by Primo Levi
As for the propusk, it formed a sign of social distinction rather than a specific advantage; in fact, anybody could easily leave through the hole in the fence, and go to the city as free as a bird in the sky. This is what many of the thieves did, to exercise their art at Katowice or even farther afield; they did not come back, or else they came back to the camp after a few days, often giving different names, not that anybody cared.
However, the propusk allowed one to make for Katowice without the long walk through the mud surrounding the camp. As my strength and the good season returned, I too felt an increasingly lively temptation to leave for a cruise through the unknown city; what use was it to have been liberated, if we still had to spend our days in a frame, of barbed wire? Moreover, the people of Katowice were friendly towards us, and we had free tickets for the trams and cinemas.
One evening I spoke of this to Cesare, and we decided on a general programme for the following days, which would combine utility with pleasure, that is to say business with vagabondage.
5
Cesare
I had got to know Cesare in the last days of the Lager, but he was then a different Cesare. After the Germans had abandoned the camp of Buna, the infectious patients’ ward, where the two French and I had succeeded in surviving and in installing an appearance of civilization, represented an island of relative comfort; in the adjoining ward, that of the dysentery patients, death ruled unopposed.
Through the wooden wall, a few inches from my head, I heard Italian being spoken. One evening, mustering what little energy I still possessed, I decided to go and see who was still living on the other side. I walked through the dark and frozen corridor, opened the door and found myself thrown headlong into a kingdom of horror.
There were about a hundred bunks; at least half were filled with corpses stiffened by the cold. Only two or three candles broke the darkness; the walls and ceilings were lost in the shadows, so that it seemed like penetrating an enormous cavern. There was no heating except for the infectious breath of the fifty living patients. Despite the cold, the stink of faeces and death was so intense as to choke my breath, and I had to do violence to my lungs to force them to inhale the foul air.
Yet about fifty men were still living. They lay huddled under their blankets; some were groaning or shouting, others climbing painfully down from the bunks to relieve themselves on the floor. They were calling out names, praying, swearing, begging for help in all the languages of Europe.
I dragged myself gropingly along one of the passages between the three-storey bunks, stumbling and swaying in the dark on the layer of frozen excrement. On hearing my steps, the cries redoubled; bony hands came out from under the blankets, grabbed hold of my clothes, touched me icily on the face, tried to block my path. At last I reached the dividing wall at the end of the passage, and found whom I was looking for. There were two Italians in a single bunk, clinging to each other to keep out the cold: Cesare and Marcello.
I knew Marcello well; he came from Cannaregio, the old ghetto of Venice; he had been at Fossoli with me and had crossed the Brenner in the wagon next to mine. He was healthy and strong, and up to the last weeks of the Lager had held out valiantly, resisting the hunger and fatigue; but the cold of the winter had broken him. He no longer spoke, and in the light of my match I could barely recognize him: a yellow face, black with beard, all nose and teeth; his eyes bright and dilated with fever, staring into emptiness. For him there was little to be done.
Cesare, on the other hand, I barely knew, for he had arrived at Buna from Birkenau only a few months before. He asked for water before food: water, because he had not drunk for four days, and his fever was burning him, and his dysentery emptying him. I brought him some, together with the remains of our soup; I did not know that in this way I was laying the basis of a long and singular friendship.
His recuperative capacities must have been extraordinary, for I found him in the camp of Bogucice two months later, not only restored, but little less than flourishing, and as lively as a grasshopper; and this, despite an additional adventure which had severely tested the natural qualities of his astuteness, strengthened in the hard school of the Lager.
After the arrival of the Russians, he had been placed among the patients in Auschwitz, and as his illness was not serious, and his constitution robust, he recovered quickly – in fact, a little too quickly. About the middle of March, the German army in flight had concentrated around Breslau, and had tried one last desperate counter-offensive in the direction of the Silesian mining zone. The Russians had been taken by surprise; perhaps overestimating the enemy’s initiative, they hastened to prepare a defensive line. They needed a long anti-tank trench to close the valley of the Oder between Oppeln and Gleiwitz; manpower was short, the work colossal, the need urgent, and the Russians saw to it according to their custom in an extremely expeditious and summary manner.
One morning, about nine o’clock, armed Russians suddenly blocked some of the main streets of Katowice. In Katowice, and in all Poland, there was a shortage of men; the male population of working age had disappeared, prisoners in Germany and Russia, dispersed among the partisan bands, massacred in battle, in the bombardments, in the reprisals, in the Lagers, in the ghettos. Poland was a country in mourning, a country of old men and widows. At nine in the morning there were only women in the street; housewives with their bags or handcarts, searching for food and fuel in the shops and markets. The Russians lined them up in rows of four, bags and all, took them to the station and sent them to Gleiwitz.
Simultaneously, that is five or six days before I arrived there with the Greek, they had unexpectedly surrounded the camp of Bogucice; they shouted like cannibals and fired shots in the air to frighten anybody attempting to run away. Without much ado they silenced their peaceful colleagues of the Kommandantur, who had sought timidly to intervene, they entered the camp with their sten-guns at the ready, and made everybody come out of the huts.
Thus on the main square of the camp a sort of parodied version of the German selections took place. A considerably less bloody version, as it was a question of going to work and not to death; but to make up for this, a far more chaotic and impromptu one.
While some of the soldiers went through the dormitories to dislodge the shirkers and then chase after them in a mad race like a great game of hide and seek, others stood by the door and examined one by one the men and women who were gradually presented to them by their hunters, or who presented themselves spontaneously. The judgement whether ‘bolnoy’ or ‘zdorovy’ (ill or healthy) was pronounced collectively, by acclamation, not without noisy disputes in controversial cases. The ‘bolnoy’ was sent back to his hut; the ‘zdorovy’ was lined up in front of the barbed-wire fence.
Cesare was among the first to understand the situation (‘to make out the movement’, as he used to say in his colourful jargon); he had behaved with praiseworthy perspicacity, and only just failed to escape scot-free; he had hidden in the wood-deposit, a place nobody had thought about, and had remained there to the end of the hunt, very quiet and still under the pile of logs which he had pulled over himself. And then, some fool, in search of refuge, had come to hide there, bringing a Russian chasing after him. Cesare had been taken and declared healthy, purely as a reprisal, for when he came out of the woodpile he looked like a crucified Christ, or rather a defective cripple, and would have made a stone weep: he was trembling all over, he forced himself to slobber, and walked bandy-legged, limping, dragging a leg, with squinting, demented eyes. All the same, they had put him in the row of healthy people; after a few seconds, with a lightning change of tactics, he had taken to his heels and tried to re-enter the camp by the hole at the back. But he had been overtaken, had received a clout and a kick on the shins, and had accepted defeat.
The Russians had taken them beyond Gleiwitz on foot, more than twenty miles; there they had lodged them as best they could in stables and barns, and had given them a dog’s life with precious little to eat, and sixteen hours a day
with pickaxe and spade, in rain or sun, with a Russian always there, sten-gun at the ready; the men at the trench, and the women (those from the camp and the Polish women they had found in the streets) peeling potatoes, cooking and cleaning.
It was tough; but the insult needled Cesare more than the work and hunger. To be caught with his pants down – he: a man who had kept a stall at Porta Portese: all Trastevere would laugh at him. He had to redeem his reputation.
He worked for three days; on the fourth, he bartered his bread for two cigars. One of them he ate; the other, he soaked in water and held in his armpit all night. The next day he was ready to report sick; he had all the symptoms, a galloping fever, terrible colic, giddiness, vomiting. They put him to bed; he stayed there until the intoxication had worked itself out, then at night-time he slipped away like a wraith and returned to Bogucice by short stages, with his conscience clear. I managed to settle him in my room, and we remained inseparable until the return journey.
‘Here we are again,’ said Cesare, pulling on his trousers gloomily when, a few days after his return, the nocturnal quiet of the camp was dramatically broken. It was an explosion, it was the Last Trumpet; Russian soldiers were running up and down the corridors, knocking on the doors with their rifle butts, yelling excited and incomprehensible orders; shortly after, the general staff arrived, Marya in hair curlers, Egorov and Danchenko half dressed, followed by Mr Rovi, bewildered and sleepy but in full uniform. We had to get up and dress, immediately. Why? Had the Germans come back? Were they transferring us? Nobody knew anything.
We finally managed to capture Marya. No, the Germans had not broken the front, but the situation was still very serious. ‘Inspektsiya’: that very morning a general was coming from Moscow to inspect the camp. The entire Kommandantur was filled with panic and despair, a dies irae state of mind.
Rovi’s interpreter galloped from dormitory to dormitory, shouting orders and counter-orders. Brooms, dusters, buckets appeared; everyone was mobilized, the heaps of rubbish had to disappear, the windows had to be cleaned, the floors swept, the door handles polished, the cobwebs dusted away. We all began to work, yawning and swearing. Two o’clock went by, three o’clock, four o’clock.
About dawn, one began to hear people speaking of ‘ubornaya’: the camp latrine really presented a problem.
It was a brick building, placed in the middle of the camp, large, striking, impossible to hide or camouflage. For months, nobody had bothered about its cleanliness or upkeep; inside, the floor was covered by a layer of stagnant filth, so deep that we had fixed large stones and bricks in it, which we could jump along in precarious equilibrium. From the doors and the cracks in the walls the filthy liquid overflowed outside, crossed the camp in the form of a stinking stream and vanished downhill in the midst of the fields.
Captain Egorov, who was sweating blood and had completely lost his head, chose a work squad of ten of us to go and clean up the latrine with brooms and buckets of chloride. But a child would have realized that ten men, even if given the right equipment, and not just brooms, would have taken at least a week; and as for the chloride, all the perfumes of Arabia would not have sweetened the place.
Not infrequently, senseless decisions emerge from the clash of two necessities where it would have been wiser to leave the dilemma to solve itself. An hour later (when the whole camp was buzzing like a disturbed beehive) the work squad was recalled, and we saw all twelve of the Command’s territorial army men arrive, with planks, nails, hammers and rolls of barbed wire. In a twinkling all the doors and windows of the scandalous latrine were closed, barred, sealed with thick planks, and all the walls, up to the roof, were covered by an inextricable tangle of barbed wire. Decency had been saved; the most diligent of inspectors quite literally could not have placed a foot inside.
Midday came, then evening, and still no sign of the general. The following morning there was already less talk about him, on the third day none at all; the Russians of the Kommandantur had returned to their habitual and benign negligence and botchery, two planks had been taken down from the back door of the latrine and everything had returned to the old routine.
However, an inspector did come, a few weeks later; he came to check the running of the camp, and especially of the kitchens; he was not a general, but a captain wearing an armlet with the slightly ominous letters NKVD. He came, and he must have found particular pleasure in his duties – or in the girls of the Kommandantur, or in the air of Upper Silesia, or in the vicinity of the Italian cooks, because he did not go away, but stayed to inspect the kitchens every day until June (when we left) without apparently performing any other useful activity.
The kitchen, run by a barbaric cook from Bergamo, and an indeterminate number of fat, greasy voluntary helpers, was situated immediately outside the fence, and consisted of a large hut, almost wholly occupied by the two huge cauldrons resting on cement kilns. To enter one climbed two steps; there was no door.
The inspector carried out his first inspection with great dignity and seriousness, jotting down notes. He was a Jew, about thirty years old, extremely tall and bony, with a fine ascetic Don Quixote-like face. But by the second day he had dug out a motor-cycle, from heaven knows where, and he fell so passionately in love with it that henceforth the two were never seen apart.
The ceremony of the inspection became a public spectacle, watched by the citizens of Katowice in ever-growing numbers. The inspector arrived at about eleven o’clock, like a hurricane; he braked suddenly with a terrible squeal, and pivoting on the front wheel made the back of the motor-cycle skid through ninety degrees. Without stopping, he aimed at the kitchen with lowered head, like a charging bull; he mounted the two steps with fearful bumpings, performed two cramped figures of eight round the cauldrons, the throttle wide open, once more flew past the steps on his way down, gave the public a military salute with a radiant smile, bent over the handlebars and disappeared in a cloud of glaucous smoke and much backfiring.
The game went smoothly for some weeks; then one day neither motor-cycle nor captain were to be seen. The latter was in hospital, with a broken leg; the former was in the loving hands of a cenacle of Italian aficionados. But they soon reappeared; the captain had had a bracket fitted to the frame of the motor-cycle and held his plastered leg on it in a horizontal position. His face, noble in its pallor, was bright with ecstatic happiness; fitted up like this, he once more began his daily inspection with hardly less impetus.
Only when April came, when the last snows had melted and the mild sun had dried the Polish mud, did we begin to feel ourselves truly free. Cesare had already been to town on various occasions, and insisted that I accompany him on his expeditions; I finally decided to overcome my inertia, and we left together on a glorious spring day.
At Cesare’s request, as the experiment interested him, we did not leave by the hole in the fence. I left first by the main gate; the sentry asked my name, then asked for my permit and I gave it him. He checked it; the name corresponded. I turned the corner, and passed the piece of cardboard to Cesare through the barbed wire. The sentry asked Cesare his name: Cesare replied ‘Primo Levi’. He asked for the permit: the name corresponded again, and Cesare left in a wholly legal manner. Not that Cesare is much concerned about acting legally; but he likes a sense of style, gamesmanship, putting one over on the next man without making him suffer.
We had entered Katowice as cheerful as schoolboys on holiday, but our happy-go-lucky mood was continually jarred by the spectacle which confronted us. At every step we came across the traces of the fearful tragedy which had touched us but had miraculously spared us. Graves at every corner, mute and hasty graves, without a cross but with the Red Star, of Soviet soldiers killed in battle. In one of the city’s parks there was an endless war cemetery with crosses and stars intermingled, almost all bearing the same date: the date of the street battle, or perhaps of the last German massacre. In the middle of the main street stood three or four German tanks, seemingly intact, transformed into
trophies and monuments, the gun of one of the tanks still aiming at an enormous hole, half-way up the house in front: the monster had died in the throes of destruction. Ruins everywhere, concrete frames, scorched wooden joists, corrugated-iron huts, people in rags, with a wild and famished look. At the important crossings, there were road signs put up by the Russians, forming a curious contrast to the tidiness and prefabricated precision of the analogous German signs we had seen earlier, and of the American ones we were to see later; rough planks of unvarnished wood, with hand-written names painted on in tar, in uneven Cyrillic characters: Gleiwitz, Cracow, Częstochowa; or rather, since the name was too long, ‘Czestoch’ on one plank, and then ‘owa’ on another smaller plank nailed underneath.
And yet the town was still living, after the nightmare years of the Nazi occupation, and the hurricane of the passing of the front. Many shops and cafés were open; the free market actually proliferated; the trams, coal-mines, schools, cinemas were all functioning.
Since, on that first day, we did not have a penny between us, we satisfied ourselves with a reconnaissance. After a few hours of walking in the sharp air, our chronic hunger had once more become acute: ‘Come with me,’ said Cesare, ‘we’re going to have lunch.’
He took me to the market, to the part where the fruit stalls were. At the first stall, under the jaundiced eyes of the stallholder, he took a strawberry, only one strawberry, but a large one; he chewed it very slowly, with the air of an expert, then shook his head: ‘Nyedobre,’ he said severely. (‘It’s Polish,’ he explained to me; ‘it means it’s no good.’) He passed to the next stall and repeated the scene; and so on with all the stalls until the last one. ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’ he then said to me with cynical pride; ‘if you are hungry, you only have to act like me.’
All the same, the strawberry technique was not enough for our hunger; Cesare had understood the situation: it was high time to dedicate ourselves seriously to business.