by Primo Levi
We Italians had decided to meet every Sunday evening in a corner of the Lager, but we stopped it at once, because it was too sad to count our numbers and find fewer each time, and to see each other ever more deformed and more squalid. And it was so tiring to walk those few steps and then, meeting each other, to remember and to think. It was better not to think.
3. Initiation
After the first day of capricious transfer from hut to hut and from Kommando to Kommando, I am assigned to Block 30 late one evening, and shown a bunk in which Diena is already sleeping. Diena wakes up, and although exhausted, makes room for me and receives me hospitably.
I am not sleepy, or more accurately, my sleepiness is masked by a state of tension and anxiety of which I have not yet managed to rid myself, and so I talk and talk.
I have too many things to ask. I am hungry and when will they distribute the soup tomorrow? And will I be able to eat it without a spoon? And where will I be able to find one? And where will they send me to work? Diena knows no more than I, and replies with other questions. But from above and below, from near by and from far away, from all corners of the now dark hut, sleepy and angry voices shout at me: ‘Ruhe, Ruhe!’
I understand that they are ordering me to be quiet, but the word is new to me, and since I do not know its meaning and implications, my inquietude increases. The confusion of languages is a fundamental component of the manner of living here: one is surrounded by a perpetual Babel, in which everyone shouts orders and threats in languages never heard before, and woe betide whoever fails to grasp the meaning. No one has time here, no one has patience, no one listens to you; we latest arrivals instinctively collect in the corners, against the walls, afraid of being beaten.
So I give up asking questions and soon slip into a bitter and tense sleep. But it is not rest: I feel myself threatened, besieged, at every moment I am ready to draw myself into a spasm of defense. I dream and I seem to sleep on a road, on a bridge, across a door through which many people are passing. And now, oh, so early, the reveille sounds. The entire hut shakes to its foundations, the lights are put on, everyone near me bustles around in a sudden frantic activity. They shake the blankets raising clouds of fetid dust, they dress with feverish hurry, they run outside into the freezing air half-dressed, they rush headlong towards the latrines and washrooms. Some, bestially, urinate while they run to save time, because within five minutes begins the distribution of bread, of bread-Brot-Broid-chleb-pain-lechem-keynér, of the holy grey slab which seems gigantic in your neighbour’s hand, and in your own hand so small as to make you cry. It is a daily hallucination to which in the end one becomes accustomed: but at the beginning it is so irresistible that many of us, after long discussions on our own open and constant misfortune and the shameless luck of others, finally exchange our ration, at which the illusion is renewed inverted, leaving everyone discontented and frustrated.
Bread is also our only money: in the few minutes which elapse between its distribution and consumption, the Block resounds with claims, quarrels and scuffles. It is the creditors of yesterday who are claiming payment in the brief moment in which the debtor is solvent. After which a relative quiet begins and many take advantage to go to the latrines again to smoke half a cigarette, or to the washrooms to wash themselves properly.
The washroom is far from attractive. It is badly lighted, full of draughts, with the brick floor covered by a layer of mud. The water is not drinkable; it has a revolting smell and often fails for many hours. The walls are covered by curious didactic frescoes: for example, there is the good Häftling, portrayed stripped to the waist, about to diligently soap his sheared and rosy cranium, and the bad Häftling, with a strong Semitic nose and a greenish colour, bundled up in his ostentatiously stained clothes with a beret on his head, who cautiously dips a finger into the water of the washbasin. Under the first is written : ‘So bist du rein' (like this you are clean), and under the second: ‘So gehst du ein’ (like this you come to a bad end); and lower down, in doubtful French but in Gothic script: ‘La propreté, c’est la santé.’
On the opposite wall an enormous white, red and black louse encamps, with the writing: ‘Ein Laus, dein Tod’ (a louse is your death), and the inspired distich:
Nach dent Abort, vor dem Essen
Hände waschen, nicht vergessen.
(After the latrine, before eating, wash your hands, do not forget.)
For many weeks I considered these warnings about hygiene as pure examples of the Teutonic sense of humour, in the style of the dialogue about the truss which we had heard on our entry into the Lager. But later I understood that their unknown authors, perhaps without realizing it, were not far from some very important truths. In this place it is practically pointless to wash every day in the turbid water of the filthy washbasins for purposes of cleanliness and health; but it is most important as a symptom of remaining vitality, and necessary as an instrument of moral survival.
I must confess it: after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter time, because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth. Does not Steinlauf know that after half an hour with the coal sacks every difference between him and me will have disappeared? The more I think about it, the more washing one’s face in our condition seems a stupid feat, even frivolous: a mechanical habit, or worse, a dismal repetition of an extinct rite. We will all die, we are all about to die: if they give me ten minutes between the reveille and work, I want to dedicate them to something else, to draw into myself, to weigh up things, or merely to look at the sky and think that I am looking at it perhaps for the last time; or even to let myself live, to indulge myself in the luxury of an idle moment.
But Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers me a complete lesson.
It grieves me now that I have forgotten his plain, outspoken words, the words of ex-sergeant Steinlauf of the Austro-Hungarian army, Iron Cross of the ‘14-'18 war. It grieves me because it means that I have to translate his uncertain Italian and his quiet manner of speaking of a good soldier into my language of an incredulous man. But this was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.
These things Steinlauf, a man of good will, told me; strange things to my unaccustomed ear, understood and accepted only in part, and softened by an easier, more flexible and blander doctrine, which for centuries has found its dwelling place on the other side of the Alps; according to which, among other things, nothing is of greater vanity than to force oneself to swallow whole a moral system elaborated by others, under another sky. No, the wisdom and virtue of Steinlauf, certainly good for him, is not enough for me. In the face of this complicated world my idea
s of damnation are confused; is it really necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to acknowledge one’s lack of a system?
4. Ka-Be
The days all seem alike and it is not easy to count them For days now we have formed teams of two, from the railway to the store — a hundred yards over thawing ground. To the store, bending underneath the load, back again, arms hanging down one’s sides, not speaking.
Around us, everything is hostile. Above us the malevolent clouds chase each other to separate us from the sun; on all sides the squalor of the toiling steel closes in on us. We have never seen its boundaries, but we feel all around us the evil presence of the barbed wire that separates us from the world. And on the scaffolding, on the trains being switched about, on the roads, in the pits, in the offices, men and more men, slaves and masters, the masters slaves themselves. Fear motivates the former, hatred the latter, all other forces are silent. All are enemies or rivals.
No, I honestly do not feel my companion of today, harnessed with me under the same load, to be either enemy or rival.
He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man. I think that even he has forgotten his name, certainly he acts as if this was so. When he speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression of being empty inside, nothing more than an involucre, like the slough of certain insects which one finds on the banks of swamps, held by a thread to the stones and shaken by the wind.
Null Achtzehn is very young, which is a grave danger. Not only because boys support exhaustion and fasting worse than adults, but even more because a long training is needed to survive here in the struggle of each one against all, a training which young people rarely have. Null Achtzehn is not even particularly weak, but all avoid working with him. He is indifferent to the point of not even troubling to avoid tiredness and blows or to search for food. He carries out all the orders that he is given, and it is foreseeable that when they send him to his death he will go with the same total indifference.
He has not even the rudimentary astuteness of a draught-horse, which stops pulling a little before it reaches exhaustion: he pulls or carries or pushes as long as his strength allows him, then he gives way at once, without a word of warning, without lifting his sad, opaque eyes from the ground. He made me think of the sledge-dogs in London’s books, who slave until the last breath and die on the track.
But as all the rest of us try by every possible means to avoid work, Null Achtzehn is the one who works more than all. It is because of this, and because he is a dangerous companion, that no one wants to work with him; and as, on the other hand, no one wants to work with me, because I am weak and clumsy, it often happens that we find ourselves paired together.
As we come back once again from the store, with hands empty, dragging our feet, an engine whistles briefly and cuts off our path. Happy at the enforced delay, Null Achtzehn and I stop; bent and in rags, we wait for the wagons to pass slowly by.
... Deutsche Reichsbahn. Deutsche Reichsbahn. SNCF. Two huge Russian goods wagons with the hammer and sickle badly rubbed off. Then, Cavalli 8, Domini 40, Tara, Portata: an Italian wagon … Oh, to climb into a corner, well-hidden under the coal, and to stay there quiet and still in the dark, to listen endlessly to the rhythm of the wheels, stronger than hunger or tiredness; until, at a certain moment, the train would stop and I would feel the warm air and the smell of hay and I would get out into the sun; then I would lie down on the ground to kiss the earth, as you read in books, with my face in the grass. And a woman would pass, and she would ask me ‘Who are you?’ in Italian, and I would tell her my story in Italian, and she would understand, and she would give me food and shelter. And she would not believe the things I tell her, and I would show her the number on my arm, and then she would believe …
… It is over. The last wagon has passed, and as if the curtain had been raised, the pile of cast-iron supports lies before our eyes. The Kapo on his feet at the pile with a switch in his hand, the wan companions who come and go in pairs.
Alas for the dreamer: the moment of consciousness that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of sufferings. But it does not often happen to us, and they are not long dreams. We are only tired beasts.
We are once again at the foot of the pile. Mischa and the Galician lift a support and put it roughly on our shoulders. Their job is the least tiring, so that they show excess zeal to keep it: they shout at companions who dawdle, they incite them, they admonish them, they drive on the work at an unbearable pace. This fills me with anger, although I already know that it is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human law.
This time it is my turn to walk in front. The support is heavy but very short, so that at every step I feel behind me Null Achtzehn’s feet which tread on mine, as he is unable or cannot be bothered to keep in step.
Twenty steps, we have arrived at the railroad, there is a cable to climb over. The load is badly placed, something is not right, it seems to be slipping from my shoulder. Fifty steps, sixty. The door of the store: still the same distance to walk and we can put it down. It is enough, I cannot go any further, the load is now weighing entirely on my arm. I cannot stand the pain and exhaustion any longer: I shout, I try to turn around, just in time to see Null Achtzehn trip and throw everything down.
If I had still had my agility of earlier days I could have jumped back: instead, here I am on the ground, with all my muscles contracted, the wounded foot tight between my hands, blind with pain. The corner of the piece of iron had cut across the back of my foot.
For a moment all is blank in the giddiness of pain. When I manage to look around, Null Achtzehn is still there on his feet, he has not moved, with his hands in his sleeves, his face expressionless, he does not say a word. Mischa and the Galician arrive, speaking Yiddish to each other, they give me incomprehensible advice. Templer and David and the others arrive: they profit from the distraction to stop work. The Kapo arrives, he distributes kicks, punches and abuse, and the comrades disperse like chaff in the wind. Null Achtzehn puts his hand to his nose and blankly looks at it, dirty with blood. I only recieve two blows on the head, of the sort that do no harm but simply stun.
The incident is closed. It is proven, for good or bad, that I can stand up, so that the bone cannot be broken. I do not dare to cut the boot open for fear of wakening the pain again, and also because I know that the foot will swell and I will be unable to put the boot on again.
The Kapo sends me to take the place of the Galician at the pile, and the latter, glaring at me, takes his place alongside Null Achtzehn; but by now the English prisoners have passed, it will soon be time to return to the camp.
During the march I do my best to walk quickly, but I cannot keep up the pace. The Kapo picks out Null Achtzehn and Finder’ to help me as far as the procession in front of the SS, and finally (fortunately there is no roll-call this evening) I am in the hut and I can throw myself on the bunk and breathe.
Perhaps it is the heat, perhaps the fatigue of the march, but the pain has begun again, together with a strange feeling of humidity in the wounded foot. I take off my shoe: it is full of blood, by now congealed and kneaded into the mud and rags of the cloth I found a month ago, and which I use as a foot-pad, one day on the right, one day on the left foot.
This evening, after soup, I will go to Ka-Be.
Ka-Be is the abbreviation of Krankenbau, the infirmary.
There are eight huts, exactly like the others in the camp, but separated by a wire fence. They permanently hold a tenth of the population of the camp, but there are few who stay there longer than two weeks and none more than two months: within these limits they are held to die or be cured. Those who show signs of improvement are cured in Ka-Be, those who seem to get worse are sent from Ka-Be to the g
as chambers. All this because we, fortunately, belong to the category of ‘economically useful Jews’.
I have never been to Ka-Be nor to the clinic, and it is all new to me. There are two clinics, medical and surgical. In front of the door, exposed to the night and the wind, there are two long shadows. Some only have need of a bandage or a pill, others ask to be examined; some show death in their faces. Those at the front of both rows are already barefoot and ready to enter. Others, as their turn to enter approaches, contrive in the middle of the crush to loosen the haphazard laces and wire threads of their shoes and to unfold the precious foot-pads without tearing them; not too early, so as not to stand pointlessly in the mud in bare feet; not too late, so as not to lose their turn to enter, because it is rigorously forbidden to enter Ka-Be with shoes. A gigantic French Häftling, sitting in the porch between the doors of the two clinics, enforces respect for the prohibition. He is one of the few French officials of the camp. And do not think that to spend one’s day among the muddy and broken shoes is a small privilege: it is enough to think of how many enter Ka-Be with shoes, and leave with no further need of them …