and sheet metal. Outside was a thin woman in black, and three pale children

sitting on the doorstep. He had approached and offered her the fish; she had made him understand that she would like the fish but had nothing to give him in exchange, and that she and the children hadn’t eaten for two days. She had invited him into the hut, and in the hut there was nothing, only beds 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.

The Forest and the Path

We stayed at Starye Doroghi, in that Red House full of mysteries and trapdoors, like a fairy castle, for two long months: from July 15 to September 15 of 1945. They were months of idleness and relative well-being, and therefore full of a penetrating homesickness. Homesickness is a fragile, mild suffering, essentially different, more intimate, more human than the other pain we had endured up to that time: beatings, cold, hunger, terror, destitution, illness. It’s a clear, pure suffering, but insistent: it pervades all the minutes of the day, allows no other thoughts, and urges escape. Perhaps for this reason, the forest around the camp exercised a profound attraction on us. Perhaps because it offered, to anyone who sought it, the invaluable gift of solitude: and for how long had we been deprived of that! Perhaps because it reminded us of other woods, other solitudes of our previous existence; or perhaps, on the contrary, because it was solemn and austere and untouched, like no other scenery known to us. North of the Red House, beyond the road, extended a mixed terrain, of brush, clearings, and pinewoods, interspersed with marshes and spits of fine white sand; you encountered a few winding, barely marked paths, which led to distant houses. But to the south, a few hundred steps from the Red House, every human trace disappeared. Also every trace of animal life, except for the occasional tawny flash of a squirrel, or the still, sinister eye of a water snake, wrapped around a rotting trunk. There were no paths, no traces of woodcutters, nothing: only silence, abandonment, and tree trunks in every direction, pale trunks of birches, reddish brown of conifers, soaring vertically toward the invisible sky. Equally invisible was the soil, covered by a thick layer of dead leaves and needles and by clumps of wild underbrush up to your waist.

The first time I ventured into it I learned, to my cost, with surprise and fear, that the danger of “getting lost in the woods” isn’t found only in fairy tales. I had walked for about an hour, orienting myself as well as I could by the sun, visible here and there where the branches were less thick; but then the sky darkened, threatening rain, and when I wanted to return I realized I had lost north. Moss on the trunks? It was on every side. I set out in the direction that seemed to me most right: but after a long and painful walk among thornbushes and brambles I found myself at a point as unknown as the one I had started from. I walked again for hours, increasingly tired and worried, almost until sunset: and already I was thinking that even if my companions came to look for me they wouldn’t find me, or only days later, when I was exhausted by hunger, perhaps already dead. When the daylight began to fade, swarms of fat hungry mosquitoes rose, and other insects I wouldn’t know what to call, as big and hard as bullets, which darted blindly among the trunks, hitting me in the face. Then I decided to go straight ahead, approximately north (that is, keeping on my left a stretch of sky slightly more luminous, which must correspond to the west), and to walk without stopping until I encountered the main road, or at least a path or track. I advanced like that in the long twilight of the northern summer, almost until total darkness, now in the grip of an orgasmic panic, the ancient fear of shadows, of the woods, and of emptiness. In spite of my weariness, I felt a violent impulse to start running, in any direction, and to run as long as I had strength and breath. Suddenly I heard the whistle of a train. So I had the railroad on my right, while, according to the plan I had made, it should have been far to the left. I was therefore going in the wrong direction. Following the sound of the train, I reached the tracks before night, and following the shining rails in the direction of the Little Bear, which had reappeared among the clouds, I arrived safely first in Starye Doroghi, then at the Red House. But there were some who moved to the forest and lived there. The first was Cantarella, one of the “Romanians,” who

discovered the vocation of hermit. Cantarella was a taciturn and misanthropic Calabrian sailor who was very tall and of an ascetic thinness. He built a cabin of trunks and branches half an hour from the camp, and lived there in savage solitude, dressed only in a loincloth. He was a contemplative, but not idle: he practiced a strange priestly activity. He had a hammer and a kind of crude forge, which he had constructed out of war surplus and set in a stump; using these tools, and old tin cans, he fashioned pots and pans with great skill and religious diligence. He made them on commission, for new families. When, in our variegated community, a man and woman decided to make a common life, and so felt the need for a minimum of equipment in setting up house, they went to Cantarella, hand in hand. Asking no questions, he got to work, and in little more than an hour, with expert hammer blows, he bent and beat pieces of metal into the shapes that the couple desired. He asked for no compensation, but accepted gifts in kind, bread, cheese, eggs; thus the marriage was celebrated, and thus Cantarella lived. There were other inhabitants of the wood as well. I discovered it one day, following by chance a path I hadn’t noticed before, which penetrated toward the west, straight and well marked. It led to a particularly thick area of the wood, entered an old trench, and ended at the door of a log blockhouse, almost completely underground: only the roof and a chimney stuck out of the ground. I pushed on the door, which yielded; there was no one inside, but the place was evidently inhabited. On the bare dirt floor (but swept and clean) there was a small stove, some plates, a military mess tin; in a corner, a bed of straw; hanging on the walls, women’s clothes and photographs of men. Returning to the camp I learned that I was the only one who didn’t know about it: in the log house, notoriously, lived two German women. They were auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht, who hadn’t managed to follow the Germans in retreat and had remained cut off in Russian territory. They were afraid of the Russians and hadn’t surrendered; they had lived precariously

for months, on petty thefts, grasses, occasional, stealthy prostitution with the English and French who had occupied the Red House before us, until the settlement of the Italians had brought them prosperity and security. The women in our colony were few, no more than two hundred, and almost all had quickly found a stable arrangement: they were no longer available. Therefore, for an imprecise number of Italians, going “to the girls in the woods” had become a habit, and the only alternative to celibacy. An alternative filled with a complex fascination: because the matter was secret and vaguely dangerous (much more for the women than for them, in truth); because the girls were foreign and half wild; because they were in a state of poverty, and so one had the uplifting impression of “protecting them”; and because of the fairy-tale-exotic scene of the encounters. Not only Cantarella but also the Velletrano had ended up in the woods. The experiment of transplanting a “wild man” into civilization has been attempted many times, often with a good outcome, to demonstrate the fundamental unity of the human species. In the Velletrano the opposite experiment took place; he was a native of the overcrowded streets of Trastevere, who had been retransformed into a wild man with admirable ease. In reality, he was probably never very civilized. The Velletrano was a Jew of thirty, a survivor of Auschwitz. He must have presented a problem for the Auschwitz official assigned to the tattooing, because both his muscular forearms were already thickly covered with tattoos: the names of his women, as Cesare, who had known him for a while, explained to me, and also explained that the Velletrano wasn’t named Velletrano, nor had he been born in Velletri, but had been put out to nurse there. He almost never spent the night at the Red House: he lived in the forest, barefoot and half naked. He lived like our distant ancestors; he set traps for hares and foxes, he climbed trees for the nests, he killed turtledoves with stones, and didn’t disdain the chicken coops of the more distant farmhouses. He gathered mushrooms and berries generally considered inedible, and at night you’d often encounter him near the camp, squatting on

his heels in front of a big fire, on which, singing hoarsely, he was roasting the day’s prey. He then slept on the bare earth, bedding down beside the coals. But, since he was still a son of man, he pursued in his way virtue and knowledge, and perfected day by day his skills and his tools; he made a knife, then an assegai and a hatchet, and if he had had time I don’t doubt that he would have rediscovered agriculture and sheep farming. When the day had been good, he became sociable and friendly; through Cesare, who willingly offered to present him as a circus phenomenon and to recount his earlier, legendary adventures, he invited everyone to Homeric feasts of roasted meat, and if someone refused he turned mean and pulled out his knife. After some days of rain, and some of sun and wind, the mushrooms and blueberries in the woods grew in such abundance that they became of interest no longer in the purely georgic and sporting guise but also the utilitarian. All of us, having taken the proper precautions not to get lost on the way home, spent entire days harvesting. The blueberries, on bushes much taller than ours, were almost as big as walnuts, and flavorful; we brought them to the camp by the kilo, and even tried (but in vain) to ferment the juice into wine. As for the mushrooms, there were two varieties: some were normal porcini, tasty and certainly edible; the others were similar in shape and smell but larger and woody and of slightly different colors. None of us were sure that these were edible; on the other hand, could one leave them to rot in the woods? One could not: we were all malnourished, and, besides, the memory of hunger in Auschwitz was still too recent, and had become a violent mental stimulus, which obliged us to fill our stomachs as full as possible, and imperiously prevented us from giving up any occasion to eat. Cesare gathered a good quantity and boiled them following prescriptions and precautions unknown to me, adding to the mixture vodka and garlic bought in the village, which “kill all poisons.” Then he himself ate some, but only a little, and he offered a little to many people, so as to limit the risk and have an abundance of case histories available

the next day. The next day he made the rounds of the dormitories, and had never been so polite and solicitous: “How are you, Sora Elvira? How’s it going, Don Vincenzo? Did you sleep well? Did you have a good night?” and meanwhile he looked them in the face with a clinical eye. They were all fine, the strange mushrooms could be eaten. For the laziest and the wealthiest, it wasn’t necessary to go into the woods to find “extra” food. The commercial dealings between the village of Starye Doroghi and us guests of the Red House soon became intense. Every morning peasant women arrived with baskets and buckets; they sat on the ground, without moving, for hours as they waited for customers. If a rain shower came, they didn’t move from their spot but only folded their skirts over their heads. The Russians made two or three attempts to expel them, putting up two or three bilingual signs that threatened the parties with punishments of senseless severity; then, as usual, they lost interest in the matter, and the trading continued undisturbed. There were old women and young: the former dressed in the traditional way, with embroidered and quilted jackets and a kerchief tied over their heads; the latter in light cotton dresses, most of them barefoot, free, bold, and ready to laugh, but not impudent. Besides mushrooms, blueberries, and raspberries, they sold milk, cheese, eggs, chickens, vegetables, and fruit, and accepted in exchange fish, bread, tobacco, and any item of clothing or piece of fabric, even the most torn and threadbare, and also rubles, naturally, from those who still had some. Cesare soon knew them all, especially the young ones. I often went with him to the Russian women, to help with their interesting negotiations. I don’t mean to deny the usefulness of speaking the same language in a business matter, but, from experience, I can state that it is not strictly necessary. Each of the two parties knows perfectly well what the other wants; initially he doesn’t know the intensity of the desire, to buy and to sell, respectively, but he deduces it with excellent approximation from the other’s facial expression, from his gestures, and from the number of his replies.

Here’s Cesare, showing up early at the market with a fish. He looks for Irina and finds her; she’s his contemporary and friend, whose liking he won some time ago by baptizing her Greta Garbo and giving her a pencil; Irina has a cow and sells milk, moloko, and in fact often, in the evening, returning from the fields, she stops at the Red House and milks directly into the containers of her customers. This morning it’s a matter of agreeing how much milk Cesare’s fish is worth. Cesare displays a two-liter pot (it’s one of Cantarella’s, and Cesare got it from a “ménage” that dissolved because of incompatibility) and makes a sign with outstretched hand, palm down, which means full. Irina laughs, and answers with lively, harmonious words, probably insults; she pushes Cesare’s hand away with a slap, and with two fingers points halfway up the side of the pot. Now it’s Cesare’s turn to be indignant. He waves the fish (not tampered with), holding it in the air by the tail with enormous effort, as if it weighed twenty kilos, and says, “This is a ribbona!” then runs it under Irina’s nose for its full length, closing his eyes and breathing in deeply as he does so, as if intoxicated by its fragrance. Taking advantage of the instant when Cesare has his eyes closed, Irina, quick as a cat, grabs the fish, cleanly detaches the head with her white teeth, and throws the flaccid mutilated body in Cesare’s face, with all of her remarkable strength. Then, in order not to ruin friendship and negotiation, she touches the pot three-quarters of the way up: a liter and a half. Cesare, partly stunned by the blow, mumbles in a hollow voice, “Yeees, and you’d like to get by with so little?” and other obscene gallantries suitable for restoring his manly honor; then, however, he accepts Irina’s last offer, and leaves her the fish, which she devours on the spot. We were to find the voracious Irina later, on several occasions, in a context that was rather embarrassing for us Latins, if completely normal for her. In a clearing in the woods, halfway between the village and the camp, were the public baths, which every Russian village has, and which at Starye Doroghi functioned on alternate days for the Russians and for us. A big wooden shed,

with two long stone benches inside, had zinc tubs of various sizes scattered around. On the wall were faucets with hot and cold water, as much as you wanted. Soap, however, was not as much as you wanted, but was distributed very sparingly in the dressing room. The bureaucrat assigned to dispensing the soap was Irina. She sat at a table with a small block of stinking grayish soap on it, and held a knife in her hand. You took off your clothes, handing them over to be disinfected, and got in line, completely naked, in front of Irina’s table. In these duties as a public official, the girl was serious and incorruptible: her forehead wrinkled in concentration and her tongue childishly caught between her teeth, she cut a slice of soap for anyone aspiring to a bath: a little thinner for the thin, a little thicker for the fat, I don’t know if she was ordered to or if she was moved by an unconscious requirement of distributive justice. Not a muscle of her face twitched at the impertinent remarks of the more vulgar clients. After the bath, you had to retrieve your own clothes in the disinfection room: and here was another surprise of the regime of Starye Doroghi. The room was heated to 120° Celsius; the first time they told us that we had to go in ourselves to get our clothes, we looked at one another in bewilderment. The Russians are made of bronze, we had seen it on many occasions, but we weren’t, and would have been roasted. Then someone tried, and saw that the undertaking wasn’t as terrible as it seemed, provided the following precautions were adopted: enter very wet; know in advance the number of your own hook; take a deep breath before going through the door and then don’t breathe again; don’t touch any metal object; and above all do it rapidly. The disinfected clothes presented interesting phenomena: corpses of exploded lice, strangely deformed; ebonite fountain pens, forgotten in the pocket of some well-off person, twisted and with the head fused; candle stubs melted and soaked into the fabric; an egg, left in a pocket for experimental purposes, cracked and dried into a horny mass, yet still edible. The two Russian attendants went in and out of the furnace indifferently, like the salamanders of legend.

The days in Starye Doroghi passed like that, in an interminable, sleepy, beneficial indolence, like a long vacation, broken at intervals only by painful thoughts of our distant home, and by the enchantment of nature rediscovered. It was pointless to ask the Russians of the Command to find out why we weren’t going home, when we would go, by what route, what future awaited us; they didn’t know any more than we did, or, with polite candor, they bestowed on us fantastic or terrifying or absurd answers. That there were no trains; or that war was about to break out with America; or that they were soon sending us to work on collective farms; or that they were waiting to exchange us with Russian prisoners in Italy. They announced these or other enormities without hatred or mockery, in fact with an almost affectionate solicitude, as one speaks to children who ask too many questions, to quiet them. In truth, they didn’t understand our hurry to get home: didn’t we have food and a place to sleep? What was missing, at Starye Doroghi? We didn’t even have to work; and were they, soldiers of the Red Army, who had fought four years of war, and had won, complaining that they hadn’t yet returned home? They were in fact returning home, a few at a time, slowly, and, to judge by appearances, in extreme disarray. The spectacle of the Russian demobilization, which we had earlier admired at the station in Katowice, continued now in another form before our eyes, day by day; not by train but along the road in front of the Red House, shreds of the conquering army passed, from west to east, in tight-knit or scattered groups, at all hours of the day and night. Men passed walking, often barefoot, carrying their shoes over their shoulders to save the soles, because the road was long; in uniform or not, armed or disarmed, some singing lustily, others ashen-faced and exhausted. Some carried sacks or suitcases on their back; others, the most disparate objects—an upholstered chair, a standing lamp, copper pots, a radio, a grandfather clock. Others passed in carts, or on horseback; still others on motorcycles, in droves, drunk on speed, with an infernal noise. American-made Dodge trucks passed, crammed with men even on the hood and the bumpers; some hauled a trailer, just

as full. We saw one of these trailers traveling on three wheels; in place of the fourth a pine tree had been fastened as securely as possible, on an angle, so that one end rested on the ground, dragging along it. As this was worn down by the friction, the trunk was pushed lower, thus keeping the vehicle balanced. Almost in front of the Red House, one of the three surviving tires went flat; the occupants, twenty or so, climbed out, tipped the trailer over on the side of the road, and got on the already crowded truck, which took off in a cloud of dust as they all shouted, “Hurray!” Other unusual vehicles also passed by, all overloaded: farm tractors, mail trucks, German buses formerly used on city routes, which still had the signs with the terminus names in Berlin, and some of which, already broken down, were hauled by other vehicles or by horses. Around the beginning of August, the nature of this manyfaceted migration began to change, almost imperceptibly. Little by little, horses began to dominate over vehicles; after a week, one saw nothing but horses, the road belonged to them. They must have been all the horses in occupied Germany, tens of thousands a day. They passed interminably, in a blur of flies and horseflies and a sharp animal odor, tired, sweaty, hungry, driven and goaded by girls, one every hundred or more animals, with shouts and lashes of the whip; they, too, were on horseback, without saddles, bare-legged, hot, and disheveled. At night, they drove the horses into the fields and woods on the side of the road to feed in freedom and rest until dawn. There were draft horses, racehorses, mules, mares suckling foals, old arthritic nags, asses; we soon realized that not only were they not counted but that the herders didn’t care at all about the beasts that went off the road because they were tired or sick or lame, or about those which wandered off during the night. The horses were so many: what importance could it have if one more or less reached its destination? But for us, nearly starved of meat for eighteen months, a horse more or less had an enormous importance. The one who opened the hunt was, naturally, the Velletrano: he came to wake us one morning, bloody from head to foot, still holding in his hand the primitive weapon he had used, the fragment of

a grenade attached with leather thongs to the top of a forked cudgel. From the inspection we made (since the Velletrano wasn’t very good at explaining in words) it seemed that he had given the deathblow to a horse that was probably already dying: the poor animal had a highly equivocal look, a swollen stomach that sounded like a drum, foam at its mouth; and it must have been kicking all night, suffering who knows what torments, since, lying on its side, it had dug two deep semicircles of brown earth in the grass with its hoofs. But we ate it anyway. Later, several pairs of specialized hunter-butchers established themselves, who, no longer content with killing sick or lost horses, chose the fattest, drove them purposely out of the herd, and killed them in the woods. They preferred to act at the first light of dawn; one covered the animal’s eyes with a rag, and the other delivered the mortal (but not always) blow to the neck. It was a period of absurd abundance: there was unlimited horse meat for all, free; at most, the hunters asked, for a dead horse, two or three rations of tobacco. All over the woods, and, when it rained, even in the corridors and the stairwells of the Red House, you saw men and women busy cooking enormous steaks of horse meat with mushrooms, without which it would have taken us survivors of Auschwitz many more months to regain our strength. Not even to this pillaging did the Russians of the Command devote the least thought. There was only one Russian intervention and a single punishment: toward the end of the passing of the horses, when horse meat was growing scarce and the price began to rise, someone from the San Vittore group had the impudence to open a real butcher shop, in one of the many crannies of the Red House. This initiative the Russians didn’t like—it wasn’t clear if for hygienic or moral reasons. The guilty man was publicly reprimanded, declared “chort (devil), parazit, spekulyant,” and put in a cell. It wasn’t a very severe punishment: for obscure reasons, perhaps out of a long-ago bureaucratic atavism holding that prisoners had to be three in number, the cell was entitled to

three food rations a day. Whether the detainees were nine, or one, or none, it didn’t matter: there were always three rations. So, after ten days of overeating, the illegal butcher came out of the cell at the end of his punishment as fat as a pig and filled with joie de vivre.

Vacation

As always happens, the end of hunger exposed and made perceptible in us a more profound hunger. Not only the yearning for home, which in a certain sense was taken for granted and projected into the future, but a more immediate and urgent need for human contact, for mental and physical work, for novelty and variety. The life of Starye Doroghi, which would have been little less than perfect if understood as a break for vacation in a busy existence, began to weigh on us because of the very idleness that it imposed. In those conditions, many left, to seek life and adventures elsewhere. It wouldn’t be right to speak of flight, since the camp was neither enclosed nor guarded, and the Russians didn’t count us, or didn’t count us carefully; simply, they said goodbye to their friends and headed off into the fields. They got what they sought: they saw towns and people, they ventured far away, some as far as Odessa and Moscow, others as far as the borders; they encountered the jail cells of remote villages, the Biblical hospitality of the peasants, vague loves, dutifully senseless interrogations by the police, new hunger and solitude. They almost all returned to Starye Doroghi, since, if there was not a trace of barbed wire around the Red House, they found the legendary border to the west that they were trying to break open shut tight. They returned, and resigned themselves to that regime of limbo. The days of the northern summer were extremely long: it was already dawn at three in the morning, and the sunset dragged on tirelessly, until nine or ten in the evening. Excursions into the woods, meals, sleep, risky swims in the swamp, the endlessly repeated conversations, plans for the future were not enough to shorten the time of that wait, or to lighten the burden of it that day by day increased. We tried to approach the Russians, with scant success. Toward us, the more sophisticated (who spoke German or

English) appeared courteous but distrustful, and often abruptly broke off a conversation, as if they felt guilty or were being watched. With the simpler Russians, the seventeen-year-old soldiers of the Command and the local peasants, the difficulties of language obliged us to truncated and primitive relationships. It’s six in the morning, but the light of day has some time ago put sleep to flight. With a pan of potatoes organized by Cesare, I’m heading toward a grove of trees where a brook flows. Since there is water and wood here, it’s our favorite place for cooking operations, and today I have the job of washing the dishes and the cooking that follows. I light a fire among three rocks; and, look, there’s a Russian a little ways off, small but muscular, with broad Asiatic features, busy with preparations similar to mine. He doesn’t have matches; he approaches, and seems to be asking for a light. He is barechested, wearing only a pair of military trousers, and he doesn’t inspire confidence. He carries a bayonet at his waist. I offer him a lighted twig; the Russian takes it, stands there looking at me with suspicious curiosity. Does he think my potatoes are stolen? Or is he thinking of taking them away from me? Or has he mistaken me for someone he doesn’t like? No: what disturbs him is something else. He has realized that I don’t speak Russian, and this irritates him. The fact that a man, adult and normal, doesn’t speak Russian—that is, doesn’t speak—seems to him an attitude of insolent aggression, as if I had openly refused to answer him. His intentions are not bad; rather, he would like to give me a hand, to lift me out of my guilty condition of ignorance. Russian is so easy, everyone speaks it, even children who can’t walk yet. He sits beside me; I continue to fear for the potatoes, and keep an eye on him, but he, from all appearances, is determined only to help me regain lost time. He doesn’t understand, he doesn’t accept my position of refusal; he wants to teach me his language. Unfortunately, he is not much of a teacher; he lacks both method and patience, and in addition he is relying on the mistaken assumption that I can follow his explanations and his

comments. As long as it’s a matter of vocabulary, it goes well enough, and basically I don’t dislike the game. He points to a potato and says, “Kartofel’,” then he grabs me by the shoulder with his powerful paw, sticks his index finger under my nose, cocks an ear, and waits. I repeat, “Kartofel’.” He makes a face of disgust: my pronunciation isn’t right—not even pronunciation! He tries again two or three times, then he gets tired of it and changes the word. “Ogon’,” he says, pointing to the fire; here things go better, my repetition seems to satisfy him. He looks around in search of other pedagogic objects, then stares at me intently, slowly stands up, still staring at me, as if he wanted to hypnotize me, and suddenly, instantaneously, he draws the bayonet out of the sheath and waves it in the air. I jump to my feet and run away, toward the Red House: so much for the potatoes. But after a few steps I here an ogre-like laugh resounding behind me; the joke was a success. “Britva,” he says to me, flashing the blade in the sun; and I repeat it, not feeling very comfortable. He, slashing like a paladin, cuts off a branch from a tree; he shows it to me and says, “Derevo.” I repeat, “Derevo.” “Ya russkiy soldat.” I repeat as well as I can, “Ya russkiy soldat.” Another laugh, which sounds contemptuous: he is a Russian soldier, I’m not, and that’s a big difference. He explains in a confused way, with a sea of words, pointing now to my chest, now his, and going yes and no with his head. He must think me a terrible student, a hopelessly obtuse case; to my relief, he returns to his fire and leaves me to my barbarity. Another day, but at the same time and in the same place, I come upon an unusual sight. There is a little knot of Italians gathered around a very young, tall Russian sailor, whose movements are rapid and eager. He is “telling” a war story; and since he knows that his language is not understood, he expresses himself as he can, in a way that to him is evidently as instinctive or more so than words. He expresses himself with all his muscles, with the precocious wrinkles that mark his face, with the flash of eyes and teeth, with leaps and

gestures, and from it emerges a fascinating, powerful solo dance. It’s night, noch’: he slowly spins his hands in a circle with the palms facing down. All is silence: he utters a long “sst” with his index finger next to his nose. He narrows his eyes and points to the horizon: there, far far away, are the Germans, nemtsy. How many? Five, he signals with his fingers; “Finf,” he adds, in Yiddish, to clarify further. With his hand he digs a small round hole in the sand, and places five sticks in it, lying down, these are the Germans; and then he adds a sixth stick, on a slant, it’s the mashina, the machine gun. What are the Germans doing? Here his eyes light up with wild delight: spat’, they’re sleeping (and he snores quietly for a moment); they are sleeping, the fools, and they don’t know what’s in store for them. What did he do? Here’s what he did: he approached, cautiously, downwind, like a leopard. Then, suddenly, he jumped into the nest, drawing his knife; and he repeats, now completely absorbed in his staged rapture, his actions at the time. The ambush, and the quick, atrocious fight, here he is, re-creating it before our eyes. The man, his face transfigured by a tense and sinister laugh, becomes a whirlwind; he jumps forward and back, he strikes in front, to the sides, high, low, in an explosion of death-bearing energy. But it’s a lucid fury, his weapon (which exists, a long knife that he has pulled out of his boot) pierces, slices, rips fiercely and yet with tremendous skill, practically in front of our faces. All of a sudden the sailor stops, slowly straightens up, the knife falls from his hand; his chest is heaving, his gaze is spent. He looks at the ground, as if amazed not to see corpses and blood; he looks around bewildered, vacant; he notices us, and gives us a timid, childlike smile. “Koncheno,” he says: it’s over. And he slowly walks away. Very different, and mysterious then, as now, was the case of the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant (we never, and perhaps not coincidentally, learned his name) was a slim olive-skinned young Russian, who wore a constant frown. He spoke Italian perfectly, with a Russian accent so slight that it could have

been mistaken for some Italian dialect intonation; but, unlike all the other Russians of the Command, he demonstrated little cordiality and kindness toward us. He was the only one we could question: How in the world had he come to speak Italian? Why was he here? Why were they keeping us in Russia four months after the end of the war? Were we hostages? Had we been forgotten? Why couldn’t we write to Italy? When would we return? . . . But the Lieutenant responded to all these questions, which were as heavy as lead, in a cutting and elusive way, with a confidence and authority that did not fit his rather low rank. We noted that even his superiors treated him with odd deference, as if they feared him. He maintained a surly detachment both from the Russians and from us. He never laughed, he didn’t drink, he didn’t accept invitations, or even cigarettes; he spoke little, and seemed to weigh his words, cautiously, one by one. When he first appeared, it seemed natural for us to think of him as our interpreter and delegate to the Russian Command, but it was soon clear that his responsibilities (if he really had any, and if his behavior was not merely a complicated way of making himself appear important) must be different, and we preferred to be silent in his presence. From some of his reticent remarks we discovered that he was well acquainted with the topography of Turin and of Milan. Had he been to Italy? “No,” he answered dryly, and gave no other explanations.

The public health was excellent, and the clients of the infirmary were few and always the same: someone with boils, the usual hypochondriacs, some skin diseases, some colitis. One day a woman showed up with various vague complaints: nausea, backache, dizziness, hot flashes. Leonardo examined her; she had bruises everywhere, but she said not to pay attention to that, she had fallen down the stairs. With the means at our disposal it wasn’t easy to make a very in-depth diagnosis, but, by ruling things out, and also given the numerous precedents among our women, Leonardo declared to the patient that very likely it was a pregnancy, in the third month. The woman displayed neither joy nor anguish nor

surprise nor indignation; she accepted the news, and thanked him, but didn’t leave. She went back and sat down on the bench in the hallway, quiet and tranquil, as if she were expecting someone. She was a small dark girl, about twenty-five, with a homely, withdrawn, dreamy look; her face, which wasn’t very attractive or very expressive, didn’t seem new to me, nor did her speech, with its slight Tuscan inflections. Certainly I must have met her, but not at Starye Doroghi. I felt a fleeting sensation of dislocation, a transposition, an important inversion of relations, but I couldn’t define it. Vaguely yet insistently, I associated with that female image a knot of intense feelings: humble and distant admiration, recognition, frustration, fear, even abstract desire, but mainly a deep and indefinable anguish. Since she continued to sit on the bench, quiet and still, without any sign of impatience, I asked if she needed something, if she still wanted us; the clinic was over, there were no other patients, it was time to close. “No, no,” she answered. “I don’t need anything. I’ll go now.” Flora! The dim memory abruptly took shape, coagulated into a precise, well-defined picture, rich in details of time and place, colors, retrospective states of mind, atmosphere, smells. She was Flora: the Italian woman in the cellars of Buna, the woman of the Lager, object of my dreams and Alberto’s for more than a month, unconscious symbol of lost freedom, no longer hoped for. Flora, whom I had met a year earlier, and it seemed a hundred. Flora was a provincial prostitute, who had ended up in Germany with the Todt Organization. She didn’t know German and she had no skills, so she had been assigned to sweep the floor at the Buna factory. She swept all day, wearily, without exchanging a word with anyone, without raising her eyes from the broom or from her endless task. No one seemed to pay any attention to her, and she, as if she feared the light of day, went as seldom as possible to the upper floors; she swept the cellars interminably, from one end to the other, and then she started 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 me she seemed beautiful, mysterious, ethereal. In spite of the prohibition, which in some way increased the enchantment of our encounters, adding to them the sharp taste of the illicit, we exchanged some furtive words with Flora; we made ourselves known as Italians, and asked her for bread. We asked a little reluctantly, conscious of debasing ourselves and the quality of that delicate human contact; but hunger, with which it’s difficult to compromise, impelled us not to waste the opportunity. Flora brought us bread several times, and delivered it with a distracted air, in the dark corners of the cellar, sniffling and tearful. She felt pity for us, and would have liked to help us in other ways, but she didn’t know how and was afraid. Afraid of everything, like a defenseless animal: maybe even of us, not directly but as inhabitants of that foreign and incomprehensible world that had torn her from her country, thrust a broom in her hand, and banished her underground, to sweep floors already swept a hundred times. We two were overwhelmed, grateful, and filled with shame. We had become suddenly aware of our wretched appearance, and suffered for it. Alberto, who knew how to find the strangest things because he went around all day with his eyes on the ground, like a bloodhound, found a comb somewhere, and we gave it solemnly to Flora, who had hair; after that we felt tied to her by a sweet, clean tie, and we dreamed of her at night. So we felt an acute uneasiness, an absurd and impotent mixture of jealousy and deception, when the evidence forced us to discover, to admit to ourselves, that Flora had meetings with other men. Where and how, and with whom? In the least elaborate place and in the least elaborate ways: nearby, in the hay, in a secret rabbit hutch organized in a closet under the stairs by a cooperative of German and Polish Kapos. It took almost nothing: a wink of the eye, an imperious nod of the head, and Flora put down the broom and obediently followed the man of the moment. She returned alone, after a few minutes; she readjusted her clothes and began sweeping again without looking at us. After that squalid discovery,

Flora’s bread tasted to us like salt; but not for that reason did we stop accepting it and eating it. I didn’t make myself known to Flora, out of compassion toward her and toward myself. Compared with those ghosts, my self of Buna, the woman of memory and her reincarnation, I felt changed, intensely “other,” like a butterfly before a caterpillar. In the limbo of Starye Doroghi I felt dirty, ragged, tired, heavy, worn out by waiting, and yet young and full of power and facing toward the future; Flora, on the other hand, hadn’t changed. She now lived with a Bergamask shoemaker, not as a spouse but as a slave. She washed and cooked for him, and followed him with humble and submissive eyes; the man, bullish and apelike, watched her every step, and beat her savagely at any suspicious sign. This was the source of the bruises that covered her; she had come secretly to the infirmary, and now she hesitated to leave and confront the anger of her master.

At Starye Doroghi no one required anything of us, nothing pressured us, no force acted on us, we didn’t have to defend ourselves against anything; we felt inert and settled, like the sediment of a flood. In this sluggish and eventless life, the arrival of the Soviet military cinema van signaled a memorable date. It must have been a traveling unit, already in service with the troops at the front or behind the lines, and now it, too, was on the way home; it included a projector, a generator unit, a supply of films, and the staff. It stopped at Starye Doroghi for three days, and showed a film every night. The projections took place in the theater. It was very spacious, and the chairs removed by the Germans had been replaced by rustic benches, balanced unsteadily on the floor, which sloped upward from the screen toward the balcony. The balcony, also on a slant, was reduced to a narrow strip; the upper part, thanks to a brilliant invention on the part of the mysterious and fanciful architects of the Red House, had been partitioned and subdivided into a series of little rooms, without air or light, whose doors opened toward the stage. There lived the single women of our colony.

The first evening an old Austrian film was shown, in itself mediocre, and of little interest to the Russians, but full of emotion for us Italians. It was a silent film of war and espionage, with titles in German, that recounted an episode on the Italian front during the First World War. It displayed the same candor and the same rhetorical paraphernalia of similar films produced by the Allies: military honor, sacred borders, heroic fighters ready to weep like virgins, bayonet attacks carried out with improbable enthusiasm. Only, it was all upside down: the Austro-Hungarians, both officers and ordinary soldiers, were noble, vigorous characters, brave and gallant; they had the sensitive, spiritual faces of stoic warriors, or the rude, honest faces of peasants, inspiring sympathy at first glance. The Italians, all of them, were a crowd of vulgar scoundrels, all marked by obvious and laughable physical defects: cross-eyed, obese, round-shouldered, knock-kneed, with low, receding foreheads. They were cowardly and ferocious, brutal and shifty-looking. The officers, with faces like depraved weaklings, were crushed under the incongruous mass of the pot-shaped cap familiar to us in portraits of Cadorna and Diaz; the soldiers had piggish or monkey-like scowls, accentuated by the helmet of our fathers, worn on a slant or pulled over the eyes in sinister fashion to hide their gaze. The traitor of traitors, an Italian spy in Vienna, was a weird chimera, half D’Annunzio and half Vittorio Emanuele: ridiculously small in stature, so that he was forced to look upward at everyone, he wore a monocle and a bow tie, and he moved up and down the screen hopping arrogantly, like a young cock. Returning to the Italian lines, he supervised with horrifying coolness the shooting of ten innocent Tyrolese citizens. We Italians, unaccustomed to seeing ourselves in the role of the “enemy,” odious by definition, and dismayed by the idea of being hated by anyone, got from the film a complex pleasure that was distressing, and yet a source of useful reflections. On the second evening, a Soviet film was announced, and the place began to heat up: among us Italians, because it was

the first we had seen; among the Russians, because the title promised a war story, full of action and shooting. The rumor spread; unexpectedly, Russian soldiers arrived from garrisons near and far, crowding in front of the theater doors. When the doors opened, they burst inside like a river in flood, noisily climbing over the benches, pushing and shoving as they thronged in. The film was simple and straightforward. A Soviet military plane was forced to land, because of a mechanical failure, in an unspecified mountainous frontier territory; it was a small two-seater, with only the pilot on board. When the malfunction had been repaired, and he was on the point of taking off, a local notable came toward him, a turbaned sheikh with an extremely suspicious look, and with unctuous bows and Turkish-style genuflections begged to be taken on board. Even an idiot would have figured out that he was a dangerous character, probably a smuggler, a dissident leader, or a foreign agent; but anyway the pilot, with foolish tolerance, gave in to his long-winded prayers and settled him in the backseat of the plane. We saw the takeoff, and some good aerial shots of mountain chains sparkling with glaciers (I think it was the Caucasus). Then the sheikh, with devious, sneaky, venomous moves, drew a revolver out of the folds of his robe, pointed it at the pilot’s back, and ordered him to change course. The pilot, without even turning around, reacted instantaneously and decisively: he pointed the plane’s nose upward, and executed an abrupt loop. The sheikh crumpled up on the seat, in the grip of fear and nausea; the pilot, instead of putting him out of action, continued tranquilly on his way to his intended destination. After a few minutes, and more wonderful scenes of the mountains, the bandit recovered; he crept toward the pilot, again raised the gun, and repeated the attempt. This time the plane did a nosedive, dropping thousands of meters, toward an inferno of steep peaks and abysses; the sheikh fainted and the plane regained altitude. So the flight went on for more than an hour, with repeated attacks by the sheikh and new acrobatics by the pilot; until, after a last order from the sheikh, who seemed to have nine lives, like a cat, the plane

went into a spin, clouds, mountains, and ice caps whirled fiercely, and finally it descended, coming in safely on the planned landing field. The lifeless sheikh was handcuffed; the pilot, fresh as a daisy, instead of being questioned, received handshakes from stern superiors, promotion in the field, and a modest kiss from a girl who seemed to have been waiting a long time for him. The Russian soldiers in the audience had followed the clumsy adventure with clamorous enthusiasm, applauding the hero and insulting the traitor. But it was nothing compared with what happened the third night. The third night, the show announced was Hurricane, a pretty good American movie of the thirties. A Polynesian sailor, a modern version of the “noble savage,” a simple, strong and gentle man, is coarsely provoked by a group of drunken white men, and he wounds one of them slightly. Right is obviously on his side, but no one testifies in his favor; he is arrested, put on trial, and, pitifully uncomprehending, condemned to a month in jail. He can stand it only for a few days, not just because of his almost animal-like need for freedom and his intolerance of chains but mainly because he feels, he knows, that not he but the white men have violated justice; if this is the law of the whites, then the law is unjust. He knocks down a guard and escapes in a hail of bullets. Now the gentle sailor has become a real criminal. He is hunted throughout the whole archipelago, but there’s no need to look far; he has returned peacefully to his village. He is captured, and sent to a remote island, to a prison: hard labor and lashes. He flees again, jumping off a high cliff into the sea, steals a canoe, and sails for days toward his land, without eating or drinking; he is approaching, exhausted, just as the promised hurricane of the title looms. Suddenly the hurricane erupts in a fury, and the man, like a good American hero, struggles alone against the elements, and saves not only his wife but the church, the minister, and the faithful who had vainly sought shelter there. Thus rehabilitated, he sets off toward a happy future, with the girl at his side, as the sun appears amid the last, vanishing clouds.

This story, typically individualistic, elemental, and well told, unleashed among the Russians a seismic excitement. An hour before it started, a tumultuous crowd (attracted by the poster, which bore an image of the magnificent, scantily clothed Polynesian girl) was beating on the doors; it was made up almost entirely of very young, armed soldiers. It was obvious that in the “sloping hall,” big as it was, there wouldn’t be room for everyone, even standing room; precisely for that reason they fought stubbornly, elbowing their way in. One fell, was trampled, and came the next day to the infirmary. We thought we would find something broken, but he had only a few bruises: these were people with strong bones. In short order, the doors were bashed in, shattered, and the pieces were seized like clubs: the crowd that swarmed into the theater was highly excited and bellicose. For them it was as if the characters in the film were not shadows but flesh-and-blood friends or enemies, within reach of their hands. The sailor was cheered at every undertaking, greeted with noisy hurrahs, with machine guns brandished dangerously over the spectators’ heads. The police and the prison guards were grossly insulted, met with cries of “Get out,” “Die,” “Down with you,” “Leave him alone.” When, after the first escape, the fugitive, exhausted and wounded, is again in chains, mocked and derided by the sardonic and asymmetrical features of John Carradine, pandemonium broke out. The audience rose up shouting, in generous defense of the innocent man; a threatening wave of avengers moved toward the screen, in turn insulted and restrained by those who were less inflamed or more eager to see how it would end. Rocks flew at the screen, clods of earth, fragments of the demolished doors, even a regulation boot, hurled with furious precision between the odious eyes of the great enemy, dominating an enormous foreground. When the film arrived at the long, powerful hurricane sequence, the tumult became a witches’ sabbath. Sharp cries were heard from the few women who remained trapped in the crush; a stake appeared, then another, passed from hand to hand over the heads, amid deafening shouts. At first it was hard to understand what the stakes were to be used for, then

the plan became clear: a plan probably thought up by those who had been excluded and were clamoring outside. They were trying to climb up to the balcony women’s rooms. The stakes were positioned upright and leaned against the balcony, and several of the thugs, pulling off their boots, began to climb, the way one might climb a greased pole at a village fair. Immediately, the spectacle of the ascent supplanted all interest in the spectacle that was continuing on the screen. As soon as one of the contenders succeeded in getting above the sea of heads, he was grabbed by the feet and brought back to earth by ten or twenty hands. Groups of supporters and adversaries formed; a bold climber was able to get free of the crowd and pull himself up with strong arm strokes, another followed on the same pole. Almost at the level of the balcony they struggled for a few minutes, the one below grabbing the heels of the other, the latter kicking blindly to defend himself. At the same time, the heads of a group of Italians, looking out from the balcony, were visible; they had rushed up the winding stairs of the Red House to protect the besieged women. The pole, pushed back by the defenders, wavered, hovered for a long instant in a vertical position, then crashed into the crowd like a pine felled by woodcutters, with the two men clinging to it. At this point, I don’t know if accidentally or thanks to some wise intervention by the authorities, the lamp of the projector went out, everything was plunged into darkness, the noise of the audience reached a frightening intensity, and everyone cleared out into the moonlight, amid shouts, curses, and cheers. To the regret of all, the cinema caravan left the next morning. The following night, a renewed and daring Russian attempt to invade the women’s quarters took place, this time by means of the roofs and eaves, following which a system of night guards was instituted, supervised by Italian volunteers. Later, out of greater prudence, the women of the balcony moved out, and joined the bulk of the female population, in a collective room: a less private but more secure arrangement.

Theater

Toward the middle of August, however, common ground with the Russians was found. Despite trade secrecy, the whole camp learned that the “Romanians,” with the consent and support of the authorities, were organizing a revue; the rehearsals took place in the sloping hall, whose doors had been repaired as well as possible, and were guarded by pickets who kept all outsiders from entering. Among the numbers in the revue was a heel-and-toe dance; the performer, a very conscientious sailor, practiced every night, with a small circle of experts and consultants. Now, this exercise is by nature noisy: the Lieutenant passed that way, heard the rhythmic din, forced his way through the blockade with a clear abuse of power, and entered. He watched two or three sessions, to the discomfort of the bystanders, without emerging from his habitual reserve and without softening his cryptic scowl; then, unexpectedly, he made known to the organizing committee that in his free time he was a passionate dance fan, that in fact he had long wanted to learn heel-and-toe dancing, and that the dancer was therefore invited, or rather ordered, to give him a series of lessons. The spectacle of these lessons interested me so much that I found a way of watching them, slipping through the strange labyrinths of the Red House and flattening myself in a dark corner. The Lieutenant was the best student that can be imagined: serious, eager, tenacious, and physically well endowed. He danced in his uniform, with his boots, for exactly an hour a day, without granting a moment’s rest to the teacher or to himself. He made rapid progress. When the revue was performed, a week later, the heel-andtoe number was a surprise for everyone. Teacher and student danced, faultlessly, in perfect step and perfect time: the teacher, winking and smiling, wearing a fantastic Gypsy costume fashioned by the women; the Lieutenant, his nose in

the air and his eyes fixed on the ground, gloomily, as if he were performing a sacrificial rite. In uniform, naturally, and with the medals on his chest and the holster at his side dancing with him. They were applauded; various other, not very original numbers were likewise applauded (some Neapolitan songs from the classic repertory; “The Firemen of Viggiù”; a sketch in which a lover wins the heart of the girl with a bouquet not of flowers but of ryba, our stinking daily fish; the “Montanara” sung by a chorus, with Signor Unverdorben the chorus master). But two less ordinary numbers had enthusiastic, and well-deserved, success. A large fat character, masked, padded, and bundled, like Michelin tires’ famous Bibendum, stumbled onto the stage, legs wide apart. He greeted the audience like an athlete, hands clasped above his head; meanwhile, with great effort, two stagehands rolled in next to him an enormous piece of equipment consisting of a bar and two wheels, like those used by weight lifters. He bent over and grabbed the bar, straining all his muscles: nothing, the bar didn’t move. Then he took off his coat, folded it carefully, placed it on the ground, and prepared for a new attempt. Since the weight didn’t leave the ground this time, either, he took off a second coat, placing it beside the first; and so on through various coats, civilian and military, raincoats, cassocks, overcoats. The athlete diminished in volume before your eyes, the stage filled with garments, and the weight seemed to have put down roots. When the coats were gone, he began to take off jackets of all kinds (among them a striped Häftling jacket, in homage to our minority), then an abundance of shirts, and every time, after every item that he put down, he tried with punctilious solemnity to lift the contraption, and gave it up without the least sign of impatience or surprise. Then, while he was taking off the fourth or fifth shirt, he stopped suddenly. He examined the shirt attentively, first at arm’s length, then more closely; he searched in the collar and the seams with agile apelike movements and, lo and behold, extracted with thumb and

index finger an imaginary louse. He looked at it with eyes dilated in horror, placed it delicately on the floor, drew a chalk circle around it, with one hand snatched the bar, which for the occasion had become light as a reed, off the floor, and squashed the louse with a sharp, precise blow. Then, after this very rapid digression, he returned to taking off shirts, pants, socks, and girdles with gravity and composure, trying in vain to lift the weight. At the end, he stood in his underwear amid a mountain of items of clothing: he took off the mask, and the audience recognized in him the likable and very popular cook Gridacucco, small, thin, hopping, and busy, and fittingly nicknamed Scannagrillo (Cricket Killer) by Cesare. The applause was deafening: Scannagrillo looked around bewildered, then, as if suddenly overcome by stage fright, he picked up the weight, which probably was made of cardboard, stuck it under his arm, and raced off. The other great success was the song “The Three-Cornered Hat.” This is a song absolutely without sense, which consists of a single quatrain repeated over and over (“My hat has three corners / My hat it has three corners / If it didn’t have three corners / It wouldn’t be my hat”) and sung to a tune so trite and worn by tradition that its origin is unknown. It is characterized by the fact that, at every repetition, one word of the quatrain is silent, replaced by a gesture: the hand concave over the head for “hat,” the fist pounding the chest for “my,” the fingers raised upward to form a cone shape, for “corners,” and so on, until, with all the words eliminated, the stanza is reduced to a mutilated stutter of articles and conjunctions that can’t be expressed by signs, or, in another version, to total silence punctuated by rhythmic gestures. In the heterogeneous group of “Romanians” there must have been someone who had theater in his blood; in their interpretation, this childish oddity became a sinister, obscurely allegorical pantomime, full of symbolic and disquieting resonance. A small orchestra, whose instruments had been provided by the Russians, started the tired old tune on low, muted notes.

Pitching slowly to the rhythm, three spectral characters came onstage: they were enveloped in black cloaks, with black hoods, and from the hoods emerged faces of a decrepit and corpse-like pallor, marked by deep, livid wrinkles. They entered with unsteady dance steps, holding in their hands three long, spent wax tapers. Still following the rhythm, they reached the center of the stage and bowed to the audience with senile difficulty, bending slowly over arthritic hips, in short weary jerks; to bow and straighten again took two good minutes, which were anguishing for the spectators. Once they had painfully regained an erect posture, the orchestra was silent, and the three phantoms began to sing the silly verses, in tremulous, hoarse voices. They sang, and at every repetition, as the silences accumulated, filled by their shaky gestures, it seemed that life, along with voice, was vanishing from them. Punctuated by the hypnotic pulse of a single, muted drum, the paralysis proceeded slowly and inevitably. The final repeat, with the orchestra, the singers, and the audience in absolute silence, was a harrowing death agony, a mortal spasm. When the song was over, the orchestra started up again lugubriously: the three figures, with an extreme effort and trembling in every limb, repeated their bow. They managed, incredibly, to straighten up again, and, with the quivering tapers, with terrible, macabre hesitations, but always following the rhythm, disappeared forever into the wings. The “Three-Cornered Hat” number took your breath away, and was greeted every night with a silence more eloquent than applause. Why? Perhaps because we could perceive, behind the grotesque display, the heavy breath of a collective dream, the dream that emanates from exile and idleness, when work and suffering cease, and nothing places a barrier between man and himself; perhaps because in it we could glimpse the impotence and nullity of our life and of life, and the crooked, hunchbacked profile of the monsters generated by the sleep of reason.

An allegorical play that was organized later was more innocuous, in fact childish and jumbled. It was obvious from the title, The Shipwreck of the Inert; the inert were us, the

Italians who had got lost on the way home, and become accustomed to an existence of inertia and boredom; the desert island was Starye Doroghi; and the cannibals were obviously them, the good Russians of the Command. Cannibals down to the last detail: they appeared onstage naked and tattooed, they blathered in a primitive and unintelligible dialect, they fed on raw, bloody human flesh. Their chief lived in a grass hut, he had as a footstool a white slave permanently on all fours, and hanging on his chest was a large alarm clock, which he consulted not for the time but for signs to guide his decisions on governing. The Comrade Colonel in charge of our camp must have been a man of spirit, or extremely tolerant, or foolish, to have authorized such an acerbic caricature of his person and his job: or perhaps it was yet again a matter of the benevolent age-old Russian carelessness, Oblomovian negligence, that emerged at all levels at that happy moment of their history. In fact, we were struck at least once by the suspicion that the Russians of the Command had not fully digested the satire, or regretted it. After the première of The Shipwreck, an uproar broke out in the Red House in the middle of the night: shouts throughout the dormitories, doors kicked in, commands in Russian, Italian, and bad German. We who came from Katowice, and had witnessed a similar pandemonium, were only half frightened; the others lost their heads (especially the “Romanians,” who were responsible for the script), the rumor of a Russian reprisal immediately spread, and the more apprehensive were already thinking of Siberia. The Russians, through the intermediary of the Lieutenant, who in the circumstances seemed more wretched and contemptuous than usual, made us all get up and dress in a hurry, and lined us up in one of the mazelike corridors of the building. Half an hour passed, an hour, and nothing happened; the line, in which I occupied one of the last places, couldn’t understand where the head was, and didn’t advance a step. In addition to the rumor of reprisal for The Shipwreck, the wildest hypotheses ran from mouth to mouth: the Russians had decided to look for Fascists; they were looking for the two girls in the woods; they were going to examine us for

gonorrhea; they were recruiting people to work on the collectives; they were looking for specialists, like the Germans. Then an Italian came by, all cheerful. He said, “They’re giving us money!” and he waved a bunch of rubles. No one believed him; but a second passed, then a third, and they all confirmed the news. The affair was never well understood (but anyway, who ever understood fully why we were in Starye Doroghi, and what we were doing there?); according to the most knowledgeable interpretation, we were to be considered equivalent to prisoners of war, by at least some Soviet officers, and so were due some recompense for days devoted to work. But on what principle these days were calculated (almost none of us had ever worked for the Russians, in Starye Doroghi or before); why even the children should be remunerated; and, principally, why the ceremony should happen so tumultuously between two and six in the morning—all this is fated to remain obscure. The Russians distributed compensation varying from thirty to eighty rubles a person, according to inscrutable or random criteria. The sum was not enormous, but it gave pleasure to everyone; it was equivalent to several days of extra food. We returned to bed at dawn, commenting variously on the event; and no one understood that it was a lucky omen, a prelude to returning home. But from that day on, even without any official announcement, the signs multiplied. Tenuous, ill-defined, timid signs, but enough to promote the sensation that something was finally moving, something was about to happen. A platoon of young Russian soldiers arrived, beardless and out of place; they told us that they had come from Austria, and were supposed to leave again soon, escorting a convoy of foreigners; but they didn’t know where. After our months of futile begging, the Command distributed shoes to all those who had need of them. Finally, the Lieutenant disappeared, as if taken up to heaven. It was all extremely vague and not a little ambiguous. Even given that a departure was imminent, who could assure us that it would be to our own country, and not a new transfer somewhere or other? The long experience we had gained by

now of the Russians’ methods counseled us to temper our hope with a healthy quotient of doubt. The season, too, contributed to our anxiety: in the first ten days of September, the sun and the sky darkened, the air became cold and damp, and the first rains fell, reminding us of the precariousness of our situation. Road, meadows, and fields turned into a desolate swamp. Water leaked copiously through the roof of the Red House, dripping pitilessly at night on our bunks; more water came in through the windows, which had no glass. None of us had warm clothing. In the village the peasants could be seen returning from the woods with cartloads of sticks and logs; others patched up their houses, repaired the straw roofs; all, even the women, wore boots. The wind carried from the houses a new, alarming odor: the bitter smoke of damp wood burning, the odor of the coming winter. Another winter, the third: and what a winter! But the announcement came, finally: the announcement of return, of salvation, of the conclusion of our long wanderings. It came in two new and unusual ways, from two directions, and was convincing and open and dissipated every anxiety. It came in the theater and through the theater, and it came along the muddy road, brought by a strange and distinguished messenger. It was night, it was raining, and in the crowded sloping hall (what else could one do in the evening, before slipping under the damp blankets?) The Shipwreck of the Inert was playing, perhaps for the ninth or tenth time. This Shipwreck was a shapeless but inventive mishmash, vivid because of the witty, good-humored allusions to our everyday life; we had all been present at all its performances, and now we knew it mostly by heart, and at every repeat we laughed less at the scene in which a Cantarella even more savage than the original fashioned an enormous tin pot commissioned by the maneating Russians, who intended to cook in it the chieftains of the inert; and the final scene, in which the ship arrived, was more and more heart-wrenching.

Because there was, as obviously there should be, a scene in which a sail appeared on the horizon, and all the shipwrecked men and women, laughing and crying, rushed to the inhospitable beach. Now, just as the oldest among them, white-haired and bent by the interminable wait, extended one finger toward the sea and shouted, “A ship!” and while all of us, with a lump in our throat, prepared for the happy ending of the last scene, then to retire yet again into our dens, we heard a sudden crash, and the cannibal chieftain, a true deus ex machina, plummeted upright onto the stage, as if he had fallen from the sky. He tore the alarm clock from his neck, the ring from his nose, the helmet of feathers from his head, and shouted in a thunderous voice, “Tomorrow we depart!” We were taken by surprise, and at first we didn’t understand. Might it be a joke? But the savage pressed on: “I’m telling the truth, it’s not the play, this is it! The telegram arrived, tomorrow we’re all going home!” This time it was we Italians, actors, spectators, and extras, who instantly overwhelmed the frightened Russians—they understood nothing in that scene that wasn’t in the script. We came outside in a disorderly fashion, and at first there was a breathless overlapping of questions without answers; but then we saw the Colonel, amid a circle of Italians, nodding yes, and then we knew that the time had come. We lit fires in the woods and no one slept; we passed the rest of the night singing and dancing, telling one another our past adventures and recalling our lost companions: since mankind is not permitted to experience joys untarnished. The next morning, while the Red House was buzzing and teeming, like a beehive preparing for the swarm, we saw a small automobile coming along the road. Very few cars passed, so the fact roused our interest, especially since it wasn’t a military vehicle. It slowed in front of the camp, swerved, and turned in, jolting over the rough ground in front of the strange façade. Then we saw that it was a vehicle familiar to all of us, a Fiat 500A, a rusty, beat-up Topolino, with its suspension pitifully misshapen. It stopped in front of the entrance and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of the curious. An extraordinary figure

emerged from it, with great effort, as if he would never finish getting out. He was a very tall, corpulent, ruddy man, in a uniform we had never seen before: a Soviet general, a highranking general, a field marshal. When he was completely out of the door, the tiny auto body rose a good few inches, and the suspension seemed to breathe. The man was literally larger than the car, and it was incomprehensible how he could have got into it. His dimensions were further enlarged and accentuated; he took a black object out of the car and unfolded it. It was a cloak that hung to the ground from two long rigid epaulets, of wood; with a casual gesture, attesting to a great familiarity with that equipment, he whirled it around and unfolded it over his back, so that his outline, which had been rounded, became angular. Seen from behind, the man was a monumental black rectangle of one meter by two, who advanced toward the vault of the Red House with majestic symmetry, between two lines of puzzled people whom he towered over by an entire head. How would he get through the door, wide as he was? But he folded back the two epaulets, like wings, and entered. That heavenly messenger, who traveled alone through the mud in an ancient, disintegrating small car, was Marshal Timoshenko in person, Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko, the hero of the Bolshevik Revolution, of Karelia and Stalingrad. After his welcome by the local Russians, which for that matter was singularly sober and lasted only a few minutes, he came out of the building again and chatted informally with us Italians, like the rough Kutuzov in War and Peace, on the field, amid the pots of fish cooking and laundry hung out to dry. He spoke Romanian fluently with the Romanians (since he was, rather is, originally from Bessarabia), and even knew a little Italian. The damp wind stirred his gray locks, which contrasted with his ruddy, tanned complexion, the complexion of a soldier, and of a hearty eater and drinker. He told us that yes, it was really true: we would be leaving soon, very soon; “war over, everybody home”; the escort was ready, also the provisions for the journey, the papers were in order. In a few days the train would be waiting for us in the station in Starye Doroghi.

From Starye Doroghi to Iasi

That the departure was not to be expected “tomorrow” in the literal sense, as the savage had said in the theater, did not really surprise anyone. Already on several occasions we had been able to observe that the corresponding Russian term, through one of those semantic slippages that are never without explanation, has a much less definite and peremptory meaning than our “tomorrow,” and, in accord with Russian habits, has the value, rather, of “one of the next few days,” “at some time or another,” “in the not too distant future”: in other words, the precision of temporal calculation there is slightly moderated. It didn’t surprise us, and it didn’t upset us excessively. When departure was certain, we realized, with the same wonder, that that boundless land, those fields and woods that had seen the battle to which we owed our salvation, those untouched and primordial horizons, that vigorous and life-loving people, were in our hearts, had penetrated us, and would long remain there, glorious and vivid images of a unique period of our existence. Not, therefore, “tomorrow” but a few days after the announcement, on September 15, 1945, we left the Red House in a caravan and arrived at the station in Starye Doroghi in a mood of celebration. The train was there, it was waiting for us, it wasn’t an illusion of our senses. There was coal, also water, and the locomotive, enormous and majestic as a monument in itself, was at the right end. We hurried to touch its side: alas, it was cold. There were sixty cars: freight cars, rather dilapidated, parked on a siding. We invaded them with jubilant fury, and without quarreling; we were fourteen hundred, that is to say twenty to twenty-five per car, which, in the light of our many earlier railway experiences, meant a comfortable and relaxing journey. The train did not leave right away; in fact it did not leave until the day after. It was pointless to ask questions of the stationmaster in the little station; he knew nothing. In that

interval only two or three trains passed through, and none stopped; they didn’t even slow down. When one of these trains approached, the stationmaster waited for it on the platform, holding high up a wreath made of branches, from which a small bag hung; the engineer leaned out of the moving locomotive, his right arm bent like a hook. He hooked the wreath as he went by and immediately afterward threw to the ground another one just like it, also with the sack attached: this was the postal service, the only contact between Starye Doroghi and the rest of the world. All else was immobility and silence. Around the station, which was slightly elevated, stretched interminable plains, limited only to the west by the black line of the forest, and cut by the dizzying ribbon of the tracks. There were herds grazing, few and far apart, the only breaks in the monotony. In the long evening before departure, the songs of the shepherds could be heard, faint and measured; one began singing, a second answered from kilometers away, then another and yet another, from all the points of the horizon, and it was as if the earth itself were singing. We got ready for the night. After so many months and moves, we were now an organized community, so we had not arranged ourselves randomly in the cars but, rather, in natural groups with common bonds. The “Romanians” occupied some ten cars; three fell to the thieves from San Vittore, who didn’t want anyone and whom no one wanted; another three were for single women; four or five held the couples, legitimate or not; two, divided into two stories by a horizontal partition, and noticeable for the laundry hung out to dry, belonged to the families with children. Most impressive was the orchestra car, where the entire theater company of the sloping hall resided, with all their instruments (including a piano), graciously presented by the Russians at the moment of departure. Ours, through Leonardo’s initiative, had been declared the infirmary car: a presumptuous and wishful denomination, since Leonardo had at his disposal only a syringe and a stethoscope, and the wooden floor was just as hard as that of the other cars; but then in the whole convoy there wasn’t a sick person, nor did any client appear for the entire journey. About twenty of us

lived there, among whom were, naturally, Cesare and Daniele, and, less naturally, the Moor, Signor Unverdorben, Giacomantonio, and the Velletrano; in addition, there were some fifteen former military prisoners. We spent the night dozing restlessly on the bare floor of the carriage. Day came: the engine was smoking, the engineer was in his place and waiting with Olympian calm for the pressure in the boiler to build up. In midmorning, the engine roared, with a marvelous deep metallic voice, shook, poured forth black smoke, the tie rods grew taut, and the wheels began to turn. We looked at one another, almost bewildered. We had endured, after all: we had won. After the year of suffering and patience in the Lager; after the wave of death that followed the liberation; after the cold and hunger and contempt and the ferocious company of the Greek; after the illnesses and misery of Katowice; after the senseless moves, because of which we felt condemned to orbit for eternity through the Russian spaces, like useless spent stars; after the idleness and bitter homesickness of Starye Doroghi, we were climbing back, therefore, traveling up, on the road home. Time, after two years of paralysis, had regained vigor and value, was working again for us, and this put an end to the lethargy of the long summer, to the threat of the coming winter, and made us impatient, greedy for days and miles. But very soon, from the first hours of the journey, we had to realize that the hour for impatience had not yet arrived; that happy route loomed long and laborious and not without surprises, a small railway odyssey within our greater odyssey. We still needed patience, in unexpected amounts: more patience.

Our train was more than half a kilometer long; the cars were in poor condition, as were the tracks, the speed was laughable, no more than forty or fifty kilometers an hour. The line had a single track; the stations that had available a siding long enough to allow a stop were few, and often the train had to be broken into two or three pieces, and pushed onto sidings by means of complicated and extremely slow maneuvers, in order to allow other trains to pass.

There were no authorities on board, with the exception of the engineer and the escort, consisting of the seven eighteenyear-old soldiers who had come from Austria to get us. These, although armed to the teeth, were ingenuous, kind creatures, with meek and innocent hearts, as lively and carefree as schoolboys on vacation, and utterly without authority or common sense. Whenever the train stopped, we saw them walking up and down the platform, with guns slung over their shoulders and proud, officious looks. They made a show of importance, as if they were escorting a transport of dangerous criminals, but it was all show; we soon realized that their inspections were increasingly focused on the two family cars, in the middle of the convoy. They were attracted not by the young wives but by the vaguely domestic atmosphere that emanated from those traveling Gypsy-like dwellings, and perhaps reminded them of their distant homes and their own childhood, which had scarcely ended; but mainly they were fascinated by the children, so much so that, after the first stops, they fixed their daily residence in the family cars, and withdrew to the one reserved for them only to spend the night. They were polite and useful; they helped the mothers willingly, they fetched water and split wood for the stoves. With the Italian boys they struck up a curious and unsymmetrical friendship. They learned various games from them, including the one in which you shoot marbles along a complicated course. In Italy, it’s understood as an allegorical representation of the Tour of Italy: thus the young Russians’ enthusiasm seemed odd to us, for in their land bicycles are rare, and cycling competitions nonexistent. In any case, it was a discovery for them: at the first stop in the morning, it wasn’t rare to see the seven Russians get out of their sleeping car, hurry to the family cars, open the doors with authority, and lift the still sleepy children onto the ground. Then they got busy digging the course in the dirt with their bayonets, and were rapidly immersed in the game, crouching on the ground on all fours, the guns on their backs, eager not to waste even a minute before the engine whistled departure. On the evening of the 16th we reached Bobruysk, the evening of the 17th Ovruch; and we realized that we were repeating backward the stations of our last journey north,

which had taken us from Zhmerynka to Slutsk and Starye Doroghi. We spent the endless days sleeping, chatting, or watching the majestic, deserted steppe unfold. Right away, our optimism lost a little of its brightness; this journey of ours, which to all appearances seemed likely to be the last, had been organized by the Russians in the vaguest and most muddled way imaginable. Rather, it seemed not to have been organized at all, but decided by who knows who, who knows where, with a simple stroke of the pen. In the whole convoy there existed only two or three maps, relentlessly argued over, on which we had trouble following our problematic progress: we were unquestionably traveling south, but exasperatingly slowly and fitfully, with incomprehensible detours and stops, sometimes covering only a few dozen kilometers in twenty-four hours. We often went to question the engineer (as for the escort, they seemed happy just to be traveling by train, and it didn’t matter to them at all to know where we were and where we were going); but the engineer, who emerged like a lower-world god from his burning-hot cab, spread his arms, shrugged his shoulders, swept his hand in a semicircle from east to west, and answered every time, “Where are we going tomorrow? I don’t know, my dears, I don’t know. We’re going wherever we find tracks.” The least tolerant of uncertainty and forced idleness was Cesare. He sat in a corner of the car, hypochondriac and bristling, like a sick animal, and didn’t so much as look at the country outside or at us inside. But it was an apparent inertia: those who have need of activity find the opportunity everywhere. As we were passing through an area scattered with small villages, between Ovruch and Zhitomir, his attention was attracted by a small brass ring on the finger of Giacomantonio, his unreliable former ally in the market square in Katowice. “Will you sell it to me?” he asked. “No,” Giacomantonio answered plainly, to all intents. “I’ll give you two rubles.” “I want eight.”

The negotiation continued for a long time; it seemed clear that both found in it a diversion and a pleasant mental exercise, and that the ring was only a pretext, a starting point for a sort of friendly game, for a practice negotiation, in order not to get out of shape. But that wasn’t the case: Cesare, as usual, had conceived a precise plan. To the amazement of us all, he gave in quite soon, and acquired the ring, which he seemed very attached to, for four rubles, a sum grossly disproportionate to the value of the object. Then he withdrew into his corner, and for the whole afternoon devoted himself to mysterious activities, chasing off with angry growls anyone who asked him questions (the most insistent being Giacomantonio). He had taken out of his pockets scraps of cloth of different quality, and he polished the ring carefully, inside and out, every so often breathing on it. Then he took out a packet of cigarette papers, and, using those, continued the work painstakingly, with extreme delicacy, no longer touching the metal with his fingers. Occasionally, he held the ring up to the light of the window, and observed it, turning it slowly as if it were a diamond. Finally the moment that Cesare was waiting for arrived: the train slowed down and stopped at the station in a village, not too large and not too small; the stop promised to be short, because the train remained undivided on the main track. Cesare got out and began to walk up and down the platform. He held the ring half hidden against his chest, under his jacket; with a conspiratorial air, he approached one at a time the Russian peasants who were waiting, stuck it out partway, and whispered nervously, “Tovarishch, zoloto, zoloto!” (“Gold”). At first the Russians paid no attention. Then an old man observed the ring close up and asked for a price. Cesare, with no hesitation, said, “Sto” (“A hundred”): a quite modest price for a gold ring, criminal for a brass one. The old man made a counteroffer of forty, Cesare acted indignant and turned to someone else. He tried this with several customers, taking his time, and looking for the one who would offer the most. Meanwhile, he listened intently for the whistle of the engine, so as to conclude the business and jump on the moving train right afterward.

While Cesare was showing the ring to this one and that one, others could be seen whispering together in little groups, suspicious and excited. Just then, the locomotive whistled; Cesare gave up the ring to the latest offer, pocketed fifty rubles, and quickly got on the train, which was already moving. It traveled one meter, two, ten meters; then it slowed again, and stopped, with a great screeching of brakes. Cesare had closed the sliding doors, and he peeked out through the crack, at first triumphant, then worried, finally terrified. The man with the ring was showing the acquisition to his fellow villagers, who passed it from hand to hand, turned it in every direction, and shook their heads with an air of doubt and disapproval. Then we saw the incautious buyer, evidently repenting, raise his head and set off resolutely alongside the convoy, in search of Cesare’s hiding place: an easy search, since ours was the only car with the doors closed. The business took a bad turn: the Russian, who couldn’t have been too bright, might not have succeeded in identifying the car by himself, but already two or three of his comrades were energetically pointing out to him the right direction. Cesare jumped back from the peephole, and resorted to extreme measures: he squatted in a corner of the car, and rapidly had himself covered with all the available blankets. In a moment he had disappeared under an enormous mass of blankets, quilts, sacks, jackets; listening intently, I seemed to hear words of prayer wafting from it, weak and muffled, and blasphemous in the context. The Russians were shouting outside the car, and beating with their fists on the wall, when the train started off with a violent jerk. Cesare reemerged, pale as death, but he cheered up immediately: “Now they can come and look for me!” The next morning, under a radiant sun, the train stopped in Kazatin. That name sounded familiar to me: where had I read or heard it? Maybe in the war news? And yet I had the impression of a closer and more present memory, as if someone had talked about it recently, and at length—after, and not before, the caesura of Auschwitz, which broke in two the chain of my memories.

And there, standing on the platform, just outside our car, was the embodiment of the memory: Galina, the girl from Katowice, the translator-dancer-typist of the Kommandantur, Galina of Kazatin. I got out to greet her, filled with joy and wonder at the unlikely meeting: to find my only Russian friend in that endless land! She didn’t seem much changed; she was a little better dressed, and was sheltered from the sun by an ostentatious parasol. Nor was I much changed, at least on the outside: a little less undernourished and weak, and just as ragged. But I was newly rich: with the train behind me, the slow but sure engine, Italy closer every day. She wished me a good journey; we exchanged a few hurried and awkward remarks, in a language neither hers nor mine, in the cold language of the invader, and parted immediately, for the train was starting up. As the car bumped along toward the border, I sat sniffing on my hand her cheap perfume, happy to have seen her again, sad at the memory of the hours passed with her, the things not said, the opportunities not taken. We passed through Zhmerynka again, suspicious, mindful of the days of anguish we had spent there a few months earlier; but the train continued without hindrance, and on the evening of September 19, having crossed Bessarabia quickly, we were at the Prut River, the border. In the thick darkness, by way of farewell, the Soviet border police carried out a tumultuous and disorganized inspection of the train, in search (they told us) of rubles, which it was illegal to export; in any case, we had spent them all. We crossed the bridge and slept on the other side, in the stopped train, eager for the light of day to reveal the Romanian landscape. It was in fact a dramatic revelation. When we opened the doors in the early morning, a surprisingly domestic scene appeared before our eyes: no longer the deserted, geological steppe but the green hills of Moldavia, with farmhouses, haystacks, rows of vines; no longer enigmatic Cyrillic inscriptions but, right in front of our car, a small, tumbledown cottage, the pale blue of verdigris, and written clearly on it the words “Paine, Lapte, Vin, Carnaciuri de Purcel” (Bread, Milk, Wine, Pork Sausages). And in front of the cottage stood a

woman, and she was pulling a long sausage out of a basket at her feet, measuring it by the arm’s length as one measures string. There were farmers like the ones at home, with sunburned faces and pale foreheads, dressed in black, with jacket and vest and watch chain across the stomach; girls on foot or on bicycles, dressed almost like the girls at home, who could have been taken for girls from the Veneto or Abruzzo. Goats, sheep, cows, pigs, hens. But then we saw, stopped at a grade crossing, a camel—a brake on every precocious illusion of home— which drove us back into the elsewhere: a worn-out, gray, woolly camel, loaded with sacks, exhaling arrogance and foolish solemnity from its prehistoric leporine snout. The language of the place sounded equally double-edged to our ears; there were known roots and endings, but millennia of intermingling had entangled and corrupted them with others of a strange, savage sound: a speech familiar in its music, hermetic in meaning. At the border the painful, complex ceremony of transfer from the broken-down Soviet-gauge cars to equally brokendown Western-gauge cars took place; and soon afterward we entered the station in Iasi, where the convoy was laboriously separated into three pieces: a sign that we would be stopped there for hours. In Iasi two notable things happened: the two German women of the woods reappeared out of nowhere, and all the married “Romanians” disappeared. The smuggling of the two German women across the Soviet border must have been organized with great daring and skill by a group of Italian soldiers. The details were never known precisely, but the rumor was that the women had spent the critical night of the border crossing hidden under the floor of the car, flattened between the tie rods and the springs. We saw them walking on the platform the next morning, carefree and insolent, bundled up in Soviet military outfits and grimy with mud and grease. At last they felt safe. At the same time, we saw violent family quarrels explode in the cars of the “Romanians.” Many of these, who had

formerly belonged to the diplomatic corps and had been demobilized or self-demobilized by the Armir, had settled in Romania and married Romanian women. At the end of the war, almost all had chosen repatriation, and the Russians had organized a train that was supposed to take them to Odessa, to be put on ships; but at Zhmerynka they had been added to our wretched convoy, and had followed our fate; no one ever knew if that had happened by plan or by confusion. The Romanian wives were furious at their Italian husbands; they had had enough of surprises and adventures and convoys and camps. Now they had returned to Romanian territory, they were home, they wished to stay there and wouldn’t listen to reason. Some argued and wept, others tried to drag their husbands off the train, the most unrestrained hurled baggage and household goods out of the cars, while the children, frightened, ran around shrieking. The Russians of the escort hurried over, but they didn’t understand and stood watching, inert and indecisive. Since the halt at Iasi threatened to extend for the whole day, we left the station and wandered through the deserted streets, among low mud-colored houses. A single tiny, archaic tram went back and forth from one end of the city to the other; at one terminus was the ticket seller, who spoke Yiddish, and was Jewish. With some effort we managed to understand each other. He told me that other convoys of veterans had already passed through Iasi, people of all races, French, English, Greeks, Italians, Dutch, Americans. There were also among them many Jews in need of help, and so the local Jewish community had established a center for assistance. If we had an hour or two, he advised us to go as a delegation to that center; we would get advice and help. In fact, since his tram was about to leave, we should get on, he would tell us where to get out, and he would take care of the ticket. Leonardo, Signor Unverdorben, and I went: passing through the worn-out city we reached a dirty, crumbling building, its doors and windows replaced by temporary boards. In a dark, dusty office we were welcomed by two old patriarchs, whose appearance was scarcely more prosperous and healthy than ours; but they were full of affectionate

solicitude and good intentions, they had us sit on the only three available chairs, they overwhelmed us with kindness, and in a rush recounted, in Yiddish and French, the tremendous ordeals that they, and few others, had survived. They were quick to tears and to laughter; at the moment of farewell, they invited us peremptorily to drink a toast of terrible rectified alcohol, and handed us a basket of grapes to distribute among the Jews of our convoy. Emptying all the drawers and their own pockets, they also scraped together a sum in lei that on the spot appeared to us astronomical; but, once we had divided it, and taken into account inflation, we realized that its value was mainly symbolic.

From Iasi to the Line

Through a countryside still in summer, through cities and villages with barbaric-sounding names (Cirea, Scantea, Vaslui, Piscu, Braila, Pogoanele), we continued south for several days, by tiny stages: on the night of September 23 we saw the fires of the oil wells of Ploie ti blazing. After that, our mysterious pilot turned west, and the next day, from the position of the sun, we realized that our route was reversed: we were again traveling north. We admired, without recognizing it, the castle of Sinaia, a royal residence. In our car we had by now used up our liquid cash, and had sold or traded everything that might have any commercial value, even the slightest. Therefore, except for occasional strokes of luck or outlaw actions, we ate only what the Russians gave us; the situation wasn’t terrible, but it was confused and nerve-racking. It was never clear who was seeing to our provisions: very likely the Russian guards, who randomly collected, from every military or civilian storehouse they happened on, the most disparate foodstuffs, or maybe the only ones available. When the train stopped and was divided, each car sent two delegates to the Russians’ car, which had been gradually transformed into a chaotic traveling bazaar, and the Russians, following no rule, distributed food to the respective cars. It was a daily game of chance: as for quantity, the rations were sometimes scant, sometimes cyclopean, sometimes none; and as for quality they were unpredictable, like everything Russian. We got carrots, and more carrots, and still more carrots, for days in a row; then the carrots disappeared and beans appeared. They were dried beans, as hard as gravel: to cook them, we had to soak them for hours in makeshift containers, mess tins, cans, pots hanging from the ceiling of the car: at night, when the train braked abruptly, that suspended forest shook violently, water and beans rained onto the sleepers, causing quarrels,

laughter, and chaos in the darkness. Potatoes arrived, then kasha, then cucumbers, but without oil; then oil, half a tin per person, when the cucumbers were finished; then sunflower seeds, an exercise in patience. One day we received an abundance of bread and sausage, and we all breathed easier; then there was grain for a whole week in a row, as if we were chickens. Only the family cars had stoves: in all the others, we managed by cooking on the ground, over campfires, lit in a hurry as soon as the train stopped, and dismantled midway through the cooking, amid arguments and curses, when the train started up again. We cooked frantically, furiously, ears cocked for the train whistle, one eye on the starving tramps who immediately swarmed on us from the countryside, attracted by the smoke like bloodhounds by the scent. We cooked like our ancestors, on three rocks; since there often weren’t any, each car ended up having its own hoard. Spits and ingenious supports appeared; Cantarella’s pots resurfaced. The problem of wood and water was urgent. Necessity simplifies: private woodpiles were ransacked in an instant; the anti-snow barriers, which in those towns were piled up along the tracks in the summer months, were stolen; fences were demolished, railroad ties, and once (for lack of anything else) an entire damaged freight car. Providential, in our car, was the presence of the Moor and his famous ax. For water, in the first place suitable containers were needed, and every car had to get a bucket, through trade, theft, or purchase. We found at the first trial that our bucket, bought legitimately, had a hole in it: we repaired it with a bandage from the infirmary, and it stood up to the cooking miraculously as far as the Brenner, where it fell apart. It was generally impossible to stock up on water at the stations. At the fountain (when there was one) an endless line formed within seconds, and only a few pails could be filled. Some people crept stealthily up to the tender, which contained the supply meant for the locomotive; but if the engineer noticed, he flew into a rage and bombarded the daredevils with curses and glowing coals. Nevertheless, sometimes we managed to draw hot water from the belly of the engine itself;

it was slimy, rusty water, unsuitable for cooking but adequate for washing. The best resource was country wells. The train often stopped in the midst of fields, at a red signal, for a few seconds or for hours—it was impossible to predict. Then we all rapidly took off our belts, which, tied together, made a long rope; after that the fastest in the car took off at a run, with the rope and the bucket, in search of a well. The fastest in my car was me, and I was frequently successful in the enterprise; but once I seriously risked missing the train. I had already lowered the bucket and was laboriously raising it, when I heard the engine whistle. If I had abandoned bucket and belts, precious community property, I would be dishonored forever, so I pulled with as much strength as I had, grabbed the bucket, dumped out the water, and ran, impeded by the knotted belts, toward the train, which was already moving. A second’s delay could be a month’s delay; I ran flat out, for my life, I climbed over two hedges and the fence, and hurled myself onto the tremulous gravel of the roadbed while the train rolled by in front of me. My car had already passed; merciful hands reached toward me from others, grabbed the belts and the bucket, other hands clutched me by the hair, the shoulders, the clothes, and hoisted me bodily onto the floor of the last car, where I lay, nearly fainting, for half an hour. The train continued to proceed northward; it advanced along a valley that became increasingly narrow, crossed the Transylvanian Alps through the pass of Predeal on September 24, amid harsh, bare mountains, in piercing cold, and descended to Bra ov. Here the engine was detached, the guarantee of a halt, and the usual ceremony began to unfold: people with a furtive and fierce look, hatchets in hand, roaming through the station and outside; others with buckets, fighting over the scant water; still others stealing straw from haystacks, or making deals with the locals; children scattered around in search of trouble or minor thefts; women washing or washing themselves in public, exchanging visits and news from car to car, rekindling the quarrels brooded on during the trip and inciting new ones. Fires were immediately lit, and cooking began.

Beside our convoy a Soviet military transport was stationed, loaded with small trucks, armored vehicles, and fuel tanks. It was guarded by two robust female soldiers, in boots and helmets, muskets over their shoulders and bayonets fixed; they were of an indefinable age and had a hard, unfriendly look. When they saw the fires being lit right under the fuel tanks, they became justly indignant at our carelessness, and, shouting “Nelzya, nelzya,” ordered us to put them out immediately. Everyone obeyed, cursing, with the exception of a small group of Alpinists, tough veterans of the Russian campaign, who had organized a goose and were roasting it. They discussed it soberly, while the two women raged behind them; then two of them, designated by the majority, rose to their feet, with the severe and resolute look of someone who is consciously sacrificing for the common good. They confronted the soldiers and spoke to them in a whisper. The negotiations were surprisingly brief; the women put down their helmets and weapons, and the four of them, serious and dignified, left the station, made their way into an alley, and disappeared from view. They returned a quarter of an hour later, the women in front, a little less hard and slightly flushed, the men behind, proud and serene. The cooking was done: the four squatted on the ground with the others, the goose was carved and divided peaceably, then, after a short respite, the Russians took up their weapons and their duties. From Bra ov the route turned west again, toward the Hungarian border. Rain arrived, to make the situation worse; it was hard to light the fires, we had a single wet garment to wear, there was mud everywhere. The roof of our car wasn’t watertight, and only a few square meters of the floor remained habitable; everywhere else water dripped mercilessly. Interminable fights and altercations arose the moment we lay down to sleep. It’s an old observation that every human group contains a predestined victim: one who is always picked on, whom everyone mocks, about whom stupid, malicious gossip is spread, upon whom all the others, by mysterious agreement, unload their bad moods and their wish to do harm. The victim

in our car was the Carabiniere. It would be arduous to establish why, if a why even existed; the Carabiniere was a young carabiniere from Abruzzo, polite, meek, helpful, and good-looking. He wasn’t even especially obtuse; rather, he was quite touchy and sensitive, and so he suffered acutely from the persecution he was subjected to by the other soldiers in the car. But he was a carabiniere: and it’s well-known that between the carabinieri and the other armed forces there’s a certain amount of bad blood. The carabinieri are rebuked, perversely, for their excessive discipline, seriousness, chastity, honesty; their lack of humor; their uncritical obedience; their customs; their uniform. Fantastic, grotesque, and foolish legends circulate about them, handed down in the barracks from generation to generation: the legend of the hammer, the legend of the oath. I will not mention the first, which is too well-known and vile; according to the other, as I learned, the young recruit is obliged to take a secret, monstrous, diabolical oath, under which, among other things, he pledges solemnly “to kill his father and his mother”; and every carabiniere either has killed them or will kill them, otherwise he doesn’t get past corporal. The unhappy young man couldn’t open his mouth: “Shut up, you, you killed papa and mama.” But he never rebelled; he absorbed this and a hundred other insults with the adamantine patience of a saint. One day he took me aside, as neutral, and assured me “that the business of the oath wasn’t true.” We traveled through the rain, which made us angry and sad, almost without stopping, for three days, halting only for a few hours in a mudfilled town with the glorious name of Alba Iulia. On the night of September 26, having traveled more than eight hundred kilometers in the land of Romania, we were at the Hungarian border, near Arad, in a village called Curtici. I’m sure that the inhabitants of Curtici still remember the scourge of our passage; it’s credible in fact that it entered into the local traditions, and will be spoken of for generations, around the fire, as elsewhere they still speak of Attila and Tamerlane. Even this detail of our journey is fated to remain obscure; according to the evidence, the Romanian military or railway authorities didn’t want us anymore, or had already

“dumped” us, while the Hungarian authorities didn’t want to accept us, and hadn’t “taken responsibility” for us. In effect, we remained stuck in Curtici, we and the train and the guards, for seven exhausting days, and we devastated the town. Curtici was an agricultural village of perhaps a thousand inhabitants, and it had very little; we were fourteen hundred, and we needed everything. In seven days, we drained all the wells; exhausted the stock of wood, and caused serious damage to everything combustible that the station held; as for the latrines it’s best not to mention them. We caused a frightening rise in the price of milk, bread, corn, poultry; after that, with our buying power reduced to zero, there was thieving at night and then even in the daytime. The geese, which appeared to constitute the principal local resource, and initially wandered free through the muddy alleys in solemn orderly squads, completely disappeared, in part captured, in part shut up in pens. Every morning we opened the doors, in the absurd hope that the train had moved without our noticing, while we slept. But nothing had changed, the sky was always dark and rainy, we were still looking at the mud houses, the train was inert and powerless, like a ship that has run aground; and the wheels, those wheels that should be carrying us home, we bent over to examine them—no, they hadn’t moved a millimeter, they were as if soldered to the tracks, and rusting in the rain. We were cold and hungry, and we felt abandoned and forgotten. On the sixth day, Cesare, more exhausted and enraged than anyone, deserted us. He declared that he had had enough of Curtici, of the Russians, of the train, and of us; that he didn’t want to go mad, or die of hunger, or be knocked off by the Curticesi; that a smart fellow can manage better by himself. He said that if we were disposed to we could also follow him: but, let’s be clear, he was tired of living in misery, he was ready to run some risks, but he wanted to get it over, make some money quickly, and return to Rome in an airplane. None of us felt like following him, and so Cesare left: he took a train to Bucharest, had many adventures, and succeeded in his goal, that is, he returned to Rome in an airplane, although later than us; but that is another story, a story de haulte graisse, which I

will not relate, or will relate in another place, and only if and when Cesare gives me permission. If in Romania I had felt a delicate philological pleasure in tasting names like Gala i, Alba Iulia, Turnu Severin, on first entering Hungary we encountered instead Békéscsaba, followed by Hódmezövásárhely and Kiskunfélegyháza. The Magyar plain was soaked with water, the sky was leaden, but what saddened us most of all was the absence of Cesare. He had left a painful void; in his absence no one knew what to talk about, no one could overcome the boredom of the interminable journey, the nineteen-day ordeal of train travel that now weighed on our shoulders. We looked at one another with a vague sense of guilt: why had we let him go? Yet in Hungary, in spite of the impossible names, we felt we were now in Europe, under the wing of a civilization that was ours, safe from alarming apparitions like the camel in Moldavia. The train was heading toward Budapest, but did not enter the city: it halted several times in Ujpest and other points on the periphery on October 6, offering spectral visions of ruins, of temporary barracks and deserted streets; then it advanced again across the plain, amid rain showers and veils of autumn fog. It stopped at Szob, where it was market day; we all got out, to stretch our legs and spend the little money we had. I had nothing more, but I was hungry, and I traded my Auschwitz jacket, which I had jealously preserved until then, for a noble meal of fermented cheese and onions, whose sharp aroma had entranced me. When the engine whistled, and we got back in the car, we counted, and we were two more. One was Vincenzo, and no one was surprised. Vincenzo was a difficult boy, a Calabrian shepherd of sixteen; who could say how he had ended up in Germany. He was as wild as the Velletrano, but in a different way: timid, closed, and contemplative as the other was violent and fiery. He had wonderful blue eyes, almost feminine, and a delicate, mobile, ethereal face; he almost never spoke. He was a nomad in his soul, restless, drawn by the forest in Starye Doroghi as if by invisible demons; and on the train, too, he had no fixed residence, but wandered through all the cars. We immediately

understood the reason for his instability; as soon as the train left Szob, Vincenzo fell to the floor, his eyes white and his jaw locked, like a rock. He roared like a beast and thrashed about, stronger than the four Alpinists who restrained him: an epileptic fit. Certainly he had had others, at Starye Doroghi and before; but each time, when he noticed the warning signs, Vincenzo, driven by a savage pride, had taken refuge in the forest so that no one would know about his illness; or maybe he fled before the evil, like birds before a storm. On the long journey, since he couldn’t stay on the ground, he changed cars when he felt an attack coming. He stayed with us for a few days, then disappeared. We found him perched on the roof of another car. Why? He answered that up there he could see the countryside better. The other guest, too, for different reasons, turned out to be a hard case. No one knew him; he was a strong barefoot boy, wearing the jacket and pants of the Red Army. He spoke only Hungarian, and none of us could understand him. The Carabiniere told us that while he was sitting on the ground eating bread, the boy had come up to him and held out his hand; he had given him half his food, and from then on had been unable to get rid of him; as we hurried to get into the car he must have followed us without anyone’s noticing. He was welcomed kindly; another mouth to feed was not a concern. He was cheerful and intelligent: as soon as the train started moving, he introduced himself with great dignity. His name was Pista and he was fourteen. Father and mother? Here it was harder to understand: I found a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper and drew a man, a woman, and a child in the middle; I pointed to the child, saying “Pista,” then waited. Pista turned serious, then he drew a picture of terrible evidence: a house, an airplane, a falling bomb. Then he crossed out the house and next to it drew a large smoking mass. But he wasn’t in the mood for sad things; he crumpled up that piece of paper, asked for another, and drew a cask, with singular precision. The bottom, in perspective, and all the staves visible, one by one; then the hoops, and the hole with the plug. We looked at one another in bewilderment: what was

the meaning of the message? Pista laughed, happily: then he drew himself next to it, with a hammer in one hand and a saw in the other. We still didn’t get it? It was his trade, he was a cooper. Everyone immediately became fond of him; besides, he was eager to make himself useful, he swept the floor every morning, he washed the pots enthusiastically, he fetched water, and he was happy when we sent him to “do the shopping” among his compatriots at the various stops. At the Brenner, he could already speak comprehensible Italian. He sang lovely songs of his country, which no one understood, then sought to explain them with gestures, making everyone laugh and laughing heartily himself first of all. He was fond of the Carabiniere like a younger brother, and little by little washed away the original sin: the Carabiniere had indeed killed father and mother, but basically he must have been a good son, given that Pista had followed him. He filled the void left by Cesare. We asked him why he had come with us, what he was looking for in Italy, but we never found out, in part because of the difficulty of understanding but principally because he himself seemed not to know. For months he had been wandering from station to station like a wild dog; he had followed the first human creature who looked at him with compassion. We hoped to cross from Hungary to Austria without trouble at the border, but it wasn’t to be: on the morning of October 7, the twentysecond day of the train journey, we were in Bratislava, in Slovakia, in view of the Beskids, the very mountains that obstructed the grim horizon of Auschwitz. Another language, another currency, another path: would we close the circle? Katowice was two hundred kilometers away; would we begin another vain, exhausting circuit through Europe? But in the evening we entered German territory; on the day of the 8th we were stuck in the freight yard of Leopoldau, a station on the outskirts of Vienna, and we felt almost home. The outskirts of Vienna were ugly and had grown up haphazardly, like those of Milan and Turin, familiar to us, and, like those, in the last views that we remembered of them, pummelled and devastated by bombs. The passersby were few:

women, children, old people, no men. Paradoxically, their language, too, sounded familiar to me; some even understood Italian. We exchanged at random the money we had for the local money, but it was in vain; as in Kraków in March, all the stores were closed, or sold only rationed goods. “What can one buy in Vienna without a ration card?” I asked a girl, no more than twelve. She was dressed in rags, but wore shoes with high heels and was gaudily made up. “Überhaupt nichts,” she answered derisively. We returned to the train for the night; during that night, with much jolting and screeching, we traveled a few kilometers and found that we had moved to another depot, Vienna-Jedlersdorf. Beside us another train emerged from the fog, or, rather, the tortured corpse of a train: the engine was vertical, absurd, its nose pointed to the sky as if it wanted to climb up; all the cars were burned. We approached, driven by the instinct for plunder and by a mocking curiosity; we expected a malicious satisfaction in putting our hands on the ruins of those German things. But mockery was answered by mockery: one car contained shapeless metal debris that must have been parts of burned musical instruments, and a hundred clay ocarinas, the sole survivors; another, service guns molten and rusted; a third, a tangle of curved sabers, which the fire and the rain had welded in their sheathes for all the centuries to come—vanity of vanities, and the cold taste of perdition. We went on and, wandering aimlessly, found ourselves on the banks of the Danube. The river was in flood, muddy, yellow, and swollen with threat; at that point its course is almost straight, and we could see, one behind the other, in a misty perspective like a nightmare, seven bridges, all broken exactly in the center, all with their stumps submerged in the swirling water. As we returned to our traveling home, we were startled by the rattle of a tram, the only living thing. It was running madly on its battered tracks, along the deserted streets, without stopping at the stops. We glimpsed the driver in his place, pale as a ghost; behind him, delirious with excitement, were the seven Russians of our escort, and no other passenger: it was the first tram of their lives. While some were hanging

out the windows, shouting “Hurrah, hurrah!” others were urging and threatening the driver to go faster. On a big square a market was being held; yet again a spontaneous and illegal market, but much more wretched and stealthy than the Polish ones that I had gone to with the Greek and with Cesare; from close up it reminded me, instead, of another scene, the Market of the Lager, indelible in memory. There were no stalls, but only people standing, cold, restless, in small groups, ready to flee, with purses and suitcases in hand and bulging pockets; they exchanged tiny bits of junk, potatoes, slices of bread, loose cigarettes, ordinary, used household rubbish. We returned to the train with heavy hearts. We had felt no joy in seeing Vienna destroyed and the Germans defeated: pity, rather; not compassion but a broader pity, which mingled with our own wretchedness, with the heavy, looming sensation of an irreparable and ultimate evil, present everywhere, hidden like a cancer in the bowels of Europe and the world, the seed of future harm. The train seemed unable to detach itself from Vienna; after three days of halts and maneuvers, on October 10 we were still in Nussdorf, another suburb, hungry, wet, and sad. But on the morning of the 11th the train headed decisively westward, as if it had suddenly found the lost path: with unusual speed it went through St. Pölten, Loosdorf, and Amstetten, and that evening, along the road that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, appeared a sign, portentous in our eyes like the birds that announce the approach of land to sailors. It was a vehicle new to us: a stocky, clumsy military vehicle, flat as a box, that bore painted on its side a white star, not red—a Jeep, in other words. A black man was driving; one of the occupants waved at us and shouted in Neapolitan, “We’re going home, guys!” The line of demarcation was therefore close; we reached it at St. Valentin, a few kilometers from Linz. Here we got out, we said goodbye to the young barbarians of the escort and the well-deserving engineer, and passed all together into the hands of the Americans.

The shorter the average duration of a stay at a transit camp, the less well organized it is; at St. Valentin people stopped only for a few hours, a day at most, so it was a very dirty and primitive camp. There was neither light nor heat nor beds; you slept on the bare wooden floor, in extremely temporary barracks, surrounded by several inches of mud. The only efficient facilities were those for baths and disinfection; under that guise, of purification and exorcism, the West took possession of us. Several giant and silent GIs were assigned to the priestly task; they were unarmed but adorned with myriad devices whose meaning and use escaped us. For the bath, everything went smoothly; there were maybe twenty wooden cabins, with a warm shower and bathrobes, a luxury never seen before. After the bath, they led us into a vast brick hall, divided by a cable from which hung ten odd pieces of equipment, vaguely resembling pneumatic hammers; you could hear a compressor pulsing outside. All fourteen hundred, as many as we were, were crowded to one side of the partition, men and women together. Here ten officials with an unearthly aspect entered the scene, enveloped in white overalls, with helmets and gas masks. They grabbed the first of the herd, and without ceremony inserted the hoses of the hanging contrivances gradually into all the openings of their clothes: the collar, the waist, the pockets, up into the pants, under skirts. The machines were a kind of pneumatic bellows, which blew in insecticide: and the insecticide was DDT, an absolute novelty for us, like Jeeps, penicillin, and the atomic bomb, of which we heard soon afterward. Cursing or laughing because of the tickling sensation, everyone adjusted to the treatment, until it came the turn of a Navy officer and his beautiful fiancée. When the hooded people put their hands, which were chaste but rude, on her, the officer energetically intervened. He was a robust and determined youth; anyone who tried to touch his woman was in trouble. The perfect mechanism stopped short; the uniformed men consulted briefly among themselves, with inarticulate nasal sounds, then one of them took off mask and overalls and

planted himself in front of the officer with fists clenched, like a guard. The others made a neat circle around them, and a boxing match began. After a few minutes of silent, gallant fighting, the officer fell down with a bloody nose; the girl, pale and upset, was dusted all over according to the prescriptions, but without anger or a wish for reprisal, and everything returned to American orderliness.

The Reawakening

Austria has a border with Italy, and St. Valentin is no more than three hundred kilometers from Tarvísio; and yet on October 15, the thirty-first day of our journey, we crossed a new border and entered Munich, suffering from an inconsolable railroad weariness, an utter nausea for tracks, for sleeping precariously on wooden boards, for jolting movement, for stations; and so the familiar smells, common to all the railroads in the world—the piercing odors of wet ties, of hot brakes, of burning coal—afflicted us with a profound disgust. We were tired of everything, tired especially of crossing useless borders. But, in another way, the fact of feeling for the first time, beneath our feet, an edge of Germany—not of Upper Silesia or Austria but of Germany itself—superimposed on our weariness a complex state of mind made up of impatience, frustration, and tension. It seemed to us that we had something to say, enormous things to say, to every single German, and that every German should have something to say to us. We felt an urgency to sum up, ask, explain, and comment, like chess players at the end of a match. Did “they” know about Auschwitz, about the silent, daily slaughter, a step from their doors? If yes, how could they go along, return home, and look at their children, cross the threshold of a church? If not, they had to listen, they had a sacred duty to listen, to learn from us, from me, everything, immediately. I felt the number tattooed on my arm burning like a wound. As I wandered through the rubble-filled streets of Munich, around the station where yet again our train was stranded, it seemed to me that I was walking among swarms of insolvent debtors, as if each one owed me something and refused to pay. I was among them, in Agramante’s camp, among the master race, but the men were few, many were mutilated, many dressed in rags like us. It seemed to me that each one should

interrogate us, read in our faces who we were, and listen humbly to our tale. But no one looked us in the eye, no one accepted the challenge; they were deaf, blind, and mute, locked in their ruins as in a fortress of deliberate ignorance, still strong, still capable of hatred and contempt, still prisoners of the ancient knot of pride and fault. I caught myself seeking among them, in that anonymous crowd of sealed faces, other faces, well defined, many provided with a name: of those who could not not know, not remember, not respond; of those who had ordered and obeyed, killed, humiliated, corrupted. A vain and foolish attempt— because not they, but others, the few righteous men, would answer in their stead.

If in Szob we had taken on a guest, after Munich we realized that we had taken on an entire litter; we were no longer sixty cars but, rather, sixty-one. At the tail end of the train, traveling with us toward Italy, was a new car, crowded with young Jews, boys and girls from all the countries of Eastern Europe. None of them looked more than twenty, but they were extremely determined and confident; they were young Zionists, they were going to Israel, taking any route they could and by any means they could. A ship awaited them in Bari. They had bought the train car and to hook it up to our train had been the simplest thing in the world, they hadn’t asked permission from anyone—they had simply hooked it up. I was amazed, but they laughed at my amazement. “Is Hitler not dead?” their leader asked me, with the intense gaze of a hawk. They felt immensely free and strong, masters of the world and of their destiny. By way of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, we arrived that evening, in incredible disarray, at the transit camp of Mittenwald, in the mountains on the Austrian border. There we spent the night, and it was our last cold night. The following day the train descended to Innsbruck, and here it filled up with Italian smugglers, who, in the absence of proper authorities, welcomed us on behalf of our homeland, and generously distributed chocolate, grappa, and tobacco.

In the ascent toward the Italian border the train, wearier than we were, broke in two like a rope stretched too far; several people were injured, and that was the last adventure. After dark we passed the Brenner, which we had crossed into exile twenty months before—our less tested comrades in cheerful tumult, Leonardo and I in a silence charged with memory. Of six hundred and fifty, the number who had left, three of us were returning. And what had we lost, in those twenty months? What would we find at home? How much of ourselves had been eroded, extinguished? Did we return richer or poorer, stronger or weaker? We didn’t know; but we knew that on the thresholds of our homes, for good or for ill, a trial awaited us, and we anticipated it with fear. Flowing through our veins, with the weary blood, we felt the poison of Auschwitz. Where would we draw the strength to resume living, to knock down the barriers, the hedges that grow up on their own during all absences, around every abandoned house, every empty den? Soon, even tomorrow, we would have to join battle, against still unknown enemies, within and outside us. With what weapons, what energy, what will? We felt centuries old, oppressed by a year of ferocious memories, emptied and defenseless. Although the months just passed, of wandering at the edge of civilization, were harsh, they now seemed to us a truce, an interlude of unlimited openness, a providential gift of destiny, never to be repeated. We spent the first night in Italy pondering these thoughts, which kept us from sleeping, as the train slowly descended the deserted, dark valley of the Adige. On October 17 the camp of Pescantina, near Verona, took us in, and there we were released, each to his own fate, but not until the evening of the following day did a train depart in the direction of Turin. In the frenzied confusion of thousands of refugees and veterans we saw Pista, who had already found his way: he wore the white-and-yellow armband of the Pontificia Opera di Assistenza, the Vatican relief organization, and was contributing eagerly and happily to the life of the camp. And then a figure came toward us, rising a full head above the crowd: a known face, the Moor of Verona. He came to greet us, Leonardo and me; he had reached home first of all, since Avesa, his town, was a few kilometers away. And he blessed

us, the old blasphemer; he raised two enormous gnarled fingers, and blessed us with the solemn gesture of popes, wishing us a safe return and all good things. We were grateful for the good wishes, since we felt the need of them.

I reached Turin on October 19, after thirty-five days of travel; the house was standing, all the family alive, no one expected me. I was swollen, bearded, and ragged, and had difficulty in making myself recognized. I found friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the concreteness of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting. I found a wide, clean bed, which at night (an instant of terror) yielded softly beneath my weight. But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my gaze fixed on the ground, as if to look for something to eat or put in my pocket quickly and sell for bread; and a dream filled with fear has not ceased to visit me, at intervals now close, now rare. It’s a dream within another dream, varying in its details, unique in its substance. I am at the table with my family, or friends, or at work, or in a verdant countryside—in a serene, relaxed setting, in other words, apparently without tension and pain—and yet I feel a subtle, profound anguish, the definite sensation of a looming threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, little by little or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and is destroyed around me, the scene, the walls, the people, and the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Everything has now turned into chaos; I am alone at the center of a gray and murky void, and, yes, I know what this means, and I also know that I have always known it. I am again in the Lager, and nothing outside the Lager was true. The rest was a brief holiday, or a trick of the senses, a dream: the family, nature in flower, the house. Now this internal dream, the dream of peace, is over, and in the external dream, which continues coldly, I hear the sound of a well-known voice: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, “Wstawa .” Turin, December 1961–November 1962

Contents The Mnemagogs Censorship in Bitinia The Versifier Angelic Butterfly Cladonia Rapida Order at a Good Price Man’s Friend Some Applications of the Mimete Versamine Sleeping Beauty in the Refrigerator: A Winter’s Tale The Measure of Beauty Quaestio de Centauris Full Employment The Sixth Day Retirement Package

. . . Si ne le croyez, je ne m’en soucie, mais un homme de bien, un homme de bon sens croit tousjours ce qu’on luy dit, et qu’il trouve par escrit. Ne dit Salomon, Proverbiorum XIV: “Innocens credit omni verbo, etc.”? . . . De ma part, je ne trouve rien escrit es Bibles sainctes qui soit contre cela. Mais, si le vouloir de Dieu tel eust esté, diriez vous qu’il ne l’eust pu faire? Ha, pour grâce, n’embure-lucoquez jamais vos esprits de ces vaines pensées. Car je vous dis que à Dieu rien n’est impossible. Et, s’il vouloit, les femmes auroient dorenavant ainsi leurs enfants par l’oreille. Bacchus ne fut il pas engendré par la cuisse de Jupiter? . . . Minerve nasquit elle pas du cerveau par l’oreille de Jupiter? . . . Castor et Pollux, de la coque d’un oeuf pont et esclos par Leda? Mais vous seriez bien davantaige esbahis et estonnés si je vous exposois presentement tout le chapitre de Pline, auquel parle des enfantements estranges et contre nature. Et toutesfois je ne suis point menteur tant asseuré comme il a esté. Lisez le septiesme de sa Naturelle Histoire, chap. III, et ne m’en tabustez plus l’entendement.

—RABELAIS, GARGANTUA, I–VI

. . . I don’t care if you believe it, but an honest man, a man of good sense, always believes what he is told, and what he finds written down. Does not Solomon say, in Proverbs XIV, “The simple believeth every word, etc.”? . . . For my part I find nothing written in the Holy Bible which contradicts it. If this had been the will of God, would you say that He could not have performed it? For goodness’ sake do not obfuscate our brains with such an idle thought. For I say to you that to God nothing is impossible. If it had been His will, women would have produced their children in that way, by ear, forever afterwards. Was not Bacchus begotten by Jupiter’s thigh? . . . Was not Minerva born from Jupiter’s brain by way of his ear? . . . Castor and Pollux from the shell of an egg laid and hatched by Leda? But you would be even more flabbergasted if I were now to expound for you the whole chapter of Pliny in which he speaks of strange and unnatural births; and, anyhow, I am not such a barefaced liar as he was. Read chapter Three of the seventh book of his Natural History, and don’t tease my brain any more on the subject.

(TRANS. J. M. COHEN)

The Mnemagogs

Dr. Morandi (but he wasn’t yet used to hearing himself called “Doctor”) got off the bus intending to remain incognito for at least a couple of days, but he soon realized that this would be impossible. The owner of the Café Alpino gave him a neutral welcome (evidently she was either not curious enough or not keen enough); but from her smile, a combination of deferential, maternal, and slightly mocking, he understood that he had already been identified as “the new doctor” and had no chance of a reprieve. My degree must be written all over my face, he thought; tu es medicus in aeternum, and, what’s worse, everyone will notice. Morandi found irrevocable things distasteful and, at least for the moment, he was disposed to see the entire matter as an enormous and perpetual nuisance. “Something akin to the trauma of birth,” he concluded to himself, nonsensically. . . . In the meantime, as the first consequence of his lost anonymity, he needed to go and find Montesanto without delay. He returned to the café in order to retrieve the letter of introduction from his suitcase, and then began, under the merciless sun, to search the deserted town for the nameplate on Montesanto’s door. He had a difficult time finding it, and succeeded only after much useless circling about; he hadn’t wanted to ask anyone for directions, as he thought he detected an unfriendly inquisitiveness on the faces of the few people he did encounter. He had expected the nameplate to be old, but he found it to be older than anything he had imagined, covered in verdigris, the name almost illegible. All the shutters on the house were closed, and the lower façade was faded and peeling. Lizards darted away rapidly and silently as he approached.

Montesanto himself came down to open the door. He was a tall, portly old man, his eyes nearsighted yet lively amid the tired and heavy features of his face. He moved with the quiet solid confidence of a bear. He was in shirtsleeves, without a collar; the shirt was wrinkled and of dubious cleanliness. It was cold and nearly pitch-dark on the stairs and then up in his office. Montesanto sat down, and offered Morandi a particularly uncomfortable chair. Twenty-two years in here, he thought with a mental shiver, while the other man lingered over the letter of introduction. He looked around, his eyes growing accustomed to the gloom. On the desk, letters, magazines, prescriptions, and other pieces of paper whose purpose was by now indiscernible had yellowed and accumulated to an impressive thickness. A long spider’s thread, rendered visible by the dust clinging to it, hung down from the ceiling and swayed weakly in the imperceptible breath of the midday air. A glass-fronted cupboard held a few antiquated instruments and a few small bottles; the liquid inside had corroded the glass, marking the level at which the bottles had been preserved for too long. On the wall was a large and strangely familiar photograph of “Senior Medical Students, 1911.” The photograph was, in fact, well-known to him: he identified the square forehead and strong chin of his father, Morandi Senior; and right next to him (ah, how difficult to recognize!) was the same man here before him, Ignazio Montesanto, thin, neat, and frightfully young, with the aura of an intellectual hero and martyr, so fashionable among senior undergraduates of the time. When he had finished reading, Montesanto put the letter on the mass of papers on his desk, where it disappeared without a trace. “Well,” he said finally; “I am very happy that fate, fortune . . .” and he finished the sentence with an indistinct mumble followed by a long silence. The old doctor leaned his chair back on its two rear legs and turned his eyes toward the ceiling. Morandi decided to wait for the other man to continue the conversation; the silence was beginning to weigh on him when Montesanto suddenly started to speak.

He spoke at length, first with many pauses, then more rapidly; his countenance became animated, his bright eyes lively and intelligent in his weary face. Morandi, to his surprise, realized that he was feeling a definite sympathy for the old man. This soliloquy was a grand holiday that Montesanto was permitting himself. Occasions to speak (and he clearly knew how to speak, knew its importance) must have been rare for him, brief returns to an old vitality of thought by now, perhaps, lost. Montesanto told stories: about his brutal professional initiation on the battlefields and in the trenches of the other war; about his attempt at a university career, which embarked on with enthusiasm, endured with apathy, and abandoned amid the indifference of his colleagues, had sapped all his initiatives; about his voluntary exile as a family doctor in a remote location, in search of something too unknowable ever to find; then about his solitary daily life, as a stranger in the middle of a community of simple, carefree people, both good and evil, but for him so distant as to be unreachable. He spoke of the past’s definitive dominance over the present, and of the final suffocation of his every passion, apart from his faith in the dignity of thought and in the supremacy of spiritual things. Strange old fellow, thought Morandi: he noticed that the other man had been talking for almost an hour without once looking him in the eye. Initially, he had tried at various points in the conversation to lead Montesanto to more concrete subjects, to ask him about the sanitary conditions of the community he served, about the outdated equipment, about the availability of pharmaceutical supplies, and perhaps also about his personal arrangements; but, owing to his own timidity as well as to a more considered reticence, he hadn’t succeeded. Montesanto was now silent, his face turned to the ceiling, his stare fixed on infinity. Evidently, the soliloquy was continuing inside his head. Morandi was embarrassed: he wondered if a reply was expected of him, if so what reply, and if the doctor was aware that he was not alone in his office. He was aware. He suddenly let his chair fall onto all four of its legs and, in an oddly strained voice, said:

“Morandi, you are very young. I know that you’re a good doctor, or, rather, will become one. I believe you’re also a good man. In case you are not good enough to understand what I’ve told you and what I’m about to tell you now, I hope that you are at least good enough not to laugh. And even if you do laugh, it won’t be so bad: as you know, it’s unlikely that we’ll meet again. Besides, it’s normal for the young to laugh at the old. Only I beg you not to forget that you are the first to learn these things about me. I won’t flatter you by telling you that you seemed particularly worthy of my trust. I’m being honest when I say that you’re the first opportunity that has presented itself to me in many years and probably the last.” “Go on,” Morandi said simply. “Morandi, have you ever noticed the power certain smells have for evoking certain memories?” The blow came unexpectedly. Morandi swallowed hard; he said that he had noticed, and had even devised a tentative theory to explain it. The change in subject was inexplicable. He privately determined it must be some kind of “mania” that all doctors succumbed to after reaching a certain age. Like Andriani: sixty-five, rich in fame, cash, and patients, he had still managed to bury in ridicule what remained of his career over the subject of neural reflexology. With both hands, the other man clutched the corners of the desk and stared into the void, frowning. He continued: “I will show you something unusual. During the years I was an assistant lecturer in pharmacology, I studied in some depth the action of stimulants when absorbed through the nose. I didn’t obtain anything useful to humanity, but I did obtain one rather indirect result, as you will see. “I dedicated much of my time later on as well to the question of olfactory sensations and their relationship to molecular structure. In my opinion, it’s a very fertile field of study, and open to researchers who don’t have a great deal of funding. Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of learning of others’ work on the subject, and I’m familiar with your electronic

theories, but the only aspect of the subject that interests me anymore is another. I am in possession of something that I don’t believe anyone else in the world possesses. “There are those who don’t care about the past, who let the dead bury the dead. There are those who, instead, are galvanized by the past, and saddened by its continual disappearance. There are still others who have the diligence to keep a diary, day after day, so that everything of theirs is saved from oblivion, and who preserve in their houses and on their persons material memories: a dedication in a book, a dried flower, a tuft of hair, photographs, old letters. “As for myself, it horrifies me to think that even one of my memories might be erased, and I practice all of these methods myself, but I have also created another. “No, it’s not a matter of a scientific discovery: I just took advantage of my pharmacological experience to reconstruct, with precision and in a preservable form, a certain number of sensations that mean something to me. “I call these sensations (I repeat, don’t get the impression that I talk about them often) mnemagogs, or ‘memory evokers.’ Will you come with me?” He got up and headed down the hall. Halfway along, he turned and added: “As you can imagine, they have to be used sparingly, if we don’t want to diminish their evocative powers; furthermore, there’s no need for me to tell you that they are inevitably personal. Strictly so. One might even say they are me, since I, at least in part, consist of them.” He opened a cupboard. Inside were fifty or so small numbered bottles with ground-glass stoppers. “Please, choose one.” Morandi looked at him, perplexed. Hesitantly he extended a hand and selected a bottle. “Open it and sniff. What do you smell?” Morandi breathed in deeply many times, at first with his eyes on Montesanto, then lifting his head and tilting it as one does when searching one’s memory.

“This smells to me like a barrack.” Montesanto sniffed the bottle himself. “Not exactly,” he responded. “Or, at least, not to me. It’s the smell of classrooms in an elementary school; in fact, of my classroom in my school. I won’t dwell on its composition. It contains unstable fatty acids and an unsaturated ketone. I understand that for you it means nothing. For me, it’s my childhood. “I also still have the photograph of my thirty-seven firstgrade classmates, but the scent in this bottle far more readily calls to mind the interminable hours of tedium spent on my spelling primer, and the particular state of mind of a child (I am that child!) who is waiting for his first spelling test. When I smell it (not now, it naturally requires a certain measure of concentration), when I smell it, my guts churn just as when I was seven years old and waiting for my turn to be examined by the teacher. Do you want to choose another?” “I seem to remember . . . wait. . . . In my grandfather’s house in the country there was a small room where he used to put the fruit to ripen . . .” “Very good,” Montesanto said with sincere satisfaction. “Exactly as the manuals describe it. I’m pleased that you’ve come across a professional smell: this is the smell of a diabetic’s breath in the acetonemic phase. With a few more years of practice, I’m sure you would have come to the same conclusion yourself. You know, of course, that the smell is an unfavorable sign, a prelude to coma. “My father died of diabetes fifteen years ago. It wasn’t a quick or merciful death. My father meant a great deal to me. I sat up with him for endless nights, powerlessly witnessing the progressive obliteration of his personality. Those vigils weren’t wasted. Many of my beliefs were shaken, much of my world changed. So for me the smell is not about apples or diabetes but about that uniquely human struggle, solemn and purifying, of religious crisis.” “But this is just phenic acid!” Morandi exclaimed, smelling a third bottle.

“So it is. I thought that this smell might mean something to you as well. But of course it’s not even a year since you stopped working shifts in a hospital, the memory hasn’t yet matured. Because you would have noticed, don’t you think? The evocative mechanism we’re discussing here requires that the stimuli, having been activated repeatedly and associated with a place or state of mind, must then be inactive for a period of time of rather long duration. Besides, it has been commonly observed that memories, in order to have an impact, must contain a flavor of the past. “I, too, have worked in hospitals and breathed phenic acid deeply into my lungs. But this took place a quarter of a century ago and since then phenol has ceased to constitute the basis of antiseptics. But in my time that’s how it was, and so still today I can’t smell it (not the chemically pure substance but this concoction, to which I have added traces of other substances, making it specific to me) without a complex array of things coming to mind, including a popular song, my youthful enthusiasm for Blaise Pascal, a certain springtime torpor in my back and knees, and the face of a fellow student, who I recently learned has become a grandmother.” This time he chose a bottle himself and handed it to Morandi. “I must confess that I still feel a certain pride in this one. Although I have never published the results, I consider this my true scientific achievement. I would like to hear your opinion.” Morandi sniffed it with care. It was certainly not a new smell. He might call it burned, dry, hot . . . “When you rub together two pieces of flint . . . ?” “Yes, that, too. I congratulate you on your olfactory acuity. You smell this scent in the mountains when rock is heated by the sun, especially in the aftermath of a rockslide. I assure you that it wasn’t easy to reproduce these substances in a stabilized form in a test tube without altering the quality of the smell. “I used to go to the mountains often, especially alone. When I reached the summit, I would lie down in the silent, still air and feel as if I had accomplished something

significant. In those moments, and only if I thought about it, I would detect a faint smell rarely found anywhere else. As far as I’m concerned, it should be called the smell of peace achieved.” Having overcome his initial discomfort, Morandi was now intrigued by the game. He randomly uncorked a fifth bottle and held it out to Montesanto. “And this one?” It gave off a faint smell of clean skin, face powder, and summer. Montesanto smelled it, replaced the bottle, and said briefly: “This is not a place or a time. It’s a person.” He closed the cupboard; his tone had been decisive. Morandi mentally prepared to make some observations expressing his interest and admiration, but he couldn’t get beyond a bizarre internal barrier and gave up on commenting aloud. He hastily took his leave with the vague promise of another visit and hurried down the stairs and out into the sun. He felt intensely embarrassed.

After five minutes he was among the pines, furiously climbing to the highest point, trampling the soft forest floor, far from any path. It was pleasant to feel his muscles, his lungs, and his heart functioning fully, naturally, without need of intervention. It was wonderful to be twenty-four years old. He picked up his pace, climbing as fast as he could, until he felt the blood beating hard in his ears. Then he lay down on the grass with his eyes closed, contemplating the red glow made by the sun inside his eyelids. He felt newly cleansed. That, then, was Montesanto. . . . No, he hadn’t needed to flee, he wouldn’t become like him, he wouldn’t let himself become like that. He wouldn’t tell anyone about it. Not even Lucia, or Giovanni. It wouldn’t be considerate. Perhaps, in the end, only Giovanni . . . and in purely theoretical terms. . . . Was there anything he couldn’t discuss with Giovanni? Yes, he would write to Giovanni all about it. Tomorrow. No (he looked at the time), right away. Perhaps the letter would even go out with the evening mail. Right away.

Censorship in Bitinia

I have already mentioned elsewhere the drab cultural life of this country, which is based, to this day, on a system of patronage and entrusted to the interests of the wealthy or even just to professionals and artists, specialists and technicians, who are quite well paid. Of particular interest is the solution that was proposed for —or, to be more precise, that spontaneously imposed itself upon—the problem of censorship. For various reasons, toward the end of the last decade there was a lively increase in the “need” for censorship in Bitinia; in just a few years, the existing central offices had to double their staff and establish local branches in almost all the provincial capitals. Difficulties were encountered, however, in recruiting the necessary personnel: first, because the work of a censor is, as is wellknown, arduous and subtle, requiring specialized training that even otherwise highly qualified people lack; and, second, because, according to recent statistics, the actual practice of censorship can be dangerous. I do not mean to allude here to the immediate risk of retaliation, which the efficient Bitinese police have reduced almost to nil. This is something different: careful medical studies conducted in the workplace have brought to light a specific type of professional hazard, irksome in nature and apparently irreversible, called by its discoverer “paroxysmal dysthymia,” or Gowelius’s disease. The initial clinical picture is vague and ill defined; then, as the years pass, various sensory system troubles appear (diplopia, olfactory and auditory disorders, exaggerated reactions to, for example, certain colors or flavors), which regularly develop, after remissions and relapses, into serious psychological anomalies and perversions. Consequently, and despite offers of high wages, the number of applicants for these government jobs rapidly

decreased, and the workload of the existing career functionaries increased accordingly, rising to unprecedented levels. In the censorship offices, work pending (screenplays, scores, manuscripts, illustrated works, advertising posters) accumulated to such a point that not only were the assigned storage spaces chockablock with documents but so were the lobbies, corridors, and bathrooms. One case was reported of a division manager who was buried by an avalanche of files and died of suffocation before help arrived. At first, mechanization provided a solution. Each branch was equipped with modern electronic systems. Since I have only a basic knowledge of such things, I am unable to describe with any precision how they worked, but I was told that their magnetic memory contained three distinct lists of words— hints, plots, topics*—and frames of reference. Anything that corresponded to the first list was automatically deleted from the work under examination; anything on the second led to elimination of the entire work; anything on the third meant the immediate arrest and death by hanging of the author and the publisher. With regard to processing the amount of work, the results were optimal (in a few days the storage spaces in the offices were cleared), but in terms of quality they proved inadequate. There were outrageous cases of oversight: Diary of a Sparrow, by Claire Efrem, was “approved” and published, and it sold with incredible success, and yet the book was of dubious literary merit and patently immoral, the author having used blatantly transparent techniques to disguise through allusion and paraphrase all the most offensive aspects of today’s ethics. Conversely, witness the sad case of Tuttle: Colonel Tuttle, the acclaimed critic and military historian, was forced to climb the gallows because in one of his volumes on the Caucasus campaign, owing to a simple mistake, the word “brigadier” appeared in altered form as brazier and was recognized by the office of mechanized censorship in Issarvan as an obscene reference. The author of a modest manual on animal husbandry miraculously escaped the same tragic fate because he had the means to flee abroad, whence he petitioned the Consulate before the court was able to pass sentence.

To these three episodes, which came to public attention, must be added numerous others, rumors of which spread by word of mouth but which were ignored by the officials because (as is obvious) any information about them fell, in turn, under the censor’s knife. A crisis situation erupted, resulting in a near-total defection of the country’s cultural forces: a situation that, despite a few feeble attempts at reversal, persists today. There is, however, recent news that gives rise to some hope. A physiologist, whose name is being withheld, concluded one of his in-depth studies by revealing in a much discussed paper some new facets of the psychology of domestic animals. If pets are subjected to particular conditioning, they can not only learn simple jobs involving transport and organization but also make actual decisions. Without a doubt, this is a vast and fascinating field, offering practically unlimited possibilities: to summarize what has been published in the Bitinese press up to the time of this writing, the work of censorship, which is damaging to the human brain, and is performed in far too rigid a manner by machines, could be profitably entrusted to animals trained for the purpose. Seriously considered, this disconcerting idea is not in itself absurd; in the last analysis, it is only a matter of decisions. Curiously, the mammals closest to humans were found to be least useful for the task. Dogs, monkeys, and horses who underwent the conditioning proved to be poor judges precisely because they were too intelligent and sensitive. According to our anonymous scholar, they act far too passionately; they respond in unpredictable ways to the slightest foreign stimuli, inevitable in every workplace; they exhibit strange preferences, perhaps congenital but still inexplicable, for certain mental categories; and their own memories are uncontrollable and excessive. In sum, they reveal in these circumstances an esprit de finesse that would be detrimental to the goals of censorship. Surprising results, on the other hand, were obtained with the common barnyard chicken: this animal’s success is such

that, as is common knowledge, four experimental offices have already been entrusted to teams of hens, under the control and supervision, naturally, of experienced functionaries. The hens, besides being easily procured and costing little, both as an initial investment and for their subsequent maintenance, are capable of making rapid and definitive decisions. They stick scrupulously to the prescribed mental programs, and, given their cold, calm nature and their evanescent memory, they are not subject to distractions. The general opinion around here is that in a few years the method will be extended to all the censorship offices in the country. Approved by the censor:

*Here and throughout Natural Histories, an asterisk indicates that a word or phrase is in English in the original Italian text.

The Versifier Characters THE POET THE SECRETARY MR. SIMPSON THE VERSIFIER GIOVANNI PROLOGUE A door opens and closes; enter the POET. SECRETARY: Hello, Maestro. POET: Hello, miss. What a beautiful day, huh? The first nice day after a month of rain. It’s a shame to have to stay in the office! What’s the schedule for today? SECRETARY: There’s not a lot: two convivial odes, a short poem for the young Countess Dimitròpulos’s wedding, fourteen advertising ditties, and a canticle for Milan’s victory last Sunday. POET: A trifle. We’ll finish it all this morning. Have you plugged in the Versifier? SECRETARY: Yes, it’s already warmed up. (Soft drone) We can begin right away. POET: If it weren’t for that machine. . . . And to think, you wanted nothing to do with it! Do you remember two years ago, how exhausting and nerve-racking the work was? Drone

THE VERSIFIER

Loud fast click-clack of a typewriter can be heard in the foreground. POET (to himself, bored and rushed): Oof! Here the work is never done. And how dull it is, too! Never a moment for spontaneous inspiration. Nuptial odes, advertising jingles, sacred hymns . . . nothing else, all day long. Have you finished the copies, miss? SECRETARY (continuing to type): In a minute. POET: Hurry up, for goodness’ sake. SECRETARY (continues to type furiously for a few seconds, then pulls the sheets out of the typewriter): Done. Just a minute, so I can read it over. POET: Don’t bother. I’ll read it over myself later and make any corrections. Right now, put another piece of paper in the typewriter, two carbon copies, double-spaced. I’ll dictate to you, that way we can speed things up: the funeral is the day after tomorrow and there’s no time to waste. In fact, look, why don’t you put the paper with the black borders directly into the typewriter, you know, the one we had printed for the death of the Archduke of Saxony. Try not to make any mistakes, that way we might avoid having to transcribe it. SECRETARY (does as she’s told; gets up, looks in a drawer, puts the paper into the typewriter): Ready. Go ahead and dictate. POET (lyrically, but still hurried): “An elegy upon the death of the Marquis Sigmund von Ellenbogen, prematurely deceased.” (The SECRETARY types) Oh, I forgot. They wanted it in ottava rima. SECRETARY: In ottava rima? POET (disparagingly): Yes, yes, rhyming octaves and everything. Change the margins. (Pauses as he tries to find inspiration) Hmm . . . okay. Write: Black is the sky, dark the sun, arid the fields

Are, without you, dear Marquis Sigmund . . . (The SECRETARY types) His name was Sigismondo, but I have to call him Sigmund, you understand, if not, goodbye rhyme. Damn these Ostrogothic names. Let’s hope they’ll approve. On the other hand, I have the genealogical tree, here —“Sigismundus,” yes, we’re in business. (Pause) Field, shield . . . hand me the rhyming dictionary, miss. (Looking at the dictionary) “Field: shield, wield, kneeled, heeled, creeled,” what the devil is “creeled”? SECRETARY (efficient): A part of the verb “to creel,” I would think. POET: Right; they know all the tricks. “Stealed” . . . no, too slangy. “Sealed.” (Lyrically) “Oh, say can you sealed, by the dawn’s early light”—but no, what am I doing! “Peeled.” (Pensively) . . . A man nearly ripe and ready to be peeled . . . (The SECRETARY strikes a few keys) But no, wait, it was only a first try. Not even a try. It was an idiocy. How does one peel a marquis? Go on, cross it out. No, rather, change the paper. (With sudden anger) Enough! Throw it all out. I’m through with this dirty work. I am a poet with a degree in poetry, not a hack. I am not a dabbler, a poetaster. The marquis, the elegy, the epinicion, the ode, Sigismondo, they can all go to hell. I am not a minstrel. Here, write this: “To the heirs of von Ellenbogen, address, date, et cetera: In reference to your respectful request for a funeral ode, made on the date of et cetera, for which we sincerely thank you. Unfortunately, owing to intervening urgent business, we are obliged to decline the commission . . .” SECRETARY (interrupting): I’m sorry, Maestro, but . . . you can’t turn down the commission. The job confirmation and receipt of down payment are here in our files. There’s also a penalty, don’t you remember?

POET: Of course, the penalty. We’re in trouble. Poetry! Ugh, what a prison this is. (Pause, then brusquely decisive) Get Mr. Simpson on the phone. SECRETARY (surprised and reluctant): Simpson? The salesman for NATCA? The one who sells business machines? POET (brusquely): Yes, him. There can’t be any other. SECRETARY (dials a number on the telephone): Mr. Simpson, please? . . . Yes, I’ll wait. POET: Tell him to come right over and to bring the Versifier brochures. No, wait, give me the phone. I want to talk to him. SECRETARY (in a low, reticent voice): You want to buy that machine? POET (in a low voice, calmer): Don’t put on that pout, miss, and don’t get the wrong idea. (Persuasively) You’re well aware that we can’t fall behind the times. We have to keep up. I don’t like it, either, I assure you, but at a certain point one has to make up one’s mind. As for you, don’t worry, there’ll always be plenty of work. Remember, three years ago, when we bought the invoicing machine? SECRETARY (into the phone): Yes, miss. Is Mr. Simpson available, please? (Pause) Yes, it’s urgent. Thank you. POET (continuing in a low voice): Well, how do you feel about that now? Could you do without it? No, right? It’s a business tool just like any other, like the telephone, like the cyclostyle. The human factor is and always will be indispensable to our work, but we have competitors, and so we must entrust to machines the most thankless and tiresome tasks. The mechanical tasks, in fact— SECRETARY (into the phone): Is that you, Mr. Simpson? Hold on, please. (To the POET) It’s Mr. Simpson on the phone.

POET (into the phone): Is that you, Simpson? Hello. Listen: you remember, right, that estimate you gave us . . . wait . . . sometime at the end of last year? . . . (Pause) Yes, exactly, the Versifier, the model for civilian use; you described it to me with such enthusiasm . . . would you see if we can still get our hands on it? (Pause) Ah, yes, I understand: but now maybe the time is ripe. (Pause) Great, yes, it’s rather urgent. Ten minutes? You’re very kind. I’ll wait for you here, in the office. See you soon. (He hangs up the phone; turns to the SECRETARY) He’s an extraordinary man, Simpson: a first-class sales rep with a rare efficiency. He’s always at his customers’ disposal, whatever time of day or night; I don’t know how he does it. It’s too bad he doesn’t have much experience in our field, otherwise . . . SECRETARY (hesitant, becoming more and more emotional): Maestro . . . I . . . I’ve been working with you for fifteen years . . . forgive me, but if I were you, I would never do the same . . . I’m not saying this for my sake, you know. But a poet, an artist like you . . . how can you agree to bring a machine in here . . . it can be as modern as you like, but it’s still a machine . . . how can it have your taste, your sensibility? We were doing so well, you and I, you dictating, me typing and not only typing, anyone can type, but attending to your words as if they were mine, putting them in order, cleaning up the punctuation, tense agreement (confidentially), even tiny errors of syntax, you know? Everyone gets distracted . . . POET: Ah, don’t think I don’t understand what you’re saying. For me, too, this is a painful choice, and I’m not at all sure about it. There is a joy to our work, a profound happiness, unlike all other kinds of happiness, the happiness of creating, of extracting something from nothing, of watching right before our eyes, slowly or suddenly, as if by magic, the birth of something new, something alive that wasn’t

there before. . . . (Suddenly indifferent) Take this down, miss: “as if by magic, something new, something alive that wasn’t there before, dot, dot, dot”—it’s all stuff we might be able to use. SECRETARY (very emotional): Already done, Maestro. I always do it, even when you don’t tell me to. (Crying) I know my job. Let’s see if that other, that thing, will know how to do it as well as I do! The doorbell rings. POET: Come in! MR. SIMPSON (brisk and jovial; slight foreign accent): Here I am: in record time, right? Here is the estimate, and here is the brochure, and here are the operating and maintenance instructions. But that’s not all; in fact, the essential item is missing. (Theatrically) One moment! (He turns toward the door) Come in, Giovanni. Push it in here. Watch the step. (To the POET) Luckily we’re on the ground floor! (Sound of a wheeled cart approaching) Here it is, for you: my own personal model. At the moment, I don’t need it. We’re here to work, right? GIOVANNI: Where’s an outlet? POET: Here, behind the desk. MR. SIMPSON (in a single breath): Two hundred and twenty volts, fifty cycles, right? Perfect. Here’s the cable. Be careful, Giovanni: yes, over there on the rug will be fine, but it can go anywhere you want to put it; it doesn’t vibrate, or overheat, and it makes no more noise than a washing machine. (Slaps the metal side of the machine) A big beautiful machine, and sturdy. Built without any economizing. (To GIOVANNI) Thanks, Giovanni, you can go now. Here are the keys, take the car and return to the office. I’ll be staying here all afternoon. If anyone wants me, say to call here. (To the POET) With your permission, of course.

POET (a little embarrassed): Yes, of course. You . . . you were right to bring the device with you; I wouldn’t have dared to ask you to go to so much trouble. I might have come to you. But . . . I haven’t yet decided to actually make the purchase. You see, what I wanted above all was to get a solid idea of how the machine works, its performance, and also . . . to refresh my memory about the price— MR. SIMPSON (interrupting): There’s no obligation, no obligation, good heavens! You are not under even the smallest obligation. This is a free demonstration, in the name of friendship. We’ve known each other for many years, haven’t we? And I haven’t forgotten the help you’ve given us, that slogan for our first electronic calculator, the Lightning,* remember? POET (flattered): Sure I do! Our brains are not always strong But the electron is never wrong MR. SIMPSON: That’s the one. How many years have gone by since then! You were right to charge us as much as you did: we earned ten times what it cost us. What’s fair is fair. Ideas must be paid for. (Pause: the drone of the VERSIFIER gets louder as the machine warms up) . . . There it goes, warming up. In a few minutes, when the warning light goes on, we can begin. In the meantime, if I may, I will tell you a bit about how it functions. First of all, let’s be perfectly clear: this is not a poet. If you are looking for a real mechanical poet, you’ll have to wait another few months. The design is in its final stages at our headquarters in Fort Kiddiwanee, Oklahoma. It will be called the Troubadour:* a fantastic machine, a heavy-duty* mechanical poet capable of composing in all the European languages living or dead, capable of writing poetry without interruption for one thousand pages, at −100° to +200° centigrade in any climate,

even underwater and in high vacuum. (In a low voice) It’s scheduled to take part in the Apollo project: it will be the first to sing of lunar solitude. POET: No, I don’t think that’s for me. It sounds too complicated, and besides I rarely travel for work. I’m almost always here in my office. MR. SIMPSON: Sure, sure. I was only telling you for curiosity’s sake. This one here, you see, is just a Versifier and, as such, has less freedom: it has less imagination, so to speak. But it’s all you need for routine jobs, and actually, with just a little effort from the operator, it’s capable of true wonders. Here’s the tape, see? Normally, the machine speaks its compositions while simultaneously transcribing them. POET: Like a teleprinter? MR. SIMPSON: Exactly. But, if needed, say, in the case of an emergency, the voice aspect can be eliminated; the composition then occurs very rapidly. Here’s the keyboard: it’s similar to the ones found on organs and Linotype machines. Up here (click) you put in the subject—from three to five words are enough. These black keys are the selectors: they determine the tone, the style, and the “literary genre,” as we used to say. These other keys define the metrical form. (To the SECRETARY) Come here, miss, it’s better if you have a look, too. I believe it will be you who operates the machine, right? SECRETARY: I’ll never learn. It’s too complicated. MR. SIMPSON: Sure, all the new machines give that impression. But it’s only an impression, you’ll see. In a month you’ll be using it just the way you drive a car, thinking of other things, maybe even singing. SECRETARY: I never sing while I’m working. (The telephone rings) Hello? Yes. (Pause) Yes, he’s here:

I’ll put him on right away. (To MR. SIMPSON) It’s for you, Mr. Simpson. MR. SIMPSON: Thank you. (Into the telephone) Yes, this is he. (Pause) Ah, it’s you, professor. (Pause) What? It’s jamming? Overheating? Very unfortunate. It’s never happened before. Have you checked the control panel? (Pause) Certainly, don’t touch a thing, you’re absolutely right: but it’s a terrible shame, just now all my workmen are out on jobs. Could you possibly wait until tomorrow? (Pause) Oh yes, of course. (Pause) Sure it’s under warranty, but even if it weren’t. . . . (Pause) Listen, I happen to be nearby at the moment. I’ll jump into a taxi and be there in a minute. (Hangs up the phone. To the POET, nervous and hurried) Excuse me, but I have to go. POET: Nothing serious, I hope? MR. SIMPSON: Oh, no, it’s nothing: a calculator, child’s play. But, as you know, the customer is always right. (Sighs) Even when he’s a darn fusspot who makes you run over ten times for no reason. Listen, let’s do this: I’ll leave the machine here, entirely at your disposal. You have a look at the instructions, and then give it a whirl, try it out. POET: And if I break it? MR. SIMPSON: Don’t worry about that. It’s very sturdy, foolproof,* says the original American brochure: “Even an imbecile” (embarrassed, realizing his gaffe), no offense intended, you understand. There is also a lockdown device in case of a wrong operation. But you’ll see, you’ll see how easy it is. I’ll be back in an hour or two; bye for now. (Exits) Pause: distinct drone from the VERSIFIER. POET (mutters while reading from the brochure): Voltage and frequency . . . yes, we’ve got that right. Inputting the subject . . . lockdown device . . . it’s all

clear. Lubrication . . . changing the tape . . . extended periods of inactivity . . . all things we can look at later. Selectors—ah, yes, this is interesting, essential really. See, miss? There are forty of them. Here’s the key for abbreviations: EP, EL (elegy, I would guess, yes, indeed, elegy), SAT, MYT, JOC (what’s this JOC? Ah, yes, jocular), DID . . . SECRETARY: DID? POET: Didactic: very important. PORN . . . (The SECRETARY jumps) “Turning it on”—it may not appear to be the case, but it’s really very simple. Even a child could use it. (With increasing enthusiasm) Look, all you have to do is set the “commands”: there are four entries. The first is for the subject, the second is for the genre, the third is for the metrical form, the fourth (which is optional) determines the era of composition. The machine does the rest; it’s marvelous! SECRETARY (challenging): Why don’t you try it? POET (hastily): Sure, I’ll try it. Here: LYR, PHIL (two clicks); terza rima, hendecasyllable (click); seventeenth century (click; with every click, the drone of the machine becomes louder and changes tone). Go! A buzzing sound: three short signals and a long one. Discharges, jamming, then the machine begins to run in rhythmical bursts, similar to those of an electric calculator when doing division. VERSIFIER (very distorted metallic voice): Bru

bru

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