centrotrentasei, centotrentasette,
The stench of urine and cattle dung warmed the nostrils of the men, who spent the night stomping around to avoid losing their toes to frostbite. They were given neither food nor drink. The only snow that might have helped quench their thirst was covered with mud and excrement. So they conserved their saliva and kept silent. In any case, they had already lost the desire to sing.
centotrentotto,
The next morning, the two thousand prisoners were cleared out of the pen and taken to join three thousand others who had been languishing in the foul conditions for several days. It took hours to arrange the five thousand captives into straight, orderly rows. And once the undertaking was finished, they were told to walk on. For those who thought the march was over… It had only just begun.
centotrentanove,
Thus began the davaï15 marches.
centoquaranta.
* * *
10.Mama, I am so happy.
11.Hands in the air! Hands in the air!
12.You are prisoners. Put down your weapons and march two hundred metres. Forward.
13.You will work in a camp, and you will return home once the war is over.
14.Mama, I am so happy / because I am returning to you / your song tells me / that today is the happiest day for me / Mama, I am so happy / to live far away because / only for you, Mama / my song flies / Mama, you will be with me / you will no longer be alone.
15 Forward
Cold Death
davaï, davaï.
The Russians had only one answer when the prisoners asked where they were going and why, when they would arrive, whether they could stop to pee, or if they could have a crust of bread or the end of a sausage.
Davaï, davaï.
Avanti, avanti.
At the height of exhaustion, Sergio would chuckle under his breath as he repeated the words in his head.
Avanti, avanti!
That was also the name of the Socialist Party newspaper, which had been run by Mussolini himself.
The five thousand hostages were forced to walk up to forty-five kilometres each day. They were taken from village to village and made to sleep in kolkhozes, where the cows were kept in the summer. These collective farms were left vacant in winter and the Red Army had requisitioned their use in order to set up camps. The prisoners were crammed into these shelters, nothing more than thatched roofs secured to wooden posts.
With neither walls nor floor.
To keep warm, the men would gather in groups of ten or twelve and sleep piled on top of each other, forming pyramids without pharaoh or sun god. They tied the sleeves of their pastrani together to make an enormous blanket that would help them survive the night.
Some of the men awoke as the sun rose, relieved that their eyes still opened and that they had made it to see another day. Others stared vacantly, their faces purple and limbs as stiff as a teenage boy in love for the first time. It was up to the survivors to take care of the bodies of the dozens of men who died each day. Once the corpses were thrown into a ditch, the march resumed without fuss.
Women in the villages were forbidden to offer food to the captives. These good Christians would have gladly spared a crust of bread or a few boiled potatoes for the poor men on the march, but their generosity was invariably curbed by a Bolshevik hand. By preventing the prisoners from nibbling on crumbs, the Soviets gained nothing but their colleagues’ respect. It was a clumsy way of asserting their harsh feelings towards the enemies of communism. As if depriving the Nazis and their allies of food would strengthen their own ideals.
Sergio didn’t speak Russian, but he understood. He’d seen how badly the peasants wanted to help them, how they wanted to do some good, something selfless, to save a body from misery and a soul from total despair. If they had been able, the women would have undoubtedly offered up a pitcher of fresh water to scrub their faces clean or a makeshift bed by the hearth. They would have welcomed them in for a bowl of bean soup and some rusk. Desperate widows would have begged them to stay a few days longer to warm their beds and tend to the animals that had been left to die since their men had gone off to the front. But this goodwill was silenced.
Although these encounters with Russian villagers were few and far between, they were painful, brutal. It seemed to Sergio that each of the people he came across lived on an island: alone, distant, and abandoned. The forsaken souls were scattered along the road like little white pebbles that had forgotten the way. As if all the housewives, the children, Sergio himself, and everything that still breathed—men, women, humans capable of beauty and light—as if all that had been destroyed by the war.
The number of prisoners dropped quickly from five thousand to four, then three. After ten days on the road, only half remained.
The men marched in rows at a pace set by their captors. Russian soldiers flanked them at the front and rear, with a few posted on the sides to discourage the men from fleeing. It would have been a fool’s errand to try to escape the ranks; if you weren’t gunned down the only thing waiting on the other side was the endless snow-covered taiga.
If he were to die of cold, Sergio would rather do it among his friends than all alone in a frozen tundra.
Trailing the procession were two large sleighs that carried the Russians’ packs, pulled by the most able-bodied of the captives. When a wounded man incapable of keeping pace collapsed along the way, he was sent to the back to recover on a heap of canvas sacks. It was the only kindness the Russians granted their hostages: a brief respite on the dead man’s sled, as it was called.
The sleighs were always filled with inert bodies. When there was no room left and another wounded soldier needed to rest, the Soviets took the man who had been there the longest and threw him overboard—the usual staff rotation. If he were unable to rise and catch up with his companions, the man would end his days lying there in the powdery snow, looking up at the grey sky. It was a far cry from the paradise promised to those who had always taken care to confess their sins.
Among themselves, the Italians called it la morta fredda. Cold death. But is there ever a warm and reassuring way to die?
Once in a while, an elbow, knee, or head might be glimpsed through the snow on the way by. They belonged to prisoners who had come through a few days ahead of them, prisoners who were now part of the missing. Their families would never know what had become of them. “The lost,” as Sergio called them.
He had never been very religious, had always kept his beliefs grounded in the matter-of-fact, but Sergio sustained himself now by praying for the men whose future had vanished without a trace. He dedicated each step to one of the unfortunate, paying tribute to their invisible legacy by pressing on without complaint.
One day, it was Sergio’s turn to fall.
His back seized up from the cold and his spine refused to bend. The Russians threw him onto the sled to recover, but he was quickly jettisoned by one of the other soldiers needing rest. Try as he might to get his feet back under him, Sergio was too unsteady to take a step once he did manage to stand. He collapsed a second time.
Primo, Fausto, and Remolo ran to his side. When they saw his initial fall they worked their way to the back, sticking close to the sleigh and waiting for the moment he would be thrown off. They helped him stand and bend his knees, stepping with first his left foot and then his right.
Sergio shook his head.
“No, no, leave me. I don’t want to slow you down, too. Get back to the ranks. I’ll manage.”
But his friends wouldn’t listen. They stuck by his side and together the group succeeded in catching up to the troops ahead, who had only covered a few dozen metres. After days spent crossing the Russian countryside, even the Bolsheviks had slowed their pace. Now it sometimes took an hour to cover half a kilometre.
Though he
had refused help at first, Sergio was grateful to his friends for saving his life. That night the Russians had them sleep in underground tunnels, sheltered from the wind and never-ending snow. If not a house, a room, then. Not of one’s own, but a room nonetheless. Or rather, an anteroom. A narrow, cloistered space in which to wait before learning what the future holds.
Someone had buried potatoes in the frozen earth, and the prisoners were allowed to eat a few of them. Raw, of course. To Sergio, they were the best things he had ever eaten. After savouring the meal, he was able to sleep on a layer of straw that proved almost soft. The reprieve allowed him to stretch out his back, and he felt much better when he woke up the next morning.
Later that week, Fausto met Sergio’s fate; he stumbled and was chucked onto the dead man’s sled, from which he was promptly discharged. Sergio repaid the favour he had been granted several days prior, hurrying to help Fausto to his feet.
“Thank you, my friend.”
“Don’t thank me, please. Just stay alive, that’s enough. I need you.”
Apart from the Poles, the Hungarians, and the Germans, there were only around a hundred Italians left in the procession, seven or eight of them from Sergio’s company. They sought to help and encourage each other, to fan the desire to cling to life. As the men lived without news of their loved ones for months, the Italians turned to each other, the only family they had.
Feeling this sense of fraternity when all faith has been lost is the only thing that can reconcile a being with his humanity.
Lullaby for the Lost
not only had the soviets’ scorched-earth policy led to the destruction of provisions, roadways, and other infrastructure, but it had also prompted the Russians to sabotage their own railway system. The trains must not serve the enemy. Rails were dismantled one by one, dotting the Russian landscape with incomplete tracks leading nowhere. Thousands of villages, their railway stations still standing proudly, no longer had trains running through them. And so prisoners of the Red Army were forced to march on. Just to reach the next town where trains still stopped.
After walking for nineteen days, Sergio and the other prisoners reached Kalach-na-Donu on January 6, 1943—ironically enough the day of Epiphany. But there was no cause for celebration and the only revelation was that the torture was far from over.
No matter how often they thought, “Finally, we’re here!” they knew they hadn’t arrived anywhere. That the station was just another stop along their descent into hell. Remolo had studied literature before enlisting in the ARMIR, and, dizzy with emotion, went around reciting passages describing the circles of Dante’s Inferno.
E io mi volsi al mar di tutto ‘l senno;
dissi: “Questo che dice? e che risponde
quell’altro foco? e chi son quei che ‘l fenno?”
Ed elli a me: “Su per le sucide onde
già scorgere puoi quello che s’aspetta,
se ‘l fummo del pantan nol ti nasconde.”16
Remolo had clearly lost his head, thinking poetry could be his saviour. He was wrong. Poetry has never delivered anyone from suffering. At best, it works to illustrate the latter brilliantly; more often, it hastens the damnation of the troubled souls it sustains.
But despite it all, Sergio envied Remolo. He would have liked to know the words too, been able to recite the lines from Dante he’d memorized, loud and clear. The only verses he knew by heart belonged to a nursery rhyme his mother had hummed when he was a child.
Ambarabà ciccì coccò
tre civette sul comò
che facevano l’amore
con la figlia del dottore
il dottore si ammalò
ambarabà ciccì coccò17
Sergio realized that the words meant nothing, which made him even sadder.
He missed his mother, and wondered whether he would see her again one day. His sisters, too. And his brother. And his father. What was happening to them? What had become of their life in bombed-out, traumatized Italy—Il Duce’s Italy? He had no idea what was going on in Carpi, yet he hoped that his family knew nothing of his life either. His mother would never recover if she knew what her baby, her Sergio, had endured since the war began.
The station at Kalach-na-Donu resembled a coal plant spitting out its employees at the end of a hard day’s work. Prisoners with grimy faces, hollow bellies, and hunched shoulders lined up along the platform, eyes lowered, afraid of seeing their own terror reflected in their comrades’ faces.
Sergio climbed unflinchingly into the car to which he and a hundred or so other men had been assigned, one usually reserved for bringing livestock to slaughter. The only way light and air could pass was through the thin cracks at the top of the car. The door was then locked from the outside, naturally. In the scramble to get in, he’d lost sight of Fausto, Remolo, and Primo. He whispered his goodbyes, a prayer murmured under his breath. He would probably never see them again.
Inside, the men were so packed together that it was impossible to lie down. They had to sleep standing up, like wild mustangs on alert. Once a day the Russians tossed a dozen dried herrings through the cracks, their idea of a meal. The men rationed the salted fish out using their teeth to divide the flesh, making sure that everyone received his share. A one-course meal in a restaurant with no view of the stars.
The meager dish roused their appetite and revived an already unbearable thirst. They were rarely offered anything to drink. After a time, hunger no longer bothered them: the men dreamt only of water. A tall glass, filled to the brim with cool, clear liquid fresh from a stream hurtling down the side of a remote mountain.
To relieve bladders that continued to produce urine even though they took in almost no liquid, the men went to a corner of the rail car they nicknamed the “water closet.” The amber, almost brown piss collected and froze into a slippery, foul-smelling patch. One day the topaz puddle crept all the way to the door’s hinges, making it impossible for the Russians to open it. Since the only way to collect water rations was through the door, the prisoners stopped receiving them. They engineered a system to collect precious drops of liquid instead: using their belts to tie the metal mess kits together, they would hang them up near the openings on the side of the train and collect the snow that had gathered on the walls. With grubby fingernails that hadn’t been cleaned in months, they managed to scrape away a few chunks of the packed grey snow. It tasted of smoke. At first they tried to pick off the coal from the ice before sucking on it, but they soon learned to stop being so picky and greedily licked anything that resembled water without regard to its gravelly appearance.
Once the sun set and the prisoners gained the cover of darkness, they would clear out the bodies of companions who had succumbed to thirst, illness, and exhaustion. They were carried at arm’s length and if someone had a leg up he could manage to slip the body through one of the tiny cracks in the car.
Contrary to what might seem mathematically possible, limp, bony skeletons offered little resistance and would easily pass through the gap. The men had already gone even before they died, leaving behind nothing but a heap of bones, wrinkles, and beard. Once the prisoners said their goodbyes and removed all clothing from the bodies, the corpses were sent to decompose in the Mordovian countryside. Bare skin on immaculate snow, or the privilege of ultimate purity—enough to make you believe the men’s errors had been of no consequence.
Just like the soldiers who fell behind the ranks of the davaï marches, these men would become part of the war’s lost. At times the survivors felt they were being cruel, but their own salvation was at stake: the germs from the cadavers would contaminate and kill the lot of them. Nobody balked at passing the clothes around, but that wasn’t the same thing.
That wasn’t the same thing.
The men tried to rest after completing this thankless task, heads pressed against the rail car’s icy sides, feet in the ever-growing puddle
of urine. As they fought unsuccessfully for sleep, their warm breath in the cold night air produced a thin layer of condensation along the car’s bolts. The fine vapor froze when it came in contact with the cold steel. In the early mornings once the men had shaken off sleep, weak-kneed and feeble-bodied, they scraped off the lifesaving frost with fingers twisted by vitamin deficiency and the accelerated passing of time.
The few drops that they managed to cull off were refreshing and, for a moment, the men forgot their insatiable thirst. Scraping off those millimetres of ice was Sergio’s favourite time of day. He was a Buddhist monk in a Zen garden. He scratched at the patch of ice in the way others weed their vegetable plots and think of the autumn harvest. Dreams of prosperity and season’s end.
The captives perished at a blinding pace, leaving more space in the car to move about. And breathe. One day as Sergio picked his way through the darkness over to the “W.C.” to relieve himself, his eyes fell on what remained Fausto’s and Remolo’s silhouettes. They had been sharing the same car the whole time! There was no sign of Primo, though.
“Fausto! Remolo! There you are! I thought I’d lost you.”
“We’re stronger than we look,” joked Fausto. “It’d take more than a train ride to do us in!”
Remolo didn’t share his optimism. He kept quiet, smiling feebly at Sergio.
“Don’t worry about him,” Fausto continued. “He’s needed to shit for days and can’t get it out. He’s all backed up.”
“Go ahead and laugh,” protested poor constipated Remolo.
One early morning, possibly January 15 or 17—Sergio had stopped keeping track, choosing to focus his energy on waking up to see another day—a mechanical failure brought the train to a halt somewhere in the middle of Mordovia. Since they couldn’t get very far given the vast nothingness that surrounded them, the prisoners were permitted to get down from the cars to stretch and piss in the fresh air.
Behind the eyes we meet Page 11