by Primo Levi
And with this, meine Herren, enough time had been lost, Kommandos 96 and 97 had already started, forward march, and to begin with, whosoever failed to walk in line and step would have to deal with him.
He was a Kapo like all the other Kapos.
Leaving the camp, in front of the musical band and the SS counting-post we march in rows of five, beret in hand, arms hanging down our sides and neck rigid; speaking is forbidden. Then we change to threes and it is possible to exchange a few words amidst the clatter of ten thousand pairs of wooden shoes.
Who are my new comrades? Next to me walks Alberto; he is in his third year at university, and once again we have managed to stay together. The third person on my left I have never seen; he seems very young, is as pale as wax and has the number of the Dutch. The three backs in front of me are also new. It is dangerous to turn around, I might lose step or stumble; but I try for a moment, and see the face of Iss Clausner.
So long as one walks there is no time to think, one has to take care not to step on the shoes of the fellow hobbling in front, and not let them be stepped on by the fellow behind; every now and again there is a hole to be walked over, an oily puddle to be avoided. I know where we are, I have already come here with my preceding Kommando, it is the H-Strasse, the road of the stores, I tell Alberto, we are really going to the magnesium chloride warehouse, at least that was not a lie.
We have arrived, we climb down into a large damp cellar, full of draughts; this is the headquarters of the Kommando, the Bude as it is called here. The Kapo divides us into three squads: four to unload the sacks from the wagon, seven to carry them down, four to pile them up in the deposit. We form the last squad, I, Alberto, Iss and the Dutchman.
At last we can speak, and to each one of us what Alex said seems a madman’s dream.
With these empty faces of ours, with these sheared craniums, with these shameful clothes, to take a chemical examination. And obviously it will be in German; and we will have to go in front of some blond Aryan doctor hoping that we do not have to blow our noses, because perhaps he will not know that we do not have handkerchiefs, and it will certainly not be possible to explain it to him. And we will have our old comrade hunger with us, and we will hardly be able to stand still on our feet, and he will certainly smell our odour, to which we are by now accustomed, but which persecuted us during the first days, the odour of turnips and cabbages, raw, cooked and digested.
Exactly so, Clausner confirms. But have the Germans such great need of chemists? Or is it a new trick, a new machine ‘pour faire chier les Juifs’? Are they aware of the grotesque and absurd test asked of us, of us who are no longer alive, of us who have already gone half-crazy in the dreary expectation of nothing?
Clausner shows me the bottom of his bowl. Where others have carved their numbers, and Alberto and I our names, Clausner has written: ‘Ne pas chercher à comprendre.’
Although we do not think for more than a few minutes a day, and then in a strangely detached and external manner, we well know that we will end in selections. I know that I am not made of the stuff of those who resist, I am too civilized, I still think too much, I use myself up at work. And now I also know that I can save myself if I become a Specialist, and that I will become a Specialist if I pass a chemistry examination.
Today, at this very moment as I sit writing at a table, I myself am not convinced that these things really happened.
Three days passed, three of those usual immemorable days,, so long while they are passing, and so short afterwards, and we were already all tired of believing in the chemistry examination.
The Kommando was reduced to twelve men: three had disappeared in the customary manner of down there, perhaps into the hut next door, perhaps cancelled from this world. Of the twelve, five were not chemists; all five had immediately requested permission from Alex to return to their former Kommandos. They were given a few kicks, but unexpectedly, and by who knows whose authority, it was decided that they should remain as auxiliaries to the Chemical Kommando.
Down came Alex into the magnesium chloride yard and called us seven out to go and face the examination. We go like seven awkward chicks behind the hen, following Alex up the steps of the Polimerisations-Büro. We are in the lobby, there is a brass-plate on the door with the three famous names. Alex knocks respectfully, takes off his beret and enters. We can hear a quiet voice; Alex comes out again. ‘Rube, jetzt. Warten,’ wait in silence.
We are satisfied with this. When one waits time moves smoothly without need to intervene and drive it forward, while when one works, every minute moves painfully and has to be laboriously driven away. We are always happy to wait; we are capable of waiting for hours with the complete obtuse inertia of spiders in old webs.
Alex is nervous, he walks up and down and we move out of his way each time. We too, each in our own way, are uneasy; only Mendi is not. Mendi is a rabbi; he comes from sub-Carpathian Russia, from that confusion of peoples where everyone speaks at least three languages, and Mendi speaks seven. He knows a great number of things; besides being a rabbi, he is a militant Zionist, a comparative philologist, he has been a partisan and a lawyer; he is not a chemist, but he wants to try all the same, he is a stubborn, courageous, keen little man.
Balla has a pencil and we all crowd around him. We are not sure if we still know how to write, we want to try.
Kohlenwasserstoffe, Massenwirkungsgesetz. The German names of compounds and laws float back into my memory. I feel grateful towards my brain: I have not paid much attention to it, but it still serves me so well.
Here is Alex. I am a chemist. What have I to do with this man Alex? He plants his feet in front of me, he roughly adjusts the collar of my jacket, he takes out my beret and slaps it on my head, then he steps backwards, eyes the result with a disgusted air, and turns his back, muttering: ‘Was für ein Muselmann Zugang.’ What a messy recruit!
The door opens. The three doctors have decided that six candidates will be examined in the morning. The seventh will not. I am the seventh, I have the highest entry number, I have to return to work. Alex will only come to fetch me in the afternoon. What ill-luck, I cannot even talk to the others to hear what questions they are asking.
This time it really is my turn. Alex looks at me blackly on the doorstep; he feels himself in some way responsible for my miserable appearance. He dislikes me because I am Italian, because I am Jewish and because of all of us, I am the one furthest from his sergeants’ mess ideal of virility. By analogy, without understanding anything, and proud of this very ignorance, he shows a profound disbelief in my chances for the examination.
We have entered. There is only Doktor Pannwitz; Alex, beret in hand, speaks to him in an undertone: ‘… an Italian, has been here only three months, already half kaputt… Er sagt er ist Chemiker …” But he, Alex, apparently has his reservations on the subject.
Alex is briefly dismissed and put aside, and I feel like Oedipus in front of the Sphinx. My ideas are clear, and I am aware even at this moment that the position at stake is important; yet I feel a mad desire to disappear, not to take the test.
Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has eyes, hair and nose as all Germans ought to have them, and sits formidably behind a complicated writing-table. I, Hafding 174517, stand in his office, which is a real office, shining, clean and ordered, and I feel that I would leave a dirty stain whatever I touched.
When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.
From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself how he really functioned as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization and the Indo-Germanic conscience; above all when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not from a spirit of revenge, but merely from a personal curiosity about the human soul.
Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings
who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.
One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner, what we all thought and said of the Germans. The brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured hands said: ‘This something in front of me belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress. In this particular case, one has to first make sure that it does not contain some utilizable element.’ And in my head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin: ‘Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially wicked. No communication possible. I am a specialist in mine chemistry. I am a specialist in organic syntheses. I am a specialist…’
And the interrogation began, while in the corner that third zoological specimen, Alex, yawned and chewed noisily.
‘Wo sind Sie geboren?’ He addresses me as Sie, the polite form of address: Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz has no sense of humour. Curse him, he is not making the slightest effort to speak a slightly more comprehensible German.
I took my degree at Turin in 1941, summa cum laude — and while I say it I have the definite sensation of not being believed, of not even believing it myself; it is enough to look at my dirty hands covered with sores, my convict’s trousers encrusted with mud. Yet I am he, the B. Sc. of Turin, in fact, at this particular moment it is impossible to doubt my identity with him, as my reservoir of knowledge of organic chemistry, even after so long an inertia, responds at request with unexpected docility. And even more, this sense of lucid elation, this excitement which I feel warm in my veins, I recognize it, it is the fever of examinations, my fever of my examinations, that spontaneous mobilization of all my logical faculties and all my knowledge, which my friends at university so envied me.
The examination is going well. As I gradually realize it, I seem to grow in stature. He is asking me now on what subject I wrote my degree thesis. I have to make a violent effort to recall that sequence of memories, so deeply buried away: it is as if I was trying to remember the events of a previous incarnation.
Something protects me. My poor old ‘Measurements of dielectrical constants’ are of particular interest to this blond Aryan who lives so safely: he asks me if I know English, he shows me Gatterman’s book, and even this is absurd and impossible, that down here, on the other side of the barbed wire, a Gatterman should exist, exactly similar to the one I studied in Italy in my fourth year, at home.
Now it is over: the excitement which sustained me for the whole of the test suddenly gives way and, dull and flat, I stare at the fair skin of his hand writing down my fate on the white page in incomprehensible symbols.
‘Los, ab!’ Alex enters the scene again, I am once more under his jurisdiction. He salutes Pannwitz, clicking his heels, and in return recieves a faint nod of the eyelids. For a moment I grope around for a suitable formula of leave-taking: but in vain. I know how to say to eat, to work, to steal, to die in German; I also know how to say sulphuric acid, atmospheric pressure, and short-wave generator, but I do not know how to address a person of importance.
Here we are again on the steps. Alex flies down the stairs: he has leather shoes because he is not a Jew, he is as light on his feet as the devils of Malabolge. At the bottom he turns and looks at me sourly as I walk down hesitantly and noisily in my two enormous unpaired wooden shoes, clinging on to the rail like an old man.
It seems to have gone well, but I would be crazy to rely on it. I already know the Lager well enough to realize that one should never anticipate, especially optimistically. What is certain is that I have spent a day without working, so that tonight I will have a little less hunger, and this is a concrete advantage, not to be taken away.
To re-enter Bude, one has to cross a space cluttered up with piles of cross-beams and metal frames. The steel cable of a crane cuts across the road, and Alex catches hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter, he looks at his hand black with thick grease. In the meanwhile I have joined him. Without hatred and without sneering, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, if someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.
11. The Canto of Ulysses
There were six of us, scraping and cleaning the inside of an underground petrol tank; the daylight only reached us through a small manhole. It was a luxury job because no one supervised us; but it was cold and damp. The powder of the rust burnt under our eyelids and coated our throats and mouths with a taste almost like blood.
The rope-ladder hanging from the manhole began to sway: someone was coming. Deutsch extinguished his cigarette, Goldner woke Sivadjan; we all began to vigorously scrape the resonant steelplate wall.
It was not the Vorarbeiter, it was only Jean, the Pikolo of our Kommando. Jean was an Alsatian student; although he was already twenty-four, he was the youngest Häftling of the Chemical Kommando. So that he was given the post of Pikolo, which meant the messenger-clerk, responsible for the cleaning of the hut, for the distribution of tools, for the washing of bowls and for keeping record of the working hours of the Kommando.
Jean spoke French and German fluently: as soon as we recognized his shoes on the top step of the ladder we all stopped scraping.
‘Also, Pikolo, was gibt es Neues?’
‘Qu’est ce qu’il-y-a comme soupe aujourd’hui?’
… in what mood was the Kapo? And the affair of the twenty-five lashes given to Stern? What was the weather like outside? Had he read the newspaper? What smell was coming from the civilian kitchen? What was the time?
Jean was liked a great deal by the Kommando. One must realize that the post of Pikolo represented a quite high rank in the hierarchy of the Prominents: the Pikolo (who is usually no more than seventeen years old) does no manual work, has an absolute right to the remainder of the daily ration to be found on the bottom of the vat and can stay all day near the stove.
He ‘therefore’ has the right to a supplementary half-ration and has a good chance of becoming the friend and confidant of the Kapo, from whom he officially receives discarded clothes and shoes. Now Jean was an exceptional Pikolo. He was shrewd and physically robust, and at the same time gentle and friendly: although he continued his secret individual struggle against death, he did not neglect his human relationships with less privileged comrades; at the same time he had been so able and persevering that he had managed to establish himself in the confidence of Alex, the Kapo.
Alex had kept all his promises. He had shown himself a violent and unreliable rogue, with an armour of solid and compact ignorance and stupidity, always excepting his intuition and consummate technique as convict-keeper. He never let slip an opportunity of proclaiming his pride in his pure blood and his green triangle, and displayed a lofty contempt for his ragged and starving chemists: ‘Ihr Doktoren! Ihr Intelligenten!’ he sneered every day, watching them crowd around with their bowls held out for the distribution of the ration. He was extremely compliant and servile before the civilian Meister and with the SS he kept up ties of cordial friendship.
He was clearly intimidated by the register of the Kommando and by the daily report of work, and this had been the path that Pikolo had chosen to make himself indispensable. It had been a long, cautious and subtle task which the entire Kommando had followed for a month with bated breath; but at the end the porcupine’s defence was penetrated, and Pikolo confirmed in his office to the satisfaction of all concerned.
Although Jean had never abused his position, we had already been able to verify that a single word of his, said in the right tone of voice and at the right moment, had great power; many times already it had saved one of us from a whipping or from being denounced to the SS. We had been friends for a week: we discovered each other during the unusual occasion of an air-raid alarm, but then, swept by the fierce rhythm of the Lager, we had only been able to greet each other fleetingly, at the latrines, in the washroom.
*
Hanging with one hand on the swaying ladder, he pointed to me: ‘Aujourd’hui c’est Primo qui viendra avec moi chercher la soupe.’
Until yesterday it had been Stern, the squinting Transylvanian; now he had fallen into disgrace for some story of brooms stolen from the store, and Pikolo had managed to support my candidature as assistant to the ‘Essenholen’ the daily corveé of the ration.
He climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the brightness of the day. It was warmish outside, the sun drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth, which made me think of a holiday beach of my infancy. Pikolo gave me one of the two wooden poles, and we walked along under a clear June sky.
I began to thank him, but he stopped me: it was not necessary. One could see the Carpathians covered in snow. I breathed in the fresh air, I felt unusually light-hearted.
‘Tu es fou de marcher si vite. On a le temps, tu sais.’ The ration was collected half a mile away; one had to return with the pot weighing over a hundred pounds supported on the two poles. It was quite a tiring task, but it meant a pleasant walk there without a load, and the ever-welcome chance of going near the kitchens.