If This Is A Man/The Truce (Abacus 40th Anniversary)

by Primo Levi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Peter Pavel spoke to nobody and had need of nobody. He was a beautiful blond and robust child, with an intelligent and impassive face. In the morning he climbed down from his bunk, which was on the third tier, with slow but sure movements, went to the showers to fill his bowl with water, and washed himself meticulously. Then he disappeared for the whole day, making a brief appearance only at noon to collect his soup in the same bowl. In the evening he came back for dinner, ate, went out again, re-entered soon afterwards with a chamber pot, placed it in the corner behind the stove, sat there for a few moments, left again with the pot, came back without it, climbed up quietly to his own place, punctiliously adjusted the blankets and pillow, and slept until the morning without changing position.

  A few days after my arrival, I saw with discomfort a well-known face appear: the pathetic and disagreeable shape of Kleine Kiepura, the mascot of Buna-Monowitz. They all knew him at Buna; he was the youngest of the prisoners, no more than twelve years old. Everything was irregular about him, beginning with his presence in Lager, which normally children did not enter alive. No one knew how or why he had been admitted, yet at the same time everybody knew only too well. His position there was irregular, because he did not march to work, but lived in semi-isolation in the officials’ Block; moreover, his whole appearance was strikingly irregular. He had grown too much and badly; enormously long arms, and legs stuck out from his squat, short body, like those of a spider; below his pale face, whose features were not lacking in infantile grace, a huge jaw jutted out, more prominent than his nose. Kleine Kiepura was the attendant and protégé of the Lager-Kapo, the Kapo of all the Kapos.

  Nobody loved him, except his protector. In the shadow of authority, well fed and dressed, exempt from work, he had led until the very end the ambiguous and frivolous existence of a favourite, amid a web of denunciations and twisted affections; his name, wrongly I hope, was always whispered in the most notorious anonymous denunciations to the Political Bureau and to the SS. Hence all feared him and shrank from him.

  But now the Lager-Kapo, deprived of all power, was marching towards the west, and Kleine Kiepura, recovering from a slight illness, shared our lot. He was given a bunk and a bowl, and he inserted himself into our limbo. Henek and I addressed only a few cautious words to him, hindered as we were by diffidence and hostile compassion; but he barely replied. He stayed silent for two days; he sat huddled in his bunk, staring into space with his fists tight against his chest. Then all of a sudden he began to speak – and we longed for his silence. Kleine Kiepura spoke as if in a dream: and his dream was of a success story, of becoming a Kapo. It was difficult to tell if it was madness or a puerile sinister game; endlessly, from the height of his bunk immediately below the ceiling, the boy sang and whistled the marches of Buna, the brutal rhythms that ruled our tired steps every morning and evening; he shouted imperious commands in German at a troop of non-existent slaves.

  ‘Get up, swine, understand? Make your beds, quickly; clean your shoes. All in line, lice inspection, feet inspection! Show your feet, scum! Dirty again, you shit-heap! Watch out, I’m not joking. If I catch you once more, it’s the crematorium for you!’ Then, yelling in the manner of German soldiers: ‘Fall in! Dressed! Covered! Collar down; in step, keep time! Hands in line with the seams of your trousers!’ And then again, after a pause, in an arrogant and stridulous voice: ‘This isn’t a sanatorium! This is a German Lager, its name is Auschwitz, and no one leaves except through the Chimney. If you like it, all right; if you don’t, all you have to do is touch the electric wire!’

  Kleine Kiepura disappeared after a few days, to everybody’s relief. His presence among us, weak and ill, but full of the timid and flickering joy of our new-found liberty, offended like that of a corpse, and the compassion he aroused in us was mixed with horror. We tried in vain to tear him from his delirium: the infection of the Lager had gained too much ground.

  The two Polish girls, who carried out the duties of nurse (pretty badly), were named Hanka and Jadzia. Hanka was an ex-Kapo, as one could tell from her unshaven hair, and even more surely from her insolent manner. She could hardly have been more than twenty-four; she was of average height, with a dark complexion and hard vulgar features. In that purgatory, full of past and present sufferings, of hopes and pity, she spent her days in front of the mirror, filing her nails or strutting in front of the indifferent and ironical Henek.

  She was, or considered herself, of a higher social standing than Jadzia: but it needed very little indeed to surpass in authority so humble a creature. Jadzia was a small and timid girl, of a sickly-rosy colour; but her sheath of anaemic flesh was tormented, torn apart from inside, convulsed by a continual secret tempest. She had a desire, an urge, an impelling need of a man, of any man, at once, of all men. Every male who crossed her path attracted her; attracted her materially, heavily, as a magnet attracts iron. Jadzia stared at him with bewitched and stupefied eyes, she rose from her corner, advanced towards him with the uncertain step of a somnambulist, sought contact with him; if the man then drew away, she followed him at a distance, in silence, for a few yards, then, with her eyes lowered, returned to her inertia; if the man waited for her, Jadzia wrapped herself around him, incorporated him, took possession of him, with the blind, mute, tremulous, slow, but sure movements which amoebae show under the microscope.

  Her first and principal objective was naturally Henek; but Henek did not want her, he derided and insulted her. But being the practical boy he was, he had not lost interest in the case, and had mentioned it to Noah, his great friend.

  Noah did not live in our dormitory; in fact he lived nowhere and everywhere. He was a nomad, a free man, rejoicing in the air he breathed and the ground he trod upon. He was Scheissminister of free Auschwitz, Minister of latrines and cesspits; but notwithstanding this monatto-like post of his (which in any case he had assumed voluntarily) there was nothing sordid about him, or if there were anything, it was cancelled out by the impetus of his vital energy. Noah was a young Pantagruel, as strong as a horse, voracious and lecherous. As Jadzia wanted all men, so Noah wanted all women; but while the feeble Jadzia limited herself to throwing out her tenuous threads, like a rock-mollusc, Noah, a high-flying bird, cruised along all the roads of the camp from dawn to dusk, on the seat of his repugnant cart, cracking his whip and singing at the top of his voice; the cart stopped before the entrance of each Block, and while his troop, filthy and stinking, hurried, cursing, through their repulsive task, Noah wandered around the feminine dormitories like an oriental prince, dressed in an arabesque many-coloured coat, full of patches and braid. His encounters were like so many hurricanes. He was the friend of all men and the lover of all women. The deluge was over; in the black sky of Auschwitz, Noah saw the rainbow shine out, and the world was his, to repopulate.

  Frau Vitta (or rather Frau Vita, as every Italian called her,)* on the other hand, loved all human beings with a love both simple and fraternal. Frau Vita, with her ruined figure and clear gentle face, was a young widow from Trieste, half Jewish, a survivor of Birkenau. She spent many hours beside my bed, speaking to me of a thousand things at the same time with Triestine volubility, laughing and crying. She was in good health, but deeply wounded, ulcerated, by what she had undergone and seen in a year of Lager, and during those last gruesome days. In fact, she had been ‘commandeered’ for the transport of corpses, of lumps of corpses, of wretched anonymous remains, and these final images weighed upon her like a mountain; she sought to exorcise them, to wash herself clean of them, throwing herself headlong into a tumultuous activity. She was the only person to bother about the invalids and the children; she did it with frantic compassion, and when she still had free time she washed the floors and windows with wild fury, rinsed the bowls and glasses noisily, ran around the dormitories to carry real or fictitious messages; then she came back exha
usted, and sat panting on my bunk, with tearful eyes, starved of words, of intimacy, of human warmth. In the evening, when all the jobs of the day were over, incapable of enduring solitude, she suddenly jumped up from her bunk, and danced by herself between the bunks, to the sound of her own songs, affectionately clasping an imaginary man to her breast.

  It was Frau Vita who closed André’s and Antoine’s eyes. They were two young peasants from the Vosges, both my companions for the ten days of the interregnum, both ill with diphtheria. I seemed to have known them for centuries. With strange parallelism, they were simultaneously struck by a form of dysentery, which soon showed itself to be extremely serious, of tubercular origin; in a few days the scales of their fate tipped down. They were in two neighbouring bunks, they did not complain, they endured the atrocious colic with clenched teeth, without understanding its mortal nature; they spoke only to each other, timidly, and they never asked anyone for help. André was the first to go, while he was speaking, in mid-sentence, as a candle goes out. For two days no one arrived to take him away; the children came to look at him with bewildered curiosity, then continued to play in their corner.

  Antoine remained silent and alone, wholly shut in a suspense that transformed him. His state of nutrition was reasonable, but in two days he underwent a metamorphosis of dissolution, as if sucked up by his companion. Together with Frau Vita we managed to get a doctor, after many vain attempts; I asked him, in German, if there was anything to be done, if there was any hope, and I counselled him not to speak in French. He replied in Yiddish, with a brief phrase I did not understand; then he translated into German: ‘Sein Kamerad ruft ihn’, ‘His companion is calling him’. Antoine obeyed the call that same evening. They were not yet twenty, and they had been in the Lager only one month.